Daphne could have, at any moment, shut off her high-time, and allowed the next event to simply happen to her. The ship would either be destroyed or saved in a moment too quick to be seen. It did her no good at all to stay on the line with Phaethon, saying nothing, watching, just watching him work, unable to assist him in any way.
Toward the end of the third subjective hour, she said, “How are we doing?”
His face showed no change of expression. “Not great. The hull has been breached. A gap about twenty angstroms wide. I’m trying to get the outside fields to collapse against each other destructively at that spot, to cancel out and create a bubble. If the magnetics are dense enough, normal plasma cannot enter. We might make it.”
Daphne was thinking that, buried in the midst of this opaque plasma, no possible noumenal signal or information could be transmitted out. Even if they both recorded their minds anywhere on the ship, if the ship were destroyed, there would be no record of what had happened here, ever again.
“What broke the hull? I thought it was invulnerable.”
“Gravitic tides in a concentrated point source. Not something I’ve seen before. Of course, no one has ever been this deep before.”
In her mind’s eye, she saw a stir of uneasy tension through the beasts her format used to represent Phaethon’s emotional and neural tensions. She switched to a traditional Silver-Gray human face format, and saw the same emotion depicted as a narrowing of Phaethon’s eyes, a twitch of the muscles in his cheek, a sigh. He said. “There is nothing more I can do at this point. Either I have balanced the overpressure across the hull or I have not. If I have, the forces will cancel each other out, and the pressure will pass evenly across the hull surface. If I have not, greater pressure along one section will cause a rupture along other sections, because the shockwave will be traveling normal to the hull rather than parallel. All the models I’ve run say I have done as much as I can do. Either we can watch this thing happening to us in terrible slow motion, unable to affect the outcome, or we can return to our normal time rate. That way, if I’ve made a miscalculation, we will be dead before either of us feels any pain or alarm. Which would you prefer?”
“ ’Twere best done quickly,” she said.
“I’m returning us to normal time rates. Any last words?”
“Do you think this is an enemy weapon? That we simply miscalculated and that the Nothing does not want, or cannot risk, to take over the Phoenix Exultant?”
“Believe it or not, no, I don’t think this is a weapon. I think this is a natural phenomenon, created by the low-pressure funnel Helion is using to drive us down this deep. If this had been a weapon, the shockwave would have struck into a vital spot in the hull, or with a pressure imbalance too great for me to counter balance with my hull magnetics. It’s a random action. Chaos. Besides, my neutrino radar shows an homogenous temperature gradient in every direction. If there were a ship our size, or made of the hull material one would need to withstand this depth and pressure, it would be as obvious and unusual as an icicle in a furnace, and give my probes a hard return. There’s nothing around us. We’re alone.”
“So if we die now, it’s just one of the universe’s little ironies. But I’m not afraid. Because you’re wrong: we’re really not alone.” And she sent a tactile signal that his sense filter could interpret as the feeling of her hand sliding into his grasp, and squeezing his fingers.
He said, “I love you.”
With a roar of noise, the sound of her own heartbeat pounding in her ears, the roar of blood, returned to her. She realized that she had her eyes squeezed shut, as if to shut out a bright light. She thought, A lot of good that will do in the middle of the sun.
Then she thought, By the time it takes you to wonder if you are still alive, the question has already become moot.
She laughed, gagged on antiacceleration fluid, spat, and cycled her cocoon to turn back into a throne and release her.
There was a long moment while high-speed pumps cleared the bridge of antiacceleration gel, and other circuits swept the deck.
She looked over to see a diamond shell around Phaethon’s golden throne also dissolving in a cloud of steam. He still had his helmet faceplate down, but on her internal channel, she could see the emotional monitors, and saw the interior view of his face.
He looked haggard. His eyes had that fatigued, red stare that men who’ve spent a month or more in high-speed time are likely to get.
She said, “You bastard!”
He said, “Hello, my darling. Nice to see you again. . . . Ah. I mean, of course, it looks like we are still alive—”
She said in a voice of hot fury, “How dare you!”
“How dare I what?”
“Spend days or months in subjective time—how long was it?—just waiting around to see if I would die, without doing me the courtesy of asking if I wanted to wait with you?!”
Daphne thought that Phaethon was the least expert liar alive. He said lamely, “What, um, gives you such a quaint idea? I remember specifically telling you it would all be over in a split second. . . .”
“Oh, good grief! If you came out of your cocoon with a nine-year growth of beard, two children, and a new hobby it could not be more obvious! Well! What in the world were you thinking?!”
He spread his hands, puzzled. “I do not see why you are upset.” He spoke in a voice of infinite, calm reason. “I wanted to spare you the anxiety. And it would have been negligent of me not to watch the explosive shockwave crawl, inch by inch, across the hull, just in case, after all, it turned out that I could have done something. As it was, the shockwave did even less damage, and was more perfectly balanced, that any model predicted. Sort of strange, actually. . . .”
