Diamonds in the Sky (27 page)

“Yes, but a pulsar is still darn unlikely to be there,” said Jennifer. “Has the champagne gone to your head already?”

“Serendipity happens,” John pointed out.

* * *

Under the rim of the crater, the big dish gleamed in the faint rain of photons. The receiving instruments caught a unique radio thread; the computer teased it out of the background circuit noise. Edward promptly converted and amplified the signal. It came out as a conversation-stopping loud hum. Echoing from the bare walls, the hum sounded startlingly pure, and made Jennifer leap up, spilling some champagne. “Edward! Make sure that’s not our equipment!” she gasped.

“High C!” Cantu guessed. “Are you sure that’s not little green men?”

John said rapidly, “It’s consistent with a millisecond pulsar.” With a glance, he verified that the display screen was representing the signal as a series of spikes. Data windows lined up under the running spikes. John opened one window and read the period of the signal: two point one thousandths of a second. “I think we’ve made a very timely discovery, thanks to you guys helping us fix the dish.”

“Hot damn!” Grinning from ear to ear, Cantu pumped Rodriguez’s hand, then Zheng’s.

Jennifer was too surprised to be jubilant. She asked, “Whatever made you look for it right away?”

“I read over the previous data last night, and slept on it.” John smiled. “And then I dreamed about a hummingbird. It was humming, just like this.” He turned both palms up in the bright flurry of sound echoing around the room.

“I’ll be darned!”

John laughed.

Edward solemnly announced, “I can’t be
absolutely
sure it’s not the equipment, but it seems unlikely,” whereupon Jennifer bounded over and kissed Edward. Then she said, “Let’s let Schropfer know!”

John nodded. “And Ramona.”

“Of course.”

Ramona would want to hear about the hummingbird dream — she would be delighted. But that was a gift to save until he saw her in person again. “She knows enough astronomical nomenclature to understand this.” He sent the same brief message on its way to the L-5 space station as well as to Washington, DC, Earth. The photons of his message traveled to L-5 and to Earth at the same speed of light with which the pulsar’s signal had crossed intergalactic space to meet the radio telescope on the Moon.

PSR 0106-73
IT WORKS

AFTERWORD

This story was first published in the February, 1991 issue of
Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact
. Because I’m not an astronomer myself, I did a great deal of research. Even more important, I posed questions to scientist friends. These included Marc R. Hairston and Sedge L. Simons, both of whom have Ph.D.s in Space Physics from Rice University. And both of whom have great imaginations.

My most invaluable consultant was Dr. Linda Dressel. At the time she was on the faculty at Rice University; she’s now with the Space Telescope Science Institute. She is a radio astronomer who has worked at the big radio dish in Arecibo Puerto Rico. She helped me move Arecibo to the Moon.

©
Alexis Glynn Latner

There is a sudden frisson of adrenaline, a surge of something approaching terror (if I could still feel terror), and I realize that this is it, this time I am the one who is doing it.

I’m the one who is going to drop into a black hole.

Oh, my god. This time I’m not you.

This is real.

Of course, I have experienced this exact feeling before. We both know exactly what it feels like.

* * *

My body seems weird, too big and at once too small. The feel of my muscles, my vision, my kinesthetic sense, everything is wrong. Everything is strange. My vision is fuzzy, and colors are oddly distorted. When I move, my body moves unexpectedly fast. But there seems to be nothing wrong with it. Already I am getting used to it. “It will do,” I say.

There is too much to know, too much to be all at once. I slowly coalesce the fragments of your personality. None of them are you. All of them are you.

A pilot, of course, you must have, you must be, a pilot. I integrate your pilot persona, and he is me. I will fly to the heart of a darkness far darker than any mere unexplored continent. A scientist, somebody to understand your experience, yes. I synthesize a persona. You are him, too, and I understand.

And someone to simply experience it, to tell the tale (if any of me will survive to tell the tale) of how you dropped into a black hole, and how you survived. If you survive. Me. I will call myself Wolf, naming myself after a nearby star, for no reason whatsoever, except maybe to claim, if only to myself, that I am not you.

