Empire Dreams (29 page)

“Anything we can have a look at yet?”

Alain Mercier, chief of staff at ESA Dharmstadt, competent and unflappable, pries loose Dr. Hugh’s question from the tapestry of tongues and replies,

“Pictures coming on screen now. There she is … there she is …”

And suddenly no matter how many words fill the control room, there can never be enough of them to express the feeling of the soul looking upon a black hole.

Dr. Hugh’s first impression is that of ceaselessness—ceaseless swirling, ceaseless spinning, ceaseless activity, a swirling whirling rainbow with a heart of darkness to which everything is drawn down and annihilated. He has never seen anything as dark as the heart of the black hole. Save possibly death. He cannot take his eyes away from the harlequin rings of gas and cometary ice swirling around the collapsar, a maelstrom of elements grinding each other finer and finer like the mills of God, forcing each other hotter, hotter into glowing plasma before the final agonized shriek into the invisibility of the event horizon.

This is it, Gemma, the nightmare on a long winter’s night, remember? This is Nemesis.

* * * *

Trolling in late and drunk after a celebratory departmental piss-up, something akin to guilt had urged Dr. Hugh to peep in at his daughter aged eight. As he switched off her electric blanket (always falling asleep with it on, someday she’ll electrocute herself) he saw bright eyes watching him.

“Daddy.”

“What, wee hons?”

“Dad, I can’t sleep.”

Wavering between
hug, kiss, goodnight, close door
and
what-is-it, how-about-a-story?
a sudden gutquake of whisky made him sit down sloshily on the bed.

“Dad, are you going to tell me a story then?”

“Aren’t you a bit old for stories?”

“Not ghost stories.” Bright eyes met bleary eyes and father and daughter felt themselves caught up in a shiver of mutual conspiracy. No one is ever too old for a ghost story.

“Okay. A ghost story, and a true one.”

“Wow!”

“One that happened to me today.”

“Dad!” Then, disbelievingly, “Really?”

“Truly. Now listen. Now, you’ve heard stories about the ghosts of people, and the ghosts of animals, and the ghosts of trains, and even the ghosts of ships, but this one is about the ghost of a star.”

“A ghost star?”

“Exactly. You see, when stars get very old, billions of years old, they go like people do when they get old. They fall in on themselves, collapse inwards, shrivel up. But unlike people, well, any people I know of, sometimes a star collapses in on itself so far and so fast that it draws a big hole down after it.”

“Like when the water swirls down the plughole in the shower?”

“Very like that. The star falls in on itself and dies but it leaves the hole behind, like the smile on the Cheshire cat, a ghost star, and we call these ghost stars collapsars. Can you say that?” He had trouble saying it himself.

“Collapsars.” Words fascinated his daughter; the longer the word, the better.

“That’s it. Now, this collapsar is like a bottomless pit. Anything that gets too close is pulled in and falls and falls and falls forever and nothing that falls in can ever get out. The collapsar swallows up everything, even light, which is why another name for them is black holes, and the more it swallows the bigger and stronger it gets and the bigger and stronger it gets the more it can draw in and swallow.”

“Dad …”

“Yes, wee hons.” He was growing accustomed to the darkness in the bedroom, he could discern Gemma’s face in the swirling dots of dark.

“You sound scared.”

And all of a sudden he was scared, terrified.

“Dad.” A pause. “You said this was a true story.”

“I did.”

“Does that mean there are such things as collapsars?”

“We found the first one today.” Or rather, two American scientists at UCLA acting on information from a Japanese skywatch probe acting on information from a Soviet orbital X-ray telescope, found one today.

“Is that why you sound scared?”

He could not answer, and in the silence Gemma asked, “Dad, has
Vivaldi
anything to do with this c—c—clasp—”

“Collapsar. Wee hons,
Vivaldi’s
going there.”

He would never forget the little shriek of fear.

“Dad,
Vivaldi’s
going to fall and fall and fall forever …”

“No no, hons,
Vivaldi
’s not going to fall into the black hole.
Vivaldi’s
just going to go round the edge of the collapsar and take a look. It won’t fall in.”

But sitting on his daughter’s bed with the autumn gales howling round the house he felt that in saying
Vivaldi
was going to the black hole he was saying that he was going there himself, and he saw what it was that had terrified him in Gemma’s three words: the sudden, fearful image of
himself
falling falling down down down spinning spinning round round round, dwindling into a little spinning homunculus of a father, falling into the black hole. Dread paralyzed him; mortality had tapped him on the shoulder.

