But Eda, lost in thought, was shaking his bead. Something about the physics was bothering him.
The black hole, if that was what it really was, could now be seen orbiting Vega in a broad lane entirely clear of debris; both inner and outer rings gave it wide berth. It was hard to believe how black it was.
As she took short video pans of the debris ring before her, she wondered whether it would someday form its own planetary system, the particles colliding, sticking, growing ever larger, gravitational condensations taking place until at last only a few large worlds orbited the star. It was very like the picture astronomers had of the origin of the planets around the Sun four and a half billion years ago. She could now make out inhomogeneities in the rings, places with a discernible bulge where some debris had apparently accreted together.
The motion of the black hole around Vega was creating a visible ripple in the bands of debris immediately adjacent The dodecahedron was doubtless producing some more modest wake. She wondered if these gravitational perturbations, these spreading rarefactions and condensations, would have any long-term consequence, changing the pattern of subsequent planetary formation. If so, then the very existence of some planet billions of years in the future might be due to the black hole and the Machine…and therefore to the Message, and therefore to Project Argus. She knew she was overpersonalizing; bad she never lived, some other radio astronomer would surely have received the Message, but earlier, or later. The Machine would have been activated at a different moment and the dodec would have found its way here in some other time. So some future planet in this system might still owe its existence to her. Then, by symmetry, she had snatched out of existence some other world that was destined to form bad she never lived. It was vaguely burdensome, being responsible by your innocent actions for the fates of unknown worlds.
She attempted a panning shot, beginning inside the dodecahedron, then out to the struts joining the transparent pentagonal panels, and beyond to the gap in the debris rings in which they, along with the black hole, were orbiting. She followed the gap, flanked by two bluish rings, further and further from her. There was something a little odd up ahead, a kind of bowing in the adjacent inner ring.
“Qiaomu,” she said, handing him the long lens, “look over there. Tell me what you sec.”
“Where?”
She pointed again. After a moment he had found it. She could tell because of his slight but quite unmistakable intake of breath. “Another black hole,” he said. “Much bigger.”
They were falling again. This time the tunnel was more commodious, and they were making better time.
“That’s it?” Ellie found herself shouting at Devi. “They take us to Vega to show off their black holes. They give us a look at their radio telescopes from a thousand kilometers away. We spend ten minutes there, and they pop us into another black hole and ship us back to Earth. That’s why we spent two trillion dollars?”
“Maybe we’re beside the point,” Lunacharsky was saying. “Maybe the only real point was to plug themselves into the Earth.”
She imagined nocturnal excavations beneath the gates of Troy.
Eda, fingers of both hands outspread, was making a calming gesture. “Wait and see,” he said. “This is a different tunnel. Why should you think it goes back to Earth?”
“Vega’s not where we’re intended to go?” Devi asked. “The experimental method. Let’s see where we pop out next.” In this tunnel there was less scraping of the walls and fewer undulations. Eda and Vaygay were debating a space-time diagram they had drawn in Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates. Ellie had no idea what they were talking about. The deceleration stage, the part of the passage that felt uphill, was still disconcerting.
This time the light at the end of the tunnel was orange. They emerged at a considerable speed into the system of a contact binary, two suns touching. The outer layers of a swollen elderly red giant star were pouring onto the photosphere of a vigorous middle-aged yellow dwarf, something like the Sun. The zone of contact between the two stars was brilliant. She looked for debris rings or planets or orbiting radio observatories, but could find none. That doesn’t mean very much, she told herself. These systems could have a fair number of planets and I’d never know it with this dinky long lens. She projected the double sun onto the piece of paper and photographed the image with a short-focal-length lens.
Because there were no rings, there was less scattered light in this system than around Vega; with the wide-angle lens she was able, after a bit of searching, to recognize a constellation that sufficiently resembled the Big Dipper. But she had difficulty recognizing the other constellations. Since the bright stars in the Big Dipper are a few hundred light-years from Earth, she concluded that they had not jumped more than a few hundred light-years. She told this to Eda and asked him what he thought. “What do I think? I think this is an Underground.”
“An Underground?”
She recalled her sensation of falling, into the depths of Hell it had seemed for a moment, just after the Machine had been activated.
“A Metro. A subway. These are the stations. The stops. Vega and this system and others. Passengers get on and off at the stops. You change trains here.”
He gestured at the contact binary, and she noticed that his hand cast two shadows, one anti-yellow and the other anti-red, like in—it was the only image that came to mind–a discotheque.
“But we, we cannot get off,” Eda continued. “We are in a closed railway car. We’re headed for the terminal, the end of the line.”
Drumlin had called such speculations Fantasyland, and this was–so far as she knew—the first time Eda had succumbed to the temptation.
Of the Five, she was the only observational astronomer, even though her specialty was not in the optical spectrum. She felt it her responsibility to accumulate as much data as possible, in the tunnels and in the ordinary four-dimensional space-time into which they would periodically emerge. The presumptive black hole from which they exited would always be in orbit around some star or multiple-star system. They were always in pairs, always two of them sharing a similar orbit–one from which they were ejected, and another into which they fell. No two systems were closely similar. None was very like the solar system. All provided instructive astronomical insights. Not one of them exhibited anything like an artifact–a second dodecahedron, or some vast engineering project to take apart a world and reassemble it into what Xi had called a device.
At this time they emerged near a star visibly changing its brightness (she could tell from the progression of f/stops required)–perhaps it was one of the RR Lyrae stars; next was a quintuple system; then a feebly luminous brown dwarf. Some were in open space, some were embedded in nebulosity, surrounded by glowing molecular clouds.
She recalled the warning `This will be deducted from your share in Paradise.” Nothing had been deducted from hers. Despite a conscious effort to retain a professional calm, her heart soared at this profusion of suns. She hoped that every one of them was a home to someone. Or would be one day.
But after the fourth jump she began to worry. Subjectively, and by her wristwatch, it felt something like an hour since they had “left” Hokkaido. If this took much longer, the absence of amenities would be felt. Probably there were aspects of human physiology that could not be deduced even after attentive television viewing by a very advanced civilization.
And if the extraterrestrials were so smart, why were they putting us through so many little jumps? All right, maybe the hop from Earth used rudimentary equipment because only primitives were working one side of the tunnel. But after Vega? Why couldn’t they jump us directly to wherever the dodec was going? Each time she came barreling out of a tunnel, she was expectant. What wonders had they in store for her next? It put her in mind of a very upscale amusement park, and she found herself imagining Hadden peering down his telescope at Hokkaido the moment the Machine had been activated.
As glorious as the vistas offered by the Message makers were, and however much she enjoyed a kind of proprietary mastery of the subject as she explained some aspect of stellar evolution to the others, she was after a time disappointed. She had to work to track the feeling down. Soon she had it: The extraterrestrials were boasting. It was unseemly. It betrayed some defect of character.
As they plunged down still another tunnel, this one broader and more tortuous than the others, Lunacharsky asked Eda to guess why the subway stops were put in such unpromising star systems. “Why not around a single star, a young star in good health and with no debris?”