All of we are me are you. But, in a real sense, you’re not here at all. None of me are you. You are far away. Safe.

* * *

Some black holes, my scientist persona whispers, are decorated with an accretion disk, shining like a gaudy signal in the sky. Dust and gas from the interstellar medium fall toward the hungry singularity, accelerating to nearly the speed of light in their descent, swirling madly as they fall. It collides; compresses; ionizes. Friction heats the plasma millions of degrees, to emit a brilliant glow of hard x-rays. Such black holes are anything but black; the incandescence of the infalling gas may be the most brilliantly glowing thing in a galaxy. Nobody and nothing would be able to get near it; nothing would be able to survive the radiation.

The Virgo hole is not one of these. It is ancient, dating from the very first burst of star-formation when the universe was new, and has long ago swallowed or ejected all the interstellar gas in its region, carving an emptiness far into the interstellar medium around it.

The black hole is 57 light years from Earth. Ten billion years ago, it had been a supermassive star, and exploded in a supernova that for a brief moment had shone brighter than the galaxy, in the process tossing away half its mass. Now there is nothing left of the star. The burned-out remnant, some thirty times the mass of the sun, has pulled in space itself around it, leaving nothing behind but gravity.

* * *

Before the download, the psychologist investigated my—your — mental soundness. We must have passed the test, obviously, since I’m here. What type of man would allow himself to fall into a black hole? That is my question. Maybe if I can answer that, I would understand ourself.

But this did not seem to interest the psychologist. She did not, in fact, even look directly at me. Her face had the focusless abstract gaze characteristic of somebody hotlinked by the optic nerve to a computer system. Her talk was perfunctory. To be fair, the object her study was not the flesh me, but my computed reflection, the digital maps of my soul. I remember the last thing she said.

“We are fascinated with black holes because of their depth of metaphor,” she said, looking nowhere. “A black hole is, literally, the place of no return. We see it as a metaphor for how we, ourselves, are hurled blindly into a place from which no information ever reaches us, the place from which no one ever returns. We live our lives falling into the future, and we will all inevitably meet the singularity.” She paused, expecting no doubt some comment. But I remained silent.

“Just remember this,” she said, and for the first time her eyes returned to the outside world and focused on me. “This is a real black hole, not a metaphor. Don’t treat it like a metaphor. Expect reality.” She paused, and finally added, “Trust the math. It’s all we really know, and all that we have to trust.”

Little help.

* * *

Wolf versus the black hole! One might think that such a contest is an unequal one, that the black hole has an overwhelming advantage.

Not quite so unequal, though.

On my side, I have technology. To start with, the wormhole, the technological sleight-of-space which got you 57 light years from Earth in the first place.

The wormhole is a monster of relativity no less than the black hole, a trick of curved space allowed by the theory of general relativity. After the Virgo black hole was discovered, a wormhole mouth was laborously dragged to it, slower than light, a project that took over a century. Once the wormhole was here, though, the trip is only a short one, barely a meter of travel. Anybody could come here and drop into it.

A wormhole — a far too cute name, but one we seem to be stuck with — is a shortcut from one place to another. Physically, it is nothing more than a loop of exotic matter. If you move though the hoop on this side of the wormhole, you emerge out the hoop on that side. Topologically, the two sides of the wormhole are pasted together, a piece cut out of space glued together elsewhere.

Exhibiting an excessive sense of caution, the proctors of Earthspace refused to allow the other end of the Virgo wormhole to exit at the usual transportation nexus, the wormhole swarm at Neptune-Trojan 4. The far end of the wormhole opens instead to an orbit around Wolf-562, an undistinguished red dwarf sun circled by two airless planets that are little more than frozen rocks, 21 light years from Earthspace. To get here we had to take a double wormhole hop: Wolf, Virgo.

The black hole is a hundred kilometers across. The wormhole is only a few meters across. I would think that they were overly cautious.

