The Singers of Time

11

"The name is superforce . . the voice of the long-gone professor was saying, and Sue-ling Quong was forcing herself to listen to every word. Whether she understood them or not was another question entirely. There was nothing in her education that had prepared her for this—or, of course, in anyone else's, either.

Nor were the surroundings conducive to concentration. Francis Krake had insisted on keeping the view screens on—"I have to see where we're going, dammit!"—and so what Sue-ling's eyes could see was the picture of her shipmates hovering around the player, and behind and around them all the great silent spectacle of the galaxy, with all its stars and dust clouds and clusters. Her shipmates looked like gods in a vast, empty heaven.

Or like pitiful living creatures, trying to comprehend what only a god could really understand.

Francis Krake was next to her, almost dwarfed by the bulk of the two Turtles on his other side. Krake looked sad, Sue-ling thought—or maybe just thoughtful, for it was hard to discern expressions in the dim light—but behind him the fierce parrot beak of Chief Thunderbird was grimly thrust forward in concentration. Or in revulsion. Sue-ling wondered which it was, and what could be passing through the mind of a Turtle as he forced himself to listen to this quantum-mechanical anathema. The Turtles had complained furiously against being compelled to share the lectures with the whole crew— out, Sue-ling thought, of pure embarrassment.

Or else simply because they were Turtles.

Krake stirred slighdy, frowning in thought. Impulsively, Sue-ling put her hand over his in sympathy. He gave her a surprised, abstracted glance, then he returned his attention to the lecture.

Now why, Sue-ling wondered, did I do that?

Then she caught Sork's glare directed toward her. Guiltily —and annoyed at herself for feeling guilty—she withdrew her hand and sat up straighter to listen ... just in time to hear the lecture come to its end.

When the chip went silent no one spoke for a moment. Then the Taur lowed softly to its mistress, and Moon Bunderan stirred. "Are those things they're talking about all real?" she asked, wonderingly. She waved at the panoply of stars all around them. "I mean, does all that talk have anything to do with that>ⁿ

Queerly, it was the giant Turtle, Chief Thunderbird, who responded. "That is a proper question," he squawked through his transposer. "What is your answer, Sork Quintero?"

Sork gave him a belligerent look, then turned it on Sue-ling. "Ask her. She's the one who gave me the chips."

Chief Thunderbird turned one red eye on Sue-ling. "Well?"

She shrugged. "Those chips came from my university, after it was closed down. Sork has my agreement in giving them to you."

"We do not seek your agreement," the Turtle told her. "That is assumed. What we need is quite different. It is necessary for us to know about the source of those information chips. It is Sork Quintero's opinion that they were genuine and represent actual scientific theories of humans. Do you concur in this?"

"As I've told you, the chips are exact copies of lectures from our astrophysics department at the university. Does that answer your question?"

"It does not," rasped Chief Thunderbird. "Does what they say represent truth V

"I can't tell you that," Sue-ling said firmly. "I don't know anything about astrophysics or cosmology or quantum effects —I was a med school student. But I did know some of the faculty members at the university as personal friends, and, yes, as far as I know—as far as they knew—the lectures represented serious theories about the subject."

"Theories can be wrong," Lidun put in, seeming unhappy.

"Of course they can. That's why they're theories," Sue-ling replied.

Sork Quintero spoke up. "That's what I've been trying to tell you," he said sulkily. "That's what human beings call the scientific method. Scientists make a theory to try to explain something that is happening. Then they look to see if the theory predicts certain effects or events, and then they conduct experiments to see if those effects happen. If they do it's a good theory. You can even assume that it's right—that it's a law— at least for the time being. But it's still only a theory, and sooner or later you may find some other phenomenon that doesn't fit; then you have to make a new theory."

"That is very unsatisfying," Chief Thunderbird rumbled.

"It's the best we can do," Sork said. "Now, what about you? Isn't it about your turn to talk now?"

