Furious Gulf (20 page)

Then his distracted thoughts came to an abrupt end when a sudden wave flexed through the deck. He and Besen slammed into a
bulkhead and tumbled to the deck of the Bridge.

As he got up, Toby saw that Killeen had remained standing, legs braced to take surges. But the Cap’n’s face was drawn and
he searched the wall screens intently for understanding. They showed a blinding hail of gauzy hot gas and chunks of unknown
matter, all spraying by them at blistering speed. Warm breezes now blew through the Bridge, fluttering Toby’s hair as the
circulators labored to ease the steady heating from outside.

Killeen called again for the Magnetic Mind. Again there was no answer. It had abandoned them.

The ship’s officers were all anchored in their shock couches, staring at Killeen, visibly wondering why he did not strap himself
in, too. Toby knew why. If he conceded even this small vulnerability, it would whittle him down in the eyes of those he now
had to lead. So he turned and conspicuously paced, hands behind back, as another ripple shook the Bridge. He did not stumble,
did not even slow his steady pace.

Toby looked around, but there were no vacant shock couches for him and Besen. If they wanted to see what was going on, they
would have to stand. Nobody noticed them, or else they would have been hustled away. All eyes watched the screens and the
Cap’n.

Killeen turned slowly, holding the Bridge crew with his level, stone-faced gaze. Then he saw Quath’s head, shifty-gimballed
in a hooded carapace, jutting into the Bridge entrance. The Cap’n called out with a faint note of desperation, “What do your
brothers know about this place?”

“They never came back?”

unlike you humans. You persist beyond reason.>

Toby broke in. “How come you hunted humans, then? We could have been allies all along.”

you are of the stuff which once blazed so bright and now is so pitiful.>

Toby gulped. Quath was no diplomat.

Killeen asked, “These ‘texts’ of yours—what do they say?”

“Space? Hell, what about the
heat
? And this stuff coming at us, big chunks—”

their way to their funerals.>

Some consolation, Toby thought. Probably they all were on the same trip.

“Did your brothers map this place?” Killeen demanded impatiently.

The screens swam with colors, forming and reforming into images that might make sense to the Myriapodia, Toby thought, but
not to him.

The image was three-dimensional, shot through with gaudy rushing dots. It whirled and jumped and made no sense. Then Quath
squashed it down to two dimensions, and Toby could see what was happening.

“That empty ball at the center—it’s the black hole, right?” he asked his Isaac Aspect. He heard a rapid cross talk, Zeno’s
sad static-clogged phrases, entries spooling out from a text-chip he carried but could not read by himself.

Indeed. I consulted with Zeno, who agrees that these Myriapodia have correctly mapped the geometry near it, as well. The bulging,
shaded region wrapped around the hole is the ergosphere—a zone where the black hole’s spin warps everything, forcing spacetime
to rotate with the hole itself.

“Sounds dangerous.”

No one knows. Zeno’s folk believed that the ergosphere was a place where nearly all the energy of a ship would be required
simply to keep from falling into the black hole itself.

Toby watched the figure on the wall screens, the way the spin of the hole made a whirlpool in space. Isaac told him that it
was not matter spinning around there, but space-time itself.

“Uh, what’s space-time? I mean, I know space, and time’s what a clock talks about, but . . .”

Quath broke into his mind, transmitting directly.

for this. Even the Myriapodia do not see space-time. We, too, divide it into the easier ideas of distance and duration.>

Until that moment Toby had not realized that Quath could pick up his whispering talks with his own Aspects. He felt embarrassed,
then irked—and then pushed aside his feelings. No time for that now.

“So how do we get out of here?”

“Huh?” Toby noticed the dashed line of their planned trajectory. It lifted some, then plunged toward the top crescent-shaped
blob.

“Those? The crescents? They’re awfully close to that ergosphere thing.” The hazy crescents hovered like caps over the poles
of the black hole, seeming to screen it.

Toby looked around, dazed more by the ideas that were coming thick and fast than by the fluttering, lurching waves that swept
through
Argo
. More tidal stresses, twisting with immense hands.

Then it dawned on him that everyone in the Bridge was looking at him. He blinked. Knowing his easy way with Quath, Killeen
had just let Toby extract information from the alien. Well, it was efficient.

“So what do we do now?” Killeen studied Quath as if he could read an expression in the great, many-eyed head.

“It’s going to get us out of this?”

Killeen paused, reflecting as the flickering screens lit the Bridge with eerie, shifting patterns. He was at the end of his
tether, Toby saw, tired and confused. His heart went out to his father, caught in this huge engine of destruction, led here
by hopes and legends, driven by fear. He let go of Besen and went to his father’s side. Hesitantly, as Killeen watched the
vibrant flux, he reached out and clasped Toby’s arm.

They stood that way for a long moment, watching now as the Myriapodia ships came into view. Against the seethe of sky and
mass Toby saw that this place was not evil or good, but something far worse. It was indifferent. Beauty lay here, and terror.
It could witness anything, this churning machine. Its unforgivable vast resplendence mocked the human plight.

The glinting Myriapodia ships held the huge cosmic hoop between them in a magnetic grip, and it glowed with intense brilliance.
Isaac told Toby that the hoop was gathering energy as it fell toward the black hole. It passed through the magnetic fields
anchored in the hole and extracted from them strong currents, electrical surges that lit up the hoop like an immense sign.

