Galaxies Read online

  But as the energy is being eaten away by the violence of combustion, so it must run out, and for this reason the neutron star will collapse in a mere ten to fifteen thousand years as opposed to the hundreds of millions which a “normal” star will have … and as that neutron star reaches the end of its cycle, its hydrogen fuses to helium, then nitrogen and even heavier elements, the atoms grabbing stray electrons in a frantic attempt to maintain atomic reaction, and then with an implosion of cosmic force, all power gone, the neutron star collapses upon itself.

  All is disaster.

  Ah, the lamentations of Jeremiah! It is not merely that the dying neutron stars destroy themselves, collapsing inward at the speed of light, layers of gases crowding, grappling with one another, falling into that diminished core … that is a pretty enough sight in itself—we may see it in our spectroscopes and telescopes as the nova—but this is merely the beginning of what the neutron star, ending, can do. For it can destroy the galaxy by which it was enveloped. .

  The gravitational force created by this implosion would be so vast as to literally seal in light. Small planets have slight gravity, larger objects heavier; the gravity on Jupiter greatly exceeds that of our Earth … but how much greater than Jupiter’s is Sol’s, how much greater than Sol’s the gravity of massive Antares into which almost all of our solar system in its orbit would fit? And the neutron star, which could contain five or ten thousand Antares before its collapse, could create a gravity which would overcome all speeds presently understood. Light travels at a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. That might not. be sufficient to escape from the ruined core.

  And not only light. Sound, heat, the properties of all the stars would be sucked into that great tube of force. The galaxy itself might be drawn into the funnel of gravitation created by the collapse and be absorbed slowly into the flickering and desperate heart of the extinguished star.

  XVIII

  Most of this theory would be news to Lena, of course. Even two thousand years in the future. She is not a theorist but a technician, and as the Skipstone begins its descent into the black galaxy, all that she would know would be pain, but it would be pain of such dimension that she would not have the language for it, a pain so profound that it might be interpreted as pleasure or as any one of a hundred other things. Tumbling, tumbling, as the animal in the center claws for her.

  XIX

  The existence of neutron stars and their disastrous outcome would make several extrapolations reasonable. Of the existence of these stars there is no doubt; they are being dealt with (along with ruined celebrities and the politics of Mozambique and the political fallout of the radical middle) in our most prominent Sunday supplements. The articles on which the astronomic theory of Galaxies is in part based are in themselves based upon a body of theory which has been widely accepted as a result of the researches of the last decade.

  Just a few extrapolations follow:

  One: The gravitational forces created by the implosion would, like great spokes wheeling from the star, drag in all sections of the galaxy within their compass, and because of the force of that gravitation, the galaxy would be invisible. Gravitation would contain light. Hit a certain section of space as has Skipstone where nothing has been mapped and find a galaxy. Galaxies themselves, of course, are merely interruptions in the lightless canvas of the universe.

  Two: The neutron star, functioning as a cosmic vacuum cleaner (all right, this is homey imagery but then good science fiction should make the mysterious, the terrible, the inviolable as comfortable and accessible as one’s own possessions, just as pornography should make the fires of sex little more than a twitch, easily untwitched, in the familiarly tumescent genitalia), might literally destroy the universe. The entire universe. Indeed, the universe may be in the process at this moment of being broken down as hundreds of millions of its planets and their suns are being inexorably drawn in the mesh of their galaxies toward the great vortices of the neutron stars. It would be a slow process, to be sure; here one is talking about many billions of years … but one is also talking about a span of time that may someday be measured in finite terms and which thus gives inexorable cast to all human endeavor.

  (“Hey, Joe, look at this! The print-out says that in two billion, three hundred and fifty-two million years and change the universe is going to be destroyed!”

  (“Let me look at that, Tom. Hey, this is frightening! This is terrible news but it all seems to check out.”

  (“We’d better tell the President. We’d better go right in there now and tell him.”

  (“No. Wait”

  (“What?”

  (“I said wait, Tom. I do not know if they can handle information like this at the present time.”

  (“It is our obligation.”

