Asimov's Science Fiction: September 2013 (6 page)

"That's not a rhetorical question," I continued. "Everyone can watch the show from here, but I'm also offering you the chance to accompany me into the black hole. The only problem is that you won't come out." I paused for emphasis. "I'll come back, but that's because I'm an escapologist—it's my job. The rest of you will all die." I said this with cheery relish.

"Here's how it works: you'll each create a temporary disposable copy, which will transmit full-sense signals back to your original self. The copy will enter the black hole, and the original will stay behind. Or vice versa! Either way, you'll simultaneously watch yourselves die, while also experiencing your own deaths.

"But only if you want to. If you'd rather not—if you think that death is perhaps a little too extreme for an evening's entertainment—then you're perfectly at liberty to opt out, and refrain from joining our descent." I smiled. "I promise not to think any less of you, as you sit safely here and watch the rest of us plummet to obliteration."

A buzz of excitement arose. I let it build for a few moments, then went on, "There are a limited number of seats available on the shuttle. First come, first served. If you want to come, please make your way to the copying booths."

I walked to Veronica's seat. "Would you like to be first, lovely lady in the audience?"

I shepherded Veronica through the booth, with contradictory emotions: anguish at creating an incarnation of her who'd live so brief ly, and relief that she'd agreed to it. I'd created this entire performance to test Veronica's attitude to copying.

The audience's new copies followed signs to the waiting shuttle. "Move along, please," I called out. "We don't want to keep Death waiting."

As the originals returned to their seats, I addressed the auditorium for the final time. "I'm afraid I won't be staying with you, because I never create copies of myself. After all, my escapes wouldn't be very impressive if I used backup copies. I'm the one and only version of me: if I fail to escape from the black hole, then I die forever. Wish me luck!"

In the front row, the original Veronica blew me a kiss.

"I'll be back—I hope—but in the meantime I'll leave you in the capable hands of my compère. Enjoy the rest of the show."

I followed all the copies into the shuttle, and guided them to their seats. "Last chance to change your mind," I said teasingly, as I closed the hatch behind me. Then I pulled the release lever. The ship juddered as it undocked from the auditorium and started falling.

This shuttle was much smaller than the luxurious spaceship in which the audience had arrived. The cabin contained seventy seats, all crammed together. Forcef ields throbbed in thick metal walls. There was only a short one-way journey ahead, and I wanted to create a sense of cramped discomfort. It's not enough to simply escape: it must also feel like a struggle. Half of showmanship is crafting the right ambience.

The shuttle's nose-cone was transparent, showing us the inferno ahead. The accretion disc flared brighter with every nugget it swallowed. I had sculpted the in falling debris into shapes resembling my rivals and their signature props. Here fell an asteroid looking like old Perplexo with his billowing cape; there fell the twin castles of Flabber and Gast; and between them plummeted Miraclissimo, holding a strangely phallic wand. All these enormous caricatures were distorted in blatant mockery, and all fell to their doom—the doom from which only I would escape.

I'd enjoyed crafting these absurd eff igies. Rivalry gave spice to our performances, as we strove to outdo each other. My fellow escapologists would be watching their eff igies fall and burn up. Some of them would already be preparing their revenges....

The prospect of sabotage intoxicated me. I knew what to expect from the black hole, but I had no inkling how my rivals might interfere. I would have to rely on my wits, and my large stock of weaponry. The danger made me feel acutely alive.

I reveled in the sensation. This was my life: the thrill of competition, making each new stunt harder than the last. And the joy of living in Cockaigne was that it enabled such escalation, with no limit upon performances other than your own imagination. Want a black hole? Here's one! It wouldn't be utopia if you couldn't have any props you wanted.

The external barrage of X-rays and gamma rays manifested as a cacophonous hiss blaring from speakers all around the cabin. It was the music of annihilation. I'd crafted the noise with a teeth-grating whine to put everyone on edge. I wanted the passengers to become unsettled and nervous. They were all going to die, but emotionally they didn't yet grasp that. I had to make them feel it, and bring them to the pitch of terror and delight.

