Revelation Space

THIRTY-EIGHT

Sylveste thought of it as the chamber of miracles.

It seemed appropriate: he had been here less than an hour (he assumed, though he had long since ceased paying much attention to time) and in that period he had seen nothing that was less than miraculous, and much for which the term itself seemed mildly insufficient. Somehow he knew that a lifetime would not be sufficient to encompass a fraction of what this place contained; what it was. He had felt like this before, on glimpsing some vista of tremendous potential knowledge not yet learnt, not yet codified and shaped into theory. But he knew that those previous occasions had been pale foreshadowings of what he felt now.

He had no more than hours here, before any chance of return was dashed. What could he do in a matter of hours? Very little, rationally, but he did have the recording systems of the suit, and his eyes, and he knew he had to try. History would not forgive him if he did anything less. More importantly, he would never forgive himself.

He jetted his suit towards the centre of the chamber, towards the two objects which snared his attention; the gash of transcendent light and the jewel-like thing which rotated around it. As he approached, the walls of the chamber began to move, as if he were being sucked into the rotational frame of the objects; as if space itself were being drawn into an eddy; as if the nature of space were in flux. His suit told him as much, chirruping with detailed analyses of the way the substrate was altering; quantum indices ticking towards unexplored new realms. He remembered something similar on the way in to Lascaille’s Shroud. As then, he felt normal enough, as if his whole being were in the process of being transcribed, transliterated, the closer he came to the jewel and its radiant partner.

It took hours to reach it, and he began to doubt that his initial estimate of the diameter of the chamber had been accurate. But, inexorably, the apparent rate of revolution of the jewel dropped to zero, until the chamber walls were spinning dizzily. He knew then that he had to be close, although the jewel did not seem very much larger than when he had first glimpsed it. Still it was in constant motion, reminding him of a child’s kaleidoscope, the ever-shifting symmetric patterns revealed by coloured glints of light, but extended to three (and possibly more) dimensions. Occasionally the thing threw out spires or spikes which reached threateningly towards him, causing him to flinch, but he held his ground and even allowed himself to drift closer in the moments when it seemed to shift into a phase of relatively low-level transformation. He sensed that his survival did not depend on closely watching the readouts of his suit. He was beyond such simplicities.

“What do you think it is?” Calvin asked, his voice so low that it almost merged with Sylveste’s own thoughts, almost was one of Sylveste’s own thoughts.

“I was hoping you’d have some suggestions.”

“Sorry; all out of shattering insights. Too many for one lifetime.”

Volyova drifted in space.

She had not died when the Melancholia went up, though she had not managed to make it to the spider-room in time. What she had done was don her helmet just before the hull whispered away, like a moth’s wing against a candle. Falling away from the wreckage, she had not been targeted by the lighthugger. It had ignored her; just as it ignored the spider-room.

She could not simply die. That was emphatically not her style. And though she knew that her chances of survival were statistically negligible, and that what she was doing was entirely bereft of logic, she had to prolong the hours she had left. She scanned her air and power reserves and saw that they were not good; not good at all. She had taken the suit hastily, thinking that the only use she would have for it was to reach the shuttle across the hangar. She had not even had the presence of mind to hook it up to one of the recharging modules aboard the shuttle during their flight. That at least would have bought her a few days, rather than the fraction of a day she now faced. Yet, perversely, she did not simply arrange to end things immediately. She knew she could make the reserves last longer if she slept when consciousness was not required (assuming, of course, that she ever had any further use for it).

So she programmed the suit to drift, telling it to alert her only if something interesting—or, more probably, threatening—happened. And now, because she had woken, something evidently had.

She asked the suit what it was.

The suit told her.

“Shit,” Ilia Volyova said.

The Infinity’s radar had just swept across her; the same radar which it had used against the shuttle, just before deploying its gamma-ray weapon. And it had done so with an intensity which suggested that the ship was in her immediate neighbourhood; no more than a few tens of thousands of kilometres away; not even spitting distance when it came to picking off a target as large, defenceless, static and conspicuous as she now was.

She hoped the ship would have the good grace to finish her off with something swift. After all, there was a very high likelihood that whatever it chose to use against her would be a system she had designed herself.

Not for the first time, she cursed her ingenuity.

Volyova enabled the suit’s binocular overlay and began sweeping the starfield from which the targeting radar had projected. At first she saw only blackness and stars—and then the ship, tiny as a chip of coal, but edging closer with every second.

