Gregory Benford Read online

  The Englishman coming up the path from the driveway was none of these, but he did have that Brit habit of knowing an awful lot about the right subjects. He had known a lot about politics when people thought it mattered, was by his own description “infrared” until it became clear that the left was truly dead, and even recently could tell you the names of which ministers voted for what measure. He applied the same acuity to the currents of astronomy. Now he was just as sure of himself as ever, his instincts having carried him quite handily to the top. She felt that she should see him as something more than a somewhat scrawny man in a green suit badly wrinkled by the tropical damp.

  She greeted him at the door with “Kingsley, what a surprise,” though she had been half-expecting him and they both seemed to know that.

  “Thought I’d drop by, was on my way to look at a flat.”

  They went into the spacious, sunlit living room and she sank a little too quickly onto a rattan couch. The trades stirred the wind chimes and she remembered to offer iced tea, which he gratefully accepted, drinking half of the glass straight off. She was infinitely glad that she had chosen the clingy blue dress, though did not let herself dwell on why. Best to keep things on a conversational level, certainly. He was being unusually quiet, getting by with a few compliments about the house, so—

  “You’re planning on staying for a while, then?” she prodded.

  “I can put aside the Astronomer Royal business for a bit. If I am to be something of a scientific shepherd, I should be where things happen. I think it inevitable, given our experience of the last few days.”

  “Ummm. Lately, experience is something I never seem to get until just after I need it.”

  His face clouded and she could see he had been trying to keep this a strictly professional discussion. Well, too bad; she was feeling fragile and human now, and not very astrophysical after a morning of it.

  After a pause, he said, “I’m so sorry about your condition.”

  “Oh Lord, Kingsley, I wasn’t fishing for sympathy. I just meant that this intruder has taken me by surprise in a way I did not think possible anymore. I like it. Keeps me guessing.”

  She half-opened her mouth to bring up the magnetic field splittings, then decided to let Benjamin be the first. After all, she thought with a sudden wry turn of mind, Kingsley had been the first in an earlier, important way that Benjamin had probably always suspected.

  “Sorry, um, again,” he said lamely.

  She felt a burst of warmth at this chink in the Astronomer Royal’s armor. “You can just move here immediately?”

  He smiled grimly. “My home situation is not the best. Angelica and I are separated, so I might just as well be here.”

  “Now it’s my turn to be sorry.”

  “It’s been coming for some time, years really.”

  “She’s a brilliant woman,” Channing said guardedly. Friends with marital strife were tricky; some wanted you to slander their mates, like a weird sort of cheerleader.

  A wobbly smile. “You’ve forgotten her mean side, I fear.”

  “Funny, I don’t remember being absentminded,” she said, hoping the weak joke would get him off the subject. He plainly did not want to go there, yet some portion of him did; a familiar pattern with divorces, she had found.

  He laughed dutifully. “Tell me about your condition. I truly want to know.”

  “Bad, getting worse. A cancer they barely have the name for.”

  “I thought we had cracked the problem down at the cellular level by using an entire array of treatments.”

  “Oh, drugs help. I do well with what they call ‘selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors.’ I take a whole alphabet’s worth of them. Endless chemical adjustments known only by their acronyms, since no human could remember their true names—or want to.”

  He was regaining some of his composure, sitting on a stool and sipping. His voice recovered some of the High Oxbridge tones as he said, “Recalls, from my random reading, a line from Chekhov. ‘If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure.’ As true in the twenty-first century as the nineteenth.”

  She shrugged. “I muddle through, to use a Brit expression.”

  “What was that old saying of yours? ‘Life is complex; it has real and imaginary parts.’ Quite so.” He actually chuckled at this obscure mathematical pun, or else was a far better actor than he had been.

  “Lately, the imaginary has been more fun.”

  “That reminds me of one of your sayings. ‘I don’t get even, I get odder.’ Quite Channing, I used to think. Good to know you’re still that way, that this damned thing hasn’t…”

  “Snuffed out one part of me at a time?” She might as well be up front about it. “That is the way it feels sometimes.”

  A sudden stark expression came onto his face and he said nothing. She said soothingly, “I plan on living forever, Kingsley. So far, so good.”

  “I wish I had your, well, calm.”

  “It may be plain old exhaustion.”

  “No, you had it the other day, leading us all by our noses on that deceleration calculation. Energetic calm.”

  She could see that he meant it and thanked him warmly. “You’ve changed some, too.”

  He shrugged. “It is famously easier to get older than wiser.”

  “I have a lot of trust in your judgment.”

  He grinned. “You showed good judgment two decades ago, dumping me for Benjamin.”

  “I did not ‘dump’ you. I got the distinct impression that you were more interested in astronomy than in me.’

  “Well, of course,” he said quite innocently, then laughed at the baldness of the truth. “That is, I was a monomaniac then.”

  “Would Angelica say anything has changed?”

  “Good point. Probably not.”

  “You weren’t going to change, and Benjamin was what I wanted, anyway. Not that it wasn’t fun…” She put a lot into the drawn-out last word.

