La Trascendencia Dorada (78 page)

“I had been hoping to get to the location to which the ghost-particle machine was sending its periodic broadcasts. But since I do not know where we are, I will not know where that point is, until the machine broadcasts again.”

She said, “The plasma outside is about twenty times as dense as solid iron. The magnetics you had been using to bore through the material you are now using (now that we are lower that we had planned to go) to reinforce the hull against a breach. So how can we be moving?”

“I must keep the drives firing at full blast, in order to overcome back pressure and dump waste heat. That is actually adding relatively little movement to our vector, because of the density of the medium. But even if we are at rest relative to the current of superdense core plasma around us now, we do not know where or how quickly that current is moving. An area of plasma a hundred times the diameter of Jupiter just closed around us; if that area is moving at the speed of some of the equatorial currents, we could be an immense distance away from where we were a few minutes ago. So the question is: How do we find out where we are, how do we get to where we want to go? And we do not have all the time in the world. Six days from now, as soon as the fuel runs out, the plasma from the sun pours into the drives, atomizing everything inside, including us.”

She said, “Do you have any magnetic power left over to put to the treads, to dig us out of this super-dense area?”

Phaethon said, “No. I’m using every erg to brace the ship against the internal currents here, within the area. Just to make this clear: we could be inside the radiative zone, falling toward the core, or this sphere of plasma could be rising like a bubble up through the convective zone, and it has not yet dispersed because of its immense size. It seems very ironic—silly, actually—to get killed this way by some accident of internal solar meteorology, without ever seeing the enemy.” He sighed and raised his hand toward his faceplate, as if about to open it, saying, “Perhaps I should not have kept watch for so many subjective, hours during that Shockwave. I do feel very tired…”

Daphne felt the nape-hairs of her neck stir. She felt as if she were being watched.

She reached out and grabbed his hand. “Keep your helmet on, you fool!”

Phaethon paused, startled. “But why—?”

Because Daphne had been trained by Warlocks, she could trigger pattern-finding intuitions from nonverbal sections of her brain, and deduce insights from partial information. So somehow she knew: “It’s the only thing saving us!”

Phaethon froze. He said, “Check the ship’s brain.”

Daphne called up a status report on the mirror next to her chair arm. “Still empty. No one’s in the ship mind except our two copies. Otherwise it’s empty.”

“Why are you so sure the enemy is aboard?” For some reason, even though the brightly lit bridge was wide and empty around them, his voice had dropped to a whisper.

It took her a moment to find the words, to bring the Warlock intuition to the forefront of her mind, like tempting some wild beast out from its dark cave. She said: “Too many coincidences. We know the enemy can manipulate solar currents and raise storms just like your father does; that is what killed Helion Prime. So we’re caught by a super-dense current. It may be carrying us, helpless, to the surface, just where the enemy wants to go, if they are aboard and if they want to escape the Golden Oecumene. If the enemy cannot escape, they wait a few days until the fuel runs out, and kill us both, so, at least, our side doesn’t have the ship. The current that caught us cannot be natural: it breaks the hull, but it somehow is more careful, more evenly balanced, that you expected; and at the same time, it puts on just enough pressure, no more, no less, to neutralize the hull magnetics we need to use to maneuver.”

He said, “But there is no evidence of anything read through the thought ports I jammed open. How did their ship transmit any crew-mind information aboard the Phoenix?‘

She said, “That I do not know. Maybe the ghost-particle machine acted like a Trojan horse, and was receiving information from an outside source.”

“Through the hull…?”

“Your drive ports are open. Besides, you were using it just now to send and receive neutrino bursts. If it can receive information from inside, it can receive it from outside. And probably send as well. Just because your closed hull stops some of the particles the ghost array puts out—the particles you detected—does not necessarily mean there were not other groups of signals you did not detect. The Nothing Sophotech probably did actually receive Ao Varmatyr’s dying broadcast, and knows everything he found out about the ship, your plans, and you.”

“I don’t really mind if the Nothing knows everything we said and did. Our strategy, in fact, relies on total honesty. But I wonder why it did not take over the ship’s mind. One would think it would welcome the higher thought-speeds, if for no other reason. Maybe the conscience redactor has given it some specious reason to fear the ship mind.