"If you have any last regrets, start contemplating them now," I said. "It will take us seven minutes to reach the accretion disc. That's the purple glow you can see. We're falling faster all the while, pulled by the hole's unstoppable gravity. Once we plunge into the halo, it will only take another three minutes to reach the event horizon—the point of no return."

The com channel showed heavy traffic, as my passengers transmitted sense-data to their originals in the auditorium. Some of them had augmented their sensoriums to directly apprehend the storm of neutrinos, X-rays, and the rest of the blue-shifted torrent of electromagnetic radiation.

My rival escapologists were not among the passengers, since the performers' code prevented them from creating disposable duplicates. Some might be watching from a distance. Others were, I knew, much closer. They waited nearby, lurking behind the curtain....

The ship fell onward, accelerating to its demise. After passing through the purple fire of the accretion disc, we saw the distorted relativistic field of the black hole itself. A dark void lay before us—no light could escape the hole. But a bright ring encircled the nothingness, as gravitational lensing focused the glow from the accretion disc on the far side.

"The event horizon approaches!" I declaimed. "Once we pass beyond, no signal can escape. Your originals back in the auditorium will feel the connection attenuate as we slide down.... Ten, nine, eight, seven... I shall return, but you shall not... Four, three, two, one..."

I let the silence ring out for long moments. I held my breath, and unconsciously the audience all mirrored me. They were under my spell. Nothing stirred as we slid through the invisible border of the event horizon. The ship's gravity compensators would hold for a little while longer.

Finally, I drew breath, and the audience also drew in a collective shuddering gasp, as though astonished to find themselves still alive.

I glanced at the com channel. Everyone was still transmitting, but now that we'd entered the black hole, the information could not escape.

"We have crossed the border into the undiscovered country, ladies and gentlemen. We're utterly disconnected from the outside universe. Your originals back home are no longer receiving the transmissions you send. Their experience of being cut off, as we disappeared into the black hole, has felt like the end of existence, like the truncation of life itself. I've given them the taste of Death that they crave."

Actually, this was only the first taste—I had more planned, which I didn't mention. Half of showmanship lies in holding something back.

I turned to Veronica, intending to ask how she felt. Before we could speak, something clattered into the ship with a jolt that almost shook me off my feet. The increasing concentration of debris within the black hole created its own perils. Yet I suspected that my rivals had set additional traps.

The elite escapologists had a tradition of spicing up each other's stunts by adding a few extra hazards. It made our exploits more challenging. The danger escalated with every show, and the performers accrued ever more prestige from their death-defying feats.

This was our private rivalry. We refrained from spoiling the show that the public saw. And so we conf ined our interference to the realm behind the curtain. Any escape act always contains a veiled moment, when the performer works his magic in secret. The audience never sees exactly how he does it. The stunt concludes when the curtain is opened and the illusionist reveals himself, demonstrating the success of his escape.

The black hole's event horizon was the curtain that shielded me from the public's gaze. It also demarcated the territory in which my rivals could attack. Only when I emerged from the black hole, completing the performance, would I finally be safe.

Another impact rocked the ship. The explosions weren't strong enough to jeopardize the hull's integrity. Not yet, anyway. Perhaps we'd merely been lucky so far. What lay out there? How far would my rivals go? I didn't bother peering at the sensors. Ever since we'd crossed the horizon, they'd showed nothing in front of the ship—they couldn't possibly show anything, because the gravity gradient was too steep for light to climb. We flew blindly on. However, I could take a few precautions. The shuttle had a full complement of weaponry: I fired several blasts with the pulse-gun, hoping to clear our route ahead and vaporize anything coming behind us.

Soon I'd need to make my escape. But not yet. I expected my rivals to aim most of their fusillade at the outer regions of the hole. Deeper inside, I would paradoxically be safer—assuming the hole itself didn't kill me. I had time to talk to Veronica. "You linger, Sir Astoundio," said Veronica. "It is for the pleasure of your company, my Queen," I replied in the approved courtly fashion.

