What would it do to your psyche if this were your sky? What would it do to the racial awareness of your species if this were their memory of their dirt-bound cradle, before they stepped out into the great emptiness beyond?
Except they’d never have a concept of emptiness, or maybe even darkness, because their sky was a brilliant dance. As I watched, a star slid behind the Well and was lensed around it, appearing as a bent-seeming, melted-looking ring surrounding the brighter crescent of the accretion disk.
It was—in the dictionary definition of the word—unfathomable.
Because Singer was filtering the image and tuning our senso, I could also make out what he saw in so much more defined detail than I could have with my naked human eye, including the towering fountains of X-rays spewing perpendicularly to the accretion disk from the poles of the rapidly spinning black hole.
The crescent shape of that visible accretion disk was not just an effect of gravitational lensing. It was also due to the fact that what we were seeing was not the light of the black hole itself, which of course did not emit any, which would be why it—and its lesser kin—were called black holes, after all. What we were seeing was radiation that had escaped the accretion disk, and the reason one side seemed so much brighter than the other was because that side of the accretion disk was rotating toward us at nearly the speed of light, so the escaping light—and other radiation—was being fired toward our observer position, while the other side was receding.
The black hole was an eerie sight, a mystical experience. Probably because I was importing an enormous weight of expectation to this glimpse of the powers of gravity. But also because here it was, the avatar of destruction, but also the engine that drove the great wheel upon which all life as we knew it depended.
I yawned like a nervous dog, feeling my jaw crack, and realized that I had risen from my work station and drifted—heedlessly—to the viewport, where I hung with my fingers pressed against the smooth, cool, transparent surface like a kid in front of an aquarium full of moray eels.
“Wow,” said Connla, who had somehow appeared beside me. Perhaps Singer had summoned him.
“Kinda makes you want to spit,” I joked.
He punched me lightly on the arm. “You’re the one with the weird psychic Koregoi hunch about supermassive black holes. So what do we do now?”
“I don’t know,” I said, still staring. “Go closer?”
? ? ?
We went closer, and I nursed a small, embarrassed secret. Because I had said I didn’t know—but I did know. Or the Koregoi senso knew, because I felt an instinctual urge to sidle up to the magnificent, incomprehensible emptiness marking out its stately dance of annihilation ahead of us. I was drawn into the furnace irresistibly, wondering all the while if this were in fact such a good idea after all.
I felt like I had to do it. And I also felt like I couldn’t explain to Connla, or even Singer, why I seemed to know what I needed to do.
It was probably a terrible mistake anyway. I told myself that I’d make sure we didn’t get too close. I told myself that moreover, Singer would make sure we didn’t get too close.
I told myself that I didn’t really need to explain to my shipmates that the alien parasite shimmering over my body—seeming brighter now, as we grew closer to the Well—was feeding me strategy.
Okay, so I was probably kidding myself.
? ? ?
We proceeded in short white transitions and long coasts between, curving down the gravitic slope of the Well like a marble dropped into a shallow funnel. The accretion disk grew brighter and brighter; Singer extruded and installed more shielding to protect us from the saturating miasma of radiation. Being X-ray-cooked wasn’t really in our plans, either for Connla and me or for the kitten sisters.
It also gave me an excuse not to exercise under gs, because Singer disassembled the spinlounge for materials. We’d just have to make do for a while.
Fortunately, having two sets of hands helps with freefall stretching and isometrics.
Space nearby was full of people—or as full as space gets, even in the tight confines of the Core. The skies around the Well were dotted with research and sightseeing vessels, not to mention all the craft merely on their way from one place to another, and skimming around the giant obstacle in the way. We dropped our encoded packets every time we came within range of a beacon, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before the Judiciary ships started coming out to meet us.
I kept feeling around for the pirate ship and Farweather, but I could no longer detect them. I hoped it meant they were far away, but it was equally likely, I knew, that Farweather and her people had some means of cloaking themselves. I hoped it was just the black hole’s mass confusing my ability to detect them, because that meant that they, too, would probably be unable to find where I was.
My ability to worry about pirates was sharply curtailed as we got closer and closer to the massive structure of the Well. It was a presence, but more than that, it was a font of data, and—since pirates don’t generally come near the Core, which is full of Synarche Judiciary—I was the first person with the ability to directly sense gravitational forces to approach it, as far as I knew.
The first person since the Koregoi, at least.
I was amazed, and I was boggled.
The physics were too much for me, so I patched Singer in to my senso. He could handle the math, and anyway he pouted if I could sense things that he couldn’t. The exchange was supposed to go the other way, after all; he’d always had the superior machine sensorium, mine being limited by being, despite my improvements, a planet-evolved kludge of an organic, while he was built, after having been designed.
It made him feel better, anyway, when I showed him what he was missing.
We both started to pick up on the anomalies simultaneously. There were variations in texture, for lack of a better word, in the area surrounding the Well. And they seemed to have a semiregular pattern.
This is not to say the Well’s accretion disk was, or should have been, entirely uniform. But the object itself was unbalanced, in its enormous mass, which should have been impossible. You can’t unbalance a singularity: it has no dimension, and dimension is a requirement when you’re trying to say that one end of a thing is heavier than the other.
At last we coasted just—in relative terms at least—above the Well, as close as the sightseeing cruises ever came. Singer got pretty quiet, which I took to mean he was recruiting as many cycles as possible to crunch numbers. I floated and watched the gorgeousness that was the Well, in all its complexity and angular momentum.
A huge, lonely melancholy welled up inside me at the sheer enormousness of what I was contemplating. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, exactly, so I let it ride.
Perhaps what I was feeling was the thing called awe.
Connla floated over next me, and we were companionably quiet for a while. The scale of the thing was so immense that though I knew the space around us bristled with other ships—syster and human—none were easily visible. I caught a flicker of a gleam of silver once or twice, starlight reflecting off the banking flank of another vessel. But that was all.
Despite the distance, it made me feel a little less lonely.
Connla said, “Do you know where the pirates are now?”
I reached out, and still couldn’t find them. Farweather was obviously better at all this stuff than I was.
“I can’t find her,” I said. “But there is something else going on.”
“Interesting,” said Singer, who must have been giving me a fraction of his attention after all. “Focus on that structure, please.”
“What structure?”
He directed my attention. “There’s a series of repeated gravitational anomalies here. That’s not something I’d expect to see inside a black hole. The literature doesn’t contain any description of something like this.”
He caught himself, his next comment sounding amused. “In fairness, nobody has examined the space around a black hole with Koregoi technology in living memory—or if they have, they haven’t published on it.”
What he was pointing at wasn’t within the Saga-star itself, where I shouldn’t have been able to recover any information, but rather in the relativistic jets that sputtered away from it, and also in the . . . well, the very fabric of space-time, warped and twisted as it was by the distorting mass of the Saga-star. The Well was a weird place, for sure.
I was distracted briefly by sparking, twisting brightness like a thrashing snake of fire as one of the black hole’s satellite stars seemed to be shredding itself to pieces, stretching into an arc like an octopus arm above and east of the heart of the Well. It writhed brightly, a spectrum of raveling colors, and then vanished and jumped position as the star itself resolved into view, some distance away.