Authors: Gregory Benford
Furious Gulf (12 page)
Toby had decided it was an oddly colored star, nothing exceptional—until it began to bulge on one side. Blue-hot flares rose
all along its fiery edge. The bulge extended, grew banana yellow. It was as though the star was turning itself into a giant
egg. But to give birth to what?
Killeen turned and saw his son. Waving him over, the Cap’n said, “Even stars are prey for it.”
“Huh? What’s happening?”
“Sorry—I forget, watching this for so long, that the lives of stars are not so gripping to everyone.”
“I repeat—huh?” Toby was used to his father going off into distracted ramblings.
“This star is about to be gobbled up. See?”
Killeen’s fingers danced on a command plate. The view backed away from the star, whose side kept swelling like a fat man’s
belly at a feast. Then, entering the frame came an angry red smear, spreading like a stain across the wall. “The great disk,”
Killeen said. “There are Family legends of it. Some call it the Eye of the Eater.”
“Disk?” The viewpoint kept backing away.
Toby saw that the orange star was just at the edge of an immense plane of festering, smoldering fire. The plane was moving.
Streams of blood red and hot, phosphorescent orange curved away into the distance, slowly circling about some axis far out
of view. “Oh—the star’s getting sucked in?”
Killeen crossed his arms and watched the doomed sun stretch itself, now rippling with vagrant yellow plumes and dark purple
veins. “Yes—but not sucked in by the disk itself. The Eye of the Eater is matter that was sucked in before.”
Toby’s Isaac Aspect rasped disdainfully,
He is copying ancient lore. Not for a moment do I believe that he understands—
“Hey, who do you think you are?” Toby shot back in a subvocal whisper. “We all repeat what you Aspects and Faces tell us—we
sure don’t have time to learn all this tech-stuff!”
Still, if he would credit the classical sources who developed the theories, who made the dangerous measurements—
“Gimmie a break! We’d be nothing but dry bones if we waited for you Aspects to yammer on till you’re happy.” He stifled Isaac.
Killeen went on, “That mass, it’s stuff flowing inward, getting a bit closer every time it circles. So the disk is a highway,
that’s all. The villain in all this, him you can’t see.”
Toby got it now. “The black hole? It’s pulling this star apart?”
Killeen nodded. “A rare event, and we’re just in time for it. The hole swallows stars—but first it likes to chew ’em up.”
The panorama grew, retreating from the star, bringing more of the huge, churning disk into view. The Eye of the Eater was
a furious red at its rim, working with gales of burnt orange and fierce yellow. Each flaring pinprick was like a momentary
bonfire—but Toby reminded himself that these bonfires were bigger than whole planets.
As the vista broadened, he saw that the disk got brighter toward its center. Reds shifted into roiling greens and wrathful
purples. Even further in, a hard blue glare seethed. He could barely make himself look as the view swung inward toward eyehurting
brilliance. The disk revolved about a white-hot ball sizzling with blistering energy.
“Where’s . . . where’s the hole?”
Killeen pointed at the white ball. “In there—but we can’t see it, because everything’s so hot at the inner edge of that disk.”
Isaac put in,
I have conferred with High Chandelier Aspects—they are getting even harder to understand!—and translated their complaints.
I must say, I agree with them. Correct attribution is important!—otherwise we lose our past. Now, all this was discovered
in 3065 by Antonella Frazier, who even wrote an epic poem about it. A cosmic irony—“that the blackest of places wears a white
cloak.” I can dimly recall hearing of this great work, and . . .
He let the Aspect run a little, not really paying attention. Isaac and Killeen’s tech-Aspect were probably using the two living
humans to subtly compete. Did such chip-beings have jealousy, envy, spite? Of course, he and his father were slinging the
techtalk around pretty heavy, maybe trying to impress each other, too. The ancient Aspects were nested inside the newer ones,
to ease translation. Their ideas and feelings came through as well, an emotion/data stew.
Small human motives, all dwarfed by the huge scale of events. All this was beautiful, in a weird way, but hard to understand.
Toby jerked himself out of his reverie. “Why’s everything so hot?”
“Friction. All that stuff, orbiting tighter and tighter around the hole, it rubs up against other stuff—gas and dust and whatnot.
Heats up.”
Toby tried to take it all in. The disk glowered, like a red eye with a white bulb smack at the center. A monster’s glare.
The Eye of the Eater—only you couldn’t see the Eater, the blackest thing in the universe. As near as he could understand it,
a hole in space. Things drained into it. “So the hole eats stars, I get that, and likes to chew its food first. The disk is
all the stuff it’s ripped apart lately.”
“And it’s been eating ever since the galaxy was born.”
“You mean—that plate of gas—it was once stars?”
Killeen nodded distantly, staring at a particularly spectacular eruption. A blue-green geyser curled up from the disk like
a maddened snake, flicking yellow tongues.
“What better way to serve up food for the Eater, than on a plate?” A grim chuckle.
Toby looked around at the strained faces of the Bridge crew. Lieutenant Jocelyn had been waiting to speak, standing off to
the side as if she didn’t want to interrupt a conversation between father and son, even on the Bridge. She stepped smartly
forward, long hair wafting in the warm ship’s air, and said, “Cap’n, we’re getting more hull heating.”
Killeen instantly snapped out of his musing. “Near the danger line?”
“Not yet, but—”
“Coolant circulating to the max?”
“Yessir.”
Killeen scowled. “How’s our spin?”