“Then is
Vivaldi
not going to look at the comets any more?”

He thanked God for Gemma’s question.

“No, and yes. You see, as the collapsar moves around the sun—which takes it millions of years, it’s so far away—it passes through the big cloud of comets, remember, the … ?”

“Oort Cloud.” Gemma repeated the name with him, mouth shaping the big, round words, eyes shining with intellectual excitement.

“And it just so happens that the region it’s passing through is very close to the place where
Vivaldi
was originally meant to go. Imagine that, wee hons, first spacecraft to go to a black hole.”

He knew Gemma took a great pride in his work. Not every Daddy in Corstorphin Primary P-5 piloted spaceships to the edge of the solar system. Even if that Daddy happened to be as pissed as a boiled owl.

“Here’s a question, Gemma. What do you know about dinosaurs?”

“You mean Tyrannosaurus Rex and Brontosaurus and all that? What’s that got to do with
Vivaldi
?”

“Wait and see. Now, why aren’t there two dinosaurs here talking astrophysics at two in the morning instead of two humans?”

“Because a comet hit the earth and killed them all.”

“Ah-hah! Now, back to the Oort Cloud. When the black hole passes through the comets, sometimes it passes so close it pulls them in and swallows them, but most of the time it just knocks them out of the cloud and sends them in towards the sun. Now, the last time this happened was sixty-five million years ago in the time of the dinosaurs, and you know what became of them. This time it’s our turn. Maybe we’ll be lucky and no comets will come close to the earth. And maybe we won’t.”

Dr. Hugh saw the fear on his daughter’s face, darker than the darkness in the room, and despised his drunken mouth for frightening her so. Yet this was the world he had bequeathed his eight-year-old child and every loving father’s eight-year-old children: a world of extinction raining out of the sky.

“Daddy?”

“Yes, wee hons?”

“Does this collapsar have a name?”

“Yes it does. The people who found it called it Nemesis.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s the name of an old Greek goddess who brought vengeance down on the earth.”

“Dad, I’m scared.”

“Gemma love, so am I.”

T – 22 15840 KM

At sixteen thousand kilometers and closing, Nemesis fills the Big Wall. Half-hypnotized, Dr. Hugh numbly asks for data. Data will keep it away, keep it remote and distant, half a light-year distant in the Oort Cloud, for projected in garish false color on the video wall it is intimidating, frightening.

“Angular rotation 24000 pi radians per second.”

“Circumference of collapsar event horizon fifteen kilometers.”

“Estimated mass: four solar masses.”

“Radiation temperature estimated 1.47 million K; energy density, 2.2×10
²⁵
eV per liter.”

Gemma, help me. Nemesis is more dreadful than he has ever imagined. Its every aspect is orders of magnitude greater than the estimates he and Kirkby Scott made when the decision was taken to reroute
Vivaldi
to the collapsar. He is not now certain whether
Vivaldi
can survive the encounter with the black hole. All his current guesstimates on survival are based on those hopelessly optimistic, conservative assumptions and even then those probabilities were only in the order of sixty percent in favor of little
Vivaldi
. The odds chalked up by the bookies down in the staff canteen express an altogether different climate of confidence.

Vivaldi
was not built for this, he tells himself.
Vivaldi
was designed for a leisurely stroll among the comets, not a headlong plunge to within twelve kilometers of the event horizon of a black hole. Everything about Nemesis is too much; too much mass, too much heat, too much radiation, too much gravity, too big, too close, too soon.

Damn you, black hole, you are too much and you are going to swallow twenty years of my life as wantonly as you would swallow a grain of comet dust.

He remembers; remembers taking Gemma to see a Disney film when she was quite small. In that film there had been a snake with whirlpool eyes that drew in and hypnotized and Gemma had screamed and screamed and screamed until he took her out of the cinema. Now as he stands before the whirlpool eye of Nemesis he understands her fear.

“Dr. MacMichaels …”

Uh? Andrea Mencke, from Personnel.

“Dr. MacMichaels, just to inform you that Kirkby Scott has arrived and is in the building.”

