Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (24 page)

“Not yet. You’ve talked to Essie, so you know we’re trying her out without the machines. We have to know how far she can go on her own, and we won’t know that for twenty-four hours. At least I hope we won’t.”

“Essie said six.”

“Six hours to readouts, twenty-four to full workup. Unless she shows bad signs before that and has to go back on the machines right away.” She was talking to me over her shoulder, scrubbing up at her little washstand. Holding her dripping hands in the air she came back closer to the comm set. “I don’t want you worrying, Robin,” she said. “All this is routine. She’s got about a hundred transplants in her, and we have to find out if they’ve taken hold. I wouldn’t let her go this far if I didn’t think the chances were at least reasonable, Robin.”

“‘Reasonable’ doesn’t sound real good to me, Wilma!”

“Better than reasonable, but don’t push me. And don’t worry, either. You’re getting regular bulletins, and you can call my program any time you want more-me too, if you have to. You want odds? Two to one everything’s going to work. A hundred to one that if something fails it’s something we can fix. Now I’ve got to transplant a complete lower genital for a young lady who wants to be sure she still has fun afterwards.”

“I think I ought to get back there,” I said.

“For what? There’s nothing you can do but get in the way. Robin, I promise I won’t let her die before you get back.” In the background the P.A. system was chiming gently. “They’re playing my song, Robin, talk to you later.”

There are times when I sit at the center of the world, and when I know that I can reach out to any of the programs my good wife has written for me and pull back any fact, absorb any explanation or command any event.

There are also times when I sit with a full console and a head full of burning questions and learn nothing, because I do not know what to ask.

And there are times when I am so full of learning and being and doing that the moments zip past and the days are packed, and other times when I am floating in slack water beside a current, and the world is sliding speedily by. There was plenty to do. I didn’t feel like doing it. Albert was bursting with news from Heechee Heaven and the Food Factory. I let him purge himself. But the synoptics plopped into my mind without raising a question or even a ripple; when he was through reporting about architectural deductions and interpretations of maunderings of the Dead Men I turned him off. It was intensely interesting, but for some reason I was not interested by it. I ordered Harriet to let my simulacrum deal with everything routine and tell everyone who was not urgent to call me another time. I stretched out on the three-meter watercouch looking out over the weird Brasilia skyline, and wished that it were that couch in the Food Factory, connected to someone I loved.

Wouldn’t that be great? To be able to reach out to someone far away, as Wan had reached out to the whole Earth, and feel with them what they were feeling, let them feel the inside of you? What a wonderful thing for lovers!

And to that thought I reacted by calling up Morton on my console and telling him to look into the possibility of patenting that application of the couch.

It was not a very romantic response to a pretty romantic thought. The difficulty was that I was not quite sure which someone I wished I were connected to. My dear wife, so loved, so needful right now? Or someone a lot farther away and much harder to reach?

So I stagnated through the long Brazilian afternoon, with a soak in the pool, and a lounge in the setting sun, and a lavish dinner in my suite with a bottle of wine, and then I called Albert back to ask him what I really wanted to know. “Albert? Where, exactly, is Kiara now?”

He paused, tamping tobacco into his pipe and frowning. “Gelle-Kiara Moynlin,” he said at last, “is in a black hole.”

“Yes. And what does that mean?”

He said apologetically, “That’s hard to say. I mean it’s hard to put in simple terms, and also hard to say because I really don’t know. Not enough data.”

“Do your best,”

“Sure thing, Robin. I would say that she is in the section of the exploration craft which remained in orbit, just under the event horizon of the singularity you encountered-which,” he waved carelessly and a blackboard appeared behind him, “is of course just at the Schwarzschild radius.”

He stood up, jamming the unlit pipe into the hip pocket of his baggy cotton slacks, picked up a piece of chalk and wrote:

2GM

C2

“At that boundary, light can’t go any farther. It is what you might think of as a standing wave-front where light has gone as far as it can go. You can’t see into the black hole past it. Nothing can come up from behind it. The symbols, of course, stand for gravity and mass-and I don’t have to tell an old faster-than-light person like you what c2 is, do I? From the instrumentation you brought back, it would appear that this particular hole was maybe sixty kilometers in diameter, which would give it a mass of maybe ten times the sun. Am I telling you more than you want to know?”

