Moro and Mackenzie met her on this simulated Martian surface.
“It was simple,” she said.
Mackenzie smiled.
Moro growled. “You’ve told us.”
“We took so much spin from the black hole that we almost stopped it rotating altogether. It became a Schwarzschild hole. Without spin, its event horizon expanded, filling up the equatorial belt where the ergosphere had been.”
Chiron had clipped the ergosphere safely. The missile, following Chiron’s trajectory exactly, had fallen straight into the expanded event horizon.
The long chase was over.
“I guess the missile wasn’t an expert on relativistic dynamics after all,” Mackenzie said.
“But we’re not so smart either,” Moro said sourly. “After all we’re still falling out of the Galaxy — even faster than before the hole encounter, in fact. A million years pass for every month we spend in here; we might be the only humans left alive, anywhere.” He looked down at his arms, made the pixels swell absurdly. “If you can call this life.
Gage thought about it. They could probably never return to their home Galaxy. But there were places beyond the Galaxy, massive stars and black holes that a pilot could use to decelerate, if she was smart enough.
And if they could find a place to stop, they could rest. Maybe Gage’s awareness could be loaded back into some flesh-and-blood simulacrum of a human form. Or maybe not; maybe the role of Gage and the rest would simply be to oversee the construction of a new world fit for her child, and the other frozen zygotes.
She smiled. “At this speed, we’ll be there in a couple of subjective months.”
“Where?”
“Andromeda…”
The Xeelee Flower
I still get tourists out here, you know. Even though it’s been so long since I was a hero. But then, I’m told, these days the reopened Poole wormholes will get you from Earth to Miranda in hours.
Hours. What a miracle. Not that these tourist types appreciate it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the company. It just bugs me that every last one, after he’s finished looking over my villa built into the five-mile cliffs of Miranda, turns his face up to the ghostly blue depths of Uranus, and asks the same dumb question:
“Say, buddy, how come you use a fish tank for a toilet?”
But I’m a good host, and I merely smile and snap my fingers. After a while, my battered old buttlebot limps in with a bottle of valley bottom wine, and I settle back and begin:
“Well, my friend, I use the fish tank for a toilet for the same reason you would. Because my boss used to live in it.”
And that’s how I got where I am today.
By working for a bunch of fish, I mean, not pissing in the tank. Although I don’t know what stopped me from doing just that by the time we reached Goober’s Star eight months out from Earth.
“The resolution, Jones, the resolution!” The shoal of Squeem darted anxiously around their tank, griping at me from the translator box taped to one glass wall.
I put down the spare tank I’d been busy scraping out, and blinked across the cluttered little cabin. The buttlebot — yes, the same one, squeaky-clean in those days — scuttled past, humming happily in its chores. I picked my way to the control panel. I got out my adjustable spanner and gingerly tweaked the fiddly little enhancement vernier. Like most Xeelee-based technology it was too fine for human fingers. The secretive Xeelee evidently have great brains but tiny hands. Then again, some people haven’t managed to evolve hands at all, I reflected, as the Squeem flipped around in their greenish murk.
“Ah,” enthused the Squeem as the monitors sharpened up. “Our timing is perfect.”
I gloomily considered a myriad beautiful images of two things I didn’t want much to be close to: Goober’s Star — about G-type, about two Earth orbits away, and about to nova; and a planet full of nervous Xeelee.
And the most remarkable feature of the whole situation was that we weren’t running for our lives. In fact, we were going to get closer — a lot closer — drawn mothlike by the greed of the Squeem for stolen Xeelee treasure.
The buttlebot squeezed past my leg, extended a few pseudopodia, and began pushing buttons with depressing enthusiasm. I sighed and turned back to my fish tank. At least I had one up on the ’bot, I reflected; at least I was getting paid. Although, like most of the rest of humanity at that time, I hadn’t exactly had a free choice in the nature of my employment—
The Squeem’s rasp broke into my thoughts. “Jones, our planet-fall is imminent. Please prepare the flitter for your descent.”
Your descent. Had they said “your” descent? I nearly dropped the fish tank.
Carefully, I got up from my knees. “Into Lethe’s waters with that.” I defiantly straightened my rubber gloves. “No way. The Xeelee wouldn’t let me past the orbit of the moons—”
“The Xeelee will be fully occupied with their flight from the imminent nova. And your descent will be timed to minimize your risk.”
