Otherness (36 page)

It was simple enough in conception.

Back in the eighteenth century, a physicist, John Mitchell, showed that any large enough lump of matter might have an escape velocity greater than the speed of light. Even luminous waves should not be able to escape. When John Wheeler, two hundred years later, performed the same conjuring trick with mass
density
, the name "black hole" was coined.

Those were just theoretical exercises. What actually happens to a photon that tries to climb out of a singularity? Does it behave like a rocket, slowing down under gravity's insistent drag? Coming to a halt, then turning to plummet down again?

Not so. Photons move at a constant rate, one single speed, no matter what reference frame you use. Unless physically blocked or diverted, light slows for no one.

But tightly coiled gravity does strange things. It changes
time
. Gravitation can make light pay a toll for escaping. Photons lose energy not by slowing down, but by stretching redder, ever redder as they rise from a space-time well, elongating to microwave lengths, then radio, and onward. Theoretically, on climbing to the event horizon of a black hole, any light wave has reddened down to nothing.

Nothing emerges. Nothing—traveling at the speed of light. In a prim, legalistic sense, that nothing
is
still light.

Isola spread her traps, planning tight, intersecting orbits. She lay a web designed to ambush nothing . . . to peer down into nowhere.

"You know, I never gave it much thought before. The whole thing seemed such a bother. Anyway, I always figured there'd be plenty of time later, after we finished our project."

Mikaela's non sequitur came by complete surprise. Isola looked up from the chart she had been studying. Across the breakfast table, her colleague wore an expression that seemed outwardly casual, but studied. Thin as frost.

"Plenty of time for what?" Isola asked.

Mikaela lifted a cup of
port'tha
to her lips. "You know . . . procreation."

"Oh." Isola did not know what to say. Ever since the visitor ship announced itself, her partner had expressed nothing but irritation over havoc to their research schedules. Of late her complaints had been replaced with pensive moodiness.
So this is what she's been brooding about
, Isola realized. To give herself a moment, she held out her own cup for the pseudo-life servitor to refill. Her condition forbade drinking
port'tha
, so she made do with tea.

"And what have you concluded?" she asked, evenly.

"That I'd be foolish to waste this opportunity."

"Opportunity?"

Mikaela shrugged. "Look, Jarlquin came all this way hoping to requisition your clone. You could have turned her down—"

"Mikaela, we've gone over this so many times . . ." But Isola's partner cut her off, raising one hand placatingly.

"That's all right. I now see you were right to agree. It's a great honor. Records of your clone-line are on file throughout the sector."

Isola sighed. "My ancestresses were explorers and star messengers. So, many worlds in the region would have—"

"Exactly. It's all a matter of available information! Pleasence World had data on you, but not on a seminatural variant like me, born on Kalimarn of Kalimarnese stock. For all we know, I might have what Jarlquin's looking for, too."

Isola nodded earnestly. "I'm sure of that. Do you mean you're thinking—"

"—of getting tested?" Mikaela watched Isola over the rim of her cup. "Do you think I should?"

Despite her continuing reservations over having been requisitioned in the first place, Isola felt a surge of enthusiasm. The notion of sharing this experience—this unexpected experiment in motherhood—with her only friend gave her strange pleasure. "Oh, yes! They'll jump at the chance. Of course . . ." She paused.

"What?" Mikaela asked, tension visible in her shoulders.

Isola had a sudden image of the two of them, waddling about the station, relying utterly on drones and pseudo-life servitors to run errands and experiments. The inconvenience alone would be frightful. Yet, it would only add up to a year or so, altogether. She smiled ironically. "It means our guests would stay longer. And you'd have to put up with Jarlquin—"

Mikaela laughed. A hearty laugh of release. "Yeah, dammit. That is a drawback!"

Relieved at the lifting of her partner's spirit, Isola grinned too. They were in concord again. She had missed the old easiness between them, which had been under strain since that first surprise message disrupted their hermit's regime.
This will put everything right
, she hoped.
We'll have years to talk about a strange, shared experience after it's all over
.