“It’s not Amarantin, is it? We agree on that.”

“The jewel, you mean?”

“Whatever it is. And I don’t think they were responsible for the light, whatever that is.”

“No. That’s not their handiwork either.” Sylveste realised now that he was deeply grateful for Calvin’s presence, no matter how illusory it was; no matter how much it was a deception. “Whatever these things are—whatever their relationship to each other—the Amarantin just found them.”

“I think you’re right.”

“Maybe they didn’t even understand what they had found—not properly, anyway. But for one reason or another they had to enclose it; had to hide it from the rest of the universe.”

“Jealousy?”

“Perhaps. But that wouldn’t explain the warnings we got coming here. Perhaps they enclosed them as a favour to the rest of Creation, because they couldn’t destroy them, or move them elsewhere.”

Sylveste thought. “Whoever put them here originally—around a neutron star—must have meant for them to attract someone’s attention. Don’t you think?”

“Like a lure?”

“Neutron stars are common enough, but they’re still exotic; especially from the point of view of a culture just achieving the capability for starflight. It was guaranteed that the Amarantin would be drawn here through sheer curiosity.”

“They weren’t the last, were they?”

“No, I don’t suppose they were.” Sylveste drew a breath. “Do you think we should go back, while we still can?”

“Rationally, yes. Is that enough of an answer for you?”

They pushed forward.

“Take us towards the light first,” Calvin said, minutes later. “I want to see it closer. It seems—this is going to sound stupid—but it seems somehow stranger than the other thing. If there’s one thing I’d choose to die having seen up close, I think it’s that light.”

“That’s how I feel,” Sylveste said. He was already doing what Calvin had suggested, as if the intention had sprung from his own will. What Calvin said was right; there was indeed something deeper about the strangeness of the light; something more profound, older. He had not been able to put that feeling into words, or even properly acknowledge it, but now it was out in the open, and it felt right. The light was where they had to go.

It was silvery in texture; a diamond gash in the fabric of reality, simultaneously intense and calm. Approaching it, the orbiting jewel (stationary now, in this frame) seemed to dwindle. Smooth pearly radiance surrounded the suit. He felt that the light should hurt his eyes, but there was nothing except a feeling of warmth, and a kind of slowly magnifying knowing. Gradually he lost sight of the rest of the chamber and the jewel, until he seemed to be enveloped in a blizzard of silver and whiteness. He felt no danger; no threat; only resignation—and it was a joyous resignation, bursting with immanence. Slowly, magically, the suit itself seemed to turn transparent, the silver luminance bursting through until it reached his skin, and then pushed deeper, into his flesh and bones.

It was not quite what he had been expecting.

Afterwards, when he came to consciousness (or descended to it, since it seemed that in the hiatus he had been somewhere above it), there was only understanding.

He was back in the chamber again, some distance from the white light, still within the rotating frame of the jewel.

And he knew.

“Well,” Calvin said, his voice as unexpected and out-of-place in the tranquillity that followed as a trumpet blast. “That was some trip, wasn’t it?”

“Did you… experience all that?”

“Put it this way. That was weirdest damned thing I’ve ever felt. Does that answer you?”

It was. There was no need to push beyond that; no need to convince himself further that Calvin had shared all that he had felt, or that for a moment their thoughts—and more—had liquefied and flowed indivisibly, along with a trillion others. And that he understood perfectly what had happened, because in the moment of shared wisdom, all his questions had been answered.

“We were read, weren’t we? That light is a scanning device; a machine for retrieving information.” The words sounded perfectly reasonable before he said them, but in the saying of them he felt he was expressing himself poorly, debasing the thing of which he spoke by the crudity of language. But for all the insights he had felt in that place, his vocabulary had not been enlarged enough to encompass them. And even now they seemed to be fading; the way a dream’s magical qualities seemed to wither in the first few seconds of waking. But he had to say it, to at least crystallise what he felt; get it recorded by the suit’s memory for posterity, if nothing else. “For a moment I think we were turned into information, and that in that instant we were linked to every other piece of information ever known; every thought ever thought, or at least ever captured by the light.”

“That’s how it felt to me,” Calvin said.

Sylveste wondered if Calvin shared the increasing amnesia he felt; the slow fading of the knowing.

