Fiasco (19 page)

On the other hand, he studied the history of astronautics—records of transsolar flights and unmanned probes to Alpha Centauri, and accounts filled with the names of the workers of Grail and Roembden—in the hope that he might recognize among them people he had once known well, and possibly be able to follow the thread of that recognition back to the enigma of himself. There were moments, before sleep or on waking, when he felt close to remembering, particularly since in more than one dream he knew who he was. But all he retained, waking, was the empty certainty of that identity.

A year passed. The
Eurydice,
braking, lost its near-light speed relative to the collapsar, which now loomed like a real hole—an absence of stars—in the sky. Training, learning, reading, he abandoned his efforts to remember. And yet, though he was now chosen to be one of the copilots of the
Hermes,
in his dreams at night—about which he told no one—he was still the man who had entered Birnam Wood.

The
Eurydice
lost speed, cutting her drive for a few days along a trajectory called an involute, toward Beta Harpyiae, which was invisible, being the collapsar. She had already crossed, at a considerable distance, some buckled isogravs, whose gravitational tides were endurable, so far, by the crew and by the ship. The course—optimal, chosen by computer—was safe, but safe did not mean problem-free. The isogravs, lines connecting points of space of the same curvature, writhed on the screens like snakes in black flame. Those who were stationed in the "parking room"—the control room that ran the ship only under wild variation of gravitational fields—watched the flickering displays before them, drank beer from cans, and made small talk to pass the time. The fact was that the men were a tradition, a relic from the era of classical astrogation. No one now would even dream of switching the controls to manual: no man possessed reflexes quick enough.

The collapsar belonged to a category discovered late and with great difficulty: it was solitary. Easiest to locate were those that belonged to binary systems, having companion stars that were "alive"—i.e., that shined—and from which they stripped the upper layers of atmosphere. The material was drawn in a contracting spiral toward the black hole, to fall into it to the accompaniment of bursts of the hardest X rays. The gases torn from the companion surrounded the collapsar in an accretion disk, a giant plane highly unhealthy for all objects, including rockets. No ship could navigate such a region. Before it would be sucked into the event horizon, the radiation would destroy both human brain and computer.

The solitary collapsar in the constellation Harpy was discovered thanks to the perturbations it produced in the Alpha, Gamma, and Delta stars. Appropriately named Hades, with a mass four hundred times that of the Sun, it betrayed its increasing presence by the lack of the stars which it occulted and by the apparent crowding of stars around its perimeter, as it was a gravitational lens for their light. The surface of annihilation rotated at the equator at two-thirds the speed of light, and the centrifugal and Coriolis forces made it bulge, so that Hades was not a perfect sphere. But even if the event horizon were spherical, gravitational storms came and went over it, compressing and stretching the isogravs. The possible causes of these storms or cyclones were provided by eight theories, each one different.

The most imaginative theory (not necessarily the closest to the truth) maintained that Hades was connected, in hyperspace, to another universe, which gave evidence of itself by producing shock waves in the terrible "pit" of the collapsar—the center, the singularity, the place without dimension, without time, where the curvature of the continuum acquired a value infinitely great. The theory of the "other side" of the Hades nucleus, whose infinite space-time compression somehow presented no problem for the transfinite engineers of the alien universe, was really a mathematical fantasy spun by astronomers intoxicated with teratopology, the latest and highly fashionable grandchild of Cantor's ancient theory. (They were even going to christen the collapsar Cantor, but its discoverer preferred using mythology.) Neither SETI headquarters on Earth nor the command of the
Eurydice
was particularly concerned about what took place
beneath
the event horizon, for practical, obvious reasons: the horizon was an uncrossable boundary, and regardless of what it covered, it very definitely represented death.

Flying in high vacuum above Hades, the
Eurydice
responded with appropriate maneuvers to each change in gravitation, firing from her rockets streams of heavy elements synthesized from hydrogen and deuterium by the Olimos Cycle. Shedding billions of tons, she cleverly maintained stability, while Hades, bound by the laws of conservation, supplied the vessel with a sizable portion of the energy released by all that it swallowed and buried forever in its interior. This was, roughly, like a balloon holding altitude at the price of ballast thrown overboard. But only roughly: no pilot would have been able to negotiate such a course.

The segmented hull of the ship, made of rings connected by swivel joints, resembled from a distance a mile-long earthworm that writhed like a white comma above the immensity of the black hole. It would have made an interesting sight, no doubt, but there was no observer and could be none, since the valiant companion of the
Eurydice
—the
Orpheus
—which was to open the gates of hell for her, was unmanned. In constant laser communication with the giant nymph, it awaited the signal that would turn it into a resonance bomb, a single-pulse gracer. A similar though thousand times smaller gracer had been tested in the solar system, and in the process deprived Saturn of its second largest moon. When even the laser contact began to worsen, the
Orpheus
received the final program and, obediently falling silent, commenced the countdown in its machine centers. It drew closer to the collapsar than the
Eurydice.
Light and every kind of related electromagnetic wave smeared and bent, driven through the infrared to the radio and ultraradio bands. As Hades twisted the surrounding space and time above its horizon of destruction, the
Eurydice
made the final, critical observations of Quinta, the fifth planet of the sixth sun of the Harpy, the real destination of the expedition. Ejected previously into space far from the collapsar, cameras took pictures of the planet, using no little aperture: two astronomical units. The image—or, rather, the three-dimensional model—of Quinta took focus on the holovision. A hazy, blue-speckled, cloud-covered sphere hung in the auditorium between the many-leveled galleries.