The best solutions are almost always the simplest
.

Within a sac of amniotic fluid, a play is acted out according to a script. The script calls for proteins, so amino acids are lined up by ribosomes to play their roles. Enzymes appear at the proper moment. Cells divide and jostle for position. The code demands they specialize, so they do. Subtle forces of attraction and repulsion shift them into place, one by one.

It is a script that has been played before.

A script designed to play again.

The pair of nanonoughts—each weighing just a million tons—hovered within a neutral gravity tank. Between the microscopic wells of darkness, a small recording device peered into one of the tiny singularities. Across the room, screens showed only the color black.

Special fields kept each nought from self-destructing—either through quantum evaporation or by folding space around itself like a blanket and disappearing. Other beams of force strained to hold the two black holes apart, preventing gravity from slamming them together uncontrollably.

It was an unstable situation. But Isola was well practiced. Seated on a soft chaise to support her overstrained back, she used subtle machines to manipulate the two funnels of sunken metric towards each other. The outermost rims of their space-time wells merged. Two microscopic black spheres—the event horizons themselves—lay centimeters apart, ratcheting closer by the second, as Isola let them slowly draw together.

Tides tugged at the camera, suspended between, and at the fiber-thin cable leading from the camera to her recorders. Peering into one of those pits of blackness, the minitelescope saw nothing. That was only natural.

Nothing could escape from inside a black hole.

A special kind of nothing, though. Nothing that had formerly been light, before being stretched down to true nothingness in the act of climbing that steep slope.

The two funnels merged closer still. The microscopic black balls drew nearer.

Light trying to escape a black hole is reddened to non-existence. Nevertheless, virtual light can theoretically escape one nought, only to be sucked into the other. There, it starts
blue
-shifting exponentially, as gravity yanks it downward again
.

Between one event horizon and the other, the light doesn't "officially" exist. Not in the limiting case. Yet ideally, there should be a flow
.

They had not believed her on Kalimarn. Until one day she showed them it was possible, for the narrowest of instants, to tap the virtual stream. To squeeze between the red-shifted and blue-shifted segments. To catch the briefest glimpse—

It happened too fast to follow with human eyes. One moment two black spheres were inching microscopically towards each other with the little, doomed instrumentality tortured and whining between them. The next instant, in a sudden flash, all contents of the tank combined and vanished. Space-time backlash set the reinforced vacuum chamber rocking—a side effect of that final stroke which severed forever all contact between the noughts and this cosmos where they'd been made. In the instant it took Isola to blink, they were gone, leaving behind the neatly severed end of fiber cable.

Gone, but not forgotten. In taking the camera with them, the singularities had given it the moment it needed. The moment when "nothing" was no longer nothing but merely a deep red.

And red is visible. . . .

This was what had won her funding to seek out a partner and come here to Tenembro Nought. For if it was possible to look inside a microhole, why not a far bigger one that had been born in the titanic self-devouring of a star? So far, she and Mikaela hadn't succeeded in that part of the quest. Their research at the micro end, however, kept giving surprising and wonderful results.

Isola checked to make sure all the secrets of the vanished nanonought had been captured during that narrow instant and were safely stored in memory. Its rules. Its nature as a cosmos all its own. She had varied the formation recipe again, and wondered what physics would be revealed this time.

Before she could examine the snapshot of a pocket universe, however, her left eyelid twitched and came alight with a reminder. Time for her appointment. Damn.

But Jarlquin had shown Isola how much more pleasant it was to be on time.

The temperature of the universe is just under three degrees, absolute. It has chilled considerably, in the act of expanding over billions of years, from fireball to cosmos. Cooling in turn provoked changes in state. Delicately balanced forces shifted as the original heat diffused, allowing protons to form from quarks, then electrons to take orbit around them, producing that wonder, Hydrogen. Later rebalancings caused matter to gather, forming monstrous swirls. Many of these eddies coalesced and came alight spectacularly—all because the rules allowed it.

