“We had to hurry. We have a pretty tight schedule.”
“Why, is something about to…”
“No, it’s just that if we don’t engineer a consistent causality, it’ll work itself out on its own. Then it’s almost always worse.” She had no idea what he meant. ” `Engineer a consistent causality.’ My dad never used to talk like that.”
“Certainly he did. Don’t you remember how he spoke to you? He was a well-read man, and from when you were a little girl he–1–talked to you as an equal. Don’t you remember?”
She remembered. She remembered. She thought of her mother in the nursing home.
“What a nice pendant,” he said, with just that air of fatherly reserve she had always imagined he would have cultivated had he lived to see her adolescence. “Who gave it to you?”
“Oh this,” she said, fingering the medallion. “Actually it’s from somebody I don’t know very well. He tested my faith….He…But you must know all this already.” Again the grin.
“I want to know what you think of us,” she said shortly, “what you really think.”
He did not hesitate for a moment. “All right. I think it’s amazing that you’ve done as well as you have. You’ve got hardly any theory of social organization, astonishingly backward economic systems, no grasp of the machinery of historical prediction, and very little knowledge about yourselves. Considering how fast your world is changing, it’s amazing you haven’t blown yourselves to bits by now.
That’s why we don’t want to write you off just yet. You humans have a certain talent for adaptability– at least in the short term.”
“That’s the issue, isn’t it?”
“That’s one issue. You can see that, after a while, the civilizations with only short-tem perspectives just aren’t around. They work out their destinies also.”
She wanted to ask him bow he honestly felt about humans. Curiosity? Compassion? No feelings whatever, just all in a day’s work? In his heart of hearts–or whatever equivalent internal organs he possessed–did he think of her as she thought of…an ant? But she could not bring herself to raise the question. She was too much afraid of the answer.
From the intonation of his voice, from the nuances of his speech, she tried to gain some glimpse of who it was here disguised as her father. She bad an enormous amount of direct experience with human beings; the Stationmasters had less than a day’s. Could she not discern something of their true nature beneath this amiable and informative facade? But she couldn’t. In the content of his speech he was, of course, not her father, nor did he pretend to be. But in every other respect he was uncannily close to Theodore F. Arroway, 1924-1960, vendor of hardware, loving husband and father. If not for a continuous effort of will, she knew she would be slobbering over this, this….copy. Part of her kept wanting to ask him how things had been since he had gone to Heaven. What were his views on Advent and Rapture? Was anything special in the works for the Millennium? There were human cultures that taught an afterlife of the blessed on mountaintops or in clouds, in caverns or oases, but she could not recall any in which if you were very, very good when you died you went to the beach.
“Do we have time for some questions before…whatever it is we have to do next?”
“Sure. One or two anyway.” `Tell me about your transportation system.”
“I can do better than that,” he said. “I can show you. Steady now.”
An amoeba of blackness leaked out from the zenith, obscuring Sun and blue sky. “That’s quite a trick,” she gasped. The same sandy beach was beneath her feet. She dug her toes in. Overhead…was the Cosmos. They were, it seemed, high above the Milky Way Galaxy, looking down on its spiral structure and falling toward it at some impossible speed. He explained matter-of-factly, using her own familiar scientific language to describe the vast pinwheel-shaped structure. He showed her the Orion Spiral Arm, JH which the Sun was, in this epoch, embedded. Interior to it, in decreasing order of mythological significance, were the Sagittarius Arm, the Norma/Scutum Arm, and the Three Kiloparsec Arm.
A network of straight lines appeared, representing the transportation system they had used. It was like the illuminated maps in the Paris Metro. Eda had been right. Each station, she deduced, was in a star system with a low-mass double black hole. She knew the black holes couldn’t have resulted from stellar collapse, from the normal evolution of massive star systems, because they were too small. Maybe they were primordial, left over from the Big Bang, captured by some unimaginable starship and towed to their designated station. Or maybe they were made from scratch. She wanted to ask about this, but the tour was pressing breathlessly onward.