  He said seriously, “Yes, it certainly was.”

  They sat for a long, silent moment. The wind chimes sang merrily and the soft air caressed them both, a tangy sea scent filling the room as the trade winds built. She let the moment run, something she would not have done until recently. She relaxed into the sweet odors of plumeria and frangipani, both lush now in her garden. A few years before, she had not even known their names. The garden itself was a recent hobby, all due to the damned disease, which she fought by concentrating upon the present. Zen Dying.

  Then Kingsley began taking his tie off, fingers prying the tight little knot loose. “I must remember where I am. Going to be here awhile, perhaps should buy one of those loud flowery shirts.”

  “And shorts.”

  “The world is not ready for the sight of my knees.”

  “Or mine anymore.”

  “Not so, they were and remain one of your best features.”

  “Say things like that a dozen more times and I’ll get bored.”

  “I’d love the opportunity,” he said brightly and then stopped, as if he saw which way this was headed. Visibly he sobered. A pause. Then he spoke carefully, so that she could hear all the commas in his sentences.

  “I wanted to come here, in part, because I don’t want to be overheard.”

  “That I can guarantee.” She wondered at his sudden mood shift. “Prettier here than in that office the Center gave you, even if it is nice and big.”

  “I fear that the Center is not secure. Or at least, as I understand people like Victoria Martinez, I cannot be absolutely sure that my office is not eavesdropped upon.” He looked at her edgily, as if this were being impolite. She liked his English delicate hesitation. “Already. But within a few days, almost certainly.”

  “That’s also why you’re looking for an apartment.”

  “Precisely. This is going to be ever so much larger and it is going to last quite a while.”

  “Once we’ve identified this new object—oh,
I see.” He made a tent of his hands and peered through them at the languid paradise out the window, like a prisoner contemplating an impossible escape. “I was shaken by Benjamin’s calculation. His implication was clear.”

  “Martinez spoke of danger—”

  “Only the obvious deduction.”

  Channing realized she had nowhere to go in this conversation without betraying Benjamin’s own ideas. She stalled with “But no one in the room mentioned…”

  “That obviously there are only two ways to reconcile his numbers.”

  He looked at her searchingly and she had to suppress a smile at this coy game. Might as well play, though; he still had the old sly charm, damn him. “Either the thing’s passing through a region of the outer solar system where the number of iceteroids is very high for some reason, or…” He let it hang there for a long moment and then gave up. “Or the thing is somehow seeking out lumps of ice and rock and processing them.”

  “Like a starship decelerating.”

  He slapped his knees, the sound scaring off a mynah bird from the windowsill, its quick white flash of wings a blur. “But my own point, that the gamma rays would kill anything—”

  “A solid argument. So there’s that pesky third choice.”

  “Third?”

  She had to admit, he looked genuinely puzzled. “None of the above.”

  “But when you say ‘starship,’ you mean—”

  “Something that flies between stars, period.”

  “Something crewed, even by silicon chip minds, would quite clearly still be vulnerable to—”

  “Give it up, Kingsley. It’s in a category we haven’t thought of yet.”

  He fretted for a moment, his hatchet face with its large eyes drawing her gaze downward to a mouth that stirred restlessly, yet would not shape words. The default style in astronomy was to explain a new observation by assembling a brew of known ingredients—types of stars, orbiting or colliding in various ways, and emitting radiation in known channels, using familiar mechanisms. This worked nearly all the time. Kingsley had used it with speed and ingenuity decades before, explaining gamma-ray bursters quite handily with a little imagination and detailed calculations. Kingsley habitually worked in this mode, his papers couched in a style whose unstated message was to show, not just an interesting application of impressive techniques to a known problem, but also that he was a good deal better at doing this than his readers. Now his mouth worked and twisted with his dislike of working outside this lifelong mode.

  “Then you two are thinking along the same lines as I.”

  “Sure—first, that this thing has to be enormously compressed, and the only object we know in its class of energy and power is…a black hole.” She sipped her iced tea and watched his veiled surprise.

  “One of…”

  He was pulling it out of her, all right, but it was an amusing game. “About three times the mass of our moon.”

  “You derived that from the Doppler shifts from very close in to the core, I suppose?”

  “Exactly. Didn’t want to say so until I had more data.”

  “A black hole of that size is quite small, a meter or two across.” He looked at her askance, skeptical.

  She had looked up the theory. Primordial black holes could have been left over from the Big Bang, but there was no evidence for them. After birth, these tiny singularities in space-time could have survived their habit of radiating away sprays of particles—that is, black holes were not exactly black. This radiation had been worked out by Stephen Hawking, who showed that a small hole would have survived this evaporation, from the beginning of the universe until the present, if it had at least 1015 grams of mass. This was equivalent to an asteroid a hundred meters in radius.

  The intruder, though, had a mass ten billion times greater. It had swallowed a lot, perhaps, in the last fifteen billion years as the universe ripened.

