I still had my contact with the ship. It didn’t seem to be trying to communicate with me through the Koregoi senso the same way Singer did through plain, old-fashioned, boring, noninfectious Synarche tech.
I examined my inputs, feeling it long before it would have come into view even if it had been in real space. We wouldn’t be able to see it until we were sharing a universe, and I wondered if it would be more efficient to do what we usually did and go close enough to it to tune our white bubble to match theirs. Or if I actually could reach out there and communicate with the thing enough to order—or convince—it to just… turn its white bubble off.
Singer’s detectors, like my Koregoi senso, could feel the mass, the dent it put in the fabric of this peculiar hole in space-time.
“Still no luck in figuring out how to talk to it?” I asked Singer.
“Maybe,” he said. “The problem is, I am even more sure now that it doesn’t have a shipmind. Or any kind of mind. It’s not sapient, either organically or machinewise. It’s just… like being noticed by a plant or something.”
“A Big Dumb Object?” Connla said helpfully.
“You’re a Big Dumb Object,” I replied. “How about you do something useful like feeding the cats?”
“I put the cats in a breath bubble,” Singer said. “Just in case.”
That was actually kind of a relief. I didn’t think the Synarche was going to open fire on us, obviously, and nobody had ever found Koregoi weapons (which made a lot of sense to me now: see above, discussion of being able to control gravity, who needs a gun?), but… better safe than sorry.
Nobody wants to spacewalk to an alien ship while worrying about their pets.
“Hey,” Singer said. “I think I have a connection.”
“Is it talking back?”
“Are you kidding?” he said. “I’m not even sure I can figure out yet how to ping.”
It took a few more diar of trial and error before he was ready to try bringing the Koregoi artifact—we were all pretty well convinced it was a ship by now—into the main line of our consensus reality and space-time, out of the pocket universe it had been so cozy in for eons. Once Singer figured out how, though, we knew we couldn’t wait. The Synarche was so close the lag on the lightspeed communication was a few standard minutes, and they were really trying to have opinions about when and where and what we should do with our friendly antique warp bubble.
Fortunately, space around the Well is saturated with radiation and clutter and loss and noise, and it’s really not surprising we couldn’t hear them very well.
So we put our fingers in our ears, and Singer unfolded space, and the Koregoi artifact popped out of the wrinkle and into Newtonian space like somebody had gently and evenly pulled smooth a blanket that had been folded around a marble.
We’d gathered in the control cabin to watch the unveiling. Connla and I both gasped aloud, as one.
It was pretty damned definitely a ship. And it was huge. Blocky, but with rounded corners and edges. Patchwork in appearance, as if the hull were constructed of vast plates that had been painted separately with different paint lots and then assembled more or less with disregard to what those color choices were. To my eyes, it was a series of warm oranges and mossy greens; I wondered what kind of color variation the eyes—or eye-analogues—of the systers who had built it saw.
A smooth, angled, wedge-shaped nose stretched back into a kind of massive, rounded parallelogram. I tasted textures, surfaces. Whatever the hull was made of, the sensors didn’t have it on file.
The thing was cold on the inside. Seriously cold. Space cold.
Methane breathers. Or dead.
I thrilled with excitement. “We got it out.”
Singer said, “And it’s big.”
“Confirmed: that’s not a human ship,” Connla said a moment later. “Or any registered syster.”
“How often does that happen twice in one trip?” I said, possibly a little more light-heartedly than the gravity of the situation suggested.
“Holy carp, how do you feed that thing?”
I closed my eyes, the better to concentrate on what I was feeling through my own senso and Singer’s instruments rather than looking.
The ship’s sensors were better, anyway. Connla’s voice made me jump and look again. It loomed over us, cliff-like now as we approached it. I had… nothing to say in reply.
Nobody built ships that big. The energy expenditure needed to throw a white field around them was beyond prohibitive. Even an antimatter reaction couldn’t cover it. This thing was bigger than the Milk Chocolate Marauder. And it wasn’t a bubble around a hollow inside.
This thing was bigger than some stations, by a long fall.
“Wow,” Connla said.
I just reached out and touched the forward bulkhead with my fingertips again. As if that could get me physically closer to the thing. Awe surged through me, so strong as to seem numinous.
So this is what the Wake-Seekers are feeling, when they feel it.
Some of that awe was because we had a visual of something that could only be a Koregoi vessel. Well, maybe not only, but it was the top explanation that came to my mind. Some of it was because, well, we had coaxed this thing out of the depths of deep time and a black hole, and here it was nearly close enough to touch.
“Wish we still had a boom,” Connla muttered.
Yeah, that was quite likely going to be a problem.
I wondered if the ship looked better in whatever wavelengths its builders perceived—I found myself imagining they saw it as a soothing marine blue—but I still had to look at it with human eyeballs. It was no better through my interface with Singer; he was getting it in infrared and ultraviolet, too, about a dozen shades of each—but with his perceptions I could experience the vivid, hallucinatory patternings that covered the hull.
They were almost organic. Stripes, spots, and whorls that looked as if somebody had painted a tabby cat while in the grip of a manic episode were laid over a shaded coloration that started dark on one surface—it might have been what was meant to be the dorsal side, but that could just be my Terracentrism getting in the way—and paled to lesser intensity on the other.
The craft itself had some organic outlines, too. Its white coils were there, intact. As we came closer, I could see that the coils encompassed a hull whose angled-brick shape was ornamented on a small scale with bulbous curves and strange, knobby outcrops. It remained strangely streamlined-looking, but the streamlining didn’t look mechanically or aerodynamically effective, and it certainly didn’t look like anything you’d take very deep into an atmosphere.
Not with the fragile halo of the white coils surrounding it. Not with the aerodynamics of a brick.
I found myself visualizing how it would look against the coruscating, folded background of white space—the silver and ebony of the Core. That white space background would have been both different from the high-gravity sky we were currently experiencing, and similar. The blaze of light, the lensed distortions, the bands of white and dark. But as flashy as the view from inside white space was, it didn’t have the twists, the spirals, the flares, the sheer magnitude of gee-whiz engendered by a forty-odd-million stellar-mass black hole.
I kept looking at it when I should have been hurrying.
We got something out of that, I thought.
Well. Not all the way out. But that got me wondering. A black hole this big… How close to the event horizon would be recoverable? What could you learn from a trip like that?