There was a disk of glowing hydrogen rotating about the center of the Galaxy, and within it a ring of molecular clouds rushing outward toward the periphery of the Milky Way. He showed her the ordered motions in the giant molecular cloud complex Sagittarius B2, which had for decades been a favorite hunting ground for complex organic molecules by her radio-astronomical colleagues on Earth. Closer to the center, they encountered another giant molecular cloud, and then Sagittarius A West, an intense radio source that Ellie herself had observed at Argus.
And just adjacent, at the very center of the Galaxy, locked in a passionate gravitational embrace, was a pair of immense black holes. The mass of one of them was five million suns. Rivers of gas the size of solar systems were pouring down its maw. Two colossal–she ruminated on the limitations of the languages of Earth–two super massive black holes are orbiting one another at the center of the Galaxy. One had been known, or at least strongly suspected. But two? Shouldn’t that have shown up as a Doppler displacement of spectral lines? She imagined a sign under one of them reading ENTRANCE and under the other EXIT. At the moment, the entrance was in use; the exit was merely there.
And that was where this Station, Grand Central Station, was-just safely outside the black holes at the center of the Galaxy. The skies were made brilliant by millions of nearby young stars; but the stars, the gas, and the dust were being eaten up by the entrance black hole. “It goes somewhere, right?” she asked. “Of course.”
“Can yon tell me where?”
“Sure. All this stuff winds up in Cygnus A.” Cygnus A was something she knew about. Except only for a nearby supernova remnant in Cassiopeia, it was the brightest radio source in the sides of Earth. She had calculated that in one second Cygnus A produces more energy than the Sun does in 40,000 years. The radio source was 600 million light-years away, far beyond the Milky Way, out in the realm of the galaxies. As with many extragalactic radio sources, two enormous jets of gas, fleeing apart at almost the speed of tight, were making a complex web of Rankine-Hugoniot shock fronts with the thin intergalactic gas–and producing in the process a radio beacon that shone brightly over most of the universe. All the matter in this enormous structure, 500,000 light-years across, was pouring out of a tiny, almost inconspicuous point in space exactly midway between the jets. “You’re making Cygnus A?”
She half-remembered a summer’s night in Michigan when she was a girl. She had feared she would fall into the sky. “Oh, it’s not just us. This is a…cooperative project of many galaxies. That’s what we mainly do–engineering. Only….few of us are involved with emerging civilizations.”
At each pause she had felt a kind of tingling in her head, approximately in the left parietal lobe.
`There are cooperative projects between galaxies?” she asked. “Lots of galaxies, each with a kind of Central Administration? With hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy. And then those administrations cooperate. To pour millions of suns into Centaurus…sorry, Cygnus A? The…Forgive me. I’m just staggered by the scale. Why would you do all this? Whatever for?”
“You mustn’t think of the universe as a wilderness. It hasn’t been that for billions of years,” he said. “Think of it more as…cultivated.” Again a tingling.
“But what for? What’s there to cultivate?”
“The basic problem is easily stated. Now don’t get scared off by the scale. You’re an astronomer, after all. The problem is that the universe is expanding, and there’s not enough matter in it to stop the expansion. After a while, no new galaxies, no new stars, no new planets, no newly arisen lifeforms–just the same old crowd. Everything’s getting run-down. It’ll be boring. So in Cygnus A we’re testing out the technology to make something new. You might call it an experiment in urban renewal. It’s not our only trial run. Sometime later we might want to close off a piece of the universe and prevent space from getting more and more empty as the aeons pass. Increasing the local matter density’s the way to do it, of course. It’s good honest work.” Like running a hardware store in Wisconsin. If Cygnus A was 600 million light-years away, then astronomers on Earth–or anywhere in the Milky Way for that matter–were seeing it as it had been 600 million years ago. But on Earth 600 million years ago, she knew, there had hardly been any life even in the oceans big enough to shake a stick at. They were old. Six hundred million years ago, on a beach like this one…except no crabs, no gulls, no palm trees. She tried to imagine some microscopic plant washed ashore, securing a tremulous toehold just above the water line, while these beings were occupied with experimental galactogenesis and introductory cosmic engineering.