Watson, Ian - SSC (23 page)

 
          
“Admit
it, Lob, it’s a nonsense interpretation,” insisted Rhoda while I piloted us up
through the clouds towards the clarity of space. She addressed Lob harshly and
petulantly, as though he was guilty of a crime. He only bowed his head and
meditated.

 
          
Then
a solar system was around us once again, obeying sensible laws; and stars in
their constellations and clusters; and the far smudges of galaxies. Ahead lay
the mother ship; silver dragonfly with bulbous head where we had our living
quarters, long slim tail terminating in the knob of the plasma drive, and wings
spread to harvest the interstellar hydrogen magnetically. We all sighed with
relief, even Lob.

 
          
Later,
we classified the aberrant moon as UIS—Uninhabited by an Intelligent Species;
dominant native life-form a biped slug with a high degree of constructive
activity, instinctively programmed. By general consent Lobsang’s version was
vetoed. I think even Lob was happy to be overruled this time. We sped away to
more substantial worlds, where his insights served us well enough,
subsequently.

 
          
I
haven’t time to tell about his breakthrough with the fire beings of Achernar IV
or the slime molds of Deneb VII. But it must have been an off-day for him, that
time on the Clayworld. Yet he never quite admitted it. He had his pride—as
Rhoda had hers. After all, a Sherpa had been
joint
-first
on the summit of Everest on Earth. And the universe was our Everest now—an
Everest without apparent summit.

 
 
          
For
the second time in three years the starship
Subrahmanyan
Chandrasekhar
sailed for the Black Hole that was the blind eye of the
binary system Epsilon Aurigae, with the Arab telemedium Habib on board.

 
          
At
about the same distance from the bright supergiant that is the visible partner
of the system as Pluto from the Sun, they reached their destination. Officers
and scientists crowded the nacelle beside the lounge to stare into space at
something they couldn’t see except insofar as it bent light from the background
stars around itself in an annulus of secondary ghost images.

 
          
The
Hole itself was nothing—literally. Even the fabric of space was missing, there.

 
          
A
nova is fearful; a supernova, awe-inspiring. Yet their ravening energies are a
creative mainspring of the galaxy, spewing out heavy elements for new stars and
planets. They are positive energies. The mind can grasp them. But the Black
Hole is all negative—the emptiness of the void multiplied a million times into
something infinitely greedy. A star collapses under its own gravity, disappears
from the universe and leaves a whirlpool of nothingness beyond it. Anything
falling into the
hole
—no matter how well protected it
is, no matter if it is powered by the energy of a thousand suns—is trapped
forever. The Black Hole is Death the Conqueror.

 
          
The
Hole in the Aurigae system had already been located from Earth in the twentieth
century by its periodic eclipses of its yellow supergiant partner every
twenty-seven years; however it wasn’t till the mid-twenty-third that a starship
brushed by it.

 
          
Then,
something more incredible than the Hole itself was found—a living being trapped
inside it.

 
          
The
growth of Psionics Communications—the telemedium system—made the discovery
possible. Instantaneous psi-force alone could enter a Black Hole and emerge
again. But only if a mind was already present in there . . .

 
          
In
the nacelle, along with the officers and scientists, were the two political
officers from Bu- Psych-Sec—the Bureau of Psychological Security—Lew Boyd and
Liz Nielstrom; Habib, who had first made contact with the mind in there; and a
young Swedish girl on her first starflight, Mara Glas.

 
          
Habib
stood out from the others by wearing traditional Arab costume: the
haik
and
aba
of the desert Bedouin. He wore the headdress and long full
skirt with a striped white and blue mantle of camel-hair sacking pulled over
it. By making a clown of
himself
in this way,
parodying his uneducated nomad’s origin, he made himself acceptable to the
others and guarded the privacy of his feelings; another strategy was his
carefully cultivated gutter humor. He was that freak thing, a mind-whore; and
however essential he might be for communications and psychological
stability,
the telemedium was a reluctant actor in a perpetual
dirty joke.

 
          
Psionics
and sexual energy were the two great forces that Bu-Psych-Sec had learned to
harness to bind starships safely to home-base Earth no matter how far they
roamed. Through psi and sex, bonded together, Earth held her star fleet on the
tightest leash, a leash rooted so deeply in the nervous system as to guarantee
there would never be any defections to lotus worlds among the stars;
nor
more mundane lapses in her continual on-line monitoring
of the farthest vessel.

 
          
As
they stood in the nacelle, Mara Glas tried telling herself for the hundredth
time that this was all for the good of everyone at home on Earth, and for the
stability of civilization; that Bu- Psych-Sec had designed the safest, most
humanitarian system compatible with star empire. So she had been programmed
to believe at any rate, by days of lectures and subliminal persuasion.

 
          
But
she never thought it would be like this, serving Earth’s starship
communications system. She never dreamed,

 
          
Naturally,
the Black Hole was fair pretext for a bout of boisterous smut, if only to mask
their fear of the phenomenon. The very name carried such blatant connotations
of the trance room that Mara thanked her stars she wasn’t born a Negress; felt
pity for Habib’s darker-skinned soul.

 
          
“There
she blows!” crowed the chief engineer.

 
          
Ted
Ohashi, the astrophysicist from
Hawaii
—a mess of a man, like a third-rate Sumo
wrestler gone to seed—snickered back:

 
          
“That
little mouth; she'll suck all the juice in the galaxy given half a
chance."

 
          
“A
suck job, that's good, I like it," laughed Kurt Spiegel, the leonine
Prussian from
Hamburg
's
In
- stitut fur Physik, boisterously. His
wiry hair was swept back in a mane as though the abstractions of Physics had
electrified it; though just as exciting to the man, in fact, was that other
district of Hamburg around the Repperbahn, St. Pauli, where he got his relief
from the enigmas of Schwarzschildian Geometry and Pauli Equations in the more
down-to-earth contortions of the strippers going through their bump and grind
routines for him, drunk on Schnapps, replete on bockwurst.