Chief Thunderbird's claws scratched warningly across his belly plate. "One does not take your meaning, Sork Quintero," he rasped.

Sork said, "I mean we have a right to know your reasons— not to mention all the other things you're keeping from us. Why you care about these lectures, and where are we going?"

"And what did you want with Thrayl?" Moon Bunderan put in.

The big Turtle's limbs were flapping ominously as he listened. He opened his beak to screech, but before he got a word out Kiri said, quite calmly and judiciously, "They are right, Proctor. We can't help you if we don't know what you need."

That stopped Chief Thunderbird. He squawked to himself, then turned off his transposer, and he and Litlun screeched at each other at length. It went on for quite a while, and the odd thing about it, Sue-ling thought, was that, although they were certainly agitated enough, they seemed more frightened than furious.

At last Litlun engaged his transposer and spoke. "This is very difficult for us," he said—quite unnecessarily. No one was in any doubt of that. "We agree that we must speak to you of things that have never been spoken outside the Brotherhood, but—" Lidun stopped, plucking nervously at the hard shell of his plastron. "But we do not know certainly what things we must share." He swiveled both eyes to Francis Krake. "Captain, when will we arrive at our destination?"

Krake gave his crew an inquiring glance. "Daisy Fay?"

"We'll be there in about twenty-two hours, Captain," the machine-girl told him.

Litlun waved both horny arms in a slow affirmative gesture. "Then I propose this," he said through the transposer, one eye inquiringly on the other Turtle for approval. "Let us postpone these questions until we see what we find at the Mother planet. If it is as we—" he paused, clucking to himself before he was able to speak the frightening thought—"have reason to believe," he went on, dodging the pain of specificity, "then we will share all our thoughts with you. But until then, allow us to wait." He hesitated again, then managed to get out that very un-Turtlelike word: "Please."

Astonishingly, Sue-ling was touched. "Of course," she blurted, but Sork's shout overrode her.

"No!" he cried. "That's not good enough!"

"But it is all we can do," Lidun said—or moaned; even the flat voice of the transposer seemed to be pleading.

"It isn't," Sork said. His voice was hostile, and he didn't even look at the others for concurrence. "YouVe kept too many secrets, and youVe kept them too long. We don't even know why your Mother matters so much to you!"

There was a startled, shocked hiss from both Turtles at that. Sork blinked at the intensity of the reaction, and his twin quickly put in: "Sork doesn't mean to offend against your religion—"

"It is not a religion," Chief Thunderbird blazed.

"Well, whatever it is. The thing is, we just don't understand the severity of this crisis for you."

Transposes off, the two Turtles shrilled and croaked at each other for a moment. Then Chief Thunderbird turned the transposer back on. "We will tell you what we can," he said sourly. "What do you specifically wish to know?"

"Everything," Sork snapped.

"There is no need for you to know 'everything'!" He paused, then made himself go on. "It is enough for you to know that we are all brothers—almost all of us still alive, born of a single Mother. So our loss is grievous."

"She must have a lot of kids," Marco Ramos piped up. He drew a scathing look from Chief Thunderbird.

"The Mother," he said severely, "produces some two eggs a minute, for all of her blessed fertile life."

"Which is how long?" Sue-ling asked.

"There is no need for you to know that," the Turtle stated.

"But after a while she does die? And then what?"

More agitated squawking between the Turtles. Then it was Litlun who said, "Then a nymph is caused to mature. She becomes the new Mother, and a new Brotherhood begins."

"And where does this nymph come from?" Krake began, but the Turtle scratched his belly plate warningly.

"That is not a proper question," he decreed.

"It's the question I'm asking, though," Krake said stubbornly.

More conferring in squawks and hisses. Then, grudgingly, Chief Thunderbird spoke. "A very few of each Mother's eggs are female. Some are allowed to develop. Others are . . . not." And the parrot beak snapped shut.