No one, true, watched it there. The holoscope had supposedly been installed in the auditorium because it was donated to the expedition by a Japanese firm for purposes of advertising the product to planetariums on Earth. But though the spectacle was dramatic, it was of no real use to the astrophysicists. They had accepted it because the whole apparatus took up little room in the walls of the forward observatory room, while the planet-scope, placed under a transparent dome, filled—ornamentally—the empty center. Visitors came to view the images of nebulas or planets inside it; there was no other way to look at the cosmic scenery, the hull of the
Eurydice
being windowless.

The survivor from Titan now had a last name: Tempe. Tempe was the valley in which Orpheus first met Eurydice. The name was given him by Ter Horab during a confidential meeting of the scout ship's full crew. Actually, it may not have been Ter Horab who named him. On that occasion, Mark received the position of second copilot of the
Hermes,
and the Commander, announcing the assignments, pretended not to notice anything. Lauger denied authorship—or, rather, dodged the question with the joke that they had all fallen under the influence of Greek mythology.

As long as the constant gravity on board allowed, as the ship lost speed, Mark visited Lauger frequently and listened to his debates with Gold and Nakamura, the astrophysicists. These debates usually turned on the mystery of the civilizations "above the window," the ones that had departed from the main road in Ortega and Nilssen's diagram. Since nothing was known about their fate, they offered no small challenge to the imagination. The opinions held by the majority of those fascinated by the mystery could be divided roughly into two schools, according to the reason for the silence: whether it was sociological or cosmological. Gold, though a physicist, held to a sociological explanation—an extreme one, called "sociolysis."

The first thing a society did upon entering an era of technological acceleration was to disturb the living environment. Later it might wish to rescue that environment, but conservation measures would prove insufficient, and the biosphere would be replaced—of necessity, inevitably—by artifacts. There would arise an environment completely transformed, though not artificial in the human sense of the word. "Artificial," to humans, was what they produced themselves; "natural" was what remained untouched, or was only harnessed, like water turning a turbine or like cultivated earth subjected to agricultural procedures. "Above the window," this distinction ceased to exist. If everything became "artificial," then nothing was "artificial." Production, intelligence, science were "transplanted" into the surrounding world; electronics—or its unknown counterparts and manifestations—took the place of institutions, legislative bodies, government, schools, hospitals; the ethnic identity of national collectives disappeared, borders disappeared, along with the police, and the courts, and the prisons. Then one might have a "Second Stone Age": universal illiteracy and idleness. Employment would not be required for survival. Anyone who wanted could have employment, of course, because everyone could do absolutely whatever he liked. This did not have to mean stagnation: the environment was an obedient guardian, and to the extent that it was able, it could change itself according to wishes or demands.

Could it change so that "progress" would take place? We had no answer for that, since we ourselves assigned to the concept of "progress" different meanings, depending on the historical moment. Could one call "scientific progress" a situation in which intellectual, creative, cognitive, and constructional activities were so specialized that in each profession one dug deeper in an ever-narrower plot of ground? If machines counted faster and better than a living being, why should the living being count? If photosynthesis systems produced food that was more nutritious and varied than what farmers, bakers, chefs, and confectioners could supply, then why till the soil or grind flour or bake bread? A civilization in such sociolysis did not broadcast in every direction of the heavens its recipe for the perfect life. And why should it, when it no longer even existed as a union formed by a unsatisfied hunger of stomachs and minds?

The result would be not a society but an enormous collection of individuals, and it would be hard, indeed, to find one individual who would choose as his life's work the signaling, on a cosmic scale, of how he was getting along. The artificial environment would unquestionably be designed by its engineers so that it could not ever acquire the attributes of a planetary "personality." Such an artificial environment would be
no one
, like a meadow, forest, or steppe—with the difference that it would grow and blossom not on its own, not for itself, but for someone. For beings. Would they become stupid from this, turning into dull-witted gluttons that whiled away their hours with toys provided by the planetary guardian? Not necessarily. It depended on the point of view. What was delusion or idleness for one man might be, for another, a life's passion. We had no standard to measure and evaluate, particularly in the case of other beings on another world in another period of a history different from our own.

But Nakamura and Lauger favored the cosmological hypothesis. He who explored space would perish in space. Not that he would lose his life—the aphorism had a completely different meaning. Astronomy, astrophysics, space travel—these were but the small, modest beginnings. We ourselves had taken the next step, learning the rudiments of sidereal engineering. And it was not a matter of expansion, the so-called shock wave of Intelligence of yore: where Intelligence, taking possession of its own and then its neighboring planets, was supposed to spread in a stellar emigration throughout the galaxy. For what purpose? To increase the population density of space? No, it was not a matter of
crescite et multiplicamini,
but concerned things that we could not understand, let alone characterize. Could a chimpanzee understand the labors of a cosmologist?

Was the Universe nothing but a very large pie, and a civilization a child trying to consume the pie as quickly as possible? The notion of invasions by aliens was a projection of the aggressive traits of the predatory, barely civilized ape-man. If he himself willingly did unto others as he would rather not be done by, then he pictured the Advanced Civilization on much the same principle. Flotillas of galactic battleships were supposed to fall upon unsuspecting little planets, to lay hands on the local dollars, diamonds, chocolates, and, of course, beautiful women—for whom aliens had about as much use as we did for female crocodiles.

How, then, did those "above the window" occupy themselves? With activities beyond our conception. Yet, at the same time, we could not accept that they were beyond our conception. Here we were about to make a hole in Hades, in the temporal onion, in order to hide in it. But we were not playing hide-and-seek. We wished to catch a civilization before it flew out the window. The probability of future expeditions with the same goal was minuscule. Our descendants would, perhaps, even pay tribute to us: the kind of tribute we paid to the Argonauts who went in search of the golden fleece.

Yusupov, who also dropped in on Lauger, described this view of civilizations beyond the interval of contact as "knowledge by unknowledge." But eventually he had to drop out of the discussions, because the proximity of the goal required his almost constant presence at the control center.