Destiny's Children - Coalescent. Part 49

Rosa briskly spun the screen back. "Tell it to the FBI. And in the meantime, this 'harmless' friend, this suspected bomber, thismurderer , is holed up inside the Crypt-andyou led him here."

"What do you expect me to do?"

"Come down there with me and get him out."

I hesitated. I dreaded walking deeper into this mess. But I knew I had no choice.

Rosa walked me to the high-speed elevators that would take us back into the downbelow. The doors slid open with a pneumatic sigh.

Once more I was swallowed up.

I stepped out into the now familiar crush.

Even as we hurried toward the scene of the crisis, I lifted my head and took deep breaths. The air was clammy and shallow, and my lungs pulled, trying to extract oxygen. But there was that powerful animal stink again, the musk of sweat and p.i.s.s, of blood and milk, so suffocating, and yet somehow so exhilarating.

I was full of doubts about the Order, full of conflicting emotions. I had listened to Peter's extraordinary arguments about eusociality and hives and Coalescents, a new form of humanity. And above all, stuck in my head, was the image of Lucia, a fifteen-year-old tortured by the exploitation of her fecundity by- well, bysomebody in this place, for some purpose, not her own. But for all that it was good to be back. I belonged here: walking down these dense corridors again, I seemed to feel it on some deep cellular level. However the Order was sending me signals, through body language or chimp grunts or scent or whatever the h.e.l.l, it was certainly getting through.

But the Crypt felt different today.

All those ageless female faces, and a few male, all with their smoky gray eyes, peered at me uncertainly, eyes wide, mouths downturned. I was sure that few of them would know anything about what was going on, but they picked up their cues from Rosa, and then from each other, and as we walked they all unthinkingly flinched away from me. That silent rejection hurt.

But even through this self-pitying ache, I noticed the Crypt wasquiet : people spoke, but softly, leaning to whisper in each others' ears. They even walked quietly, their feet padding gently on the floor. I listened for the hum of generators, the hiss and low roar of the air-conditioning systems, but could hear nothing.

"Silent running," I said to Rosa.

"What do you mean?"

"Just like a submarine, trying to evade the sonar of the surface ships. We're in a great, static, underground submarine . . ."

It struck me then that the Order, whatever its powers and wealth, being stuck immovably in this Crypt, this hole in the ground, was terribly vulnerable. No wonder Rosa had reacted so strongly to Peter's incursion. For the Crypt to be revealed was about the worst thing that could happen, because once exposed it would stay exposed. The silent running must be instinctive, I thought, a reaction bred in over generations. A great wave of fear and despondency must have rippled out through the tight-packed, touching, gossiping members of the Order, a wave of alarm but not of information, a wave that left silence and caution where it pa.s.sed.

We descended to Level 2 and hurried past the great galleries of hospital wards and dormitories.

Eventually we began to pa.s.s through quieter, darker corridors. I sensed we were moving out of the core of the sprawling complex, reaching areas I hadn't seen before. Perhaps the ventilation shaft Peter had used was old, long abandoned, unguarded.

At last we came to a wall, not of concrete or interior part.i.tion, but of tufa, honest, solid lava. I ran my hand along the wall. I felt oddly rea.s.sured to think that I wasn't in the middle of things anymore-that beyond my hand there were no more galleries and chambers, no morepeople , nothing but a tremendous ma.s.s of patient, silent rock.

A knot of people stood before a cleft in the rock wall, all Order members. The lighting here, coming from fluorescent lamps bolted crudely to the tufa wall, was spa.r.s.e and dim, and as they watched us approach, their faces, all so similar, seemed to float, disembodied, in the gloom. I recognized none of them. There were ten of them-only one was a man-but they were all tall and hefty looking inside their smocks. They were here for physical work, I thought, perhaps to wrestle Peter to the ground.

And they wereold , I realized with a shock; with crow's-feet eyes and sunken cheeks, they all showed far more visible signs of aging than I had seen in the Crypt before. Uneasily I remembered Peter's talk of aging ant warriors, of elderly mole rats sacrificed to the jackals; it was another unwelcome parallel.

Rosa spoke briskly to these guardians and came back to me. "He's still in there."

"Where?"

She jerked her thumb at the cleft in the rock.

