IT WAS A LONG TRIP. Connla learned some strategy game from Xxyxxyx and tried to get Singer interested in it. Singer continued with the hobby that had gotten him into draft trouble in the first place, which was playing in the official Synarche governance and conflict-resolution algorithm games and simulators. The so-called Global Dynamic Systems let him have a direct influence on government and policy through soft governance; there was oversight from the Core AIs and systers, but somebody a long time ago had figured out that people of almost all species tended to be more altruistic when allowed to set their own limits for sacrifice, and they’d also figured out that, statistically speaking, widesourced solutions to problems often worked out pretty well when you considered the average across responses, instead of the most popular response.
I repeat this because Singer mentioned it to me no less than five or six times, along with some long-winded stuff about “using the narrative to change framing around complex problems whose solutions are impeded by poor conceptualizing.”
He always wanted to talk to me about his hobbies when I was just getting into a good bit of my book. I am not sure how he could tell.
Maybe we should send him off to govern for a few ans. Running checks and oversight on people and doing what he loved to do all the time might just get him to shut up about it occasionally when he came back.
If he came back.
Which was, of course, the outcome I feared.
Life is change, I reminded myself, and scrolled open my copy of The Color Purple.
I finished any number of very long antique books over the time that followed. Most recently, Roots, and by the time we were approaching the Core I had started Two Winding Stairs. Travel got fussier as we made our way into the Core. Space here was cluttered, hops short, and traffic in lanes controlled by AIs in order to avoid inadvertent and tragic colocations. Because we were not following a filed and programmed plan, we had to avoid the lanes.
I think I read everything we had downloaded on that trip. I’d worked my way into the nonfiction, and some of Connla’s strategy books. I even picked up the little onionskin edition of Illuminatus! a couple of times and ran my thumb down the pages. They crinkled playfully. I put it back in my cubby, next to a chain a crèchemate gave me when I was little and a gingko leaf preserved in some kind of molded crystal. It was a keepsake of Terra, supposedly. I had read that in the early ans of the diaspora, people leaving the homeworld took a teaspoon of earth with them, but the practice fell out of favor eventually. Microbes, probably. And there were enough humans scattered through the galaxy by now that we would have excavated down to regolith if we’d kept up with it.
White space, this far into the Core, was quite literally white. Less brilliant bands brindled it, but it was sufficiently bright outside that Singer dimmed all the viewports and even filtered the output from his own senso feed so that what reached Connla and me was considerably attenuated. We’d learned that trick some ans ago, around the time that we also discovered it was totally possible to develop a glare headache from referred senso.
This has nothing to do, of course, with either Connla or me having a tendency to shrug into Singer’s skin and pretend to be a space ship ourselves. Definitely not while making vroom noises.
We dropped out of white space occasionally in order to correct course or navigate around some large obstacle such as a star—which we had to do more and more, because while I could guide us by reading the curves of space-time, it turned out that the longer I did that the more exhausted I got, and the more likely I was to make mistakes. So it was easier to have me give Singer a map, and let him handle the tricky bits in normal space.
Mistakes are a good thing to avoid, in space. And the EM drive doesn’t use fuel.
Coming back Newton, we entered a jeweled realm. Stars—suns—gleamed huge and bright and close on every side. The depth of field was most striking; through the lack of perspective, space can seem flat. Here in the Core, though, the sheer density of pinprick stars gave a sense of texture to the velvety blackness they illuminated. You could read by their glow. You could probably even have drawn by it.
By then, the Well was a constant presence—or a heavy absence, rather—in the back of my mind. It was not painful, but inescapable, inspiring me with trite comparisons to lost teeth and missing limbs. I felt it—not so much physically as through the Koregoi senso, which I guess means I felt it physically and I was making valueless distinctions to make myself feel better—as a pull whose effect swept an entire galaxy into a stately, turning spiral, the way you would feel it if you anchored your feet to the hull close to the hub of a station, in such a way that your body was parallel to the axis of rotation. Like when you’re young, and you hold two of another person’s hands and whirl around a common center of gravity until your other two limbs are flung out and the pair of you spin like a carousel.
I found myself glancing constantly at the forward viewport, as if I might catch a glimpse of the Well we were rushing toward. It hung there, our destination, as present as the sense that somebody nearby is staring at you.
More than a hundred diar later—which is to say almost that many white transitions and intermediary short coasts on EM drive later—I looked up not out of impatience, but because Singer’s senso warned me that now would be an excellent time to look up.
I watched the wall of starlight peel itself back and shiver into countless discrete points of light just as we were falling out of white space and into reality, and I caught my first glimpse of the Well.
How do you describe a system that might just be the biggest thing in the galaxy? It was there, right before us. Still distant enough so what we were seeing was a look down the slide of history into long ago.
Revealed before us was a ballet of stars swathed in nebulae like layers of tulle and chiffon illuminated from within. Without really realizing I was expecting anything, I had nevertheless expected space around the Well to be empty and dark, a vacuumed carpet. Instead, the sky was full of brilliant clouds and orbiting stars.
The cluster and its primary massed something like four million times what a yellow dwarf star does. You could make an argument that the object at its heart was, in fact, the primary for the entire Milky Way galaxy, the Well so deep it swept all the systems and systers of the vast and far-flung Synarche in our endless, careening dance.
At its center, veiled in all those whirling nets of mist and light, lay the most incredible precipice in the galaxy. The event horizon of the supermassive black hole.
The accretion disk around the Well was a vast, whipping spiral of white and peach and gold, redshifting through orange into blood as it approached the center. Around the edge of the event horizon was a lensed ring of light—the image of everything behind the Well condensed and twisted into a torus by the profound space-time curvature invoked by its mass.
That was how, despite being a singularity from which no light escaped, the Saga-star was mistily visible, its deformed crescent of brilliant light a partial ring around a hopelessly dark center. It looked like images I’ve seen of how a partially eclipsed sun would look on a cloudy dia, if you were on the dirt downwell.
The Saga-star was so enormous, so vast, that even a human with no more protection than a space suit could have approached that event horizon, sidled right up to it, without being ripped apart by the tidal forces. You’d be blinded by its light—which Singer was filtering for us—and die in a blaze of blueshifted radiation condensed out of the entire history of the universe before you could get close enough to die of being stretched to pieces.
The Saga-star whipped around at a tremendous rate of speed, much faster than the rotation of the accretion disk. That disk, and the relativistic jets careening forth at right angles from it, were not stable, stately spinning or fluttering objects such as you see in animations. Instead they roiled and twisted and barrel-rolled, as if the black hole were a giant marble wrapped in glowing fabric, spun at random.
It looked deadly and fierce, and the most amazing thing was that I wasn’t scared of it at all.
It was too big, too powerful, too amazingly beyond my comprehension. Its companion stars swung around it. A couple of them had worlds, two of those even inhabited. There were systers that had grown up here as species.