Valen frowned. Esker’s reply had been scoffingly obvious. Valen’s brow cleared. Lissa saw he was willing to overlook the matter. As keyed up as he was, Esker doubtless bypassed tact without noticing. “Fine. Give me your plan.”
“I’ll develop it as we go along and collect more information. For the present, hm, I must do some figuring. I’ll get back to you with the coordinates of the next observation point in about an hour.” The physicist cut the connection.
“An hour,” Lissa said. “That’ll serve.”
Valen blinked. “What?”
“An hour of our own. Let’s take advantage. We may not have more for some time to come.”
XIX
FIFTY hours of leap, study, leap were unendurably long and unbelievably few. At the end, the travelers met in the saloon. Word like this should be face to face, where hand could seize hand. For it, they gave themselves boost, weight, that they might sit around the table at ease, perhaps the last ease they would ever know.
Esker rose. Pride swelled his stumpy form. “I am ready to tell you what I have found,” he said.
“After the Great Confederacy.” Orichalc murmured the words, but forgot to keep the trans equally quiet. Well, Lissa thought beneath her heart-thumping, Children’s Day morning expectancy, of course all beings want their races given all due honor, whether or not they like the governments.
Esker surprised her with a mild answer: “True. And your people scarcely came upon this by last-minute accident. I imagine a survey ship found it ten or twenty years ago. They—the rulers, that is—saw the potentialities, but bided their time till the climactic moment neared. Humans couldn’t have kept a secret like that.”
Has his triumph made him gentler? wondered Lissa. I’m glad for you, Esker.
“What are the potentialities, then?” Valen demanded.
“I don’t know,” the physicist replied. “Neither do the Susaians, or they wouldn’t be making such an effort.” He paused. Something mystical entered his speech, his whole manner. “An unprecedented event, rare if not totally unique in the universe. Who can say what it will unleash? Quite possibly, phenomena [111] never suspected by us. Conceivably, laws of nature unknown even to the Forerunners.”
And what technologies, what powers might spring from those discoveries? went chill through Lissa. For good or ill, salvation or damnation. I can’t blame the Susaians or the Domination for wanting to keep it to themselves. I wish we humans could.
“Tell us what it is!” she blurted.
The three assistants shifted on their bench. They knew. Their master had laid silence on them. This was to be his moment.
He looked at her and measured out his words. “I can give you the basic fact in a single sentence, milady. Two black holes are on a collision course.”
Orichalc hissed and Valen softly whistled.
Black holes, Lissa evoked from memory. Stars two—or was it three?—or more times greater than Sunniva, ragingly luminous, consuming their cores with nuclear fire until after mere millions of years they exploded as supernovae, briefly rivaling their whole galaxy; then the remnant collapsing, but not into the stability of a neutron star. No, the mass was still huge, gravitation overcame quantum repulsion, shrinkage went on and on toward zero size and infinite density, though to an outside observer it soon slowed almost to a halt and would take all eternity to reach its end point. The force of gravity rose until light itself could not escape. …
She had seen pictures of a few, taken from spacecraft at a distance and by probes venturing closer. No more than that; their kind was surely numbered in the billions, but explorers were still ranging only this one tiny segment of a thinly populated outer fringe of the galaxy.
Wonder and terror enough, just the same. The event horizon, the sphere of ultimate darkness, was asteroid size, sometimes visible as a tiny round blot in heaven, sometimes not. For it captured matter from space, and if there happened to be enough of that nearby, a nebula or, still more so, a companion sun from which the hole sucked mass, then fire wheeled around it, the accretion disc, spiraling ever faster into the maw, giving off a blaze of energy [112] as it fell. The stupendous gravity dragged at light waves, reddened them, twisted their paths. Its tidal pull stretched a probe asunder and whirled the fragments off into the disc. … Most of the knowledge was to Lissa little more than words, quantum tunneling, Hawking radiation, space and time interchangeably distorted. …