“Yes. What makes them interesting is that they are traveling abreast, in formation, along a line 6.1 light-years long. Straight as an arrow. The interior omega is two light-years from the end of the line.”
She waited, apparently expecting Hutch to respond. “You’re suggesting,” she said, “there’s one missing.”
“Exactly. We know these things tend to travel in orchestrated groups. Either the interior cloud should be in the middle, or there should be a cloud two light-years from the other end.”
“The missing cloud—” said Jon.
“Would have passed through this area. Three hundred years ago.”
They talked about putting everyone into the Preston for the remainder of the voyage. Let the AI do the navigation for the McAdams. There was a risk in doing that: If a glitch showed up somewhere, a cable came loose, a short developed in the wiring, there’d be nobody to fix it, and they’d lose the ship. The chance of such an event was remote, but it could happen. Matt argued against the idea, offered to ride alone if Jon wanted to join Hutch and Antonio. But he explained he felt responsible for the McAdams. She thought maybe he liked being on the bridge, and thought about suggesting they ride on his ship, but her instincts told her not to do it. Maybe she also liked being on the bridge.
I’ll never understand Hutch. She’s one of the most optimistic people I know, but she’s convinced we’re all going to hell in a handcart. I asked her tonight whether she really thinks civilizations can’t survive long term. She looked straight at me and asked whether I’d give a monkey a loaded gun.
Chapter 31
There was a possibility the flight to Tenareif would be nonproductive, for the simple reason they might not be able to find the black hole. It had been detected by its gravitational effects on nearby stars. No companion was known to exist. If that was indeed the case, and there was no matter nearby, no dust or hydrogen or incoming debris to light the thing up, it would be invisible. Nothing more than a deeper darkness in the night. And looking for it would require a risk Hutch wasn’t prepared to take. Furthermore, there’d be no point in it anyhow since, even if they found it, there’d be nothing to see.
If the outside universe was about to acquire a flavor of weirdness, the climate inside the Preston had also changed. Not dramatically. Not in ways that Hutch could have explained. Antonio remained upbeat and encouraging. He could sit for hours trading barbs and gags, describing misadventures while trying to cover political events, natural disasters, and even occasional armed rebellions. “Got shot at once, in the Punjab. You believe that? Somebody actually tried to kill me. I was doing an interview with a local warlord and got in the way of an assassin.”
“You didn’t get hit, I hope?”
“In the hand.” He showed her a burn scar. “She—it was a woman—wanted a clear shot, and I was in the way. It was a bad moment.”
“I guess.”
“I mean, it’s got a special kind of significance, knowing that someone, a perfect stranger, wants to take your life.”
“Well,” Hutch said, “at least it wasn’t personal. She wasn’t after you. She just wanted to clear the area.”
“You can say that. It felt personal to me.”
“Why did she want him dead?”
“You’d think it was political, right?”
“Sure.”
“That she was from an oppressed group of some sort?”
“She wasn’t?”
“She was a government worker who’d been terminated. She got the warlord confused with the local bosses and tried to take him out. She should have been after the chief of the tax bureau.”
“Incredible.”
“No wonder they booted her.”
But if Antonio remained the same, the atmosphere had nevertheless changed. Maybe it was her. There was less reading and game-playing and VR. The climate had become more personal, the sense of isolation more acute. Rudy had been simply one of her two passengers during the first two legs of the flight. Now, with him gone, he’d become something infinitely more, a companion, a reflection of her own soul, an anchor in a turbulent time.
They talked about Rudy every day, how they would see that his memory was kept, how he would have been overjoyed at the poetry in the Sigma Hotel Book. How they missed him.
Hutch even began listening to country music, which she’d never done before. Years behind everybody else in her generation, she discovered Brad Wilkins, who always sang about moving on, and about the darkness outside the train windows.
When Antonio suggested they were becoming morose, that they should try to put the Sigma Hotel staircase behind them, Hutch agreed but really thought it was best to talk it out. Gradually, as the days passed, politics and black holes began to dominate the conversation. Rudy receded.
Three weeks and two days after leaving Sigma 2711, they arrived in the area that was home to Tenareif, roughly one and a half light-years from the position of the black hole.
They did a second jump, and, when they came out, Phyl announced immediately that she could see the target. “Take a look,” she said.
She put it on-screen: a luminous ring.
“That’s the accretion disk,” said Antonio. “It circles the black hole.”
“If not for the extra shielding,” said Phyl, “we wouldn’t want to come this close.”
“That bad, Phyllis?”
“Very high levels of X-rays and gamma rays. Higher than theory predicts.”
“I guess they’ll have to revise the theory.” She saw a second object, glowing dully nearby. A planet. With an atmosphere. It looked like a moon seen through a haze. “So it does have a companion.”
“Yes, it would seem so.”
It wasn’t a planet. The thing was a brown dwarf, a star not massive enough to light up. “It’s about eight times as massive as Jupiter,” said Phyl.
“Anything else in the system?”
“Not as far as I can see.”
Hutch took them in closer. Angled them so they were able to look down on the accretion disk. It was a swirl of dazzling colors, of scarlet and gold and white. The ring was twisted and bent, an enormous tumbling river, dragged this way and that by the immense tidal effects, simultaneously brilliant and dark as if the rules of physics shifted and melted in the flow.
Antonio sat beside her, his notebook in his lap. “No way to describe it,” he said.
A light mist was being sucked off the surface of the brown dwarf. It spiraled out into the sky, a cosmic corkscrew, aimed at the black hole, until it connected with the accretion disk.
“It’s feeding the accretion disk,” said Antonio. “That’s what lights it up. If the brown dwarf weren’t there, there’d be no accretion disk.”
“And we wouldn’t be able to see the hole,” said Hutch.
“That’s correct.”
“It’d be kind of dangerous, navigating through here,” she said.
“I’d say so.”
The dwarf writhed like a living creature. “How long will this process take?” Hutch asked. “Before the dwarf collapses and the lights go out?”
“Difficult to estimate. Probably millions of years.”