  (“Our obligation to what? Make science a mere servant of the state? No … we must conform to a higher ethic.”

  (“Only two billion, three hundred and fifty-two million to go. I don’t know what to say. Only that … only that we’ll miss it all terribly.”)

  A single neutron star, at least theoretically, could absorb the universe given limitless time and of that there would be nothing in the universe as we know it. There are quite a few neutron stars.

  Three: But, then, the universe may have, looking at it the other way, been created by such an implosion, that implosion throwing out enormous cosmic filaments, which in flickering instants of time which are as eons to us but mere instants to the cosmologists, are now being drawn in like a child’s paddle ball extended on a rubber string, now falling back. Those filaments lead to the neutron star. The galaxies may be a by-product of the implosion; existence as we know it may be an accidental offshoot, an interruption in the cycle controlled by the neutron star whose creation and expulsion are the true ordering force of the universe.

  This would either cancel vanity or make it stronger.

  Four: Consider this astronautically for a moment, ignoring questions of cosmology. A ship trapped in such a vortex, such a black or invisible galaxy, drawn toward the deadly source of the neutron star, would be unable to leave through normal faster-than-light drive; because the gravitation would absorb light it would be impossible to build up through acceleration to escape velocity. (Accelerative velocities are sub-faster-than-light.) If it were then possible to emerge from the field, it could be done so only by an immediate switch to the tachyonic drive without acceleration. This is a process which could well drive the occupants of the ship insane and which would, in any case, give no clear destination. At the point of breakout the flight would be uncontrollable. The black hole of the dead star is a literal vacuum in space. One could fall through the hole but where, then, where would one go?

  And when? To what time?

  Five: The mere process of falling toward the dead star would be a state incomprehensible to current understanding of biophysics or chronology. It would certainly make one insane.

  XX

  So one can understand now why Lena would not know that Skipstone had fallen into the black galaxy until, with no sense of transition, she would simply be there. Not that anticipation would have done her much good. There is literally no way to plan for events like this. One cannot create vectors for madness.

  XXI

  These fragments of technological data having been stated, the crisis of the novel—the fall into the black galaxy—having already occurred, it would be necessary in terms of a smoothly plotted story line with a rising level of excitement to describe then the actual sensations incurred by Skipstone’s entrapment in the field of the neutron star.

  This is not unreasonable. Science fiction, after all, is all that most of us will ever be able to know of the technological wonders of the future, and although it is true that the majority of us are not interested in the future, having more than we can handle, mostly, in coming to terms with the unspeakable present, there is a small and dedicated group of readers to whom the future has at least as much meaning as their circumstances and thes
e, the science-fiction audience for the most part, should not be disappointed. One would not want to skimp on the details. Even at its relatively low word rates, and this must be understood, they are quite low in relation to the amount of invention needed and time expended, science fiction in the hands of its best writers has always been a generous medium, offering more detail than would strictly speaking be necessary from the standpoint of mere plotting, of simple manipulation of characters through obstacles. Indeed, science fiction often suffers from the weakness of too much background, too little foreground, skimping of characterization in favor of un-assimilated futurological details, but at this point the construct hints at breaking down into a series of grumbling little essays about the state of the art and this is not the author’s intention.

  I will resist, this. Polemic, after all, is not fiction nor does fiction serve didactic purposes and remain art, and the author’s opinions, artistic or polemical alike, are worthless; only his ability to transmute them through the material matters, and this is the contract with the reader. He will not be led away from Skipstone (not far, anyhow), the author will stay with the point, the novel will be science fiction and not merely about science fiction, and if the reader will stay around, I promise a smooth and satisfying read containing effortless little blocks of scientific data which will be of personal use. A little hard fact is by no evidence dangerous; it may be the last legitimate refuge of those of us who would still espouse—as does your suffering, tormented, lecherous and self-pitying author—the colorful tenets of Calvinism.