“That’s a lot of ‘you’ and ‘your,’ “ I observed witheringly. “Show me where my contract says I’ve got to do this.”
Can fish be said to be dry? The Squeem said drily, “That will be difficult as you haven’t got a contract at all.”
They had a point. I reluctantly took off my pinafore and began to tug at the fingers of my rubber gloves. The buttlebot smugly opened up the suit locker. “You ought to send that little tin cretin,” I said; and the Squeem replied, “We are.”
I swear to this day that buttlebot jumped.
And so the buttlebot and I found ourselves drifting through a low orbit over the spectacular Xeelee landscape. We watched morosely as the main ship pulled away from the tiny, human-design flitter, and wafted our employer off to the comparative safety of the far-side of one of the planet’s two moons.
My work for the Squeem, roughly speaking, was to do any fiddly, dirty, dangerous jobs the buttlebot wasn’t equipped for, such as to clean out fish tanks and land on hostile alien planets. And me, a college graduate. Of course, the role of humanity at that time was roughly equivalent.
It isn’t that the Squeem — or any of the other races out there — were any brighter than we were or better or even much older. But they had something we didn’t, and had — then — no way of getting our hands on.
And that was stolen Xeelee technology. For instance the hyperdrive, scavenged by the Squeem from a derelict Xeelee ship centuries earlier, had been making that fishy race’s fortune ever since. Tools and gadgets of all kinds, on which a Galactic civilization had been based. And all pilfered, over millions of years, from the Xeelee.
I use the word civilization loosely, of course. Can it be used to describe what exists out there — a ramshackle construct based on avarice, theft and the subjugation of junior races like ourselves?
We began our descent. The dark side of the Xeelee world grew into a diamond-studded carpet: fantastic cities glittered on the horizon.
And I was as close to them as any sentient being had ever got, probably. Nice thought.
Yes, like gods. But very occasionally careless. And that was the basis of the Squeem’s plan that day.
We dropped slowly. The conversation left a lot to be desired. And the surface of the planet blew off.
I recoiled from the sudden light at the port, and the buttlebot jerked us down through the incredible traffic. It looked as if whole cities had detached from the ground and were fleeing upwards, light as bubbles. The flitter was swept with shifting color; we were in the down elevator from Heaven.
Abruptly as it had risen, the Xeelee fleet was past. Immense, night-dark wings spread over the doomed planet for a moment, as if in farewell; and then the fleet squirted without fuss into infinity. Evidently, we hadn’t been noticed.
The flitter moved in looser arcs now towards the surface. I took over from the buttlebot and began to seek out a likely landing place. We skimmed over a scoured landscape.
From behind the darkened planet’s twin moons, the valiant Squeem poked their collective nose. “The nova is imminent; please make haste with your planetfall.”
“Thanks. Now get back in your tin and let me concentrate.” I wrestled with the flitter’s awkward controls; we lurched towards the ground. I cursed the Xeelee under my breath; I thought of fish pie; I didn’t even much like the buttlebot. The last thing I needed at a time like that was a reminder that what I was doing was about as clever as looting a house on fire. Get in after the owners have fled; get out before the roof caves in. The schedule was kind of tight.
Finally, we thumped down. Reproachfully, the buttlebot uncoiled its pseudopodia from around a chair leg, let down the hatch and scuttled out. Already suited up, I grabbed a data desk and flashlight laser, and staggered after it. That descent hadn’t done me a lot of good either, but in the circumstances I preferred not to hang around.
I emerged into a bonelike landscape. The noise of my breath jarred in the complete absence of life. I imagined the planet trembling as its bloated sun prepared to burst. It wasn’t a happy place to be.
I’d put us down in the middle of a village-sized clump of buildings, evidently too small or remote to lift with the rest of the cities. In a place like this we had our best chance of coming across something overlooked by the Xeelee in their haste, some toy that could revolutionize the economies of a dozen worlds.
Listen, I’m serious. It had happened before. Although any piece of junk that would satisfy the Squeem and let me get out of there would do for me.
The low buildings gaped in the double shadows of the moonlight. The buttlebot scurried into dark places. I ran my hand over the edge of a doorway, and came away with a fine groove in a glove finger. The famous Xeelee construction material: a proton’s width thick, about as dense as glass wool, and as strong as Life itself. And no one had a clue how to make or cut it. Nothing new; a familiar miracle.
