"Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)
Chapter 16 Icosahedral God
The Saddle Point for the Chaera’s home system turned out to be within the accretion disc of the black hole itself. Ben and Madeleine clung to the windows as smoky light washed over the scuffed metal and plastic surfaces of the habitat.
The accretion disc swirled below the flower-ship, like scum on the surface of a huge milk churn. The black hole was massive for its type, Madeleine learned — meters across. Matter from the accretion disc tumbled into the hole continually; X rays sizzled into space.
The flower-ship passed through the accretion disc. The view was astonishing.
The disc foreshortened. They fell into shadows a million kilometers long.
A crimson band swept upward past the flower-ship. Madeleine caught a glimpse of detail, a sea of gritty rubble. The disc collapsed to a grainy streak across the stars; pea-sized pellets spanged off Ancestor ’s hull plates. Then the ship soared below the plane of the disc.
A brilliant star gleamed beneath the ceiling of rubble. This was a stable G2 star, like the Sun, some five astronomical units away — about as far as Jupiter was from Sol. The black hole was orbiting that star, a wizened, spitting planet.
Soon, the monitors mounted on the Ancestor ’s science platform started to collect data on hydrogen alpha emission, ultraviolet line spectra, ultraviolet and X-ray imaging, spectrography of the active regions. Ben took charge now, and training and practice took over as the two of them went into the routine tasks of studying the hole and its disc.
Nemoto had hooked up to the Chaera’s tank a powerful bioprocessor, a little cubical unit that would enable the humans to communicate, to some extent, with the Chaera and with their Gaijin hosts. When they booted it up, a small screen displayed the biopro’s human-interface design metaphor. It was a blocky, badly synched, two-dimensional virtual representation of Nemoto’s leathery face.
“The vanity of megalomaniacs,” Madeleine murmured. “It’s a pattern.”
Ben didn’t understand. The Nemoto virtual grinned.
Ben and Madeleine hovered before a window into the Chaera’s tank.
If Madeleine had encountered this creature in some deep-sea aquarium — and given she was no biologist — she mightn’t have thought it outlandishly strange. After all it had those remarkable eyes.
The eyes were, of course, a stunning example of convergent evolution. On Earth, eyes conveyed such a powerful evolutionary advantage that they had been developed independently perhaps forty times — while wings seemed to have been invented only three or four times, and the wheel not at all. Although details differed — the eyes of fish, insects, and people were very different — nevertheless all eyes showed a commonality of design, for they were evolved for the same purpose, and were constrained by physical law.
You might have expected ETs to show up with eyes.
The Chaera communicated by movement, their rippling surfaces sending low-frequency acoustic signals through the fluid in which they swam. In the tank, lasers scanned the Chaera’s surface constantly, picking up the movements and affording translations.
Interspecies translation was actually getting easier, after the first experience with the Gaijin. A kind of meta-language had been evolved, an interface that served as a translation buffer between ET “languages” and every human tongue. The meta-language was founded on concepts — space, time, number — that had to be common to any sentient species embedded in three-dimensional space and subject to physical law, and it had verbal, mathematical, and diagrammatic components; to Madeleine’s lay understanding it seemed to be a fusion of Latin and Lincos.
Madeleine felt an odd kinship with the spinning, curious creature, a creature that might have come from Earth, much more sympathetic than any Gaijin. And if we have found you so quickly, perhaps we will find less strangeness out there than we expect.
“What is it saying?” Ben asked.
Virtual Nemoto translated. “The Chaera saw the disc unfolding. ‘What a spectacle. I am the envy of generations…’ ”
Mini black holes, Madeleine learned, were typically the mass of Jupiter. Too small to have been formed by processes of stellar collapse, they were created a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, baked in the fireball at the birth of the universe.
Mini black holes, then, seemed to be well understood. The oddity here was to find such a hole in a neat circular orbit around this Sun-like star.
“And the real surprise,” virtual Nemoto said, “was the discovery, by the Gaijin, of life, infesting the accretion disc of a mini black hole. The Chaera. It seems that this black hole is God for the Chaera.”
“They worship a black hole?” Madeleine asked.
“Evidently,” Nemoto said impatiently. “If the translation programs are working. If it’s possible to correlate concepts like ‘God’ and ‘worship’ across species barriers.”
Ben murmured wordlessly. Madeleine looked over his shoulder.
In the central glare of the accretion disc, there was something surrounding the black hole, embedding it.
The black hole was set into a netlike structure that started just outside the Schwarzschild radius and extended kilometers. The structure was a regular solid of twenty triangular faces.
“It’s an icosahedron,” Ben said. “My God, it is so obviously artificial. The largest possible Platonic solid. Triumphantly three-dimensional.”