“That the same as what the Magnetic Mind said?” Killeen whispered, eyes fixed on the screens. In the warming air the Bridge
was silent.

Toby frowned. “Mech? What’s mech-made here?”

“So? Just more of the weird weather here—”

Killeen and Toby alike regarded Quath with disbelief. The alien went on, You saw their massive, shadowy constructions, feeding on the energy and matter here. Their researches are many and wide.>

“But . . . the Cyaneans? Hard to believe,” Killeen said. “Those things, they’re huge.”

The Cosmic Circle had raced ahead of
Argo
now. Then on the major wall screen Toby saw ahead an enormous sheet—the Cyaneans. It was like a choppy gray sea, waves of
blacks and troughs of white making shifting patterns as far as the eye could see.

In the brilliant white-hot glare of yellows and reds that blazed up all around them, the eerie lack of color in the Cyaneans
filled Toby with a sinking dread. He felt as though the bottom had fallen out of his stomach. Only Besen steadied him, holding
from one side while Toby stood with the other arm around his father. There was nothing here for mere humans to do.

Ahead, the hoop plunged down into the gray, rippling expanse. And cut. Like a knife, it sheared through the ashen surface
and deep, deep into the interior.

Released, the edges of the strange dusky surface pulled away. They curled away from the Cosmic Circle, peeling back.

But the hoop paid a price. It crumpled along its leading edge. The resistance of the turbulence dented and deformed it.

Toby could not guess what colossal energies grappled there. The sharpness of the Cosmic Circle was a mere atom wide, his Isaac
Aspect said, but its tight curvature was more than equal to the gray, storming surges. It pierced the tossing turbulence,
sending sputtering hot light in its wake.

“What . . . what do we do?” Killeen asked quietly.

Quath sent a chorus of lilting sounds through the human-linked sensorium, a plaintive long note
of sympathy.

Killeen made a sign to Jocelyn, who was watching him with round, frightened eyes. She turned the ship downward, into more
of the blazing luminosity, toward the shifting gray sheet. Long moments passed as the grayness swelled like an impassable
wall of strangely shifting stone.

They rushed into the shadowy gap carved by the hoop. To all sides peaks and valleys formed and dissolved, like mountains of
ash made from burned bones.

Fringes of the stuff washed over
Argo
and brought dizzying, reeling moments when Toby thought he had been snatched up by his heels and shaken, upside down, hair
fraying in the air. Crew vomited on the Bridge. Others howled with fright and nausea. The ship’s deep skeleton protested,
popping and creaking.

But the long passage stayed open. Once cut, it peeled back to form new zones of contorted space-time.
Argo
sped after the glowing, crumpling hoop.

It seemed to take a long time to cross the thickness of the sliced Cyanean ghost-space. Besen puked and gasped, mouth gaping
and messed. But Toby held on to his father, not to steady him but to simply know that he was there.

And then they were out, free. The hoop tumbled away, crushed. The Myriapodia ships banked after it, grasping at the battered
cosmic string, turning back toward the poles of the entire rotating system.

Killeen found his voice. “Jocelyn. Try . . . try to follow them.”

Quath rattled her legs loudly, steel clanging and ringing.

“What?” Killeen’s mouth sagged.

“Look . . . Family Bishop always spoke of True Center as our goal, without anybody knowing why. It was handed down. We believe
it. But this . . .” Toby saw that his father was nearly finished, his endurance broken by the enormity of this place.

Then the gray exhaustion hardened. Killeen’s face lost its slackness, eyes regaining their composure. “Toward the black hole?
Look, we’ve followed what you said. And that Magnetic Mind, too. And we’ve come as far as we can. Whatever was supposed to
be here, waiting for us, it’s gone. Eaten up. Burned away.”

Killeen said flatly, “I don’t believe it.”

Toby looked ahead of them. The ergosphere was a rotating fat waist in the diagram, but ahead bulged something spitting light
like an angry, setting sun. Except that it extended away in a great, curving sheet. It arced into the distance, and Toby understood
at last the size of the demon black hole that was the ultimate, hidden cause of all the cosmic violence he had witnessed.
The vicious maw. The reason why the Galactic Center was a swarming, frying pit of death and loss.

Through eye-stinging radiance he saw the spreading sheen where the hole came finally to rule even the fabric of the universe,
clasping space-time until it bent to the unending will of gravity.

Through ten billion years the galaxy had fed it. Stars had perished, swept into it by the millions. And the civilizations
that had thrived around those suns—they had been forced to flee or die.

He wondered what planets that sun had once harbored, whether they had given birth to organic molecules that could link and
replicate themselves, whether intelligence had once brimmed on those lost shores. Whether creatures had glimpsed their fate,
seen it as a boiling, growing presence in the sky. Perhaps they had known that at the dead center of such immense tragedy
sat an absolute, unblinking void.

“The ergosphere?” Toby whispered.

the quest. The physics is momentarily appropriate for our entry.>

A strong timbre was back in Killeen’s voice. “Why?”

creating fresh contortions. Only now, the Myriapodia say, can the ergosphere portal be entered.>

“Why?”

the ergosphere as a tight-stretched skin of space-time, across which waves wash. The infall of matter forces the entire beast
to readjust itself, knit up the ravels of causality. As a star’s weight rains upon the beast, the resulting splashes in space-time
open opportunities.>