Watson, Ian - SSC (25 page)

 
          
Mara
went back to her tiny cabin to weep her bewilderment.

 
          
Mara
was Swedish for “little witch.” But it was also Swedish for “nightmare” . . .

 
          
One
month out from Earth, there’d been a discussion in the lounge about the Black
Hole and the nature of the creature trapped in it. . .

 
          
“When
we get there, we can fire particles into the ergosphere,” Kurt Spiegel
explained to an impromptu audience. “This ergosphere is the region between the
so-called ‘surface of infinite redshift’ and the ‘event horizon.’ ‘Infinite
red- shift’ is the outer layer of the Hole, where queer things really start
happening. But there is still a possibility of extracting news from there. A
particle is fired into the ergosphere; if it breaks up in there, part falls
down the Hole, but the other part may pick up energy from the spin of the Hole
and emerge into normal space again, where we can measure it. But beyond ‘infinite
redshift’ is the terrible ‘event horizon’ itself. Geometry collapses, becomes
meaningless. Thus there is no longer any way out, since there is no
way:
no way up or down, no in or out, no
physical framework. So that’s the end of matter, radiation, anything fall- ling
in there. I believe we may find out something from the ergosphere—but beyond
that, nothing. Anything else is impossible.’’

 
          
“So
you believe that Habib is lying about the thing in there?’’ Liz Nielstrom
demanded.

 
          
Habib
sat silent, face half hidden by the
haik,
though Mara imagined she saw him smile faintly and mockingly.

 
          
“Look
at it this way, Miss Nielstrom,” Carlos Bolam intervened. He was a Chicano
physicist who came from a desert region utterly unlike Habib’s desert of the
mind—from a Californian desert of freeways, drive-ins, hotdog stands, and neon
signs. “Thought must be a function of some matrix or matter or organized
radiation. It’s got to be based on something organized. But by definition
there’s no kind of organization possible within a Black Hole.”

 
          
Spiegel
nodded.

 
          
“All
organization is doomed, beyond the event horizon. The name means what it says.
Events end there, and that’s that. All identity is wiped out, even so basic a
difference as that between matter and antimatter. There is only mass and charge
and spin—”

 
          
“Isn’t
that sufficient to sustain a mind?” asked Liz Nielstrom,
innocently.     ^

 
          
Spiegel
shook his head brusquely.

 
          
“No,
even granted a stripped-down kind of existence, this too only lasts a finite
time till even this residue is sucked into an infinitely small point. You
cannot have a mind organized on a point. That is like angels dancing on a
pinhead.
Nonsense!”

 
          
“I
don’t know about that,” hazarded the fat Ohashi. “Maybe relativistically
speaking we can contact this mind for a hell of a long time span, though from
its own point of view it is rapidly approaching extinction—”

 
          
“But
what happens to this collapsed matter when it reaches an infinitely small
point, I ask you? I say it must spill out someplace else in the universe.
Maybe to become a quasar.
Maybe to form
diffuse new atoms for continuous creation.
This ‘being’ must pass
through this hole. He cannot stick there—even if he does exist . . .” “And you
don’t believe he does, Dr. Spiegel?” “I don’t think so, no.”

 
          
“Well,
Habib?” Lew Boyd demanded. “What do you have to say to that?”

 
          
Habib
shrugged.

 
          
“We
see the universe a different way. I have my symbols, he has his. Did
Bu-Psych-Sec think I was lying? That wasn’t a casual chat we had about the
matter!”

 
          
“I
suppose not,” grudged Boyd.

 
          
“So.”
And Habib retreated back into his robes
again.   .

 
          
“If
there is a being in there,” Ohashi pursued, “he must have some crazy ideas by
now. I presume he fell in there by accident; didn’t evolve in there. He’ll have
memories from sometime of a universe of length and breadth and height, but no
evidence to back this up, no reliable sense impressions. It’ll seem like a mad
hallucination, a drug trip. Yet he might just be able to tell us what it’s like
in there subjectively—”

 
          
“To
get that information out of Black Hole,” snorted Spiegel, “is by definition
impossible!”

 
          
“Maybe
when one of us rides Habib in there—”

 
          
“Remember
what happened to the sailor who was riding Habib last time? He died in
there—and nobody knows why. I’m not riding Habib.” Carlos Bolam stared bitterly
at the Arab, and Mara thought she caught the hint of another cruel smile on
Habib’s lips.

 
          
“The
man wasn’t properly prepared for the encounter,” Lew Boyd stated ominously. “He
thought he was going to meet a mermaid back on Earth, poor bastard. But we’ll
be keeping a tight eye on the trance this time.”

 
          
Despite
Boyd’s grudging acceptance of Habib’s story on that occasion, neither he nor
Nielstrom showed any sign of trusting the telemedium. It was soon plain to Mara
that some trap was being laid for Habib, though if Habib was aware of it he
showed no sign of caring.

