Vala stood. ‘Let’s do this.’
14
The whale ploughed steadily towards the Core of Cores. The crew huddled behind the whale’s face, singing their eerie repetitive chants.
Lura sat looking out through the whale’s scarred hide. Her Mole was in her arms, and the great Supply Machine that the whale had literally bitten off from the perimeter of the Raft was lying on its back beside her. On its far side Brother Pesten sat, long since awed into silence.
The whale shuddered and shook, and let out another deep, agonised groan. Well might it groan, Lura thought, for it had been many shifts since Otho and his crew had forced it to leave the last rich nebula where it had been able to feed, and it had begun this appalling dive deep into the heart of the tremendous gravitational system in which they were all embedded. Otho had said his whale would never recover from this ordeal – and Lura sensed that he would never forgive her for that, whatever the outcome of this strange adventure.
Yet here they were, plunging into the Core of Cores, at the behest of a boy from another universe.
For some shifts the whale had ploughed through layers of the thick black debris cloud that surrounded the Core itself. But now things were changing. Sombre clouds parted before them, and the debris began to show depth and structure. A pale, pinkish light shone upwards, and veils of the stuff of shattered stars and nebulae arched over the whale, dwarfing it.
Then, abruptly, the clouds cleared, and they were sailing over the Core of Cores itself.
‘By the Bones,’ Pesten muttered, an ancient, un-Brother-like curse. ‘It’s like a planet.’
The Core of Cores was a compact surface clustered about the massive black hole at its heart, a flattened sphere that would have taken hundreds of shifts to walk across – if you could have withstood the gravity. It was by far the largest organised object any of them had ever seen or heard of.
And it was indeed like the ‘planets’ Coton had described in his own universe, a planet rendered in shades of red and pink against charcoal grey and black. There were ‘oceans’ of some quasi-liquid material, thick and red as blood; they lapped at ‘lands’ that thrust above the general spherical surface. There were even small ‘mountain ranges’, like wrinkles in the skin of a soured fruit, and clouds like smoke that sped across the face of the seas. There was continual motion: huge waves crossed the seas, and the mountain sheets seemed to evolve endlessly, and the coasts of the strange continents writhed.
Pesten was ecstatic. He peered through the whale skin as if he wished he could climb through it. ‘It is more like an Alpha world, as Coton described them, than anything we’ve seen before. More like Earth itself than anything we’ve ever seen! Perhaps it’s the largest-scale structure to be found in Beta. Yet even this is much smaller than a trivial Alpha world.
‘You understand that we’re seeing a kind of shell containing the black hole itself. It represents a balance between the influx of material from the debris cloud, and the radiation from the accretion around the black hole itself. It is not as Coton described the environment of Alpha black holes; this has much more structure, and apparently a greater density. And it is held together by something else unique to Beta – gravitic chemistry!’
‘You sound as if you’re proud of it.’
‘Well, why shouldn’t I be? There is no spectacle like this in Alpha.’
‘But it has nothing to do with us,’ Lura murmured.
‘Yes, yes . . . You have your Mole? We must send images of what we’re seeing through to Alpha.’
The crew muttered. Lura saw that they were silhouetted against a new, paler glow, and they were pointing. Lura turned to see. At the centre of one of the strange continents was a grid of pink-white light, etched into the surface like a vast game board.
‘Look,’ Pesten breathed. ‘Look!’
Ideas crowded into Lura’s mind. ‘Life,’ she whispered.
‘And intelligence. Two staggering discoveries in a single glance.’
‘How is this possible?’
‘Well, why should it not be so? Life feeds on sharp energy gradients, places where structure emerges out of chaos and organisation arises.’
Not for the first time Lura wondered how much of the ancient learning he repeated he really understood.
And now she saw more gridworks. Some covered whole continents, and lines of light arrowed around the globe, and embedded in the lattice Lura thought she saw individual structures: pyramids, tetrahedrons and cubes.
‘But we knew they were here,’ she said. ‘Didn’t we, Brother? That was the whole point of our endless labour to shift the star kernels, and drop them into the Core of Cores. These were our gods, the inhabitants of the Core. And they rewarded us with oxygen, pumped out into the veil of nebulae . . .’
The Mole murmured, ‘This is Coton, speaking for Academician Vala. She says she’s surprised to find evidence of intelligence here, despite your beliefs. She thought you were just being superstitious about gods in the Core of Cores.’
Pesten flared. ‘Primitive we may be compared to you – we have forgotten much in this hostile place – but we are not fools!’
‘No, no . . . She apologises . . . That’s not the point she was trying to make. She imagined the oxygen venting was unrelated to your kernel-dropping. Like praying for rain, she says. Now she’s not so sure. However, she says it’s unlikely that whatever intelligence resides here needs your lumps of iron. Look at the scale of this Core; think of the masses involved. She thinks that the intelligences of the Core most likely took the infall of your star kernels as a signal that life persisted in the clouds of nebulae surrounding the Core – chemical life, like yours. And as long as it did, the Core beings have tried to support you. As if your kernels were messages, cries for help hurled into the Core. You were right that there were mighty minds in the Core, protecting life in your cosmos. It’s just that they weren’t gods . . .’
Lura was stunned by these ideas.
Pesten said, ‘To think of it – that creatures of this scale, and so different in every way, should take any notice of us.’
‘Empathy seems to be universal,’ said Coton, through the Mole. But Lura wasn’t sure what that word meant. ‘In the end, however, Vala says, this experiment in symbiosis will end. Symbiosis, grandmother, what does that mean? For the nebulae, all of them, are dying, as your stars go out.’
Lura knew this was true. But long after the trees and whales and sky-wolves were extinct, and all the stars and nebulae were dark, and the people were all gone, the gravitic entities would still swarm over their roiling black hole world. These creatures were the true denizens of this Beta cosmos; humans, soft, wet, dirty and flabby, were mere transient interlopers.
Of course when the ‘Big Crunch’ Coton had described came to this universe, even the gravitic gods of the Core of Cores would not survive.
There was a soft chime. Coton called through the Mole, ‘The spacetime stresses – the graviton flux—’
Pesten said, ‘Just tell us!’
‘My grandmother says we’re ready to try the transfer.’
Lura quailed from the metal box that lay beside her.
The engineers in universe Alpha had found a way to modify the Raft Supply Machine.
They had had Pesten connect it to the Mole with bits of wire pulled out of the stumps of one machine and thrust into orifices in the other. This had been enough, it seemed, for information to be sent chattering from universe Alpha via the Mole into the Supply Machine.