White space, this far into the Core, was quite literally white. Less brilliant bands brindled it, but it was sufficiently bright outside that Singer dimmed all the viewports and even filtered the output from his own senso feed so that what reached Connla and me was considerably attenuated. We’d learned that trick some ans ago, around the time that we also discovered it was totally possible to develop a glare headache from referred senso.
This has nothing to do, of course, with either Connla or me having a tendency to shrug into Singer’s skin and pretend to be a space ship ourselves. Definitely not while making vroom noises.
We dropped out of white space occasionally in order to correct course or navigate around some large obstacle such as a star—which we had to do more and more, because while I could guide us by reading the curves of space-time, it turned out that the longer I did that the more exhausted I got, and the more likely I was to make mistakes. So it was easier to have me give Singer a map, and let him handle the tricky bits in normal space.
Mistakes are a good thing to avoid, in space. And the EM drive doesn’t use fuel.
Coming back Newton, we entered a jeweled realm. Stars—suns—gleamed huge and bright and close on every side. The depth of field was most striking; through the lack of perspective, space can seem flat. Here in the Core, though, the sheer density of pinprick stars gave a sense of texture to the velvety blackness they illuminated. You could read by their glow. You could probably even have drawn by it.
By then, the Well was a constant presence—or a heavy absence, rather—in the back of my mind. It was not painful, but inescapable, inspiring me with trite comparisons to lost teeth and missing limbs. I felt it—not so much physically as through the Koregoi senso, which I guess means I felt it physically and I was making valueless distinctions to make myself feel better—as a pull whose effect swept an entire galaxy into a stately, turning spiral, the way you would feel it if you anchored your feet to the hull close to the hub of a station, in such a way that your body was parallel to the axis of rotation. Like when you’re young, and you hold two of another person’s hands and whirl around a common center of gravity until your other two limbs are flung out and the pair of you spin like a carousel.
I found myself glancing constantly at the forward viewport, as if I might catch a glimpse of the Well we were rushing toward. It hung there, our destination, as present as the sense that somebody nearby is staring at you.
More than a hundred diar later—which is to say almost that many white transitions and intermediary short coasts on EM drive later—I looked up not out of impatience, but because Singer’s senso warned me that now would be an excellent time to look up.
I watched the wall of starlight peel itself back and shiver into countless discrete points of light just as we were falling out of white space and into reality, and I caught my first glimpse of the Well.
How do you describe a system that might just be the biggest thing in the galaxy? It was there, right before us. Still distant enough so what we were seeing was a look down the slide of history into long ago.
Revealed before us was a ballet of stars swathed in nebulae like layers of tulle and chiffon illuminated from within. Without really realizing I was expecting anything, I had nevertheless expected space around the Well to be empty and dark, a vacuumed carpet. Instead, the sky was full of brilliant clouds and orbiting stars.
The cluster and its primary massed something like four million times what a yellow dwarf star does. You could make an argument that the object at its heart was, in fact, the primary for the entire Milky Way galaxy, the Well so deep it swept all the systems and systers of the vast and far-flung Synarche in our endless, careening dance.
At its center, veiled in all those whirling nets of mist and light, lay the most incredible precipice in the galaxy. The event horizon of the supermassive black hole.
The accretion disk around the Well was a vast, whipping spiral of white and peach and gold, redshifting through orange into blood as it approached the center. Around the edge of the event horizon was a lensed ring of light—the image of everything behind the Well condensed and twisted into a torus by the profound space-time curvature invoked by its mass.
That was how, despite being a singularity from which no light escaped, the Saga-star was mistily visible, its deformed crescent of brilliant light a partial ring around a hopelessly dark center. It looked like images I’ve seen of how a partially eclipsed sun would look on a cloudy dia, if you were on the dirt downwell.
The Saga-star was so enormous, so vast, that even a human with no more protection than a space suit could have approached that event horizon, sidled right up to it, without being ripped apart by the tidal forces. You’d be blinded by its light—which Singer was filtering for us—and die in a blaze of blueshifted radiation condensed out of the entire history of the universe before you could get close enough to die of being stretched to pieces.
The Saga-star whipped around at a tremendous rate of speed, much faster than the rotation of the accretion disk. That disk, and the relativistic jets careening forth at right angles from it, were not stable, stately spinning or fluttering objects such as you see in animations. Instead they roiled and twisted and barrel-rolled, as if the black hole were a giant marble wrapped in glowing fabric, spun at random.
It looked deadly and fierce, and the most amazing thing was that I wasn’t scared of it at all.
It was too big, too powerful, too amazingly beyond my comprehension. Its companion stars swung around it. A couple of them had worlds, two of those even inhabited. There were systers that had grown up here as species.
What would it do to your psyche if this were your sky? What would it do to the racial awareness of your species if this were their memory of their dirt-bound cradle, before they stepped out into the great emptiness beyond?
Except they’d never have a concept of emptiness, or maybe even darkness, because their sky was a brilliant dance. As I watched, a star slid behind the Well and was lensed around it, appearing as a bent-seeming, melted-looking ring surrounding the brighter crescent of the accretion disk.
It was—in the dictionary definition of the word—unfathomable.
Because Singer was filtering the image and tuning our senso, I could also make out what he saw in so much more defined detail than I could have with my naked human eye, including the towering fountains of X-rays spewing perpendicularly to the accretion disk from the poles of the rapidly spinning black hole.
The crescent shape of that visible accretion disk was not just an effect of gravitational lensing. It was also due to the fact that what we were seeing was not the light of the black hole itself, which of course did not emit any, which would be why it—and its lesser kin—were called black holes, after all. What we were seeing was radiation that had escaped the accretion disk, and the reason one side seemed so much brighter than the other was because that side of the accretion disk was rotating toward us at nearly the speed of light, so the escaping light—and other radiation—was being fired toward our observer position, while the other side was receding.
The black hole was an eerie sight, a mystical experience. Probably because I was importing an enormous weight of expectation to this glimpse of the powers of gravity. But also because here it was, the avatar of destruction, but also the engine that drove the great wheel upon which all life as we knew it depended.