  I would use, then, a surrealistic mode to describe Lena’s descent into the galaxy. Conceive of what is happening now as Skipstone is gathered to that palm and crushed like sand downward: she sees, perhaps, grotesques slithering in dimensions on the walls, monsters that are really little recoveries of her past, plastered there in descent. Watching them whirl in pattern, scuttle on the bulkheads, she could reenact her life in full consciousness from birth to death, the grotesques merely being triggering projections of events from her history. She could indeed be turned inside out anatomically; she could perform in her imagination or in the flesh gross physical acts upon herself; she could live or die a thousand times in the lightless, timeless expanse of the pit … all of this could be done within the confines of this one section, the descent toward the neutron star. It would lead to some powerful insights if only properly handled.

  One could do it in many ways. Picaresque would be a possibility, an episodic framework one should say, one perversity or lunacy to a chapter, the chapters interwoven with flatter, more expository sections on the gravitational effects, the biochemistry of descent, the physics of the force field. For instance, there might be a point at which Lena could take herself to be back in training, preparing for the ordeal of Skipstone.

  In only a little while, she thinks, she will be responsible for the great ship and for its cargo of the dead, but now, staggering from the tube of the simulator, her vision is somewhat more limited. She sees the man who is responsible for her training, a man whom we will call John. Slightly disoriented, nauseated from the experiments, she finds herself speaking to him in a way that she has never before. “Why the dead?” she says. She moves her hands across the slate of cheekbones, whoops with little convulsions of nausea. “Why must we carry the dead?”

  “There are many reasons.”

  “Tell me. Tell, me one. Why must I take death into the stars when the stars were to bring us life?”

  “Because it is they who have paid for much of this,” John says, holding her tentatively. He is a wise and embittered man who believes that it is necessary for him to see and tell the truth at all times, and for these reasons he lives in great pain because his is not a truthful culture. “Without the moneys that are paid from the great trusts of the dead to make possible this first stage of their revival, they would be unable to finance the probes.”

  “It’s not right.”

  “The conditions are stringent. The ultraviolet will restore them, with other things, to life someday. It is fortunate that their needs and ours have so meshed.”

  “But it is not right,” Lena says, “it’s not right; the dead are the dead and should not be tied to life. And what happens if something goes wrong in space? Am I responsible for all of them, then? What will become of me?”

  “Waivers,” John says. “There are careful and complete waivers which are signed, Lena; you can be sure of that. All will be taken care of.”

  He takes her, then, from the simulating crate, trying to ease her toward calm with many little pats and touches on her back, but Lena moves from him and says, “I don’t want to travel with the dead. I can’t bear it to feel that they’re all in there with me.”

  “They have no consciousness.”

  “They’re still dead.” Old fears and revulsions—the word is atavism, I suppose—persist.

  ‘They are merely cargo.”

  “Cargo is cargo but these were people once.”

  “Lena, the costs of this are more enormous than anyone can grasp. The dead at least subsidize a little part of it, make it that much easier. Is it their fault that this is for them another opportunity to live again someday? Lena, we will all be dead someday. Are you prepared to say what you will do?”

  She shakes her head. “I’m not going to be dead for a long time,” she says, “but if I were to die now, I would accept it; I would not take down the living.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know” she says, “I know what I am, what I would do; you have no right to say that I don’t,” and she then goes on to explain to John in a lucid fashion that makes a good deal of sense why this is so: why she cannot bear the presence of the dead on what she takes to be (she believes this if only to sustain her own mood) a mission that is life-seeking, but as she tries to explain this in a level, reasonable tone to John, something opens darkly within her, restraint vanishes and she is weeping convulsively against him.

  John makes brusque, useless little gestures across her arms and shoulders, hoping that he will not break down himself and cry with her and for the Skipstone, for the dead in space. If he were to do this, he knows, he would never stop, that single lunge of feeling would take him all the way over the precipice of detachment and he would be gone forever; no good for Lena either; he must take care of her and so he gets hold of himself, swaddling Lena against him, leading her away from there under the confused gaze of other, less senior technicians who cannot possibly imagine the meaning of this scene but know that something has happened to their pilot and to their supervisor which will change the course of all preparations. Except that in this world nothing changes.

