“But how can I? I can’t fly a starship.”
“You can do anything, be anything, answer any question except one. You are a sibyl, and it’s time that you learned what it means, my dear. Trust me.”
The words had choked her as she reached out to release the straps that kept Moon in her seat.
A loud clack echoed through the ship, jerking Elsevier back into the present. “Silky! What was that? Something’s loose—” The protective counterbalances of the cocoon had immobilized her. She could not pull a finger free, or shift her head a fraction of an inch; there was nothing to do but gaze straight ahead toward the shining cancer that spread across the screen before them.
“Wristwatch.”
She gave a small sigh of vexation and relief, seeing it stuck to a double star in the lower half of the screen. The images of the stars drained inward toward the center of the screen; the black hole wore a starry crown, symbol of its power over light itself… Careless! Something larger than her watch left unsecured might have torn a hole through the hull in its urge to suicide. “I just got that watch! I’ve endured this trip too many times; I don’t carry the years lightly, alone. TJ was my strength, Silky… and he’s gone.” She sensed a faint tremor through the fiber of the ship; looking up again she saw no starfield before them now, but only the film of reddening hell shine lighting their way to doom. “She’s controlling the field stabilizers, Silky, or we’d be turning somersaults by now. I knew she could hold us!”
But what if it destroys her mind? If anything happened to the girl because of this, she would never forgive herself. Never. In the bare few days the girl had spent with them she had reaffirmed by her sun pie presence the things TJ had always believed. Flexible and independent, she had begun to recover from the shock of her abrupt transplanting, begun reaching out to the possibilities they offered in propitiation. In a cheerful, eye-stimulating jump suit instead of drab handmade clothing, there was no way a stranger could have known her for a second-class citizen of the Hegemony, one judged undeserving of a full share of its knowledge. And the sibyl-machinery of a civilization far more knowledgeable than their own had judged her and found her worthy.
TJ’s dream had always been that all intelligent beings would someday have an equal chance to fulfill their potential. That was why he had begun running contraband shipments to Tiamat, against her own futile protests that he was becoming a common smuggler. “There are smugglers and smugglers, my heart,” he had said, grinning; and by then she knew that no human protest could shout down the inner voice that drove him… not even hers.
The Hegemony held Tiamat back from developing a technological base of its own by restrictions and embargoes (she still remembered how his lectures rang through their cramped apartment); kept the inhabitants at a level where they were only pampered children, given selected toys their parent-masters could later render harmless. And all for the sake of that precious obscenity, the water of life, that seduced the Hegemony’s privileged and powerful with the hope of eternal youth.
If Tiamat developed a technologically-based world society of its own, if it were left to mature untended during the century that it was cut off from the Hegemony, who knew what they would find when they returned? A world able to stand up to them, one which no longer craved their technological toys because it could make its own — a world which had decided that it preferred to keep immortality to itself, and was tired of exploitation? Or a world which had decided that its own exploitation of mers was immoral… worse yet, one which had turned itself into a radioactive cinder the way Caedw had done. Tiamat had something that no other world could offer, and what it had was more of a curse than a blessing.
It was a situation that TJ had found intolerable. Knowing she couldn’t stop him, she had gone with him again, as she had always gone with him, always been unable to refuse him any desire. And as always, she had been caught up in his passion in the end… and after his death, she and Silky had carried on his crusade, the only thing in her life that had seemed to have any purpose after he was gone.
And now chance had swept the girl Moon into her life, as if to prove that it had all been worthwhile — the image of the child that she and TJ had never had. He would have been proud. It would be no burden to be guardian to Moon’s new life; it would be a privilege…
Elsevier felt a sickening vertigo as the irresistible force of the tidal stress sucked at her immobile body. Even with the protective fields functioning, the ship could not protect them entirely. She looked toward the glowing heart of blackness once again. Oh, heaven, I’m not ready; it happens too fast, and lasts too long. At least Moon was free of the heat and pain, with her mind held captive somewhere halfway across the galaxy… 7 wouldn’t have done it, except for Cress… It wouldn’t have happened, except for Cress… Oh, gods, let him be all right. He still lay in the emergency prism; they hadn’t dared to move him to a safer spot. But the whole of the ship and all its equipment had been designed to survive this passage; surely he would survive, too — if any of them did…
She felt the sockets of her bones loosen and shift again, felt the less acute but growing discomfort as the temperature inside the ship rose. She imagined the outer hull incandescent now with stress as it plummeted toward the black hole’s horizon, a part of the flaming distress call endlessly broadcasting as the damned were gathered in to then: final reckoning. The ship was constructed of the strongest, most resilient materials known to man, and equipped with counter fields to protect and stabilize its descent into the maelstrom.
It was as small in size as possible, and shaped like a coin; the stabilizers kept its flat broad face always aligned with the gravitational gradients as it fell. Because the walls of the black hole’s gravity well in space were so steep, if the ship ever lost its stability and began to tumble it would be ripped apart in seconds by tidal stresses. Death would come to them all in an instant’s blazing agony, and their death scream would echo in that well forever. Passage through the Black Gate taxed human and mechanical endurance, and the limits of Kharemough’s technology. Only the symbiosis of a computer and the astrogator’s human brain could hold them together and guide them down to the precise point of entry at the horizon.
And what if Moon held them together, but they missed the tiny opening to the hyperspace conduit that would spit them out two light-years from Kharemough? Kharemough had redeveloped the principle of Black Gate travel over a millennium ago, working from the Old Empire knowledge given to them by sibyls. The Old Empire had had a hyper light star drive that let it extend its control across distances still impossible for the Hegemony; but even it had used the Black Gate as a local center for its far-flung communications. The Hegemony had used its cosmic shortcut to reestablish this small part of the Empire’s network of worlds, and used its fossil wisdom to get them safely through. But they still had no real understanding of the forces they manipulated… If this ship did not pass through the horizon at the proper coordinates, it might emerge in an entirely unexplored sector of space, with no system nearby and no coordinates for their return… or it might never emerge anywhere in the known universe. Ships had been lost before; and they had been lost forever.
Elsevier felt her eyes bulging against her closed lids, no longer able to watch the coruscating fire of the black hole’s surface swallow her universe. She heard the ship groan, and her own groan as she felt herself coming apart at the seams. The rippling bright blackness echoed inside her as her consciousness gave way; she let all her doubts and fears fly up like a shower of sparks and surrendered herself at last, gladly, to oblivion.