"There will be no more questions on this subject," Litlun decreed, but Sork Quintero was shaking his head.

"Wrong," he said. "There's at least one more, and we want an answer. Why don't you simply do what you usually do and let a new nymph take over?"

This time there was no discussion. Both Turtles stood silent for a moment, eyes wandering aimlessly, before Chief Thunderbird said slowly, miserably, "This time there are no nymphs left, either."

An hour later, Sue-ling was in her little cabin, doing her best to go to sleep. She wasn't really tired but, medically speaking, she was aware that it was sleeping time, and she wanted to be fully awake for their arrival at the Mother planet.

What kept waking her up wasn't the excitement of the trip, and the tragic fears of the Turtles. It was Sork Quintero. It wasn't good for him to get so tense and argumentative. And she was not able to get out of her mind his quick, sardonic remark as she left him: "If I can't have what I want, maybe a drink would be second best."

And then, of course, she had had to spend half an hour with him, talking him out of it. She resented the imposition, kept asking herself why she had bothered. She knew, as a doctor, that the only person who could keep an alcoholic dry was the alcoholic himself.

And yet, he was so sad. Finally she took herself off, consoling herself with the thought that there wasn't anyplace for him to get a drink on the ship. . . .

When she woke to the sound of hammering on her door frame she began to suspect she had been wrong about that. She got up, pulling a robe around her—it wasn't really a robe but a long tunic she had borrowed from Francis Krake, and she thought she could detect his masculine odor in it—and stumbled to the curtain door, her hair undone, her eyes swollen from sleep. When she pulled the curtain door back she was not surprised to find herself blinking into the reddened eyes of Sork Quintero.

"What do you want?" she asked fuzzily. "I was sound asleep."

"I need to talk to you. Let me in."

She stood silendy regarding him, wrinkling her nose as she caught a whiff of his whiskey breath. Then she shook her head. "I just got up. I need to get cleaned up and dressed. You can wait out here if you want to." And slid the curtain closed in his angry face.

Time was when a young woman about to face an interview with a lover—by the looks of it an unpleasant interview— would have spent at least an hour on makeup and hair and choosing just the right dress.

Sue-ling was not of that generation. If she had been, she would still have been forced to make compromises, given the sparse resources of The Golden Hind. She rinsed herself off in the spray chamber, pulled on a clean coverall and glanced at herself in the mirror. She did go so far as to pull a comb through her hair, but that was it.

But she did it all in slow morion, because she was determined not to let Sork Quintero hurry her into anything. When at last she let Sork in he plumped himself down on the edge of her bed, sliding the door closed behind him. He glared at her silently.

"All right," she said. "What's this all about?"

"You know damn well!" Sork snapped. "I'm not stupid."

She said, controlling her patience, "And what is it that you're not stupid about?"

"Francis Krake! I've seen the way you act around him, and it isn't fair to me. To us," he corrected himself. "Kiri's as upset as I am."

"I don't believe that, Sork."

"Then just believe that I'm hurting over it!"

Sue-ling gazed at him blankly. "What are you talking about?" she asked, her tone purely wondering. "Francis Krake is the captain of this ship. We're all stuck in here together. We have to get along—"

"You don't have to get along that well!" Sork said resentfully. "YouVe kept Kiri and me on the hook for months now. You always said you would marry one of us—"

"I said I thought I would—"

"You made us believe that was what you intended! And now here comes this new man, and you're hanging on his every word, following him around—anybody can see that you think he's pretty fascinating."

Sue-ling said, as simply and clearly as she could, "I've never even kissed Francis Krake. He hasn't shown any signs of wanting to kiss me, either. There is no 'relationship' to discuss— and, Sork, I'm astonished at you. I didn't expect this kind of jealousy from you."

"It's not jealousy," Sork began heatedly, and then stopped himself. "All right, it's jealousy," he admitted, looking astonished at a new discovery. "But what did you expect? We've waited a long time for you to make a choice between us, Sue-ling."