Because the rules
required
it.

Time processed one of those lights—by those selfsame rules—until it finished burning and collapsed, precipitating a fierce explosion and ejection of its core from the universe.

Tenembro Nought sat as a fossil relic of that banishment. A scar, nearly healed, but palpable.

All of this had come about according to the rules.

"We've liberated ourselves from Darwin's Curse, but it still comes down to the same thing."

The visitor made a steeple of her petite hands, long and narrow, with delicate fingers like a surgeon's. Her lips were full and dyed a rich mauve hue. Faint ripples passed across her skin as pores opened and closed rhythmically. A genetic graft, Isola supposed. Probably some Vorpal trait inserted into Jarlquin's genome before she was even conceived.

Fortunately, laws limit the gene trade
, Isola thought.
All they can ask of me is a simple cloning
.

Over Jarlquin's shoulder, through the window of the lounge, Isola saw the starscape and realized Smolin Cluster was in view. Subvocally, she ordered the magnifocus pane to enlarge one quadrant for her eye only. Flexing gently, imperceptibly to other visitors across the room, the window sent Isola a scene of suns like shining grains. One golden pinpoint—Pleasence Star—shone soft and stable. Its kind, by nature's laws, would last eons and never become a nought."

"You see," Jarlquin continued, blithely ignorant of Isola's distraction. "although we've pierced much of the code of Life, and reached a truce of sorts with Death, the fundamental rule's the same. That is successful which continues. And what continues most successfully is that which not only lives, but multiplies."

Why is she telling me this
? Isola wondered, sitting in a gently vibrating nonlife chair across from Jarlquin. Did the biologer-nurturist actually care what her subject thought? Isola had agreed to disrupt her research and donate a clone, for the genetic benefit of Pleasence World. Wasn't that enough?

I ought to be flattered. Tenembro Nought may be "close" to their world by interstellar standards; still, how often does a colony send a ship so far, just to collect one person's neonate clone
?

Oh, the visitors had also made a great show of scrutinizing their work here, driving Mikaela to distraction with their questions. The pair of Butins were physicians and exuded enthusiasm along with their pungent, blue perspiration. But Jarlquin had confided in Isola. They would never have been approved to come all this way if not also to seek her seed. To treasure and nurture it, and take it home with them.

As I was taken from my own parent, who donated an infant duplicate to Kalimarn as her ship swept by. We are a model in demand, it seems
.

The reasons were clear enough, in abstract. In school she had learned about the interstellar economy of genes, which prevented the catastrophe of inbreeding and spread the boon of diversity. But tidal surges of hormone and emotion had not been in her syllabus. Isola could not rightly connect abstractions with events churning away below her sternum. They seemed as unrelated as a sonnet and a table.

Two pseudo-life servitors entered—no doubt called when Jarlquin winked briefly a moment ago—carrying hot beverages on a tray. The blank-faced, bipedal protoplasmoids were as expressionless as might be expected of beings less than three days old . . . and destined within three more to slip back into the vat from which they'd been drawn. One servant poured for Isola as it had been programmed to do, with uncomplaining perfection no truly living being could have emulated.

"You were speaking of multiplication," Isola prompted, lest Jarlquin lose her train of thought and decide to launch into another recital of the wonders of Pleasence. The fine life awaiting Isola's clone.

"Ah?" Jarlquin pursed her lips, tasting the tea. "Yes, multiplication. Tell me, as time goes on, who populates the galaxies? Obviously, those who disperse and reproduce. Even though we aren't
evolving
in the old way—stressed by death and natural selection—a kind of selection is still going on."

"Selection?"

"Indeed, selection. For traits appropriate to a given place and time. Consider what happened to those genes that, for one reason or another, kept individuals from leaving Beloved Earth during the first grand waves of colonization. Are descendants of those individuals still with us? Do those genes persist, now that Earth is gone?"