“Ravishing,” Dors said.
“See Andromeda? It looks nearly as close.”
The twin spiral hung above them. Its lanes of clotted dust framed stars azure and crimson and emerald. “Here comes our connection,” Hari warned.
This wormhole intersection afforded five branches. Three black spheres orbited closely together, blaring bright by their quantum rim radiation. Two cubic wormholes circled farther out. Hari knew that one of the rare variant forms was cubical, but he had never seen any. Two together suggested that they were born at the edge of galaxies, but such matters were beyond his shaky understanding.
“We go-there.” Dors pointed a laser beam at one of the cubes, guiding the pencil ship.
They thrust toward the smaller cube, gingerly inching up. The wormyard here was automatic and no one hailed them.
“Tight fit,” Hari said nervously.
“Five fingers to spare.”
He thought she was joking, then realized that she was underestimating the fit. At this less-used wormhole intersection slow speeds were essential. Good physics; unfortunate economics. The slowdown cut the net flux of mass, making them backwater crossroads.
He gazed at Andromeda to take his mind off the piloting. Narrow wormholes did not emerge in other galaxies for arcane reasons of quantum gravity. Extremely narrow ones might, but if the throat had other mass coming through, the squeeze wave could kill. Few had ever ventured down them in search of extragalactic emergent points.
Except, that is, for Steffno’s Ride, a legendary risky expedition which had popped out in the galaxy cataloged as M87. Steffno had gotten data on the spectacular jet emerging from the black hole at M87’s center, majestic strands twisting into helical arabesques. The lone rider had not tarried, returning only seconds before the worm snapped shut in a spray of radiant particles.
No one knew why. Something in wormhole physics discouraged extragalactic adventures.
The cubic worm took them quickly to several wormyards in close orbit about planets. One Hari recognized as a rare type with an old but ruined biosphere. Like Panucopia, it supported advanced life-forms. On most inhabitable worlds early explorers had found algae mats that never developed further.
“Why no interesting aliens, then?” Hari mused while Dors dealt with the local wormyard Grey Men.
Occasionally Dors reminded him that she was, after all, an historian. “The shift from one-celled to many-celled creatures took billions of years, theory says. We just came from a fast, tougher biosphere, that’s all.”
“We came from a planet with at least one big moon, too.”
“Why?” she asked.
“We’ve got repeating patterns of twenty-eight days built in. Female menstruation, for instance-unlike pans, incidentally. We’re designed by biology. We made it, these biospheres didn’t. There are plenty of ways to kill a world. Glaciers advancing when an orbit alters. Asteroids slamming in, bam-bam-bam!” He slapped the side of the pencil ship loudly. “Chemistry of the atmosphere goes wrong. It runs away into a hothouse planet, or a frozen-out world.”
“I see.”
“Humans are tougher-and smarter-than anybody. We’re here, they aren’t.”
“Who says?”
“Standard knowledge, ever since the sociotheorist, Kampfbel-”
“I’m sure you’re right,” she said quickly.
Something in her voice made him hesitate-he loved a good argument-but by then they were slipping through the excruciating tight fit of the cube. The edges glowed like a lemony Euclidean construction-and then they popped into an orbit above a black hole.
He watched the enormous energy-harvesting disks glow with fermenting scarlets and virulent purples. The Empire had stationed great conduits of magnetic field around the hole. These sucked and drew in interstellar dust clouds. The dark cyclones narrowed toward the brilliant accretion disk around the hole. Radiation from the friction and infalling was in turn captured by vast grids and reflectors. The crop of raw photon energy itself became trapped and flushed into the waiting maws of wormholes. These carried the flux to distant worlds in need of cutting lances of light, for the business of planet-shaping, world-raking, moon-carving.
But even amid this spectacle he could not forget the tone in Dors’ voice. She knew something he did not. He wondered…
Nature, some philosophers held, was itself only before humanity touched it. We did not then belong in the very idea of Nature, and so we could experience it only as it was disappearing. Our presence alone was enough to make Nature into something else, a compromised impersonation.
These ideas had unexpected implications. One world named Arcadia had been deliberately left with a mere caretaker population of humans, partly because it was difficult to reach. The nearest wormhole mouth was half a light-year away. An early emperor-so obscure his or her very name was lost-had decreed that the forests and plains of the benign planet be left “original.” But ten thousand years later, a recent report announced, some forests were not regenerating, and plains were giving way to scrubby brush.
Study showed that the caretakers had taken too much care. They had put out wild fires, suppressed species transfer. They had even held the weather nearly constant through adjustments in how much sunlight the ice poles reflected back into space.
They had tried to hold onto a static Arcadia, so the forest primeval was revealed as, in part, a human product. They had not understood cycles. He wondered how such an insight might fold into psychohistory…
Forget theory for the moment, he reminded himself. It was a fact that the Galaxy had seemed empty of high alien life-forms in the early, pre-Empire times. With so many fertile planets, did he truly believe that only humanity had emerged into intelligence?
Somehow, surveying the incomprehensible wealth of this lush, immense disk of stars…somehow, Hari could not believe it.
But what was the alternative?
8.
The Empire’s twenty-five million worlds supported an average of only four billion people per planet. Trantor had forty billion. A mere thousand light years from Galactic Center, it had seventeen wormhole mouths orbiting within its solar system-the highest density in the Galaxy. The Trantorian system had originally held only two, but a gargantuan technology of brute interstellar flight had tugged the rest there to make the nexus.
Each of the seventeen spawned occasional wild worms. One of these was Dors’ target.
But to reach it, they had to venture where few did.
“The Galactic Center is dangerous,” Dors said as they coasted toward the decisive wormhole mouth. They curved above a barren mining planet. “But necessary.”
“Trantor worries me more-” The jump cut him off
—and the spectacle silenced him.
The filaments were so large the eye could not take them in. They stretched fore and aft, shot through with immense luminous corridors and dusky lanes. These arches yawned over tens of light-years. Immense curves descended toward the white-hot True Center. There matter frothed and fumed and burst into dazzling fountains.
“The black hole,” he said simply.
The small black hole they had seen only an hour before had trapped a few stellar masses. At True Center, a million suns had died to feed gravity’s gullet.
The orderly arrays of radiance were thin, only a light-year across. Yet they sustained themselves along hundreds of light-years as they churned with change. Hari switched the polarized walls to see in different frequency ranges. Though hot and roiling in the visible, human spectrum, the radio revealed hidden intricacy. Threads laced among convoluted spindles. He had a powerful impression of layers, of labyrinthine order descending beyond his view, beyond simple understanding.