“I can’t tell.” Jocelyn frowned. “The board says refraction makes it impossible to measure.”
“Refraction?” Toby asked. Everybody ignored him, but his Isaac Aspect supplied,
In curved space-time, light is warped. It cannot propagate in straight lines. No distance measurements are reliable. Or time measures, either.
“That thing’s getting nearer,” Cermo said. “Bigger.”
That may be an illusion, too, caused by the bending of light. Here nothing is what it seems, theory says.
“What design is it?” Killeen asked.
“Hard to tell,” Jocelyn answered, frowning. “Its image keeps jumping around.”
“Kinda lumpy,” Cermo said.
“Not like the Myriapodia craft,” Killeen mused.
“Are those domes?” Jocelyn delicately tuned the sensors. “Bulges in the profile, see?”
“Ummm. Could be. Mechs have bumps like that.”
“Frap!” Jocelyn gritted her teeth. “Looks to be getting closer. If it’s mech, we’ll be wide open.”
<I see similarities to your own ship.>
Killeen glanced back at Quath, startled. Toby had forgotten that the Bridge was tuned into Quath’s transmissions. He could not carry on a snug, private conversation with the alien any longer. The thought made him somehow sad.
Killeen said, “Argo’s ancient. Last of its kind, prob’ly. Wouldn’t find anything like that here.”
<Assumptions are not facts.>
“Humans here?” Cermo asked. “I hope to God it’s so.”
“Its color function is not smooth,” Jocelyn said crisply. No speculations for her; she kept eyes fixed on the flowing dynamics of her board.
Killeen ceased his slow pacing and walked quickly to her side, fighting the jolts of vagrant gravity. The board showed a bewildering array of numbers, graphs, scattershot diagrams. Toby could piece them out, with some help—they were like the math lessons from Isaac—but Killeen had a long-standing impatience with such pesky details. “What’s that stuff mean?”
“When the instruments scan across the image, even though it’s kinda watery, they can tell if it’s the same color. That ship has blotches on it.”
“So?” Killeen ran a hand over the displays, as if he could feel their significance. Toby knew the puzzled impatience in his father’s face. Long years of trusting his wits made abstract instruments seem untrustworthy, no matter how advanced. Toby could sympathize; he felt pretty shaky, too, relying on devices he could not possibly figure out.
“So maybe it’s damaged. Taken hits. Got holes in it, even.”
“Likely it’s a warship, then.” Jocelyn frowned.
On the screen a blue-white shape swam, shimmering and bobbing in the incessant streaking light-drops. The ship’s minds fretted over its identity and strobed UNKNOWN on the screen. Toby watched the bobbing, silvery ship and Quath said, <We plunge quickly. Already we near the thirty-day level.>
“Huh? What?”
<A day at this depth inside the time pit equals thirty normdays’ duration outside.>
“How can that be?”
<The Myriapodia have sent me a submind. I assign it these tasks. Its digital consciousness can guide us through such reaches. It understands how the curving of space-time is both a warpage of distance and a shrinkage of time, for us.>
Toby swallowed, and not just from a new lurch of his couch. Before he could take in Quath’s meaning, Killeen made a decision, smacking a palm on the board. “Can’t risk it being a warship, maybe mech. Prepare to fire on it.”
Jocelyn replied crisply. “Ready for action.”
“Wait!” Toby called. “You heard Quath. She says everything’s twisted down here. That ship could be from some different time, not following us at all.”
“What’s time matter?” Killeen snapped. “A mech’s a mech.”
“Dad, give that ship a little leeway. My Isaac Aspect, Quath, they both’re talking about how crazy it is here. Seems to me, until we understand—”
Killeen glanced at his son and nodded to Jocelyn. “Keep a sharp eye. Stand ready. Armed.”
“Armed, Cap’n.”
“Dad!”
<It is not advisable to act without knowledge.>
Killeen studied the alien’s head and feelers, which swayed with the effort of compensating for the tides of gravity that swept through the Bridge like a pressure wind. “You sure?”
<Here nothing is certain. But my submind reports that many unknown craft linger here.>
“How many?”
<Unknown. They stack up from all ages past.>
“Mech?”
<Some, it says, may be from before the age of the mechanicals.> Quath sent a rippling, fizzy sound with this, which Toby did not know how to interpret. Wasn’t the ‘age of the mechanicals’ now—their time?
Killeen seemed to understand, though, and nodded. “All right. Can you put your information on our screens?”
<Soon.> Another mysterious series of fizzy, ringing notes.
The ship on the screens waxed and waned in shimmering, heated luminosity. For a moment it sharpened. A scarred skin, once silver-smooth, now pocked and stained. Bulges that could be domes, but streaked and grimy.
Jocelyn said, “Our pattern-recognition programs say that’s old human construction.”
Killeen rubbed his chin. “Ummm, could be.”
“It is!” Toby cried. The cut and angles struck a chord in him. Before he could say more, the clarity fled. A long moment of silence followed. The Bridge officers stared openly at their Cap’n. To fire on a human craft would be a great sin, but to die from a mech bolt . . .
“Not mech, anyway,” Killeen conceded. “Stand down.”
The tension on the Bridge broke. Officers murmured, rustled. Killeen resumed pacing. Toby was still watching the screens when the other ship’s image began to dwindle away. “Hey!” Jocelyn cried, working at her instruments. But the image faded like a plucked flower sinking into a dark pond.
“Gone.” Killeen seemed relieved. “Maybe we were looking at a mirage all the time.”
<It is possible, here. Note:>
Onto the main screen popped two clocks. Toby had learned to read a digital clock on Argo, so he was startled to see one in blue keep ticking away at the rate he knew, while another in red spun its numbers past in a blur. <The in-ship time flows normally,> Quath sent in response to his confusion. <Outside time runs much faster, the deeper we go.>
Toby watched the numerals spin, scarcely believing they could represent anything real. “You mean outside, time’s going fast?”
<Relative to us, this is true.>
“What makes it speed up, out there?”
<It is we who are slowed. Time is always a matter of local opinion.>
Toby couldn’t reckon how that could possibly be. “What happens when we go back out?”
<If we remain in this region of curvature, we will find that much has happened while we were here.>
“Curvature?” Killeen intruded.
<The effect can be opposite, as well. Much is contorted here, like events seen through smoky, thick glass.>
“Gonna make it hard to find anything.”
<That is the least difficulty. Time is trapped here. It can be ingested and disgorged.>
“So that’s why you call it a time pit?”
Toby’s Isaac Aspect added,
The black hole swallows space. Old Zeno says—though even her memory of these matters is from long before her real, bodily life—that we can regard it as if space slides into the hole’s gullet at ever-faster speed, as it nears the steepening angle of descent. Against this slippery slope even light labors to save itself. But the ergosphere is a chasm for time, not space. Here the duration of an event may stretch, compress, warp, as space—in-sliding, doomed space—plays and toys with it, twists the tail of time.
Toby tried to get his mind around all this, as his stomach lurched with acid and the screens flashed. Streaking matter, bristling with radiation, spattered their ship. Toby thought woozily that maybe they were seeing God spit across the sky, a cosmic joke. “How . . . how do we find our way around?”