“We were in Hades, weren’t we?” Sylveste felt his thoughts stampeding at the gates of expression, desperate to be vocalised before they evaporated. “That thing isn’t a neutron star at all. Maybe it was once, but it isn’t now. It’s been transformed; turned into a…”

“A computer,” Calvin said, finishing the sentence for him. “That’s what Hades is. A computer made out of nuclear matter, the mass of a star devoted to processing information, storing it. And this light is an aperture into it; a way to enter the computational matrix. I think for a moment we were actually in it.”

But it was much stranger than that.

Once, a star with a mass thirty or forty times heavier than Earth’s sun had reached the end of its nuclear-burning lifetime. After several million years of profligate energy-expenditure the star had exploded as a supernova, and in its heart, tremendous gravitational pressure had smashed a lump of matter within its own Schwarzschild radius, until a black hole had been formed. The black hole was so named because nothing, not even light, could escape from its critical radius. Matter and light could only fall into the black hole, thereby engorging it towards greater mass and greater attractive force; a vicious circle.

A culture arose that had use for such an object. They knew a technique whereby a black hole could be transformed into something far more exotic, far more paradoxical. First, they waited until the universe was considerably older than when the black hole had been formed; until the predominant stellar population consisted of very old red-dwarf stars, stars which were barely massive enough to ignite their own fusion fires. Next, they shepherded a dozen of these dwarves into an accretion disk around the black hole and slowly allowed the disk to feed the hole, raining starstuff onto its light-swallowing event horizon.

This much Sylveste understood, or could at least deceive himself into thinking that he understood. But the next part—the core of it—was much harder to hold in his mind, like a self-contradictory koan. What he grasped was that, once within the event horizon, particles continued to fall along particular trajectories, particular orbits which swung them around the kernel of infinite density which was the singularity at the black hole’s heart. Falling along these lines, time and space began to blend into one another, until they were no longer properly separable. And—crucially—there was one set of trajectories in which they swapped places completely; where a trajectory in space became one in time. And one subset of this bunch of paths actually allowed matter to tunnel into the past, earlier into the black hole’s history.

“I’m accessing texts from the twentieth century,” Calvin murmured, seemingly able to follow his thoughts. “This effect was known—predicted—even then. It seemed to follow from the mathematics describing black holes. But no one knew how seriously to take it.”

“Whoever engineered Hades had no such qualms.”

“So it would seem.”

What happened was that light, energy, particle-flux, wormed along these special trajectories, burrowing ever deeper into the past with each orbit around the singularity. None of this was “evident’ to the outside universe since it was confined behind the impenetrable barrier of the event horizon, and so there was no overt violation of causality. According to the mathematics which Calvin had accessed, there could be none, since these trajectories could never pass back into the external universe. Yet they did. What the mathematics had overlooked was the special case of the tiny subset-of-a-subset-of-a-subset of trajectories which actually carried quanta back to the birth of the black hole, when it collapsed in the supernova detonation of its progenitor star.

At that instant, the minute outward pressure exerted by the particles arriving from the future served to delay the gravitational infall.

The delay was not even measurable; it was barely longer than the smallest theoretical subdivision of quantised time. But it existed. And, small though it was, it was sufficient to send ripples of causal shock propagating back into the future.

These ripples of causal shock met the incoming particles and established a grid of causal interference, a standing wave extending symmetrically into the past and the future.

Enmeshed in this grid, the collapsed object was no longer sure that it was meant to be a black hole. The initial conditions had always been borderline, and perhaps these entanglements could be avoided if it remained poised above its Schwarzschild radius; if it collapsed down to a stable configuration of strange quarks and degenerate neutrons instead.

It flickered indeterminately between the two states. The indeterminacy crystallised, and what remained behind was something unique in the universe—except that elsewhere, similar transformations were being wrought on other black holes, similar causal paradoxes coming into being.

The object settled on a stable configuration whereby its paradoxical nature was not immediately obvious to the outside universe. Externally, it resembled a neutron star—for the first few centimetres of its crust, at least. Below, the nuclear matter had been catalysed into intricate forms capable of lightning-swift computation, a self-organisation which had emerged spontaneously from the resolution of its two opposed states. The crust seethed and processed, containing information at the theoretical maximum density of storage of matter, anywhere in the universe.

And it thought.

