Space

“Another Gaijin experiment.”

“Yes.” He seemed angry again, in his controlled, internalized way. “Who knows how it died? From hunger, perhaps, or thirst, or just simple sunburn. These are archaic forms; this isn’t the ecology they evolved in.”

“And so they die.”

“And so they die.”

They walked on, and found more bones of animals that should have been dead for ten thousand years — huge, failed experiments, bleached in the unrelenting Sun.

The Saddle Point gateway was a simple hoop of some powder-blue material, facing the Sun, perhaps thirty meters across. Madeleine thought it was classically beautiful. Elegant, perfect.

As the flower-ship approached, Madeleine’s fear grew. Ben told her Dreamtime stories, and she clung to him. “Tell me…”

There was no deceleration. At the last minute the flower-ship folded up its electromagnetic petals, and the silvery ropes coiled back against the ship’s flanks, turning it into a spear that lanced through the disc of darkness.

Blue light bathed Madeleine’s face. The light increased in intensity until it blinded them.

With every transition, there is a single instant of pain, unbearable, agonizing.

…But this time, for Madeleine, the pain didn’t go away.

Ben held her as the cool light of different Suns broke over the flower-ship, as she wept.

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