“Uh-huh,” Ito said with a lifted eyebrow.
“You doubt this?” The woman looked affronted. “I speak for the Old Ones.”
“They’re speaking through you,” Ito shot back. “You’re just a puppet.”
Nigel put a restraining hand on his oldest son’s shoulder. Ito did not have the diffidence of Benjamin. “Point is,” Nigel said, “why send a body back?”
“Let us say that the Old Ones have several theories.” The Interfacer drew herself up with serene disdain. “Quite complex. They are difficult to convey properly to . . .”
“To ordinaries like us?” Nikka asked with a wise smile.
The woman sniffed. “I do not use such mundane slang. Though surely there is a difference between us. I have touched the Old Ones directly. At the mental level.”
“I’m sure it’s wonderful,” Nikka said.
There was not a shade of malice in her tone but Nigel had a hard time not chuckling at the stiletto of meaning he could read in the words. He and Nikka were far older than this woman, but if he ever got as stiff and dead as her, he would blow his head off. So much for Interfacing with the Old Ones. He had decided to not undergo it when it was first offered, when the Earthers had devised the intricate method. Now he was reminded why.
“I expect you to tend to the defenses we will set up here,” the woman said, still eyeing Nikka for a hint of spleen. Interfacers were notorious for taking offense.
“Defenses?” Ito was surprised.
“Against mechanicals. They may try to cut off this esty Vor.”
Ito scowled skeptically. “Haven’t seen a mech around here in a long time.”
“They have attacked other Vors and sealed them up.”
Nigel nodded, old angers rising in him.
The Interfacer held out a viewboard. “There were further views in the data you extracted from the dead woman.”
In its surface images flickered. A vision of black holes—sharp dots against a wash of pearly light. The esty had formed from their collision. The viewboard was an advanced model. Into Nigel’s sensorium sounded quick, darting visions.
FOUR
Agonies of Gravity
Locked in a madly whirling embrace, the two black holes spiral inward to a final marriage. As the partners draw closer, they swing around each other faster and faster. Each tugs out the other, stretching the envelope of each hole into a tortured egg shape.
In its last moments, the smaller black hole stretches and contorts its own space-time, emitting a cry of gravitational agony: waves. These curl and lap about the smaller hole, then reflect and refract from the larger one. Eddies form. Standing waves reverberate between the two. These deepen as the moment of death approaches for the smaller hole. Energy foams from the doomed hole, in the form of the deepening trough of gravitational waves that eddy and play in the narrowing gap.
With a final scream of torsion and torque, the smaller hole plunges into its giant master. But the wave energy is not lost. An intense packet of waves remains, lapping in the wash of fatality.
This packet would disperse, bleeding away into space . . . if more matter did not intervene. At this precise moment an exactly directed stream of dense mass comes snaking in along a swift trajectory. In the full form of the General Field Equations—as envisioned long ago by Einstein, and of course by many other of the highest minds elsewhere in the galaxy, for Nature opens its secrets to many styles of thinking—space-time can curve itself. A gravitational wave is an oscillation in the curvature of space-time, like a ripple on the sea. But the equations are not linear. This means that the undulation, too, produces further curvature. Gravity itself has weight.
The incoming blue-white stream of compact mass loops, drawn by the wave packet. Tidal tugs hook the now-incandescent matter into a beautiful spiral. From a distance, the silvery luminosity follows a path recalling the chambered nautilus, a creature born in Earth’s ancient oceans, shaped by evolution into a classic geometry.
Now the true violence begins. Soundless, swift and sure.
The mass reflects the gravitational wave troughs, forcing them to build to even higher amplitudes. This draws the mass farther in. The spiral tightens. Wave builds upon wave. The stretch and warp of space-time deepens. In a single microsecond comes a new kind of creation: a permanent, self-confined warpage of space-time. Within a second it spreads, an intact structure. Extra energy bleeds away into fleeting waves, radiating out toward unreachable infinity.
Later, men who ventured into it would call it the Wedge. The name was inelegant but partly true. It had been formed by waves wedged between two black holes. It now orbited the single spherical hole, a tombstone of so much lost matter.
But the final drop of mass which applied the crucial touch—that was not lost. It resides inside the Wedge. It was the first contribution of ordinary matter to the exotic, transparent walls of the Wedge.
The first damp earth, in a ceramic flower pot.
FIVE
Three Billion Years
Impressive,” Nigel said guardedly. His family murmured, surprised at the intensity of the vision broadcast into their sensoria.
Nikka said, “I’ve never seen before how it was done. But this is from the past, many thousands of years—”
“There is a date on it,” the woman said. “It says that this image is from three billion years in the past.”
“But I know—”
“Of course.” The woman lifted her lip in a regal sneer. “Three billion years in the past of that dead woman. Which gives us the first fix on the origin of these bodies. They come from a genuinely distant future. I am surprised that humans will still exist, then.”
Ito said, “Hell, billions—what can matter over that much time?”
Nikka said soberly, “The mechs think something does.”
“They certainly do,” the Interfacer said. “They sent the Grey Mech to seal those other Vors.”
The family blinked and glanced at each other silently. The Grey Mech was the one form that not even the Old Ones could master. It had extraordinary powers and could penetrate the esty seemingly at will. The mechanical civilizations that dominated the space around the esty—restrained by its tightrope walk near the Galactic Center’s black hole—did not dare venture in often. But the Grey Mech could. And did, following patterns no one had ever been able to predict.