Madeleine couldn’t make out any framework within the icosahedron, or any reinforcement for its edges; it was a structure of sheets of almost transparent film, each triangle hundreds of meters wide. The glow of the flower-ship’s hungry ramscoop shone and sparkled from the multiple facets.
“It must be mighty strong to maintain its structure against the hole’s gravity, the tides,” Ben said. “It seems to be directing the flow of matter from the accretion disc into the event horizon…”
It was a jewel-box setting for a black hole. A comparative veteran of interstellar exploration, Madeleine felt stunned.
The Chaera thrashed in its tank.
“Time to pay the fare,” Nemoto said. “Are we ready to speak to God?”
Madeleine turned to Ben. “We didn’t know about this. Maybe we should think about what we’re doing here.”
He shrugged. “Nemoto is right. It is not our mission.” He began the operations they’d rehearsed.
Reluctantly, Madeleine worked a console to unship the first of the old X-ray lasers; the monitors showed it unfolding from its mount like a shabby flower.
The self-directed laser dove into the heart of the system, heading for its closest approach to the hole.
“Three, two, one,” Ben murmured.
There was a flash of light, pure white, that shone through the Service Module’s ports.
Various instruments showed surges of particles and electromagnetic radiation. The laser’s fission-bomb power source had worked. The shielding of Ancestor seemed adequate.
The X-ray beam washed over the surface of “God.” The net structure stirred, like a sleeping snake.
The Chaera quivered.
Ben was watching the false-color images. “Madeleine. Look.”
The surface of “God” was alive with motion; the icosahedral netting was bunching itself around a single, brooding point, like skin crinkling around an eye.
“I can give you a rough translation from the Chaera,” Nemoto said. “ ‘She heard us.’ ”
Madeleine asked, “ ‘She’?”
“God, of course. ‘If I have succeeded… then I will be the most honored of my race. Fame, wealth, my choice of mates — ’ ”
Madeleine laughed sourly. “And, of course, religious fulfillment.”
Ben monitored a surge of X-ray photons and high-energy particles coming from the hole — and the core at the center of the crinkled net exploded. A pillar of radiation punched through the accretion disc like a fist.
The Chaera wobbled around its tank.
“ ‘God is shouting,’ ” Nemoto said. She peered out of her biopro monitor tank, her wizened virtual face creased with doubt.
The beam blinked out, leaving a trail of churning junk.
The flower-ship entered a long, powered orbit that would take it, for a time, away from the black hole and in toward the primary star and its inner system. Madeleine and Ben watched the black hole and its enigmatic artifact recede to a toylike glimmer.
The Chaera inhabited the accretion disc’s larger fragments.
In the Ancestor ’s recorded images, Chaera were everywhere, spinning like frisbees over the surface of their worldlets, or whipping through the accretion mush to a neighboring fragment, or basking like lizards, their undersides turned up to the black hole.
The beam from “God” had left a track of glowing debris through the accretion disc, like flesh scorched by hot iron. The track ended in a knot of larger fragments.
In the optical imager, jellyfish bodies drifted like soot flakes.
“Let me get this straight,” Madeleine said. “The Chaera have evolved to feed off the X-radiation from the black hole… from ‘God.’ Is that right?”
“Evolved or adapted. So it seems,” Nemoto said dryly. “ ‘God provides us in all things.’ ”
“So the Chaera try to… shout… to ‘God,’ ” Ben said. “Some of them pray. Some of them build great artifacts to sparkle at Her. Like worshiping the Sun, praying for dawn. Basically they’re trying to stimulate X-radiation bursts. All the Gaijin have done is to sell them a more effective communication mechanism.”
“A better prayer wheel,” Madeleine murmured. “But what are the Gaijin interested in here? The black-hole artifact?”
“Possibly,” Nemoto said. “Or perhaps the Chaera’s religion. The Gaijin seem unhealthily obsessed with such illogical belief systems.”
“But,” Madeleine said, “that X-ray laser delivers orders of magnitude more energy into the artifact than anything the Chaera could manage. It looks as if the energy of the pulse they get in return is magnified in proportion. Perhaps the Chaera don’t understand what they’re dealing with, here.”
The main star was very Sunlike. Madeleine, filled with complex doubts about her mission, pressed her hand to the window, trying to feel its warmth, hungering for simple physical pleasure.
There was just one planet here. It was a little larger than the Earth, and it followed a neat circular path through the star’s habitable zone, the region within which an Earthlike planet could orbit.
But they could see, even from a distance, that this was no Earth. It was silent on all wavelengths. And it gleamed, almost as bright as a star itself; it must have cloud decks like Venus.