I moved past her to take a look. The cleft was a crack in the tufa, barely wide enough for me to have squeezed into sideways. It looked as if it had been caused by a mild earthquake, and then widened by seeping water. The glow from the wall-mounted lamps didn't penetrate very far, and I cupped my hands over my eyes, peering into silent blackness.

Suddenly light flared in my face. I fell back, rubbing my eyes. "Ow.s.h.i.t."

A sardonic voice, made hollow by echoes, came drifting out of the cleft. "You took your time."

"h.e.l.lo, mate. How did you get yourself in there?"

"Let's just say it wasn't easy," he said gnomically.

"What are you doing?"

"Saving the future."

"We can't get him out," Rosa said to me. "The cleft is too narrow. We haven't been able to find the way he got in-presumably from above. We might get one or two people in from the front, but they could never get behind him to bring him out. And besides, we're afraid he might harm them."

I frowned. "Harm them? Harm them how? You think he's sitting in there with a revolver?"

Rosa said heavily, "Remember San Jose."

"Look, Rosa, I don't know why he's got himself stuck in a hole in the rock. But I can't see what harm he can do you in there. I mean, all you have to do is wait a few hours, or days even, and you'll starve him out. In fact you might have to if you want him to get through that gap."

"This isn't funny, George."

"Isn't it?" I felt a little light-headed.

"Talk to him. You say he's your friend. Fine. Find out what he's doing here, what he wants, what he intends. And then find a way to resolve this situation. Because if you don't,I will ."

I tried to read her. "Will you call the police? . . . You won't, will you? Or the FBI, or Interpol. You don't want to bring them here into the Crypt, despite the danger you perceive.What are you planning, Rosa?"

She said evenly, "I'm responsible for the safety of the Crypt. As is every member of the Order. I will do whatever it takes, at whatever cost, to ensure that safety. I suggest you make sure it doesn't come to that." In the gloom her face was hard, set-almost fanatical-I thought she had never looked less like me, or my parents.

I nodded, chilled. "I believe you."

I approached Peter's wall again.

"Don't listen to her," he said. "Don't let her whisper in your ear."

"Or overwhelm me with chimp pant-hoots or pheromones? . . ."

"George, just get out of here."

"Why?"

"It doesn't concern you. Just get away-"

"Of course it concerns me. That's my sister, standing over there. But that's not why I'm staying, Peter."

"Then why?"

"For you, you a.r.s.ehole."

He laughed, sardonic. "I didn't see you once in twenty years."

"But you were a good friend to my dad. Even if I didn't know about it until too late."

Silence for a while. When he spoke again, his tone was softer. "Okay, then. Do what you like. a.r.s.ehole yourself."

"Yes . . . Peter, we need to talk."

"About-"

"About San Jose."

He hesitated. "So you know about that."

"Interpol send their best. Peter, what happened over there?"

He sighed noisily. "You really want to know?"

"Tell me."

"I warn you now we will have to discuss black holes. Because that's what they were trying to build in that lab."

Even now, more spooky stuff. "Oh, for G.o.d's sake . . ."

The drones, unaware of the odd grammar of our relationship, stirred, baffled, nervous.

Peter began to describe "geometric optics." "A black hole is a s.p.a.ce-time flaw, a hole out of which nothing can escape, not even light. Black holes suck in light through having ultrapowerful gravity fields . . ."

Black holes in nature are formed by ma.s.sive collapsed stars, or by aggregates of matter at the centers of galaxies like ours-or they may have been formed in the extreme pressures of the Big Bang, the most tremendous crucible of all. It used to be thought that black holes, even microscopic ones, would be so ma.s.sive and would require such immense densities that to make or manipulate them was forever beyond human reach.

But that wisdom, said George, had turned out to be false. "Light is the fastest thing in the universe-as far as we know-which is why it takes the ma.s.sive gravity of a black hole to capture it. But if light were to move more slowly, then a more feeble trap might do the job."

Tense, with the gazes of the drones boring into me, I took the bait. "Fine. How can you slow down light?"

"Anytime light pa.s.ses through a medium it is slowed from its vacuum speed. Even in water it is slowed by about a quarter-still b.l.o.o.d.y fast, but that's enough to give you refraction effects."