“A little bit, Albert,” I said, shifting uncomfortably on the Watercouch. I wasn’t really sure just what I was asking for.

“Perhaps what you want to know is whether she is dead, Bobby,” he said. “Oh, no. I don’t think so. There’s a lot of radiation around, and God knows what shear forces. But she hasn’t had much time to be dead yet. Depends on her angular velocity. She might not yet even know you’re gone. Time dilation, you see. That is a consequence of-“

“I understand about time dilation,” I interrupted. And I did, because I was feeling almost as though I were living through some of it. “Is there any way we can find that out.”

“‘A black hole has no hair,’ Bobby,” he quoted solemnly. “That’s what we call the Carter-Werner-Robinson-Hawking Law, and what it means is that the only information you get out of a black hole is mass, charge and angular momentum. Nothing else.”

“Unless you get inside it, the way she did.”

“Well, yes, Robby,” he admitted, sitting down and attending to his pipe. Long pause. Puff, puff. Then, “Robin?”

“Yes, Albert?”

He looked abashed, or as abashed as a holographic construct can. “I haven’t been entirely fair with you,” he said. “There is some information that comes out of black holes. But that gets us into quantum mechanics. And it doesn’t do you any good, either. Not for your purposes.”

I didn’t really like having a computer program tell me what my “purposes” were. Especially since I wasn’t all that sure myself. “Tell me about it!” I ordered.

“Well-we don’t really know a lot. Goes back to Stephen Hawking’s first principles. He pointed out that, in a sense, a black hole can be said to have a ‘temperature’-which implies some kind of radiation. Some kinds of particles do escape. But not from the kinds of black holes that interest you, Robby.”

“What kind do they escape from?”

“Well, mostly from the tiny ones, the ones with the mass of, say, Mount Everest. Submicroscopic ones. No bigger than a nuclear particle. They get real hot, a hundred billion Kelvin and up. The smaller they get, the faster the quantum tunneling goes on, the hotter they get-so they keep on getting smaller and hotter until they just blow up. Big ones, no. It goes the other way. The bigger they are, the more infall they get to replenish their mass, and the harder it is for a particle to tunnel out. One like Kiara’s has a temperature probably down around a hundred millionth of a Kelvin, which is really cold, Robin. And getting colder all the time.”

“So you don’t get out of one of those.”

“Not any way I know about, no, Robin. Does that answer your questions?”

“For now,” I said, dismissing him. And it did, all but one: Why was it that when he was talking to me about Kiara he called me “Robby”?

Essie wrote good programs, but it seemed to me that they were beginning to overlap. I used to have a program that addressed me by childhood names from time to time. But it was a psychiatric program. I reminded myself to speak to Essie about straightening out her programming, because I certainly did not feel I had any need for the services of Sigfrid von Shrink now.

Senator Praggler’s temporary office wasn’t in the Gateway tower, but on the 96
^th
floor of the legislators’ office building. A courtesy from the Brazilian Congress to a colleague, and a flattering one, because it was only two stories below the top. In spite of the fact that I got up with the dawn, I got there a couple minutes late. I had spent the time wandering around the early morning city, ducking under the overhead roadways, coming out in the parking lot. Strolling. I was still in a sort of temporary stasis of time.

But Praggler shook me out of it, all charged-up and beaming. “It’s wonderful news, Robin!” he cried, pulling me into his office and ordering coffee. “Jesus! How stupid we’ve all been!”

For a moment I thought he meant that Bover had dropped his suit. That only showed how stupid I was still being; what he was talking about was a late flash from the Food Factory relay. The long-sought Heechee books had turned out to be the prayer fans that we had all seen for decades. “I thought you’d have known all about it,” he apologized, when he had finished filling me in.