On a sleep break, Ben and Madeleine, clinging to each other, floated before the nearest thing they had to a picture window. Madeleine peered around, seeking constellations she might recognize, even so far from home, and she wondered if she could find Sol.
“Something’s wrong,” Ben whispered.
“There always is.”
“I’m serious.” He let his fingers trace out a line across the black sky. “What do you see?”
With the Sun eclipsed by the shadow of the FGB module, she gazed out at the subtle light. There was that bright planet, andthe dim red disc of rubble surrounding the Chaera black hole, from here just visible as more than a point source of light.
“There’s a glow around the star itself, covering the orbit of that single planet,” Ben said. “Can you see?” It was a diffuse shine, Madeleine saw, cloudy, ragged-edged. Ben continued. “That’s an oddity in itself. But—”
Then she got it. “Oh. No zodiacal light.”
The zodiacal light, in the Solar System, was a faint glow along the plane of the ecliptic. Sometimes it was visible from Earth. It was sunlight, scattered by dust that orbited the Sun in the plane of the planets. Most of the dust was in or near the asteroid belt, created by asteroid collisions. And in the modern Solar System, of course, the zodiacal light was enhanced by the glow of Gaijin colonies.
“So if there’s no zodiacal light—”
“There are no asteroids here,” Ben said.
“Nemoto. What happened to the asteroids?”
“You already know, I think,” virtual Nemoto hissed.
Ben nodded. “They were mined out. Probably long ago. This place is old, Madeleine.”
The electromagnetic petals of the flower-ship sparkled hungrily as it chewed through the rich gas pocket at the heart of the system, and the shadows cast by the Sun — now nearby, full and fat, brimming with light — turned like clock hands on the ship’s complex surface. But that diffuse gas cloud was now dense enough that it dimmed the farther stars.
Data slid silently into the FGB module.
“It’s like a fragment of a GMC — a giant molecular cloud,” Ben said. “Mostly hydrogen, some dust. It’s thick — comparatively. A hundred thousand molecules per cubic centimeter… The Sun was born out of such a cloud, Madeleine.”
“But the heat of the Sun dispersed the remnants of our cloud… didn’t it? So why hasn’t the same thing happened here?”
“Or,” virtual Nemoto said sourly, “maybe the question should be: How come the gas cloud got put back around this star? ”
They flew around the back of the Sun. Despite elaborate shielding, light seemed to fill every crevice of the FGB module. Madeleine was relieved when they started to pull away and head for the cool of the outer system, and that single mysterious planet.
It took a day to get there.
They came at the planet with the Sun behind them, so it showed a nearly full disc. It glared, brilliant white, just a solid mass of cloud from pole to pole, blinding and featureless. And it was surrounded by a pearly glow of interstellar hydrogen, like an immense, misshapen outer atmosphere.
The flower-ship’s petals opened wide, the lasers working vigorously, and it decelerated smoothly into orbit.
They could see nothing of the surface. Their instruments revealed a world that was indeed like Venus: an atmosphere of carbon dioxide, kilometers thick, scarcely any water.
There was, of course, no life of any kind.
The Chaera spun in its tank, volunteering nothing.
Ben was troubled. “There’s no reason for a Venus to form this far from the Sun. This world should be temperate. An Earth.”
“But,” Nemoto hissed, “think what this world has that Earth doesn’t share.”
“The gas cloud,” Madeleine said.
Ben nodded. “All that interstellar hydrogen. Madeleine, we’re so far from the Sun now, and the gas is so thick, that the hydrogen is neutral — not ionized by sunlight.”
“And so—”
“And so the planet down there has no defense against the gas; its magnetic field could only keep it out if it was charged. Hydrogen has been raining down from the sky, into the upper air.”
“Once there, it will mix with any oxygen present,” Nemoto said. “Hydrogen plus oxygen gives—”
“Water,” Madeleine said.
“Lots of it,” Ben told her. “It must have rained like hell, for a million years. The atmosphere was drained of oxygen, and filled up with water vapor. A greenhouse effect took off—”
“All that from a wisp of gas?”
“That wisp of gas was a planet killer,” Nemoto whispered.
“But why would anyone kill a planet?”
“It is the logic of growth,” Nemoto said. “This has all the characteristics of an old system, Meacher. Caught behind a wave of colonization — all its usable resources dug out and exploited…”
Madeleine frowned. “I don’t believe it. It would take a hell of a long time to eat up a star system.”
“How long do you think?”
“I don’t know. Millions of years, perhaps.”
