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out?"
while we were here.>
"Curvature?" Killeen intruded.
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FURIOUS GULF
153
through smoky, thick glass.>
"Gonna make it hard to find anything."
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 toys it, and with
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
bell
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.
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"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
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154
Gregory Benford fashion of that great time--imagine, the luxury to do such!
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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.
destination.>
i .
"Why?" Killeen demanded.
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
,i 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?"
worlds.>
Killeen's face tightened with uncertainty. "The aperture moment?
", Aperture means 'opening,' right? But an opening to what?"
I '
.
know nothing more.>
The ship trembled and groaned with new stresses. A shiny, oily
., ,,,, blackness filled all the screens, immense and inescapable.
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2
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.
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.
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?"
"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?"
"To be able to get free of this place?"
"Yeasay--this 'ergosphere.'" The word sat awkwardly on Killeen's lips, Aspect
jargon, like a language he only pretended to speak.
The popping of strains running through Argo had distracted Toby from the
gut-deep pulse of their engines. The laboring rumble rose, sending tremors
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through his couch.
Jocelyn worked a moment, eyes dancing as she listened to her direct link with
the ship's systems. Worry-lines creasing her brow, she said, "The board's
working hard, calc'lating how much it'll take to get out of here.
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Gregory Benford
These numbers keep jumping around. We're getting close. Gobbling up fuel just
to keep in an orbit, seems like."
"How long?"
"Maybe fifty minutes left."
Even to Toby's practiced eye Killeen seemed unmoved by this. "I see."
Argo flew by sucking in plasma with magnetic mouths, burning it in fusion
chambers, and spewing it out the back. But it needed catalysts for this, and
they were running low.
hole--we will find that no amount of fuel can save
Toby was shocked at the matter-of-fact way Quath stated this, without even a
softening further remark. Killeen also gave nothing away, his eyes fixed on
the strange oily-black thing. "This object, it's like a rock that grows. You
sure it has nothing to do with this 'event horizon'?"
"How come you're sure?"
streaming, infalling mass is being absorbed.>
"That'll be the star stuff, taking a nosedive into the black hole?"
Killeen asked.
Toby put in, "How come we're okay here?"
because it is the largest in our galaxy, over a million times the mass of a
star. Though its great mass attracts, the tidal forces are lesser here near
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