  Where it came from was completely open. It could not have been born in a supernova collapse, which was the theorists’ favorite recipe for making holes. Such a cataclysm would have produced a black hole of mass comparable to the sun. This intruder might have been built up by sucking in mass, all the way back to the Big Bang. Might. Maybe. Perhaps…the familiar wiggle room terms that accompanied most advanced astrophysical theory, which was starved for hard data. Until now.

  Kingsley was enjoying this a bit too much, so she cut to the chase. “So how’s it guide itself, right? Like a fat man on skates, it should just shoot through in a straight line.”

  Kingsley allowed himself a smile. “I apologize for seeming to lead the conversation, but I have had the impression for several days that you know a great deal more than you are admitting.”

  “Being away from the scramble at the Center helps. The quiet gives me time to think.”

  “Particularly, to think of how this impossibility can exist.”

  “It’s a black hole, almost certainly guiding itself with its magnetic fields. I’ve proved they’re there, thousands of Gauss in strength, by looking in a small bit of the optical line data.” There, the whole truth and nothing but. She was tired of all this precious waltzing around, as though they were all trying to get an ace journal paper out of this, or competing for a prize. She had operated under the assumption that Kingsley was, since he had quite a few prizes on his mantel already. But she now saw that he was beyond that, engaged at some different level.

  “I see.”

  He had something to say now, she could tell, but wanted to be coaxed. “This object is not the only problem?”

  “Sure, it’s damned strange and people higher up—a hell of a lot higher up—are going to want to control the situation. But our position is equally odd.”

  “I try not to think beyond the astronomy.”

  “Alas, I must.” He got up and paced, hesitating at the vision of leafy paradise beyond the window. “Quite predictably, we will be…enlisted.”

  “Benjamin feels the same way, but he didn’t want to say it.”

  “Why didn’t he mention it to me today at the Center?”

  “You two have your own, uh, styles. They don’t match up too well.”

  “A very polite way to say it. Bad blood between us, going back to…”

  “Yes, you and me. He suspects, but I’ve never told him.”

  “Good.” Quick nods of the head, a brisk manner. “No point.”

  “He got some hints from ‘friends’ around the time of our marriage. I could tell, from the way he edged around the subject, bringing you up at odd times. Then, years later, noticing very obviously your steady rise up the ladder. A professorship at Manchester—‘Not bad for his age,’ he said. Then a chair at Cambridge, how he envied that! Always in the back of his mind I could feel the question…but he never asked.”

  “It was over, done.”

  “Between men like you nothing is ever really over.”

  “Well, it is to me.” He smiled very slightly. “With you, I mean.”

  “I know. Me, too. But you two are always going to be competitors.”

  “Inevitably.” She could see him draw himself up, taking a cleansing breath, shoving the personal into a pocket of his mind. “And I fear my understanding of how power works in our tiny world implies that matters shall soon change radically.”

  “For the worse.”

  He looked soberly at her and she saw that he had enjoyed this bit of verbal jousting as much as she. But not as flirting, no—as nostalgia. He was shoring up memories of better times, against a grim future.

  Not that she did not do the same, she reminded herself.

  Kingsley gazed at the tropical wealth and sighed. “We’re all going to be kept here, close to the incoming data, and ‘encouraged’ to work together. Of that I am sure. It’s what you expect, isn’t it?”

  “I hadn’t given it a thought.”

  He smiled. “Of course. You have far more important matters to attend. Quite right. I do hope I am wrong.”

  “Me, too…” She
let the sentence trail off. His transition from the Kingsley of old to this astute observer of the corridors of power was unsettling.

  “I can think of no better place to be incarcerated. Compared with my situation in Oxford, especially with the chilly winds blowing from Angelica, it is—”

  “It’s like paradise,” she finished for him.

  3

  For centuries, physics and astronomy sought the big, glamorous governing equations for phenomena that were themselves ever-more grand: larger or smaller, hotter or colder, faster or slower than the narrow, comfortable human world. But shortly after the end of the TwenCen, science—particularly astronomy, with its pricey telescopes—approached the financial turnover, where ever-larger infusions of money yielded only incrementally more insight.

  The universe kept upping the fare for further erudition. The particle physicists had hit that marginal realm with their massive accelerators. Now science increasingly shifted from the fundamental equations to discovering what emerged from those equations in the real, complex world.

  One faction among scientists decried this turning to more applied problems. In their vision, physics resembled Latin—an important canon, essential for advanced work and kept alive by small bands of devoted advocates. This view failed to carry the day among those who gave funding. Applied problems had become the mainstream of physics and even astronomy, making the twenty-first century a more practical place, especially when compared with the great cathedrals of knowledge erected in the TwenCen, soaring to grand heights from the base of great theories.

  Astronomers, with so many new observing windows thrown open upon the universe, kept busy scrutinizing the zoo of objects available at ever-finer resolutions. Those who interpreted the observations evolved new approaches. Theorists now used pencil and paper in a blend with vast computer programs, asking questions with whatever tool seemed best.