This was our latest ritual: a little old-fashioned romance, as if I were a knight courting her favor. We'd been lovers a long time, but we always sought new ways to aff irm it. "The pleasure is all mine," Veronica said. She clasped the sleeve of my black-and-purple tailcoat. Veronica wore a white dress with accents of pink, its style subtly mirroring my own costume. In her hair she wore the silver circlet that had once been the crown of Elfland, in a former frolic that still held fond memories. Her skin was impossibly youthful, inhumanly perfect, save for one area on the left of her neck where three warts lurked. The fad of grotesquerie remains popular because its blemishes can symbolically represent any vices. We often joked about which vices Veronica exhibited.

I have my own blemish, of course. Veronica's fads were mine too. My personal grotesquerie consists of an extravagant scar upon my left hand. I sustained it during a skirmish with the Blight, in the days when Veronica and I helped defend the borders of Cockaigne. I kept the scar for showmanship: it suggests the danger of my trade, implying a narrow brush with death.

"Any regrets?" I asked. "Since you're going to die anyway, you can be honest."

"How long have I got to list them? Should I stick to the top hundred?" Veronica smiled and shook her head. "No, I don't believe in regrets.

" "That's not the same as saying you don't have any.

" "I know. But why don't you narrow it down? Tell me what you're really asking."

"I'm just wondering if you're still happy with me, that's all," I said. Veronica raised her eyebrows a mere fraction, like a queen whose tiniest gesture moves worlds. "If I weren't, I wouldn't wait for imminent death to tell you. You'd have heard about it before now. Quite loudly!"

I exhaled a breath that I hadn't realized I was holding. "All right, I take your point. Still... generalities, trivialities—speak now or forever rest in peace. Anything you'd like to say?"

She shrugged. "We're only in this position because you're performing yet another escape. You've been an escapologist as long as I've known you. It gets old, sometimes. I wonder why you don't..." She paused, in case I wanted to jump in, but I waited for her to finish. "Well, why don't you find another hobby?"

Veronica had plenty of interests, and she kept them on heavy rotation. There was nothing unusual in that: most of her friends did the same. Every few months, she would download some expertise from the Facilitator and dive into an unexplored realm of art or mathematics or gardening or history. Whenever any new fad came along—speaking in iambic pentameter, installing a household spirit, gambling for social forfeits—she would embrace it with good cheer, then abandon it until its ironic revival.

I was the exception. Although I absorbed some of Veronica's enthusiasms, I was an escapologist first and always. "I want to be the best," I said. "It takes time to achieve that."

"I respect your dedication, I really do. And you've achieved a lot." Veronica waved her arm, gesturing to the ship, the black hole, and by implication my audience in the auditorium and beyond. "Isn't this enough? How can you do any better than this?"

"You'll find out," I said. My hand flew to my mouth as I realized I needed to rephrase that. "Your original self will, anyway. The next escape I perform will be my best ever: the ultimate stunt. And you'll be part of it—if you want to be."

"Oh, you always say that. Every performance better than the last...." Her voice took on a singsong tone as she mimicked my patter: " 'An amazing new feat in the annals of illusion! Audiences will be astounded, rivals will be dismayed!' "

She didn't understand that I really meant it: my next exploit would put me at the peak of my profession, but it would change our lives forever. There was no time to explain. The ship fell onward, into the darkness. My feet vibrated with the trembling of the deck-plates, as the gravity compensators battled against the unimaginably fierce conditions around us. On the control panel, readings crept ever closer to the red line indicating catastrophic collapse.

Death approached.

"One last kiss?" I asked, with a knowing smile. We always strove to keep our love fresh, and this brush with mortality would certainly give it a frisson.

Veronica's cheeks were flushed; her eyes blazed as though a lifetime's passion had been compressed into the tiny few minutes she had left. She threw her arms around me, and kissed me with wild abandon. The moment stretched... and broke, interrupted by a commotion in the cabin.

"I've changed my mind—I don't want to die!" someone shouted. A passenger stood up and walked toward me, staggering as the shuttle shook from external impacts.