 
          
It
puzzled Mara. If Bu-Psych-Sec were so unsure of Habib, why had they sent him
out as ship’s telemedium yet again? To the same place where a sailor had lost
his life!

 
          
A
couple of weeks after that discussion in the lounge, Boyd and Nielstrom were in
there again interrogating the Arab, while Mara stood out in the nacelle, gazing
at the redshifting stars receding from the ship and the violetshifting suns
ahead of them: suns which she knew as a pure golden desert of dunes—and which
she also knew, with a trace of pity, could never be seen as such by the
majority of the human race. Perhaps people’s crudity and violence were brought
on basically by anger at their own limitation of vision?

 
          
“You
went in there, Habib,” she heard.

 
          
“In
there, there is no ‘there,’ ” said Habib elusively.

 
          
“We
know all about this collapse-of-geometry business, but you still went
somewhere.”

 
          
“True.
I went to no-where—”

 
          
“If
you went to nowhere, perhaps there was nothing there?”

 
          
“True,” smirked Habib.
“Nothing.”

 
          
“How
do you make contact with
nothing,
nowhere
, Habib? That’s nonsense!”

 
          
“He
lives imthe midst of non-sense, where even geometry has gone down the drain—”

 
          
“He?
If everything else is so damned uncertain, how can you
be so sure of that thing’s sex?”

           
“You have to use some pronoun ...”

           
“Why not ‘it’?
It’s only an alien thing, in there. It isn’t human, Habib—”

 
          
“Even
a thing must be allowed some dignity,’’ muttered Habib.

 
          
“Interesting
point of view,” said Boyd.

 
          
“I
don’t see that it’ll have much ‘dignity’,” Nielstrom jibed. “When you isolate a
human being in a sensory deprivation tank, he soon starts hallucinating. If you
keep him in there long enough, he goes insane. What is the flavor of this
thing’s insanity, Habib?”

 
          
The
Arab glanced down at the floor so that the
haik
hid his face.

 
          
He
laughed.

 
          
“What
flavor would you prefer?
Vanilla?
Chocolate?
Raspberry?”

 
          
“That’s
not funny,” snapped Boyd.

 
          
“Oh
no, sir, I know how in earnest you are, I remember
Annapolis
.”

 
          
“So
answer! That being’s a psychotic, isn’t it? A fragmented mind—”

 
          
“Psychosis,”
said Habib stiffly, “is a judgment within a context. But he has escaped from
context. Geometry itself has collapsed. Two and two don’t add up to four. The
angles of a triangle may be anything from zero to infinity. It’s the Navy who
are the psycho tics, from his point of view.”

 
          
Habib
abruptly raised his head and grinned; he stuck his thumb in his mouth and
sucked it like a child sucking a lollipop.

 
          
He
pulled his thumb out with a plop.

 
          
“Chocolate?
Vanilla?
Raspberry?”
He smirked.

 
          
“It’s
all a question of
escaping
from
context, isn’t it, Habib?” Boyd demanded, furiously accenting that single word
“escaping” and outstar- ing the Arab, till Habib dropped his eyes furtively.

 
          
The
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
changed
orbits at
20:00
hours
to a circuit as low as they dared fly about the equator of the ergosphere, from
where other stars in the sky had their light warped freakishly into long blue
worm-like streaks and spirals. But they were still safe enough, orbiting faster
than the escape velocity from this zone, flying in a forced curve at great
expense of power rather than allowing their orbit to be dictated to them by the
local gravity.

 
          
Boyd
and Nielstrom were waiting for Mara and Habib in the trance room.

 
          
“Change
of plan,” Liz smiled sweetly.

 
          
“New
procedure,” Boyd explained. “Our little witch will inject with 2-4-P-C on her
own. You, Habib, will ride with her in—”

 
          
“What
in the name of—!” Habib recovered himself. “But Mara isn’t ready. What a mad
thing to do!” He paced up and down between the
trance
couches in a fury.

 
          
“So
near and yet so far, eh?” laughed Boyd, enigmatically.

 
          
Habib
argued; and the more he argued, the more pleased Liz and Lew seemed to be. They
taunted him again about the sailor who’d lost his life inside the Hole.

 
          
“He
poured like water through a sieve, eh, Habib? I wonder if he could have been
poured out,
deliberately?
”

 
          
“That’s
impossible,” gasped Mara.

 
          
“But
think,
what if the rider wasn’t safe? Just imagine the
implications for the Navy.”

 
          
“A
million-to-one accident,” mumbled Habib, distraught. “I know I lost a rider in
there. But what about the Bu-Psych-Sec man who rode in there after him? He
didn’t get hurt.”

 
          
“He
was able to switch off in time. He had the Tantric training to hold back from
orgasm and withdraw when he saw there was nothing in the mirror at the end. So
now you shall ride in there yourself as passenger and let us see what
happens.”

 
          
The
Arab stared queerly at Mara.

 
          
“Mekhtoub,”
he muttered in Arabic, “it is fated. Poor little witch. May Allah be with
you.
May you not lose yourself, and me, in
there.
”