"Why does this have to come up now?" she asked plaintively.

Sork said angrily, "Why not now? Why not settle it before you get too deeply entangled with this Krake character and we both lose out?"

"Oh, God," said Sue-ling, raising her palms to her temples, "don't you think you're a little crazy? Here we are out in space, on this mystery' cruise to nowhere, and all of a sudden—"

"It is definitely not all of a sudden," Sork corrected her. Then he took a deep breath. "Sue-ling," he said, his voice firm, "you know I love you. So does Kiri. It hurts not to know who you're going to choose."

"But Sork, dear," she said, trying to make her voice as kind and loving as she felt ... or thought she felt, "don't you see that it's hard for me to choose? We've been very close together, all three of us. To pick one of you means refusing the other, and how can I do that? What would it do to the three of us?"

"What's it doing now?" Sork snapped. "No! Decide, Sue-ling. Pick me, or pick Kiri, if that's the way you want it to be. But, please, do it now."

"I can't," Sue-ling whispered.

"You must," said Sork. "You can flip a coin if you want to do it that way. But, one way or the other, it's time for you to make up your mind."

Later on, on her shift at the state-of-the-ship board, with Francis Krake standing approvingly behind her, Sue-ling was very conscious of the fact that he was so close.

But there was nothing wrong with that, she told herself. To think anything else was simply foolishness. There was no reason why she should let Sork's jealousy make her self-conscious about what was a perfectly normal, not at all sexual, relationship between colleagues and friends. To prove this to herself, she moved a bit closer to Krake as she concentrated on the screens and the ship.

The sight the screens displayed was spectacular. Since the ship was in wave-drive, the walls of the control chamber had disappeared entirely. From Sue-ling's point of view, they seemed to be inside a huge, hollow globe that simulated the midnight of space.

She looked around wonderingly, trying to understand what she saw. She did have some idea of the Turtle technology involved, because Captain Krake had explained it to her. The navigation system had to keep track of thousands of stellar reference points—most of them stars, but some of them actually distant external galaxies themselves—as benchmarks. Automatically "fingerprinting" each object by analyzing its spectrum, the system could consult its datastore and pinpoint the location of The Golden Hind anywhere within hundreds of light-years of the Turtle planet. She could see the results on the screen.

The view was not static. The star patterns were changing as she watched. The Milky Way and the Pleiades and a few giant stars stayed the same, but the burning Sun of Earth had long since dimmed behind them until she lost it. Slowly, the nearer stars crept past the ship and slid into new constellations.

Krake touched her shoulder. "We're almost there," he said, pointing. "See that object? That's the Turtle star. I'd better start calling the others so they can be here when we shift into mass-drive."

Sue-ling studied the frosting of stars in the area Krake had indicated. It wasn't rewarding. No particular object looked any great deal different from any other. "Well, it didn't take us long to get here," she observed. It wasn't until she noticed that he wasn't responding that she looked up and saw the expression on his face.

"It took seventy-three years," he said simply.

She swallowed, raising the back of her hand to her lips. "I —forgot," she whispered.

Krake nodded somberly. "It's easy to forget," he said. "But that's the hard fact. We're committed now. It's been seventy-three years since we took off, and most of the people we left behind arc dead now—and everything will be all changed, in ways we couldn't have guessed." He watched her expression for a moment, then said gruffly, "Tough idea to get used to at first, isn't it? Well, there it is." He leaned forward to the communicator again. "Excusc mc for a minute while I let the others know we're coming into mass-drive range."

Sue-ling found her eyes blurring as Krake spoke into the ship's communications system: "Marco? Daisy Fay? We're almost ready to power down from wave-drive. Report in, please."

Seventy-three years. . . . Sue-ling wasn't listening, barely noticed as he turned back to her. Seventy-three years.

What they had done, she saw at last, was one of the few truly irrevocable acts of her life.