  XXII

  No, the technicians are wrong again; anyone who functions under the supposition of change surrounding these experiments would be wrong. The schedule for the mission is as rigorous and controlled as any of our own countdowns. So diabolically cunning are those in this Bureau of 3902 that they have even programmed into the countdown emotional breakdowns of the minor sort which Lena has just experienced, which has so unsettled John. (They have worked up the psychometrics; they know there will be no major breakdowns.) Not only the engineering but personalities have been taken into account by the cunning and nearly omniscient Bureau so that, while Lena and John feel that they have undergone a series of reactions, they are merely enacting what the psychologists had long since forecast as a momentary stress-tremor. Nothing that they have done since the beginning of training, not even the hasty and uncertain intercourse which they now undertake in the sterile cell of Lena’s quarters, is not charted by the Bureau.

  Of course Lena would like to feel that it is. If she were to know that her sudden coupling with John was part of her program and that the Bureau has calculated it almost to the minute of entrance, if John were to know that he occupies his position as training superior only because he has been judged most likely to give Lena a satisfactory sexual recollection to hold to herself in the void, both of them would be overco
me with revulsion and their plotted coupling would not have taken place. They would have sprung from one another.

  For these reasons the Bureau tries to make its involvement in the lives of its principals as subtle as possible, although every now and then, particularly in the matter of monitoring—on which it is adamant—its true impulse to control can be glimpsed. Still, who can blame it? From the vantage point of 1975, none of us can comprehend the forces which made it this way. The future of humanity, or so their computers and technicians hold, is dependent on the outcome of these FTL experiments. Unless the tachyonic drive can be used by the hundreds of thousands sent routinely voyaging to colonize, unless the space of Skipstone can someday, much enlarged, shield inexperienced travelers from the horrors of hyperdrive, humanity will remain confined to its precarious hold only upon portions of the Milky Way. The tachyons must work. The flight must be accomplished. The investment in Skipstone and in Lena is absolute.

  So who is to begrudge these two or the Bureau their desperate moments of communion in her quarters? Not now; not these two. Certainly not the author who here would bring out his rhetorical arsenal to prove that sex in the future is very much the same as sex in the present or past. (This kind of approach is very reassuring to readers of science fiction, to say nothing of the author himself who has the feeling that he has been missing something most of his life.) And then, too, the author has a wicked hand with a sex scene, always did, is a master of the pornographic literary or the literary pornographic, depending upon your point of view.

  “Oh, my God, you must do it to me,” Lena would shriek, a little floridly, but floridity under stress is one of her more charming habits; she becomes more rather than less dignified When excited and indulges in archaisms of speech. “You must do it to me quickly, you must do it to me now, you must penetrate me swiftly to the core and make me close upon you in the arc of my need,” her nipples bursting like little flowers, or, more in tune with the material, one might say that they are the dull purple of methane. “I want it now, I really do want it now, John; you have got to give it to me, for I cannot, truly cannot stand it anymore,” and John, grunting not only with need but with a reluctance which he has always felt with her, finds her desirable, yet there is something within her that he cannot touch, something which he thinks of as eternally measuring, moves toward the task, poised on his knees, running his hands over the slab of her body, his flesh seeming to retract as nevertheless he covers the pilot of Skipstone and begins to move upon her slowly, unrhythmically, pausing now and then to wipe his streaming brow with a veined, competent supervisor’s hand. Silent during sex—the clinical opposite of Lena, he finds himself speechless during the act, performing it in a reverent manner—he nevertheless conducts an interior monologue. I don’t know why I’m doing this, he thinks; I can’t imagine what the point of this is; it isn’t having her for the meaning of the act but only to satisfy something within her, and he comes close in that instant to an understanding of the uses to which the Bureau has put them, but he pushes this away, not able, as he never will be, to confront what the Bureau has made of him. But I must do it, I must do the best for her that I can because, well, because that is what is expected of me and I must always meet my obligations. He is obsessed with the thought that his obligations must be fulfilled; in a simpler age he would have been a slave to duty.