The first lesson of relativity is that time and space are one. For a long time after the theoretical prediction that such a thing as a traversable wormhole ought to be possible, it was believed that a wormhole could also be made to traverse time as well. It was only much later, when wormhole travel was tested, that it was found that the Cauchy instability makes it impossible to make a wormhole lead backward in time. The theory was correct — space and time are indeed just aspects of the same reality, spacetime — but any attempt to move a wormhole in such a way that it becomes a timehole produces a vacuum polarization to cancel out the time effect.

After we — the spaceship I am to pilot, and myself/yourself — come through the wormhole, the wormhole engineers go to work. I have never seen this process close up, so I stay nearby to watch. This is going to be interesting.

A wormhole looks like nothing more than a circular loop of string. It is, in fact, a loop of exotic material, negative-mass cosmic string. The engineers, working telerobotically via vacuum manipulator pods, spray charge onto the string. They charge it until it literally glows with Paschen discharge, like a neon light in the dirty vacuum, and then use the electric charge to manipulate the shape. With the application of invisible electromagnetic fields, the string starts to twist. This is a slow process. Only a few meters across, the wormhole loop has a mass roughly equal to that of Jupiter. Negative to that of Jupiter, to be precise, my scientist persona reminds me, but either way, it is a slow thing to move.

Ponderously, then, it twists further and further, until at last it becomes a lemniscate, a figure of eight. The instant the string touches itself, it shimmers for a moment, and then suddenly there are two glowing circles before us, twisting and oscillating in shape like jellyfish.

The engineers spray more charge onto the two wormholes, and the two wormholes, arcing lightning into space, slowly repel each other. The vibrations of the cosmic string are spraying out gravitational radiation like a dog shaking off water — even where I am, floating ten kilometers distant, I can feel it, like the swaying of invisible tides — and as they radiate energy the loops enlarge. The radiation represents a serious danger. If the engineers lose control of the string for even a brief instant, it might enter the instability known as “squiggle mode,” and catastrophically enlarge. The engineers damp out the radiation before it gets critical, though — they are, after all, well practiced at this — and the loops stabilize into two perfect circles. On the other side, at Wolf, precisely the same scene has played out, and two loops of exotic string now circle Wolf-562 as well. The wormhole has been cloned.

All wormholes are daughters of the original wormhole, found floating in the depths of interstellar space eleven hundred years ago, a natural loop of negative cosmic string ancient as the Big Bang, invisible to the eyes save for the distortion of spacetime. That first one led from nowhere interesting to nowhere exciting, but from that one we bred hundreds, and now we casually move wormhole mouths from star to star, breeding new wormholes as it suits us, to form an ever-expanding network of connections.

I should not have been so close. Angry red lights have been flashing in my peripheral vision, warning blinkers that I have been ignoring. The energy radiated in the form of gravitational waves had been prodigious, and would have, to a lesser person, been dangerous. But in my new body I am nearly invulnerable, and if I can’t stand a mere wormhole cloning, there is no way I would be able to stand a black hole. So I ignore the warnings, wave briefly to the engineers, though I doubt that they can even see me, floating kilometers away, and use my reaction jets to scoot over to my ship.

* * *

The ship I will pilot is docked to the research station, where the scientists have their instruments and the biological humans have their living quarters. The wormhole station is huge compared to my ship, which is a tiny ovoid occupying a berth almost invisible against the hull. There is no hurry for me to get to it.

I’m surprised that any of the technicians even see me, tiny as I am in the void, but a few of them apparently do, because in my radio I hear casual greetings called out: how’s it,
ohayo gozaimasu
, hey glad you made it, how’s the bod? It’s hard to tell from the radio voices which ones are people I know, and which are only casual acquaintances. I answer back: how’s it,
ohayo
, yo, surpassing spec. None of them seem inclined to chat, but then, they’re busy with their own work.

They are dropping things into the black hole.

Throwing things in, more to say. The wormhole station orbits a tenth of an astronomical unit from the Virgo black hole, closer to the black hole than Mercury is to the sun. This is an orbit with a period of a little over two days, but, even so close to the black hole, there is nothing to see. A rock, released to fall straight downward, takes almost a day to reach the horizon.