 
          
Habib
made a point of joining in the merriment, while Liz Nielstrom flashed a grin of
pure malice at Mara for failing to join in.

 
          
How
the human race struggled against Beauty! Mara wept silently. How desperately
they strove to make the Singular and Remarkable, dirty and shameful!

 
          
Mara
was young. With the perpetual rush to draft telemediums into the Navy, and the
fewness of those with the potential among Earth’s billions, the Swedish girl
was barely out of her fifteenth year before being drafted.

 
          
One
thing she didn’t know about Habib was the kind of debriefing Bu-Psych-Sec put
him through after the first expedition, when he reported the existence of that
mind inside the Black Hole to the incredulity of practically everyone in the
Navy. They'd peeled his mind down like an onion at the
Navy
Hospital
in
Annapolis
. They'd used strobe- hypno on him.
Neoscopalamine.
Pentathol-plus.
Deepsee.
It had been a harrowing, insane-making three weeks
before they believed him. And it was another two years before the second
expedition sailed.

 
          
But
one thing she did know about him, that no one else did, was the utter
difference between the image he presented publicly of a dirty street Arab, and
the sense of his mind she had whenever they’d taken the psionic trigger drug,
2-4 Psilo-C, together, to cathect with Earth across the void. Then it was like
a light being switched on in a dark room, and he was a different Habib—a Bedouin
of the sands, a poet, and a prophet.

 
          
The
people who rode the carrier beam of the teletrance never knew the pure beauty
of the desert between the stars. All they got a sense of was the dirty urchin
hanging around the oasis of far Earth, plucking at their sleeves and mumbling,
“Mister, you want to buy my sister?” But Habib was the desert Bedouin too. Why
did he always deny the desert beauty, out of trance?

 
          
Maybe
this was the last lesson she had to learn—the final breaking in of the foal, to
insure she could be safely graduated with flying colors and posted to some star
frigate by herself.

 
          
Just
then, strangely, as though he was reading her thoughts out of trance, Habib
grasped her arm softly and whispered in her ear, with the voice that she’d
longed to hear from his lips for the past three months—yet quietly, so that no
one else could hear:

 
          
“Compared
with the void of space, Mara, whatever is the void inside that thing?”

 
          
He
asked her gently and eerily—as though the
Mecca
pilgrimage of their minds was at last
underway and the furtive shabbiness of the caravanserais, the whores and
beggary and disease, could be put behind them.

 
          
 
 
“It is
so
solid
a void that
‘here' and ‘there' are
meaningless words. There will be no referents in
there, except those you yourself manufacture, Mara . . ."

 
          
But
could she really trust this sudden shift from urchin to muezzin calling the
faithful to prayer—or was it just another round in the game of cruelty?

 
          
“It's
so dense in there that it must be like swimming through stone." Habib went
on murmuring in her ear. “Yet even that comparison's no good, for he has no
power to swim about his dwelling place*—"

 
          
Puzzled,
Mara stared out without replying.

 
         
 
The captain stepped into the
nacelle a moment later—a thick-set, hard-headed grandson of Polish-German
immigrants to America, who still had the air of being a peasant in from the
country dressed in his best, ill-tailored suit, and who ran the ship with all
the cunning and blunt persistence of the peasant making a profitable pig sale:
this, alloyed to a degree or two in Astronavigation and a star or two for
combatin some brushfire war in Central Africa stirred up by the draft board's
“child-snatching." Immune to the wonders of space, Lodwy Rinehart barely
glanced outside.

 
          
“May
I have your attention a moment? We’ll be sailing down to the ergosphere
commencing twenty hundred hours—"

 
          
Ted
Ohashi gobbled nervously:
 
 
         
“You mean
tonight
?
Maybe we should fire a
few drones near that thing first, to check the stability of the ergosphere-—”

 
          
“After
three months you want to hang back another few days? Maybe you want another
session with Mara Glas in case you get killed and never know those joys again,
is that it? Sorry, Dr. Ohashi. Twenty hundred, we’re going right down on her up
to the hilt.’’

 
          
“Just
not too close,” the fat man pleaded. “We could be sucked in, you know. Space is
so bent there. No power could get us out then. Fifty nautical miles off the
top of the ergosphere’s fine by me, Captain!”

 
          
“Point
taken, Dr. Ohashi,” Rinehart smiled acidly. “That’s also fine by me. ‘Up to the
hilt’ was just a colorful bit of naval slang. Need I spell it out for you?”

 
          
The
German from
Hamburg
guffawed. “That’s good, I like it, Captain.”

 
          
The
Hawaiian snickered dutifully too then, his fat wobbling in the starlight, but
he was scared.

 
          
Mara
shivered. Habib shrugged indifferently; by shrugging he hid his features in the
shadow of the
haik
. . .

 
          
Space
presents itself to the telemedium’s mind in symbolic form. The mind can only
see what it has j learned to see, and it has certainly not learned to see
light-years and cosmic rays and gravity waves. Therefore space must present
itself in terms of symbols learned by the brain during the cognitive processes
of life on Earth.

 
          
The
symbols Habib presented Mara with were those of the desert Bedouin. Perhaps,
taught by someone from her own part of the world, she would have learned to see
the wastelands of the arctic tundra, the icefloes of the northern seas, or
endless flows of forest. But Habib presented her with the golden desert—and for
this she thanked him from the bottom of her heart, for its pure beauty had a
wealth of heat and color—stark as it was—that awakened her Swedish soul to
life, as the brief hot summer awakened her country from its wintry melancholy
once a year.