—and augh! The arguments that caused. I had to admit the other side had a point, save the home world and all that. So we compromised. Built a robot starship, using mech bits. Tricky, that. Then we packed it full of mechtech. Let Earth make use of its tricks, we figured.
Some wanted to go along, no less. Classic Wagnerian gesture—all emotion, no reason. Too risky.
So we dispatched it to Earth, crawling along at a twentieth of light speed. Best we could manage, I’m afraid.
In truth, I wanted to stay there, commune with the two species still living beneath the moon’s ice. But there was the other faction . . .
Nikka and I had allies in the crew. We hated the mechs, wanted to do something. Follow this riddle to the end. So we set sail—if that quaint term includes boosting up to within a hair’s width of light speed.
Straight inward. To the Center.
Took nearly thirty thousand years to get here—but that’s measured in the rest frame of the galaxy. What some call “real” time. But all inertial frames are really equivalent, y’know. We proved that. Only diff is the clocks ran slow on our craft. Plus, we had coldsleep.
So to me it was as if I had gone through several comfy afternoon snoozes, waking just for medical checkups and the odd message to send. My turn to patrol the ship, fix things. Lonely experience. My friends frozen stiff. I, clumping about in a stolen, alien machine. Hurtling down a corridor of relativistic refractions like a tunnel lined by rainbows. Quite striking. Frightening, too, no matter how well you fathomed the physics.
I had rigged—well, Nikka rigged; she was a wonder—an infrared transmitter. Messages for Earth, squirted them off every thousand light-years or so. Keeping them up to date on what we’d found—data, reams of it. Plus a bit of rah-rah from me. I was hoping they were still there, really. It seemed like a small gesture at the time, only found out much later how important it was.
Then, presto physico—there was the Center, glowing like a crass advert out the window. Convenient, these mech devices. Makes one wonder if their designers appreciate them. Pity, if they’re wasted on creatures who don’t relish the delights they can bring.
The Center? Well, today you can’t see it the way I did. The Old Ones were already there, and more evident than they are now.
We came in along an instreaming flow, to pick up even more speed. The Center was a perpetual firework. Arcing above it like a vast triumphal arch was a braided fire river. Bristling with gold and orange and sulphurous yellows, it was. Ferocious stuff. The gravitational potential of the black hole, expressed as ruby-hot gas, plasma filaments, incandescences light-years long.
I’d expected those. From Earth, the Very Large Array had mapped the long, curving arcs that sliced straight up through the galactic plane. They hung a hundred light-years out from the True Center. There were others, too, filmy laces—all lit by gigantic currents.
Galactic neon lights, they were, the specialists decided. But why so thin and long?—several hundred light-years long, some, and barely half a light-year wide.
As we got closer, we could make out those filaments—not in the radio waves, but the optical. Dazzling. So clean, so obligingly orderly. Could they be some colossal power source? A transportation corridor, an unimaginable kind of freeway? What—or who—would need that much room to get around?
They hung there like great ruddy announcements in the sky. But for what? A religious monument? An alien equivalent of the crucifix, beaming its eternal promise across the entire galaxy?
We all thought of these possibilities as our ship—a great kluggy old thing, with streets of room compared with Lancer—plunged on through murky dust clouds, hot star-forming regions, the lot—hammering inward hard and swift, like an old dog heading home at last. Its navigational gear was simple, direct—and had a setting built in for the True Center.
Think about that. This was one of its standard destinations.
Easy to see why, in retrospect. Energy density. A blaze of light. Proton sleet. Huge plasma currents. Just the place for a hungry mech. The feeding trough.
Mostly I had thought of True Center as a sort of jewel box, with stars packed in and glowing like emeralds, rubies, hot sapphires—all circling neatly around the black hole. Which had quite properly eaten up the nasty dust long ago, of course, leaving this pleasing array of finery.
Or so the astronomers thought. Never trust in theories, m’lad, if they’re thought up by types who work in offices.
What? Oh, offices are boxes where people work—no, not actual labor, heavy lifting or anything, more like—let’s pass over that, eh?
Y’see, I’d forgotten that with several million stars jammed into a few light-years, there are collisions, abrasions. And plenty of shrapnel.
As we got closer we could see the brawl. Fat, wobbly stars flaring like angry gods, spewing red tongues. They were the children of awful marriages, when two stars had collided, merged, and fallen into the same oblate quarrel.
You could see others about to go at it—circling each other, loops of gas flung between them like insults. Even worse cases, too, as we got to see the outer edge of the accretion disk. Stars ripped open, spilled, smelted down into fusing globs. They lit up the dark, orbiting masses of debris like tiny crimson match heads flaring in a filthy coal sack.
Amid all that were the strangest stars of all. Fast ones, they were. Each half-covered by a hemispherical mask. The mask gave off infrared and it took me a while to fathom what was going on.
See, the hemispherical mask hung at a fixed distance from the star. It hovered on light, gravity just balancing the outward light pressure. The mask reflected half the star’s flux back on it—turning up the heat on the cooker. That made the poor star send pretty arcs and jets of mass out, too. Which probably helped the purpose of it all.
Light escaped freely on one side. The mask bottled it up on the other. That pushed the star toward the mask. But the mask was bound to the star by gravitation. It adjusted, kept the right distance. As far as the wretched star knew, however, it was able to eject light in only one direction. So it recoiled in the opposite way.
Somebody was herding these stars. Those masks made them into fusion-photon engines. Sluggish, but effective. And the herd was headed for the accretion disk.
Somebody was helping along the black hole’s appetite.
Who could do such engineering? No time to find out, just then.
We were getting closer. Heating up. Bloody awful hot, it was.
And now, after all those years, communications traffic was coursing through the ship’s receivers. Chirps, beeps, dense thickets of blindingly fast code.
Clearly, signals intended for the mechs who had run the ship. How should we respond?
We were still dithering when a rather basic truth got pointed out to us. The ship didn’t just ferry mechs about. It was a mech.
It had carried higher levels of mechs, sure. But it was still a member of the tribe, of sorts.
As we approached, the course selection we had made ran out. We decelerated, hard. The magnetic throat, which dwarfed the actual ship, compressed. Then it tilted, so that incoming plasma hit us at an angle. That turned the whole ship—and such a groaning, popping, shrieking maneuver I’ve never heard. Clearly, the mechs weren’t sensitive to acoustics.
We nearly went deaf. It lasted a week.
But it worked. Turned the ship clean around, swapping ends so the fusion jet played out front of us now. That backflow protected us from the solid junk in the way—burnt it to a crisp, cooked it into ions for the drive itself.
The throat was now aft of us, but the magnetic field lines fetched a fraction of the debris around, and stuffed it into the maw of the great, fat craft. Fusion burners rattled the plates, heated the air—but our life support labored through.
