And they weren’t just characters of convenience, devoid of families, people with no personality apart from what I might need in a story. At the end of a day of writing, I thumbed through those books from the library and I read interviews with parents, friends, people who had known the victims all their lives. The students didn’t come out of nowhere — they came from homes and neighborhoods that mourned, prayed, lost sleep, wept, all trying to come to grips with grief.
Reading those interviews I felt ashamed.
Consider what an observer sees when an object descends into a black hole. For convenience, assume that the object is a burning candle that’s somehow tough enough to withstand the tidal forces of gravity around the hole.
As the candle falls, it takes longer and longer (from your point of view) for each particle of candlelight to climb the gravity well and reach your eye. Light particles emitted near the very edge of the black hole may take thousands of years to fight their way out to the universe at large. The result is that you perceive the candle falling for a potentially infinite length of time. Every now and then, another light particle struggles free of the black hole’s pull and reminds you of the candle’s descent.
It’s an obvious metaphor for grief. Hot and burning at the start, dimming over time... but even after many years, memory particles surface now and then to remind you of a life that’s gone.
I should point out that the candle’s infinite fall is only in the eye of the outside observer. A trick of the light. From the candle’s point of view, it drops straight down and crosses the event horizon without pause. Inside the black hole its flame may still be burning; it’s just that the light doesn’t reach the outside world anymore.
The next morning, Sunday, May 6, 1990, I reread what I’d written, wondering if there was anything that could be salvaged. I was struck by a new regret: I’d written about some guy named McGregor, not about the students.
I knew why I’d written it that way, of course. I didn’t believe I had the right to put words in their mouths, thoughts in their heads. How could I presume to speak for the real people? I could only deal with characters.
But I’d gone too far into the fiction. In my story, like the newspaper articles, the victims were only there for the body count. Without thinking, I’d started to write the story of a button-pusher who was troubled by his conscience, but who went ahead and did what he had to do for the good of history.
Sound familiar?
SECOND SCRIBBLE: THE BUTTON-PUSHER
Bannister sat in the time chamber, cradling his gun. An M-1 carbine in pristine condition. According to the antiquities database there were only five M-1s still in existence, four in museums, one in the hands of a collector who’d bought hers on the open market. You could assume another twenty or thirty still in secret collections around the world... maybe even a few in the arsenals of the Quarantined states, since most of the Q’s were too stupid to realize the black market price of a single twentieth-century firearm would buy a hundred twenty-third-century E- guns.
Call it a nice round number of forty M-1s on the entire planet. And Bannister had one.
Admittedly, this weapon could just be a replica; but he doubted it. The Corrections Institute disdained replicas. If they needed some antique, they sent back a Special Services team to steal one. Bannister had gone out on plenty of those runs himself — popping into foxholes to pull Lee-Enfields from the cold fingers of gas victims, or materializing in the cargo holds of boats shipping AK-47s to terrorist groups. But as of today, Bannister had graduated from such gruntwork. As of today, he was going to make history.
“You about ready in there?” he called to the two techies in the control booth.
The woman of the pair flicked a switch and said over the intercom, “What’s your hurry? Got a hot date waiting?”
“You got it,” Bannister answered. “The date’s May 4, 1970.”
The intercom clicked off loudly. He wondered if the woman was annoyed at his attitude. Maybe she’d been making a pass at him. Maybe he should have said, “No date yet, but when I get back I’ll really be looking for action.” The woman’s lab coat hid her tits and her ass, but the way she moved when she walked, he could tell she was thinking of her body all the time. Feeling it move, tuned in to being sensuous. A night with a woman like that would leave a memory or two.
And all of the psych profiles said he’d be horny afterward. It was sick when you thought about it, but if horniness was natural, it was natural. You didn’t lose sleep if your body wanted to fart after eating beans — you just farted, didn’t you? So if Bannister’s body wanted to get laid after pulling the trigger on four strangers who died three hundred years ago...
The intercom clicked again and the male techie said, “Departure in thirty seconds.”
“Going to be a bumpy one?” Bannister asked. He was trying to sound cool, but the words came out too sharply. It was eagerness, only eagerness. He hoped the woman in the booth wouldn’t interpret it as nerves.
“The sea’s calm as glass all the way back to 2042,” the male techie replied. “Turbulence there, of course, but you’ve got clearance for one of the calmest straits in the area. Someone’s definitely pulled strings on this run — smoothest route we’ve been authorized to navigate since the beginning of the year. The Executive Board must really want these kids dead.”
“It’s crucial to world peace,” Bannister said.
“Yeah, right.” The man clicked off the intercom again.
Bannister wanted to shout back some kind of self-justification. The mission was crucial. No one liked killing, not even when it was necessary, but trading four lives for several hundred million... it had to be done. The deaths were the catalyst for change; so someone had to be the catalyst for the deaths. Someone had to start the shooting up on Blanket Hill, had to spur the Ohio National Guard into putting Kent State University on the map.
