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