“We’ve got all the independently moving sections of the ship at their top rotation.” Jocelyn’s full, muscular frame stayed
at strict attention, but Toby could see from her twitching fingers that she was worried.
They were spinning parts of
Argo
to smooth out the heat load. The ferocious rage of that brawling gas could singe their hull, and crisp up the human cargo
nicely. Toby recalled Quath’s gourmet comments about cracking open carefully cooked primate bones, savoring the marrow. He
shuddered.
Killeen smacked a fist into his palm, a momentary release. “I don’t see what more we—”
The Bridge crew turned as if one. They stared at the half-seen alien who stood absolutely still in the corridor outside.
Killeen was the first to speak, with sardonic humor. “I wondered when you would begin to spill your lore.”
Quath’s two eye-stalks rattled against the hatchway.
Killeen laughed. “Glad to know you care so much. Those antennas we erected—I suppose your new link with your ships works better?”
understand.>
“Well, we’re learning.” Killeen grinned. Toby could see his father relish the conversation, his face losing its lined tension.
Partially.
“We don’t need all that extra mass you lug around.”
“You look like you’ve grown some more eyes, since I saw you last time.”
visions in this wracked place. But I have no need for more legs, for we do not run from even the most fierce of dangers.>
Toby knew the word “Myriapodia” simply meant “many-legged,” but the funny trilling way Quath sounded the word carried an air
of awe and pride, too. Killeen had told Toby to get here in a hurry, then had ignored Quath completely. Toby was beginning
to see that Killeen had different ways of dealing with the alien, maybe better ones.
“This Besik Bay. You want to hide there, many-eyed?”
The crew murmured. Toby knew they all suspected that they were being used by the Podia for some murky purpose, and this brought
that question close to the surface again. But what choice did they have now?
Quath rattled her eye-stalks again.
“Ummm—diplomatic of you. But I asked what
you
think.”
Toby put in, “Besik? No Family of that name.”
Somehow Quath made the wall screens jump and swivel. They whirled around as the ship’s sensors sought a different target—and
locked on an inky blob, high above the glowering red disk.
Killeen gestured to Lieutenant Jocelyn. “Take us up that way.” He had always been one for quick decisions, and the Bridge
jumped to comply. Killeen turned back to Quath, his expression veiled. “What were your ancestors looking for here?”
“What kind of weapon?”
“Can’t say more than that?”
“Hell! Look, for Family Bishop True Center is a legend. Almost a holy place—only we don’t know
why
.”
“Yeasay?” Killeen frowned. “Whatever we did, way back then, it’s lost.”
Killeen stated moodily at the expanses. “For us, coming here—well, it’s like climbing the tallest mountain anybody ever saw.”
Killeen shrugged, as if sensing when he would learn no more. “Okay, we’ll cool our heels a little behind that cloud.”
Though ordinary crew seldom spoke on the Bridge without the Cap’n’s bidding, Toby decided to use his position as Cap’n’s son.
He could not resist probing further. “Quath, what made your ancestors leave?”
“Why? It’s a hellhole.”
“But there aren’t any mechs here now.”
“There are plenty on our tail,” Killeen observed mildly.
“So we hide?” Killeen asked, frowning.
Toby knew his father did not like to sneak by a challenge unless he absolutely had to. On the other hand, the Families had
been running for a long time, learning the elusive crafts, and knew the virtues of being missing.
Killeen shrugged again, as if he knew when he wasn’t going to get any more out of Quath. He tapped the control board. The
screens veered again, coming around to the strange, warped star—which wasn’t a star at all any more.
While they had been talking, the inflating fat-man’s belly had broken open. Now it spewed out white-hot streamers, the tortured
sun finally shredding. Erupting gas swirled away from the split star, twisting. It rushed to join the smoldering rim of the
great disk. As the view backed away, Toby saw the star as if it were a helpless animal, caught, struggling pointlessly, its
life being sucked out. Lumps of it streamed into the disk, setting off fresh orange explosions there.
Toby felt a chilling wonder mixed with fear. “How come the hole can rip up a whole star, this far out, and it’s so small we
can’t even see it?”
Killeen reached down and patted his son’s shoulder, and in his face Toby saw the same mix of emotions. “The way I understand
it, that hole is small, sure—but it’s got plenty of mass in it. That much, all compressed together, it makes strong tides.
The inner face of that star’s trying to orbit along one curve, see? Its back face, it’s a smidgen further out from the hole,
so it wants to orbit along a little-bit different orbit.”
“I guess. So?”
“Well, they can’t both go their separate ways and still hold together and be a star, right?” From Killeen’s half-distracted
gaze Toby knew he was getting coached by his tech Aspect. “But they can go their own way, if the star tears itself apart.
So when the tides get strong enough, that’s what it does. The tides just plain shred it, like a rag doll.”
Toby looked around. The whole Bridge crew was silent, watching their Cap’n. In their upturned faces Toby read hope and need,
sobered by the spectacle. Killeen’s wary smile reflected the glare of the agonized, dying sun.
In the quiet Quath spoke, her words carrying a faint hiss.
Killeen’s face wrinkled with worry. “So it’ll get hotter?”
Toby grinned. “I thought your kind looked but didn’t run.”
“Ummm. Sounds like an excuse to me, big-bug.”
<[Untranslatable].>
Besik Bay
T
oby didn’t like to take advantage of his being son of the Cap’n, but there were times when he couldn’t resist.