“I’ve been out walking,” I said. It was pretty disconcerting for him to be telling me about something as big as that on my own project. But I recover fast. “Seems to me, Senator,” I said, “that’s a big plus for vacating that injunction.”

He grinned. “You know, I could have guessed it would strike you that way. Anything would. Mind telling me how you figure that?”

“Well, it looks clear to me. What’s the biggest purpose of the expedition? Knowledge about the Heechee. And now we find out that there’s a lot of it lying around, just waiting for us to pick it up.”

He frowned. “We don’t know how to decode the damn things.”

“We will. Now that we know what they are, we’ll figure out a way to make them work. We’ve got the revelation. All we need is the engineering. We ought to-“ I stopped myself in the middle of a sentence. I was going to say that it was a good idea to start buying up every prayer fan on the market, but that was too good an idea to give even a friend. I switched to, “We ought to get results pretty fast. The point is, the Herter-Hall expedition isn’t our only iron in the fire any more, so any argument about national interests loses a lot of weight.”

He accepted a cup of coffee from his secretary, the real-live one that didn’t look a bit like his program, and then shrugged. “It’s an argument. I’ll tell it to the committee.”

“I was hoping you’d do more than that, Senator.”

“If you mean you want the whole thing dropped, Robin, I don’t have that authority. I’m only here to oversee the committee. For one month. I can go home and raise hell in the Senate, and maybe I will, but that’s the limit of it.”

“And what’s the committee going to do? Will they uphold Bover’s claim?”

He hesitated. “I think it’s worse than that. I think the sentiment’s to expropriate you all. Then it’s a Gateway Corporation matter, which means it sticks there until the signatories to the treaty unstick it. Of course, in the long run, you’ll all get reimbursed-“

I slammed the cup back into its saucer. “Fuck the reimbursement! Do you think I’m in this for the money?”

Praggler is a pretty close friend. I know he likes me, and I even think he trusts me, but there wasn’t any friendly look on his face when he said, “Sometimes I wonder just why you are in it, Robin.” He looked at me for a moment without expression. I knew he knew about me and Kiara, and I also knew he’d been a guest at Essie’s table at Tappan. “I’m sorry about your wife’s illness,” he said at last. “I hope she’s all better real soon.”

I stopped in his outer office to make a quick coded call to Harriet, to tell her to get my people started buying every prayer fan they could get their hands on. She had about a million messages, but I would only take one-and all that said was that Essie had passed a quiet night and would be seeing the doctors in about an hour. I didn’t have time for the rest, because I had somewhere to go.

It is not easy to get a taxi in front of the Brazilian Congress; the doormen have their orders, and they know who rates priority. I had to climb up on the roadway and flag one down. Then, when I gave the driver the address, he made me repeat it twice, and then show it to him written down. It wasn’t my bad Portuguese. He didn’t really want to go to Free Town.

So we drove out past the old cathedral, under the immense Gateway tower, along the congested boulevard and out into the open planalto. Two kilometers of it. That was the green space, the cordon sanitaire the Brazilians defended around their capital city; but just beyond it was the shantytown. As soon as we entered it I rolled the window up. I grew up in the Wyoming food mines and I am used to twenty-four-hour stink, but this was a different stink. Not just the stench of oil. This was open-air toilets and rotting garbage-two million people without running water in their homes. The shanties had sprung up in the first place to give construction workers a place to live while they built the beautiful dream city. They were supposed to disappear when the city was finished. Shantytowns never disappear. They only become institutionalized.

The taxi-driver pushed his cab through nearly a kilometer of narrow alleys, muttering to himself, never faster than a crawl. Goats and people moved slowly out of our way. Little kids jabbered at me as they ran along beside us. I made him take me to the exact place, and get out and ask where Senhor Hanson Bover lived, but before he found out I saw Bover himself sitting on cinder-block steps attached to a rusty old mobile home. As soon as I paid him, the driver backed around and left, a lot faster than we had come, and by then he was swearing out loud.