* * * *

One evening Dr. Hugh arrived home at 26 Milicent Crescent after a busy day on the edge of the solar system to find a stranger in a tasteless but utterly fashionable plaid suit sitting in his favorite armchair chatting amiably to a rapt nearly-sixteen Gemma and sipping a glass of Dr. Hugh’s very very best single-malt.

“Hello, Dad.” Gemma greeted him with a kiss and a Hello-Daddy-Bear hug. “This is Kirkby Scott.”

“Good evening, sir,” said the plaid-suit single-maltsipper, standing and enthusiastically shaking hands. “Kirkby Scott, UCLA. I believe you’re the one wants to send a spaceship to my collapsar.”

His name was Kirkby Scott; he came from the University of California, Los Angeles, though he was born in Wisconsin, where apparently everyone in California was born; he was twenty-eight years old; he had won the youngest-ever doctorate in astrophysics from the University of California, for which he and his partner Paul Mazianzky, now of the Jet Propulsion Lab, Pasadena, had made a study of the orbits and perturbations of orbits of comets in the Oort Cloud on the hypothesis that the sun possessed a distant companion, tentatively christened Nemesis (pretty good name, no?), with the sub-hypothesis, subsequently proved, that this Nemesis was a black-body object, possibly (now verified) a moderately sized collapsar of approximately three solar masses, and that on account of this epochal discovery (words like “Nobel” had been bandied) UCLA, NASA, and the ESA had decided in their corporate wisdom that he, Kirkby Scott, was to be Dr. Hugh MacMichaels’s new partner on the Vivaldi Project.

To which, Dr. Hugh MacMichaels of the Vivaldi Project said,

“You what?”

He went to the Space Lords of the ESA and the Space Lords of the ESA said things like “Americans feeling left out,” and “They did discover it, after all.” They also said things like “no place for dog-in-the-manger attitudes” and “brotherhood of science.” More revealingly, they said “got some deep-space pulse-fusion thing going on over there—Orion, they call it—powered starflight, all that; you scratch my back, all that stuff?” And, sinisterly, they said, “old allies” and “Western-bloc solidarity” and, most sinisterly of all, “directive from the Highest Authorities.”

“Doesn’t the position of Project Director entitle me to some say-so?” said Dr. Hugh.

“Sorry, Hugh,” said the Space Lords of the ESA. “It’s a political decision.” And that was that. Dr. Hugh shuttled home to Edinburgh hating both Kirkby Scott the flesh and Kirkby Scott the idea. He poured out his cup of bile to Moira, but, self-absorbed with the darkness that had taken root in the empty places within her, she was no longer interested in either his work or him. So he poured it out again to Gemma and she listened patiently and when he had emptied himself of his anger at the European Space Agency, Kirkby Scott, and Moira, she said,

“I rather like him, Dad.”

“Like him? Like that … that … dandy, that … popinjay, that poseur?”

“He has a good heart, Dad.”

Dr. Hugh did not appreciate then that his daughter possessed the gift of reading hearts, a kind of spiritual X-ray vision to which all intents were open and from which no secrets could be hid, and so he went away hating Kirkby Scott, idea and man. But day by day, week by week, year by year, his resentment of his partner mellowed and softened and became first admiration, then open liking, and he came to realize that a man can wear a flashy plaid suit (forgivable through fashion), sit in someone’s favorite armchair (forgivable through ignorance) and swill someone’s very very best single-malt and chat up his dear and only daughter (unforgivable under any circumstances), and have a good heart.

Two days after Gemma’s nineteenth birthday, with
Vivaldi
six months from the black hole. Dr. Hugh and Kirkby Scott were guests of honor at the 43rd International Astronautical Conference in Houston, Texas. Dr. Hugh was very excited by the prospect of going to Houston. He had piloted spaceships to the edge of the stars but had never crossed the Atlantic. Gemma was excited for him too.

“Got passport, air-sickness pills, glasses, cheap thriller?”

He nodded, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

“Right, then. Be good, Dad, and knock them dead.”

The 43rd International Astronautical Conference was a triumph. Even half a year from the black hole,
Vivaldi
had still pushed Death Stars, orbital factories, Jupiter ramjets, Martian go-bots, and even pulse-fusion Orion stardrives into the wings and Drs. Hugh and Kirkby—one tweedy, beardy, amiably confused; the other confident, garrulous, the picture of fashion in paisley one-piece and matching duster coat—under the spotlight center stage.