Onto the main screen popped two clocks. Toby had learned to read a digital clock on Argo, so he was startled to see one in blue keep ticking away at the rate he knew, while another in red spun its numbers past in a blur. <The in-ship time flows normally,> Quath sent in response to his confusion. <Outside time runs much faster, the deeper we go.>
Toby watched the numerals spin, scarcely believing they could represent anything real. “You mean outside, time’s going fast?”
<Relative to us, this is true.>
“What makes it speed up, out there?”
<It is we who are slowed. Time is always a matter of local opinion.>
Toby couldn’t reckon how that could possibly be. “What happens when we go back out?”
<If we remain in this region of curvature, we will find that much has happened while we were here.>
“Curvature?” Killeen intruded.
<The effect can be opposite, as well. Much is contorted here, like events seen through smoky, thick glass.>
“Gonna make it hard to find anything.”
<That is the least difficulty. Time is trapped here. It can be ingested and disgorged.>
“So that’s why you call it a time pit?”
Toby’s Isaac Aspect added,
The black hole swallows space. Old Zeno says—though even her memory of these matters is from long before her real, bodily life—that we can regard it as if space slides into the hole’s gullet at ever-faster speed, as it nears the steepening angle of descent. Against this slippery slope even light labors to save itself. But the ergosphere is a chasm for time, not space. Here the duration of an event may stretch, compress, warp, as space—in-sliding, doomed space—plays and toys with it, twists the tail of time.
Toby tried to get his mind around all this, as his stomach lurched with acid and the screens flashed. Streaking matter, bristling with radiation, spattered their ship. Toby thought woozily that maybe they were seeing God spit across the sky, a cosmic joke. “How . . . how do we find our way around?”
Gravity may bend and turn a given sequence of events. Living in such a place is like being a bug doomed to crawl along a man’s belt, hanging in a closet. A belt, say, which has the tab flipped over, then fitted into the buckle. The bug can creep all it wants, and cover both sides of the belt—since now the leather really has only one side—but it can never get off. Events for the bug repeat endlessly, and the bug never reaches the end of its dreary, endless belt.
The Aspect’s tinny voice had a disagreeable relish to it. “You talk about all this like you know it firsthand.”
I studied these things, but alas, know them only from ancient texts. And from the dried-up Zeno, a truly disagreeable sort. She tells me of experiments humans once performed here. Even, she says, of constructions they made.
“How could anybody build here?”
Doubtless this is a transcription error, or doddering old Zeno’s errant memory. But I can quote to you from more reliable Chandelier texts. They often blended mythology and physics, a fashion of that great time—imagine, the luxury to do such! Still, for your edification I can lecture fully on—
“Uh, no thanks.” Toby hastily pressed the Aspect back into its crevice.
“What’s that?” Killeen asked, pointing at a glinting blackness that swam into view. To Toby it looked like a huge beehive, dark and oily and honeycombed with passages.
Quath sent a trill of alarm. <I do not know. But I suspect this may be our destination.>
“Why?” Killeen demanded.
<From the moment the Magnetic Mind spoke, I have communed with the Myriapodia, with the full legion of Philosophs. They spoke of the singular time when we could enter the time pit and find the right direction. It only occurs when much matter infalls—the mass fed by that dying star which we saw. Such colossal masses, plunging in, render the surface of the time pit turbulent. We could then enter. Only at such moments can one reach this place.>
Toby tried to figure how that could be. “Like slipping in a side door, one that blows open in the wind?”
<In a way. To ripple the surface of the time pit requires the wind of worlds.>
Killeen’s face tightened with uncertainty. “The aperture moment? Aperture means ‘opening,’ right? But an opening to what?”
<To this structure before us. Or to something beyond. My Philosophs know nothing more.>
The ship trembled and groaned with new stresses. A shiny, oily blackness filled all the screens, immense and inescapable.
TWO
Honeycomb Home
The glistening black thing seemed to unfold itself, swimming in the watery half-light. Toby realized that it was growing somehow. Emerging, like an ornate vessel rising from a slate-black lake. It appeared to ooze into the space nearby, drawn out of fitful storm-wracked darkness, as though emerging from some unseen, deeper place. Fresh ramparts and plains expanded along it, flinty and sharp-crested, faces of it catching the flashing illuminations that still shot by on all sides of them.
<Note our ship time.>
Toby stared, blinked. Quath’s tone gave no hint that she shared the surprise Toby felt. The outside time digits now fled by in a blur. <We are at the year level.>
Killeen still stood on the creaking deck, shifting his weight to counter random thrusts. Face tense, he did not take his eyes from the stretching, spreading mass on the screens. “How much deeper can we go?”
<No one knows. But further than this is possible.>
“Ummm,” Killeen said sardonically. “What isn’t possible here?”
Jocelyn said tersely. “Fuel rate’s up.”
Killeen nodded. “It’s been climbing all along. What’s our remaining margin?”