Nemoto grunted. “Listen to me. The growth rate of the human population on Earth, historically, was two percent a year. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? But it’s compound interest, remember. At that rate your population doubles every thirty-five years, an increase by tenfold every century or so. Of course after the twentieth century our growth rates collapsed; we ran out of resources.”
“Ah,” Ben said. “What if we’d kept on growing?”
“How many people could Earth hold?” Nemoto whispered. “Ten, twenty billion? Meacher, the whole of the inner Solar System out to Mars could supply only enough water for maybe fifty billion people. It might have taken us a century to reach those numbers. Of course there is much more water in the asteroids and the outer system than in Earth’s oceans, perhaps enough to support ten thousand trillion human beings.”
“A huge number.”
“But not infinite — and only six tenfold jumps away from ten billion.”
“Just six or seven centuries,” Ben said.
“And then what?” Nemoto whispered. “Suppose we start colonizing, like the Gaijin. Earth is suddenly the center of a growing sphere of colonization whose volume must keep increasing at two percent a year, to keep up with the population growth. And that means that the leading edge, the colonizing wave, has to sweep on faster and faster, eating up worlds and stars and moving on to the next, because of the pressure from behind…”
Ben was doing sums in his head. “That leading edge would have to be moving at light speed within a few centuries, no more.”
“Imagine how it would be,” Nemoto said grimly, “to inhabit a world in the path of such a wave. The exploitation would be rapid, ruthless, merciless, burning up worlds and stars like the front of a forest fire, leaving only ruins and lifelessness. And then, as resources are exhausted throughout the light-speed cage, the crash comes, inevitably. Remember Venus. Remember Polynesia.”
“Polynesia?”
“The nearest analog in our own history to interstellar colonization,” Ben said. “The Polynesians spread out among their Pacific islands for over a thousand years, across three thousand kilometers. But by about A.D. 1000 their colonization wave front had reached as far as it could go, and they had inhabited every scrap of land. Isolated, each island surrounded by others already full of people, they had nowhere to go.
“On Easter Island they destroyed the native ecosystem in a few generations, let the soil erode away, cut down the forests. In the end they didn’t even have enough wood to build more canoes. Then they went to war over whatever was left. By the time the Europeans arrived the Polynesians had just about wiped themselves out.”
“Think about it, Meacher,” Nemoto said. “The light-speed cage. Imagine this system fully populated, a long way behind the local colonization wave front, and surrounded by systems just as heavily populated — and armed — as they were. And they were running out of resources. There surely were a lot more space dwellers than planet dwellers, but they’d already used up the asteroids and the comets. So the space dwellers turned on the planet. The inhabitants were choked, drowned, baked.”
“I don’t believe it,” Madeleine said. “Any intelligent society would figure out the dangers long before breeding itself to extinction.”
“The Polynesians didn’t,” Ben said dryly.
The petals of the flower-ship opened once more, and they receded from the corpselike planet into the calm of the outer darkness.
It was time to talk to the icosahedral God again. The second X-ray punch laser was launched.
After studying the records of the last encounter, Ben had learned how the configuration of the icosahedral artifact anticipated the direction of the resulting beam. Now Madeleine watched the core squint into focus. The killer beam would again lance through the accretion disc — and, this time, right into one of the largest of the Chaera worldlets.
Millions of Chaera were going to die. Madeleine could see them, infesting their accretion disc, swarming and living and loving.
In its tank, their Chaera passenger drifted like a Dali watch.
“Nemoto,” Madeleine said, “we can’t go ahead with the second firing.”
“But they understand the consequences,” virtual Nemoto said blandly. “The Chaera have disturbed the artifact a few times in the past, with their mirrors and smoke signals. Every time it’s killed some of them. But they need the X-ray nourishment… Meacher,” she warned, “don’t meddle as you did at the burster. If you meddle, the Gaijin may not allow human passengers on future missions. And we won’t learn about systems like this. We’ll have no information; we won’t be able to plan… Besides, the laser is already deployed. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
“It is the Chaera’s choice, Madeleine,” Ben said gently. “Their culture. It seems they’re prepared to die to attain what they believe is perfection.”
Nemoto quoted the Chaera. “It knows we’re arguing here. ‘Where there are prophecies, they will cease. Where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.’ ”
“Who’s the philosopher?” Madeleine asked sourly. “Some great Chaera mind of the past?”
Ben smiled. “Actually, it was quoting Saint Paul.”
Nemoto looked startled, as Madeleine felt.
“But there remain mysteries,” Ben said. “The Chaera look too primitive to have constructed that artifact. After all, it manipulates a black hole’s gravity well. Perhaps their ancestors built this thing. Or some previous wave of colonists, who passed through this system.”