“Are you sure it’s not in there?” Daphne asked. “Our read-out here could be an illusion. Run a line check.”

He tapped the mirror with a fingertip, gave a command. “Well, there is something strange here. According to this, you won the argument, and I apologized. Something must be manipulating the data. Best two out of three?”

“Very funny. You don’t think the Nothing is aboard, do you?”

“I think it would have initiated conversation with us.”

“Why? All it has to do is wait until you open your armor to scratch your nose or get a nonsimulated kiss, and zap, it sends an information beam through your skull and into the inside-crown thought ports.”

“But if a Sophotech was transmitted into our ship, where did it come from? It’s not as if transmissions can travel so very far through the dense solar plasma. The enemy ship must have been nearby, practically alongside. But we did not detect a foreign ship. It has to be a starship, not just a spaceship. Why didn’t we see her?”

When she did not respond, he glanced at her. She was sitting in her throne, staring upward, a blank, thoughtful look on her face.

“Well?” he said. “If the Nothing Sophotech is actually out there, why did we not see the foreign starship?”

She spoke in a slow and dreamy voice: “Because the Silent Oecumene starship is very, very small.” “What? Why do you say that?” She raised her finger slowly and pointed. “Because it is here.”

At first Phaethon was not certain what he was seeing.

Across the deck, tall pressure curtains and overmind formation poles rose vertically toward the dome. At first, it seemed as if something had distorted the second balcony. The wall was puckered. The reaction boxes were crowded oddly toward each other and the angles of the cubes were no longer right angles. The poles were warped in the middles, bending toward each other, left and right, no longer parallel.

Then the distortion moved. The vertical rods to the right straightened, like harpstrings plucked, now released. But the straight rods to the left were bending, their midsections crowding toward a moving point. It looked as if the whole scene had been painted on an elastic sheet, and the elastic were puckering toward a small moving point, or as if a distorted sheet of convex glass were moving between Phaethon and the far wall… Or as if… “There is a black hole here on the bridge with us,” said Phaethon. “The singularity is bending the light from the wall beyond in a gravity lens. Look.”

He draw an energy mirror up from the floor and focused it on the center of the distortion. Through the amplified view in the mirror, the reddish haze from the microscopic gravity well was clearly visible. Light moving near the singularity was retarded, lost energy, and Doppler-shifted toward the red.

According to the mirror, the singularity itself was only about the diameter of a helium nucleus, a few angstroms wide. Extending an inch or two in diameter was an outer sphere of ozone and charged particles formed from stripped air molecules, attracted by gravity, spiraling down and through the point-singularity, and disintegrating into constituent electrons and protons. If he turned his hearing up, he could hear the high-pitched, steady tea-kettle whistle of escaping vanishing air, being pushed at fifteen pounds per square inch into a point smaller than could be seen.

Phaethon threw pressure curtains across the chamber, in case the surface area of the black hole grew, or the rate of air loss became noticeable. The distortion in the air, seeming to bend all things behind it toward it, hazed in reddish light, haloed by hissing X-rays, moved with slow majesty across the bridge, toward them.

It passed through the pressure curtains without slowing. Their powerful fields were helpless to stop the black hole. There were electric discharges as the pressure curtains’ field flows were twisted out of parallel and canceled out. Sparks guttered for a moment along the hull beneath.

Daphne said, “Is it my imagination, or is the deck tilting toward that thing?”

“It’s your imagination. I think. The gravimeter says it has less mass than a large asteroid, only a few thousand million tonnes or so. We would not be able to feel that amount of gravitic attraction. But the light is being bent as if there was something the size of a galaxy or three at that pinpoint. How much light distortion does it take to be visible to the naked eye like that? For that matter, how is it floating? How is being controlled? Why isn’t it dispersing? Classical theory says that black holes that small only have a life of a few microseconds before they evaporate in a wash of Hawking radiation.”

