“What do you know about my grandfather?”
“Met him, actually.”
“When? Where is he?”
“I’ve learned not to use ‘when’ too much down here. Where is easier. He’s here.”
Toby stood up, knocking over the little chair with a clatter. “I want to see him!”
“That you can’t do.”
“I want to now.”
“He’s not available. If—”
“I’ve had about enough of you and your—”
The old man’s face was suddenly stern and imposing, bringing a flicker of memory to Toby: very much like his grandfather. Maybe all old people got that, something years brought. He sighed and sat down. “All right. Can you tell him I’m here?”
“He knows.”
“How?”
“That’s what I’m attempting to tell you.”
“Uh, sorry.”
NINE
The Strong Field Limit
The Old Ones—not a very inventive name, but then, Jehovah isn’t that catchy, either.
The Old Ones had been here when the mech civilizations arrived. Mechanicals arose when advanced, organic societies somehow committed suicide—from war, degeneration, unimaginable things—or retreated, from plain simple lack of interest in the tensions of the technological life. That left machines, who evolved into separate societies.
But the Old Ones weren’t mech-based. Not derived from the clanking iron and silicon, no.
They weren’t cumbersome chemical concoctions like us, either—rickety packets of salty water and sundry impurities held together by calcium rods and an easily punctured skin, all run by dead slow electrical wiring. They weren’t beings that had to be retrofitted over ever worse workmanship from earlier times. Nothing messy. Nothing slapped together by chance.
The Old Ones were those long strands. Each strand could speak with a single, well, voice. Approximately. It’s hard to describe what it feels like to have one, well, simply invade you. Not like a conversation, no. Rather more like being sodomized by God, I’d say.
You saw them on your way in? Good. Like pearly lightning, as I remember. You could see them slowly twisting, fragile-seeming.
They looped and arced around our ship. By this time there were plenty of mech blips on the screens. These the Old Ones deflected—using their magnetic pressures, I expect.
Us, they swept along. They took precious little note of our limits. Gave us several gravities of acceleration at times. I’d once been an “astronaut”—a term from the days when doing this sort of thing wasn’t as ordinary as walking—and knew to balloon my lungs, then suck in air in rapid little pants, breathing off the top. Others didn’t weather so well. Nikka came through, despite being still weak.
The Old Ones had made the explosion. That shock wave was simple cleaning up after the real job, sort of a janitor with his broom making a tidy Galactic Center for all. The Old Ones had released an immense burst of energy, mating two black holes together. Making this—the Lair.
The mechs made a profit off it all. Someone always does. They sucked in the fast protons, harvested the photon flux. They have a whole system set up to gather in the energy fluxes, currents and all. You might say they’re farming the Galactic Center, but there’s another game afoot, a bigger one.
The Lair. That the mechs tried to destroy. Almost did, I gather. It’s not easy to maintain, still harder to build.
That explosion shaped the Lair, made it larger. Folded up space-time, manufactured room where there was no room. The Old Ones had made it in the far past, apparently to store things or beings or God knows what. And they kept adding to it, perhaps deepening its complexity.
In our ship we got picked up, hurled at the accretion disk, then up and over it. Down the axis. Toward the pole of the black hole.
You followed a similar path, correct? Good—I sent it to you.
What? Of course, all that about Abraham sending messages. Well, I had to say something to get your attention.
Deceptive? Of course. Immoral? Don’t be ridiculous.
I had to claim it was from your grandfather, dead right. I had met him, after all. And speaking through the Magnetic Mind was the only route open to you. Mechs would’ve intercepted anything else.
Where was I? Ah—
All the bloody time with mechs coming straight at us. Inflicted some damage, too. Killed some of us. Have you ever seen steel blister?
Mechs got through. Even the magnetic pressures couldn’t halt everything. Neutron beams, for one. Nothing stopped those.
The Old Ones were powerful, certainly, but not like God the Sodomizer. Sorry if you find my sense of humor a bit demented. I’ve been here in this mountain largely without company, except of the most lofty sort. A bit wearing. Makes me long for the animal, I suppose. The root and rut of life.
The Lair? Call it that because we’re hiding in it. As well as countless other organic species.
The Old Ones stuffed us in here, with our ship. Down the steepest gravitational gradient in the galaxy, into a time-locked storage vault. General relativity, writ large.
What they never taught me at Cambridge, not even that Hawking fellow, was that space-time could be a construction material. Mass is equivalent to the curvature of space-time, that I’d learned. We build things from matter. Why not build them from curved space-time?