Same setting as the piece I wrote the previous day, but someone different in the time chamber. Someone who would join the National Guard and instigate the tragedy. Someone who would have to face what he had done and eventually... well, I didn’t know what would happen to Bannister. As the story unfolded, as I got to know him better, I’d discover whether he went mad, found wisdom, became a soulless killer, whatever. Sometimes the reason you write a story is to learn how it turns out.
I spent most of Sunday morning on the Bannister story, but as time went on my doubts grew. By lunch I had to admit that my second try was just as corrupt as the first one. I was trying to reassure myself there was an underlying purpose to the events, that someone somewhere knew the price and made a choice. But I didn’t believe that. Furthermore, I didn’t believe in letting the National Guard off the hook by suggesting they were spurred on by an outside provocateur. As I sat in my study and comfortably sipped mint tea twenty years after the fact, it wasn’t my place to lay blame; but it wasn’t my place to make excuses either.
The Kerr-Newman model of a rotating black hole can be mathematically extended by recoordinatizing, using a scheme suggested by the work of M. D. Kruskal (1960). The result is a model where the black hole has a white hole on its flip side. Just as a black hole is a phenomenon that no slower-than-light object can leave, a white hole is a phenomenon that no slower-than-light object can enter. Light and matter can flood out of a white hole, but nothing can get back inside. Beyond the white hole, the extended model shows an area of space whose physical characteristics are the same as our own familiar space — “another universe,” if you want to look at it that way.
Extending mathematical models is a dicey business. I could, if I wanted, extend the mathematical model of temperature below absolute zero Kelvin and find that (wow!) there was a whole other universe down there where temperatures were negative instead of positive. Mathematically, I could argue the idea was valid; but physically, it’s nonsense. One mustn’t get carried away believing scribbles on paper.
But the black hole/white hole model is more satisfying than an unadorned black hole. The white hole completes the black hole’s story. Things vanish into a black hole and it seems they are gone forever; but unbeknownst to us, they pass through the darkness, through crushing forces, through a moment of infinity at the very heart of the black hole, and then they flood out the other side into a new and brightly illuminated universe.
It could be the oldest story in the world. Ra in his sunboat. Jonah in the whale. Dying heroes and deities from every culture on the planet.
The journey into blackness. The dark night of the soul. The moment of trial and grace. Glorious liberation and rebirth into a new world.
Kerr-Newman has it all.
I’ve never heard anyone talk about the black hole/white hole model from a theological viewpoint. No one is comfortable with theology anymore. I know I’m not.
But I’m comfortable with ghost stories.
THIRD SCRIBBLE: THE KENT STATE JAMBOREE
Walpurgisnacht came a few days late in 1990. Blame it on precession of the equinox, global warming, or whatever your pet cause might be — Walpurgisnacht 1990 fell on the night of May 4.
The honor of the first sighting went to Benjamin Howe, third-year math student at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio. May 4, Howe spent an uncomfortable evening sitting on the floor in Taylor Hall, hoping to intercept one Catherine Weiss as she left a night class. For the past six months, Howe and Weiss had shared a relationship; but that afternoon a discussion of what they would do over the summer break had not gone well. It had, in fact, sucked rocks. Neither of them shouted; neither of them cried; but after they went their separate ways, both felt sick in the pits of their stomachs, wondering if this was it, if it was all over, if they had ruined the best chance at love they would ever get. By suppertime, both wanted to apologize as profusely as necessary. It was just a matter of finding each other before it was too late.
Howe knew that Weiss had a night class somewhere in Taylor Hall. He drove there and wandered the corridors, peeping into classrooms without spotting her. Eventually he settled down on the floor near the exit that Weiss was most likely to take on her way home... provided she didn’t take a different door as she headed for a sleaze-up at the pub with some slimy classmate. (Unbeknownst to Howe, Weiss hadn’t gone to class that night. She’d parked herself outside Howe’s apartment building and was waiting for him to come home, thinking he had probably gone to the pub to get sloppy drunk with his buddies from differential geometry.)
Hours passed. Benjamin Howe watched the classes get out, tried to scan every woman who went by but not too closely, not threateningly for fear one of them would report him as a potential rapist. He stayed an hour after the last class went home, not because he believed Weiss was still in the building but because he had no idea what to do next. He considered going to the pub to see if she was there; he considered phoning her friends; he considered phoning the hospitals; he considered walking aimlessly around campus in the hope that fate would bring them together again, the way it did in the movies.
Finally he decided to go home.
When he got to the parking lot, his was the only car left. That made it easy to see the long dark smear trailing out from underneath. “Great,” he muttered to himself, “the end of a perfect day. Must have spun up a stone through the oil pan.”
He got down on his knees to look. It was after eleven o’clock, and even though the parking lot was well lit, he could see only darkness under the chassis. A deep darkness, a black lump blocking out the light that should have been visible on the other side of the car.
Jesus Christ, he thought, I hit something. A dog. I must have hit a dog. Nothing else could be that big except... no, it had to be a dog.
He looked again at the smear on the pavement. The parking lot’s blue-white streetlamps bleached out most of the color, but he could convince himself the smear was