Daphne stared at the impossible twist of reddish light. It was like staring down a well, or the bore of some cannon made of bent space. She said in a calm voice: “This is he. Or should I say ‘it.’ The Nothing Sophotech is housed in the interior of the black hole. It is controlling the gravitic fields, somehow. How it communicates to the fields around the singularity, the ones which determine its position in space, that I do not know. Hawking radiation? Gravitons? It might give orders by altering black-hole rotational spin-values in a sort of Morse code, which the surrounding field can pick up. You’re the engineer. You tell me how it’s…”

“I am still trying to figure out how it can be bending the light when it’s only the mass of a large city…”

Daphne said, “That I know. Think like a mystery writer for a moment, not like an engineer. It’s a trick. An illusion.”

“Illusion? How?” She said, “Could a ghost-particle array inside the event horizon manifest particles outside?”

“Theoretically, yes, through the quantum-tunneling effect.”

“Photons? Red-colored photons? If a Sophotech were tracing the path of every lightwave, and weaving them together in a hologram, could it create the appearance of a deep gravity well, when there was no such well?”

“By making highly complex fields, of photons appear out of nowhere? I think I’d rather believe they somehow discovered gravity control. Neither technology is one I thought was possible. Why bother?”

The reddish light vanished. As if the elastic sheet on which the scene were painted had suddenly returned to true, the vertical rods on the far side of the bridge now straightened, and the angles of the evenly spaced boxes on the balconies were right again. At the same time, the door motors hummed, the air lock opened, and a section of floor rose up into view. Through the door rose a figure wearing a pale mask, robed in floating peacock-colored hues, crowned in feathery light antennae. The figure glided across the wide expanse of shining deck toward them, making no noise as it approached.

“Now what…?” whispered Daphne.

What approached them seemed to be a man. The robes were peacock purple, shimmering with deep highlights, bright with woven colors of green and scarlet, spots and traceries of gold and palest white. The man’s folded hands were hidden in silver gauntlets, gemmed with a dozen finger rings and shining bracelets of Sophotech thought ports. The mask itself was a face-shaped shield of silver nanomaterial, pulsing and flowing with a million silver-glinting thoughts. From the upper mask rose whiplike slender fans, like the tail feathers of a quail, perhaps antennae, perhaps odd decorations. Similar decorative antennae spread from the shoulderboards, floating rosettes of white, long feathery ribbons of many colors, freaked with gold and shining jet, like the wing feathers of some extinct tropical bird. The eyes of the mask were lenses of amethyst.

The apparition approached and was a score of feet away. It was taller and more slender than an Earth-born man, not unlike a frail lunarian, and the headdress towered taller yet.

No, not like a lunarian. Like a Lord of the Silent Oecumene. This was the regal garb and ornament and dreaming-mask to which those ancient and solitary beings aspired. Ao Varmatyr, before he died, in his tale, had hinted at something of this style. The Silent Ones, living alone in their artificial asteroid palaces of spun diamond, in microgravity, had no doubt been as tall as this phantasm. Daphne and Phaethon both stared up, fascinated. The figure stood erect, motionless except for the slow sea-fernlike bob of his feathery antennae, and still, except that a web of bright and soft blue shadows fled across his pulsing gown, as if the apparition were seen through changing shades of rippling water.

And music pulsed softly, elflike, from the robes, a hint of chimes, a laughter of distant strings, a dreaming of soft sonorous horns, slowly breathing. (“This more illusion,”) Phaethon sent to Daphne on a secure side-channel, like a whisper. He showed her that the mirror to his left was still detecting a gravitic point source in the air where the singularity hung. Electric circuits in the door motors had opened and closed, but no signals had entered the circuits from outside: ghost teleportations of electrons, no doubt. Radar indicated no physical substance in the shining, fairy-shimmering robes of light, no body underneath. Daphne sent back an image of her own face, bug-eyed her shoulders shrugging, as with text saying: If this is a hologram, where is the music coming from? Phaethon sent back that perhaps ghost particles, issuing from the singularity, were forming uncounted trillions of air molecules, enough to form pressure waves, and create sound vibrations. If so, the feat was staggeringly complex, casually impossible, one impossibility built upon another, to create something as simple as a sigh of strings and woodwinds.