She stood up, hands on hips. “Not as strange as you’re going to feel when I yank out your lying tongue four feet, wrap it around your neck, and strangle you with it! I came along with you because, out of everyone, Atkins, Diomedes, your father, everyone, I was the only one who believed in you. And now you don’t believe in me! Do you still think I’m a coward, is that it? Or do you think I would not have had anything to offer, no ideas, not even comfort or support, while you spent a month by yourself waiting to see if we would die? If you don’t think I can take what you can, why did you bring me along? Why?”
Phaethon held up his finger. “While I would really like to continue this argument—it makes me feel like we’re already married, you know, and that is comforting—why don’t we store this conversation in a back file and play it out later? We can store our emotions so that you’ll be just as mad and I’ll be just as tired. Because there is something very bad happening right now, and I’d like your advice and support on the issue.”
“Well. Okay. But no backup files. I hate old conversations. Since there is nothing but empty ship mind all around us, why don’t we send two partials to finish that conversation for us, provided we agree to abide by the results? We still have the portable noetic unit right here.”
Phaethon agreed, and they established copies of themselves to continue the argument on another of the ship’s channels. Meanwhile, Phaethon showed Daphne what he had found during the hundred hours (for him) that had taken place during the split second (for her) it had taken the shockwave to pass across the ship.
He pointed to a mirror that now showed a yellow-white haze rippled by feathery clouds of red and dark red.
“The shockwave threw us out of the funnel of Helion’s low-pressure area,” said Phaethon. “And I do not know where we are. Helion may have also lost track of us.” He pointed toward the mirror. “The environment here looks like we have dropped into the radiative zone, but we may still be inside the bubble of higher-density plasma that erupted over us.”
Daphne said, “How bad is that? I mean, all we were doing was waiting until the bad guys found us.”
“I had been hoping to get to the location to which the ghost-particle machine was sending its periodic broadcasts. But since I do not know where we are, I will
not know where that point is, until the machine broadcasts again.”
She said, “The plasma outside is about twenty times as dense as solid iron. The magnetics you had been using to bore through the material you are now using (now that we are lower than we had planned to go) to reinforce the hull against a breach. So how can we be moving?”
“I must keep the drives firing at full blast, in order to overcome back pressure and dump waste heat. That is actually adding relatively little movement to our vector, because of the density of the medium. But even if we are at rest relative to the current of superdense core plasma around us now, we do not know where or how quickly that current is moving. An area of plasma a hundred times the diameter of Jupiter just closed around us; if that area is moving at the speed of some of the equatorial currents, we could be an immense distance away from where we were a few minutes ago. So the question is: How do we find out where we are, how do we get to where we want to go? And we do not have all the time in the world. Six days from now, as soon as the fuel runs out, the plasma from the sun pours into the drives, atomizing everything inside, including us.”
She said, “Do you have any magnetic power left over to put to the treads, to dig us out of this superdense area?”
Phaethon said, “No. I’m using every erg to brace the ship against the internal currents here, within the area. Just to make this clear: we could be inside the radiative zone, falling toward the core, or this sphere of plasma could be rising like a bubble up through the convective zone, and it has not yet dispersed because of its immense size. It seems very ironic—silly, actually—to get killed this way by some accident of internal solar meteorology, without ever seeing the enemy.” He sighed and raised his hand toward his faceplate, as if about to open it, saying, “Perhaps I should not have kept watch for so many subjective hours during that shockwave. I do feel very tired. . . .”
Daphne felt the nape-hairs of her neck stir. She felt as if she were being watched.
She reached out and grabbed his hand. “Keep your helmet on, you fool!”
Phaethon paused, startled. “But why—?”
Because Daphne had been trained by Warlocks, she could trigger pattern-finding intuitions from nonverbal sections of her brain, and deduce insights from partial information. So somehow she knew: “It’s the only thing saving us!”
Phaethon froze. He said, “Check the ship’s brain.”
Daphne called up a status report on the mirror next to her chair arm. “Still empty. No one’s in the ship mind except our two copies. Otherwise it’s empty.”
“Why are you so sure the enemy is aboard?” For some reason, even though the brightly lit bridge was wide and empty around them, his voice had dropped to a whisper.
It took her a moment to find the words, to bring the Warlock intuition to the forefront of her mind, like tempting some wild beast out from its dark cave. She said: “Too many coincidences. We know the enemy can manipulate solar currents and raise storms just like your father does; that is what killed Helion Prime. So we’re caught by a super-dense current. It may be carrying us, helpless, to the surface, just where the enemy wants to go, if they are aboard and if they want to escape the Golden Oecumene. If the enemy cannot escape, they wait a few days until the fuel runs out, and kill us both, so, at least, our side doesn’t have the ship. The current that caught us cannot be natural: it breaks the hull, but it somehow is more careful, more evenly balanced, that you expected; and at the same time, it puts on just enough pressure, no more, no less, to neutralize the hull magnetics we need to use to maneuver.”
He said, “But there is no evidence of anything received through the thought ports I jammed open. How did their ship transmit any crew-mind information aboard the Phoenix?”
She said, “That I do not know. Maybe the ghost-particle machine acted like a Trojan horse, and was receiving information from an outside source.”
“Through the hull . . . ?”