Krake said, with sympathy, "It hits you hard at first, doesn't it? But here we are. I'll zoom in on the Turtle system so we can get a better look."

She forced herself to pay attention as Krake began to explain what she was looking at—anything to take her mind off those eternally lost years. There was, she saw as Krake pointed it out, one single pale fleck that began to stand out as that section of the sky swelled as though it were racing toward them. (Seventy-thru years!) Then she saw that the star was double. (And almost everyone dead! She shuddered and forced her mind to focus on what she was seeing.) Krake was pointing out that one member of the double was a hot blue point, the other a misty disk. He upped the magnification still more, and now the fuzzy disk showed thin blue plumes jutting from its hot blue-white center. It spun so fast—or seemed to—that her eyes could make out the motion, as the blue-lit plumes wound into spirals around it, joining into a wide ring of creeping fire.

"There's a black hole at the center of that," Krake said grimly. "You know what a black hole is? Sork does; we've talked about it. A black hole is the last cinder of a giant star that's gone supernova. What we see is the accretion disk around the black hole. Of course, you'll never see what's left of the star itself; that's why it's a black hole."

"Then what's that light coming from?"

"I told you. It's the accretion disk. Some matter gets trapped in the black hole's intense gravity field. Then the matter is torn into hot plasma as it falls closer to the hole—and that is really mean stuff, Sue-ling. The radiation from it would kill us, right through our shielding, if we went into orbit too close."

Sue-ling gazed at the frightening object, trying to take it in. "And the other star?" Even magnified, it was only a hotter, brighter point.

"That's a queer one, too. It's a neutron star, Sue-ling. It's more massive than our sun, but only about a dozen kilometers through. Probably it went supernova too, some time—they must have traded mass with each other until both went up. But that one was just a little smaller, so it didn't go all the way to black hole . . . not that either one of them is anything you want to get too close to."

She turned and looked up at him. "And the Turtles live there?"

"It's their home," he confirmed wryly. "You'd think nothing could survive in a system like that, wouldn't you? But the Turtles do. They love it." He reached for the controls again, saying, "Wait a minute—let's see if we can screen out the stars and get a look at their planet—"

As the screen blurred something touched Sue-ling on the back of her neck. Startled, she turned and saw the mech-woman, Daisy Fay McQueen. The face on her belly screen was smiling up at Sue-ling, and trailing behind Daisy Fay was her crewmate.

But Marco Ramos wasn't smiling. Both of his tentacled eyes were fixed on the Turtle star, as he said sharply, "What's the matter with the screens, Francis?"

Sue-ling turned quickly back. It didn't look to her as though anything were wrong, but she did see that something like a vast shadow had settled on the fringes of the image. The angry dot of light from the companion had winked out, the furious haze of blue light was covered over, and that part of the screen had gone almost black. Sue-ling saw only a pale powdering of more distant stars in the background.

But Krake too was scowling. He looked around at the others who were beginning to come into the control room, answering to his summons. "Where are the Turtles?" he demanded.

"They're on their way, Captain," Daisy Fay reported. "What's the matter?"

"It's funny," he complained. "At this distance we should be able to pick up the Turtle planet, but where is it?"

"What does it look like?" Sue-ling asked, squinting as hard as she could at the screen.

"Not much of anything," he said absently, looking around for the Turtles. Then he turned back to her. "All I can tell you is what I've seen from space. It's a bare world, Sue-ling. No green. It doesn't even have ice caps. It looks dead."

"And the Turtles live there?"

"Some of them still do, yes. Or did. They all come from there originally. They aren't human, you know. That radiation would fry us in a second, but it's mother's milk to them— it's most of what they live on." But he was paying little attention to their conversation, speaking only with half his mind. The rest was trying to be patient until the Turtles arrived.

"Captain?" Marco called. "I bet I know why they aren't here. They've got screens of their own in their quarters—I'll bet they're watching from there, just to be private from the rest of us."

