Simple enough, but the stress-energy tensors involved—you don’t want to see the mathematics, believe me. Ugly stuff. Frightful.
You see, the most important point in understanding the universe is that God doesn’t have to make any approximations. He’s not doing as I dutifully learned at Cambridge, expanding in some small parameter, iterating solutions, solving differential equations by cut-and-try. God plays the game straight.
The Old Ones aren’t Gods—in fact, they’re decidedly irritating—but they can solve general relativity in full. No short cuts. In the “strong field limit,” as it’s termed.
How? I don’t know. I wasn’t here to see it done. Somehow the Old Ones squeezed together two black holes—the giant at True Center, and a lesser one they’d acquired somehow—and blew off a hell-storm of energy.
When the dust cleared, here was the Lair. Furiously orbiting the remaining black hole, which has total mass a few million times the sun’s. The Lair Labyrinth. Stable. Twisted esty. An abiding refraction.
They simply inserted us into it. You Bishops flew in, skimmed the ergosphere, correct? That’s the only way in now, apparently. That works only when there’s a significant chunk of mass coming through, rippling the skin of the black hole at its equator. Then someone can fly through.
Unfortunately, the mechs learned this, too. The Old Ones couldn’t prevent that. We’ve done our best against them, even with the Earthers—I’ll get to them, different subject—to help. But it has been a losing battle. The mechs are good.
In fact, the Old Ones have stooped to cooperating with us biologicals, the so-called Naturals, because the mechs are too good. They may exterminate all Naturals. The Old Ones don’t want that, for reasons of their own.
What reason? I have guesses, plenty of them. But nobody knows for sure.
Part of the confusion, for an ordinary TwenCen mind like mine, is the sheer complexity. Never mind the higher-order mechs, the Old Ones, and the like—they’re beyond view, for me. For you, too, I expect.
It takes a while to get used to even the physics, y’see. The Lair—what? Oh, right, you can call it Wedge if you like, there must be a thousand names. Some quite obscene; you should hear sometime how “black hole” translates into Russian. The Lair is like a wasp’s nest perched on a cliff. The Eater’s tidal forces warp it, stretch both space and time.
The lower parts live differently. Time runs slower here—straight Einsteinian effect, that. So outside, while centuries are sweeping by, I’m having lunch. Gives a body perspective. Of course, I do take long lunches.
And it gets a bit lonely, too.
TEN
Vermin
Toby had listened and watched and finally it was too damned much.
The walls flashed with pictures, scenes of astonishing depth and range. Colossal twisted ships, frothing turbulence in the accretion disk, vistas with skewed perspectives, geometries so odd the eye could not keep them in order. Walmsley’s voice alone called up the images, summoned by some program in the utterly bare room.
To Toby, technology meant details, controls, complex systems. Here nothing met the eye but plain walls. Yet the room responded to everything Walmsley seemed to need, even when he did not speak. Food and drink appeared through the floor. Music sounded in the distance, and Walmsley cocked an ear to it.
“Look,” Toby said, “I’m trying to piece this together with the history of Family Bishop.”
“That I know. Your Family came out of the Hunker Down. That’s when the folk outside, the Earthers, decided they couldn’t hold the mechs anymore. They left their cities.”
“The Chandeliers?”
“Right, that’s one tribal name for them. Wonderful places. I watched them disintegrate, alas.”
“And we Bishops went to Snowglade?”
“Is that—” Walmsley appeared to listen to some distant voice, then nodded. “Your name for it, yes. J-three-six-four, the index says. The index isn’t very romantic about these things, I’m afraid.”
“And we lived there for . . . ?”
“Many centuries. The mechs weren’t bothering with planets just then, y’see. They harvested plasma flows in those eras. When they got around to mining and chewing up planets, they ran into another organic species that came surging in. Big bugs, they were.”
“Quath!—the Myriapodia.”
“Right. Impressive creatures. They’re tech-bio anthologies, half-artificial, as the Earthers became. The Old Ones say they’re still missing something we humans’ve got, but I can’t fancy what that could be.”
Toby felt elation at finding something in this history that he knew about. Quath . . . and where was she?
Walmsley said, “The Myriapodia have been giving the mechs trouble. Not enough to stop their grand works, though.”
“We hooked up with the Myriapodia, after some skirmishing. One is—was—with me.”
Walmsley nodded. “Standard mech tactic. Used you to take some of the fight out of the bugs.”
“What? We ran into them by accident. Our Family had escaped from Snowglade and—”
“The mechs let you get away.”
“The hell they did! We fought—”
“We’re vermin to them,” Walmsley said gently.
“And together, we and Quath’s kind, we tore the hell out of the mechs around that planet, near Abraham’s Star. I was there, I know—”
“Certainly. The big bugs had cosmic strings, correct?”
“Uh, yeasay.”
“Fearsome as tools or weaponry alike. But the mechs are managing all this, for reasons I don’t quite follow. A faction wanted you Bishops here, at the Lair. They want something from you, but precisely what, I don’t know. Another faction would much prefer you all dead. Some strange game’s afoot.”