Below, the crust blended seamlessly with a flickering storm of unresolved possibility, as the interior of the collapsed object danced to the music of acausality. While the crust ran endless simulations, endless computations, the core bridged the future and the past, allowing information to channel effortlessly between them. The crust, in effect, had become one element of a massive parallel-processor, except that the other elements in its array were the future and past versions of itself.

And it knew.

It knew that, even with this totality of processing power strewn across the aeons, it was only part of something much larger.

And it had a name.

Sylveste had to let his mind rest for a moment. The immensity of it was dwindling now, leaving only the ringing aftertones, like the last echoes of the final chord of the greatest symphony ever played. In a few moments, he doubted that he would remember much at all. There was simply insufficient room in his head for it all. And, strangely, he did not feel the slightest sorrow at its passing. For those few moments, it had been wonderful to taste that transhuman knowledge, but it was simply too much for one man to know. It was better to live; better to carry a memory of a memory, than suffer the vast burden of knowing.

He was not meant to think like a god.

After many minutes, he checked his suit clock, and was only mildly surprised to find that he had lost several hours, assuming his last check on the time had been correct. There was still time to get out, he thought; still time to make it to the surface before the bridgehead closed.

He looked at the jewel; no less enigmatic for all that he had now experienced. It had not ceased its constant fluxing, and he still felt its beguiling attraction. He felt that he knew more about it now; that his time in the porthole to the Hades matrix had taught him something—but for a moment the memories were too thickly integrated into the other experiences he had gained, and he could not quite bring them to conscious examination.

All he knew was that he felt a foreboding which had not been there before.

Still, he moved towards it.

The agonised red eye of Hades was noticeably larger now, but the neutron star at the heart of that burning point would never amount to more than a glint; it was only a few tens of kilometres across, and they would be dead long before they were close enough to resolve it properly, shredded by the intense differential force of gravity.

“I feel I should tell you,” Pascale Sylveste said, “I don’t think it will be fast, what’s going to happen to us. Not unless we’re very lucky.”

Khouri tried her best not to sound irritated at the woman’s tone of superior understanding, admitting to herself that Pascale was probably quite justified in adopting that manner.

“How do you know so much? You’re no astrophysicist.”

“No, but I remember Dan telling me about how the tidal forces would limit the close approach of any of the probes he wanted to send here.”

“You’re talking as if he’s dead already.”

“I don’t think he is,” Pascale said. “I think he might even survive. But we’re not going to. I’m sorry, but it amounts to the same thing.”

“You still love that bastard, don’t you?”

“He loved me too, believe it or not. I know from the way he acted—what he did—the way he seemed so driven, it must have been hard for outsiders to see. But he did care. More than anyone will ever know.”

“Maybe people won’t be so hard on him when they find out the way he was manipulated.”

“You think anyone’s going to find out? We’re the only ones who know, Khouri. As far as the rest of the universe is concerned, he was just a monomaniac. They don’t understand that he used people because he had no choice. Because something bigger than any of us was driving him forward.”

Khouri nodded. “I wanted to kill him once—but only because it was a way to get back to Fazil. There was never any hatred in it. Matter of fact, I can’t say I honestly disliked him. I admired anyone who could carry around that much arrogance, like it was his birthright, or something. Most people, they don’t carry it off. But he wore it like a king. It stopped being arrogance, then—became something else. Something you could admire.”

Pascale elected not to reply, but Khouri could tell that she was not in complete disagreement. Maybe she was just not quite ready to come out and say it aloud. That she had loved Sylveste because he was such a self-important bastard and made something noble of being a self-important bastard, did it with such utter aplomb that it became a kind of virtue, like the wearing of sackcloth.

“Listen,” Khouri said, eventually. “I’ve got an idea. When those tides begin to bite, do you want to be fully conscious, or would you rather approach the matter with a little fortification?”

“What do you mean?”

“Ilia always told me this place was built to show clients around the outside of the ship; the kind of clients you wanted to impress if you wanted to keep the contract. So I’m thinking, somewhere on board there has to be a drinks cabinet. Probably well-stocked, assuming it hasn’t been drunk dry over the last few centuries. And then again, it might even be self-replenishing. Are you with me?”

Pascale said nothing, during which time the gravitational sinkhole of Hades crept closer. Finally, just when Khouri assumed that the other woman had elected not to hear her proposition, Pascale released herself from her seat and headed rearwards, to the unexplored realms of plush and brass behind them.