“Your drive ports are open. Besides, you were using it just now to send and receive neutrino bursts. If it can receive information from inside, it can receive it from outside. And probably send as well. Just because your closed hull stops some of the particles the ghost array puts out—the particles you detected—does not necessarily mean there were not other groups of signals you did not detect. The Nothing Sophotech probably did actually receive Ao Varmatyr’s dying broadcast, and knows everything he found out about the ship, your plans, and you.”
“I don’t really mind if the Nothing knows everything we said and did. Our strategy, in fact, relies on total honesty. But I wonder why it did not take over the ship’s mind. One would think it would welcome the higher thought-speeds, if for no other reason. Maybe the conscience redactor has given it some specious reason to fear the ship mind.
“Are you sure it’s not in there?” Daphne asked. “Our read-out here could be an illusion. Run a line check.”
He tapped the mirror with a fingertip, gave a command. “Well, there is something strange here. According to this, you won the argument, and I apologized. Something must be manipulating the data. Best two out of three?”
“Very funny. You don’t think the Nothing is aboard, do you?”
“I think it would have initiated conversation with us.”
“Why? All it has to do is wait until you open your armor to scratch your nose or get a nonsimulated kiss, and zap, it sends an information beam through your skull and into the inside-crown thought ports.”
“But if a Sophotech was transmitted into our ship, where did it come from? It’s not as if transmissions can travel so very far through the dense solar plasma. The enemy ship must have been nearby, practically alongside. But we did not detect a foreign ship. It has to be a starship, not just a spaceship. Why didn’t we see her?”
When she did not respond, he glanced at her. She was sitting in her throne, staring upward, a blank, thoughtful look on her face.
“Well?” he said. “If the Nothing Sophotech is actually out there, why did we not see the foreign starship?”
She spoke in a slow and dreamy voice: “Because the Silent Oecumene starship is very, very small.”
“What? Why do you say that?”
She raised her finger slowly and pointed. “Because it is here.”
6.
At first Phaethon was not certain what he was seeing.
Across the deck, tall pressure curtains and overmind formation poles rose vertically toward the dome. At first, it seemed as if something had distorted the second balcony. The wall was puckered. The reaction boxes were crowded oddly toward each other and the angles of the cubes were no longer right angles. The poles were warped in the middles, bending toward each other, left and right, no longer parallel.
Then the distortion moved. The vertical rods to the right straightened, like harpstrings plucked, now released. But the straight rods to the left were bending, their midsections crowding toward a moving point.
It looked as if the whole scene had been painted on an elastic sheet, and the elastic were puckering toward a small moving point, or as if a distorted sheet of convex glass were moving between Phaethon and the far wall. . . .
Or as if . . .
“There is a black hole here on the bridge with us,” said Phaethon. “The singularity is bending the light from the wall beyond in a gravity lens. Look.”
He draw an energy mirror up from the floor and focused it on the center of the distortion. Through the amplified view in the mirror, the reddish haze from the microscopic gravity well was clearly visible. Light moving near the singularity was retarded, lost energy, and Doppler-shifted toward the red.
According to the mirror, the singularity itself was only about the diameter of a helium nucleus, a few angstroms wide. Extending an inch or two in diameter was an outer sphere of ozone and charged particles formed from stripped air molecules, attracted by gravity, spiraling down and through the point-singularity, and disintegrating into constituent electrons and protons. If he turned his hearing
up, he could hear the high-pitched, steady tea-kettle whistle of escaping vanishing air, being pushed at fifteen pounds per square inch into a point smaller than could be seen.
Phaethon threw pressure curtains across the chamber, in case the surface area of the black hole grew, or the rate of air loss became noticeable. The distortion in the air, seeming to bend all things behind it toward it, hazed in reddish light, haloed by hissing X-rays, moved with slow majesty across the bridge, toward them.
It passed through the pressure curtains without slowing. Their powerful fields were helpless to stop the black hole. There were electric discharges as the pressure curtains’ field flows were twisted out of parallel and canceled out. Sparks guttered for a moment along the hull beneath.
Daphne said, “Is it my imagination, or is the deck tilting toward that thing?”
“It’s your imagination. I think. The gravimeter says it has less mass than a large asteroid, only a few thousand million tonnes or so. We would not be able to feel that amount of gravitic attraction. But the light is being bent as if there was something the size of a galaxy or three at that pinpoint. How much light distortion does it take to be visible to the naked eye like that? For that matter, how is it floating? How is being controlled? Why isn’t it dispersing? Classical theory says that black holes that small only have a life of a few microseconds before they evaporate in a wash of Hawking radiation.”
Daphne stared at the impossible twist of reddish light. It was like staring down a well, or the bore of some cannon made of bent space. She said in a calm voice: “This is he. Or should I say ‘it.’ The Nothing Sophotech is housed in the interior of the black hole. It is controlling the gravitic fields, somehow. How it communicates to the fields around the singularity, the ones which determine its position in space, that I do not know. Hawking radiation? Gravitons? It might give orders by altering black-hole rotational spin-values in a sort of Morse code, which the surrounding field can pick up. You’re the engineer. You tell me how it’s done.”