"And cooking up what they want to tell us," Sork snarled —startling Sue-ling, who hadn't seen him come in. He looked distinctly hung over, she saw, and was not surprised.

"Maybe so," Krake said worriedly, peering at the wall view. He shook his head. "I've seen the planet on other trips," he said, exasperated. "I've even landed on it—sort of."

She looked at him in surprise. "I could have sworn you said you hadn't."

"It wasn't really much of a landing," he explained. "I dodged down and back—they warned me the radiation from the accretion disk would be deadly if we were unprotected. The neutron star's not quite as bad, but it's bad enough; so we had to take precautions. But I had to land to transfer cargo." He stared somberly out at the scene in space. "See, the black hole and its accretion disk are several light-days away—a safe enough distance, unless you get caught in a flare. We stayed in the shielded parts of the ship, unloading by machine, but the important thing we did was to come in at night. We brought Hind in down the cone of shadow, where it was shielded, to the orbiting station for their Skyhook. Then we did what we had to do, and got out of there before the orbiter was exposed again."

"It sounds dangerous."

He looked at her blankly. "Oh? Well, a little maybe, but that's not what's worrying me. What I'm worried about is where the damned thing is. I know IVe picked the planet up from farther out than this."

And then, as the two Turtles at last appeared, despondently pulling themselves into the room, he appealed to them. "What's wrong? Are our instruments screwed up?"

It was Chief Thunderbird who answered. "The instruments are working perfectly, Krake," the Turtle boomed, the grating voice like a dirge. "The situation is as our worst fears. It is our entire sacred Mother planet that has disappeared. There is nothing left of it at all."

Among the songs the aiodoi sing is a song which speaks of oneness, and it goes:

"It is all now.

"It is all ever.

"It is all one."

And sometimes among the songs the aiodoi hear there is a song which echoes their own, even when it comes from a small voice on a distant world.

"Now suppose these notions of Stephen Hawking and all those other people are true, and our universe is only one of many—maybe of an infinity of them. Is there any way that one universe can make contact with another?

"The answer, surprisingly, is 'yes.' It may not be a practicable way. But theoretically, yes, there may be a point of contact; it's what Hawking and others called a Svormhole.'

"According to Hawking and Roger Penrose, the trouble with wormholes as a doorway to other universes was that they were surrounded by an impassable barrier called the Cauchy horizon. It was theoretically possible that something could pass the Cauchy barrier, but only if you didn't care what shape it got through in. Hawking and Penrose thought that the Cauchy horizon would destroy anything that entered it with one giant pulse of infinite energy.

"That was kind of discouraging to would-be universe travelers.

"But then Kip Thorne took a closer look at the problem, and came up with good news. The barrier wouldn't be all that destructive in one special case that he discovered, and that was where the wormhole had been formed from so-called 'exotic matter.'

"That inspired a couple of English scientists, Felicity Mel-lor and Ian Moss, to dig a little deeper into the question. Sure enough, they discovered that you didn't even need exotic matter. All you needed was a closed universe.

"The mistake their predecessors had been making lay in the assumption that the universe was flat and open. That made their mathematics easier, but it hid the truth from them. There was, after all, no a priori reason to make that assumption. There was no evidence that the flat-open universe corresponded to physical reality. When Mellor and Moss did the problem over with the more plausible closed-universe assumption, they found that the problem of the Cauchy barrier had disappeared.

"So the way was open for anyone to go through a worm-hole and come out in another universe. . . .

"Well, that's not quite true. There was one little remaining problem.

"For that kind of a trip, the first step was the hardest. You had to do one of two things. In order to travel through a wormhole, you had to make one to travel through. Or, if you couldn't find any way to make a wormhole, you had to find a way to get to where some wormhole was."

And the aiodoi sang on:

"And that is the way to reach from the near to the endless. "Do it!"