Memories of O-level physics swam into my mind. "Like the way a stick in a stream will seem bent-"

"Yes. But in the lab you can do a lot better. Pa.s.s light through a vapor of certain types of atom and you're down to a few feet per second. And if you use a Bose-Einstein condensate-"

"A what?"

He hesitated. "Supercold matter. All the atoms line up, quantum-mechanically . . . It doesn't matter. The point is, light can be slowed tobelow walking pace . I saw the trials in that lab in San Jose. It's really quite remarkable."

"And then you can make your black hole."

"You can blow your slow-moving light around-even make it move backward. Photons, thrown around like paper planes in a Texas twister. To make a black hole you set up a vortex in your medium-a whirlpool. You just pull out the plug. And if the vortex walls are moving faster than your light stream, the light gets sucked into the center and can't escape, and you have your black hole."

"That's what these Californians were doing?"

"They were getting there," Peter said. "They hit practical problems. The condensate is a quantum structure, and it doesn't respond well to being spun around . . . But all this was fixable, in principle."

"Why would anybody want to do this?"

"That's obvious. Quantum gravity," he said.

"Of course," I said. I actually had to keep from laughing. I was talking to a crack in the wall, watched by ten differently evolved hive-mind drones and my own long-lost sister. "You know, on any other day this conversation would seem bizarre."

"Pay attention, double-oh seven," he said wearily.

Quantum gravity, it seems, is the Next Big Thing in physics. The two great theories of twentieth-century physics were quantum mechanics, which describes the very small, like atomic structures, and general relativity, which describes the very large, like the universe itself. They are both successful, but they don't fit together.

"The universe today is kind of separated out," said Peter. "Large and small don't interact too much- which is why quantum mechanics and relativity work so well. You don't find many places in nature where they overlap, where you can study quantum gravity effects, the predictions of a unified theory.

But the Black Hole Kit would be a tabletop gravity field. The San Jose people hoped, for instance, to explore whether s.p.a.ce-time itself is quantized, broken into little packets, as light is, as matter is."

I said heavily, "What I don't understand is why all this should cost anybody her life. How do you justify it, Peter? Omelettes and eggs?"

"You know I don't think like that, George."

"Then tell me why that lab was destroyed."

"You already know."

"Tell me anyhow."

"Because of the future. Humankind's future. And because of the war in Heaven."

All this was so like our bulls.h.i.t sessions in the park by the Forum. I could imagine his earnest face as he spoke, that big jaw, the small mouth, the beads of sweat on his brow, the half-closed eyes. But Rosa was watching me, skeptical, drawing her own conclusions, no doubt, about Peter's sanity. She twirled her finger.Hurry it up.

He reminded me of what he had told me, of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial life, and attempts to signal to it.

"Most of it was absurd," he whispered. "Quixotic. Like the plaques stuck on the side of Pioneer s.p.a.ce probes.They will fail through sheer statistics, because the chance of any sentient being picking up such objects is minuscule. We are surrounded by that tremendous unintentional ripple of radio noise, spreading out everywhere at lightspeed-nothing we can do about that now . . . But then, most perniciously, some signaling has been intentional, and designed to succeed. Such as using the big antenna at Arecibo to throw digital signals at the nearest stars . . ."

"Pernicious?"

"George, where was the debate? Were you consulted? Did you vote to have your whereabouts blasted to the universe? What right had these people to act on your behalf?"

"I can't say it keeps me awake at night."

"It does me," he said hoa.r.s.ely. "Weknow there is something out there waiting for us. The Kuiper Anomaly-long faded from the news-is still out there, orbiting silently. My seismic signals, the dark matter craft that decelerated and veered inside the Earth: more evidence.Signaling is dangerous. It must be. That is why the sky is so quiet. Whoever is out there has learned to keep quiet-or has been forced to be."

"Peter, I don't see what this has to do with the destruction of the black hole lab."

He sighed again. "George, there are some SETI proponents who say that our feeble attempts to signal so far are futile. Plaques on clunky s.p.a.cecraft, radio signals-all of this is laughably primitive technology.

Jungle drums. It won't attract the attention of anybody advanced enough to matter."

"Right. And the kind of technologythey will use-"