“You aren’t thinking it through,” virtual Nemoto whispered. “The Chaera have eyes filled with salty water. They must have evolved on a world with oceans. They can’t have evolved here.”
“Then,” Madeleine snapped, “why are they here?”
“Because they had no place else to go,” Nemoto said. “They fled here — even modified themselves, perhaps. They huddled around an artifact left by an earlier wave of colonization. They knew that nobody would follow them to such a dangerous, unstable slum area as this.”
“They are refugees.”
“Yes. As, perhaps, we will become in the future.”
“Refugees from what?”
“From the resource wars,” Nemoto said. “From the hydrogen suffocation of their world. Like Polynesia.”
The core artifact trembled.
And Nemoto kept talking, talking. “This universe of ours is a place of limits, of cruel equations. The Galaxy must be full of light-speed cages like this, at most a few hundred light-years wide, traps for their exponentially growing populations. And then, after the ripped-up worlds have lain fallow, after recovery through the slow processes of geology and biology, it all begins again, a cycle of slash and burn, slash and burn… This is our future, Meacher: our future and our past. It is after all a peculiar kind of equilibrium: the contact, the ruinous exploitation, the crash, the multiple extinctions — over and over. And it is happening again, to us. The Gaijin are already eating their way through our asteroid belt. Now do you see what I’m fighting against?”
Madeleine remembered the burster, the slaughter of the star lichen fourteen times a second. She remembered Venus and Australia, the evidence of ancient wars even in the Solar System — the relics of a previous, long-burned-out colonization bubble.
Must it be like this?
Something in her rebelled. To hell with theories. The Chaera were real, and millions of them were about to die.
And there was — she realized, thinking quickly — something she could do about it.
“Oh, damn it… Ben. Help me. Go down to the FGB module. Get everything out of there you think we have to save.”
For long seconds, Ben thought it over. Then he nodded. “I’ll trust your instincts, Madeleine.”
“Good,” she said. “Now I have a little figuring to do.” She rushed to the instrument consoles.
Ben gathered their research materials: the biological and medical samples they’d taken from their bodies, data cassettes and diskettes, film cartridges, notebooks, results of the astrophysical experiments they had run in the neighborhood of the black hole. There was little personal gear in here, as their sleeping compartments were in the Service Module. He pulled everything together in a spare sleeping bag, and hauled it all up into the Service Module.
Madeleine glanced down for the last time through the FGB module’s picture window, at smoky accretion-disc light. The flower-ship skimmed past the flank of “God”; the netting structure swarmed around the pulsing core.
The Chaera thrashed in its tank.
Ben pulled down the heavy hatch between the modules — it hadn’t been closed since the flower-ship had swept them up from the surface of Earth’s Moon — and dogged it tight.
Madeleine was running a hasty computer program. “Remember the drill for a pressure-hull breach?” she called.
“Of course. But—”
“Three, two, one.”
There was a clatter of pyrotechnic bolts, an abrupt jolt.
“I just severed the FGB,” she said. “The explosive decompression should fire it in the right direction. I hope. I didn’t have time to check my figures, or verify my aim—”
Bits of radiation spat out like javelins as the core began to open.
“What have you done, Meacher?” Nemoto thundered.
She saw the FGB module for one last instant, its battered, patched-up form silhouetted against the gigantic cheek of “God.” In its way it was a magnificent sight, she thought: a stubby twentieth-century human artifact orbiting a black hole, fifty-four light-years from Earth.
And then the core opened.
The FGB Module got the X-ray pulse right in the rear end. Droplets of metal splashed across space… But the massive Russian construction lasted, long enough to shield the Chaera worldlets.
Just as Madeleine had intended.
The core closed; the surface of the net smoothed over. The slowly cooling stump of the FGB module drifted around the curve of the hole. Madeleine saluted it silently.
“The journey back is going to be cramped,” Ben said dryly.
The Saddle Point gateway hung before them, anonymous, eternal, indistinguishable from its copies in the Solar System, visible only by the reflected light of the accretion disc.
“You saved a world, Madeleine,” Ben said.
“But nobody asked you to,” virtual Nemoto said, her voice tinny. “You’re a meddler. Sentimental. You always were. The Chaera are still protesting. ‘Why did you hide God from us?’…”
Ben shrugged. “God is still there. I think all Madeleine has done is provide the Chaera with a little more time to consider how much perfection they really want to achieve.”
“Meacher, you’re such a fool,” Nemoto said.
Perhaps she was. But she knew that what she was learning — the dismal, stupid secret of the universe — would not leave her. And she wondered what she would find, when she reached home this time.
The blue glow of transition flooded over them, and there was an instant of searing, welcoming pain.