“We’d have to fly between the two holes to make that loop.”
“Uh huh.”
“Jun Davd says they’re only a few diameters apart at this stage. And they’re spiraling closer. The final dive could happen at any moment.”
“He thinks we have enough time to squeak through.”
Bram’s heart was pounding. “He said that at the present high rate of spin, the static limit is well above the edge of the accretion disk. The region between them must be very weird. We could get sucked into the hole with no warning. Into either one of the holes.”
“Yah. That’s why he says it’s your decision.”
Bram was going to ask for an estimate of their chances. But that would be begging the question—asking Jao and Jun Davd to make the decision.
“Do it,” he said.
Jao nodded and crawled off on his elbows and knees to confer with Smeth.
The ghost of a star drifted by, a ball of red so dull as to be at the limits of visibility. The universe outside the long observation wall was no longer blind; it was filled with a meaningless red fog that showed a suggestion of vast billows, specks, twisting sheets. The phantom star cleared a tunnel ahead of it, but that was an illusion; actually, the star was going the other way, and the tunnel, of course, was its wake.
“Can you see it?” Jun Davd’s voice said over the loudspeaker.
“Yes,” Bram called to the directional pickup.
“Interesting,” Jun Davd said. “I wasn’t sure it would be visible. That shows you how chaotic the galaxy’s final act has become. Imagine the odds against encountering a fellow traveler at anything like a fraction of our relativistic speed! I wish I had a window here.”
“There isn’t that much to see, Jun Davd. Just red mist.”
“Yes, a pale reflection of events behind us. Supernova explosions proceeding outward, perhaps. Possibly local turbulence in those expanding jets, sending shock waves in the opposite direction. Puffs of stripped matter, relativistic electrons, moving inward to add to the mischief. The death throes of a galaxy.”
Mim’s hand sought Bram’s. Her floor mat was pulled up close to his. He had tried to make her nap, but she was unable to. The party dress was bedraggled. It had been a long time since she or anyone else had eaten; Marg and her helpers had had to give up when acceleration increased.
“Easy,” Bram said. “Remember, the Father World is still alive at this moment. Nothing will happen to them for almost fifty thousand years.”
“Oh, Bram, it’s so awful! Isn’t there anything we can do?”
He shrugged. “You heard Jun Davd. The first shells of radiation are already on their way. The big one will be right behind us. We can use the Message beacon to send a warning as soon as we swing around the core, but our warning would reach them only a few years before the radiation front did. It would almost be cruel. Then what? Suppose they managed to fit out a few space arks with ramjet drives to save a few thousand Nar and humans. They have no time to build up their gamma to the point we have, and they can’t outrun the expanding shell. They can’t reach another galaxy, anyway, not in a million years of subjective time, because they can’t use the H-II in the inner galaxy to accelerate the way we did.”
“It’s all so ironic,” she said bitterly. “We were supposed to ensure the survival of the Nar species. We came all this way. And now it’s all gone for nothing. Instead of broadcasting their Message, all we can do is to give them their death sentence.”
He squeezed her hand. There was absolutely nothing he could say.
The people around him, fanned out on mats in front of the forward viewscreen, didn’t have much to say, either. Where two people lay together, they might murmur at each other at intervals, but mostly they watched the view painted by Jun Davd’s computer.
Other screens around the bridge, and the screens in the living quarters where the bulk of the people lay waiting it out, had now been plugged into Jun Davd’s program. Some of the people watching with Bram and Mim had access to their own screens, but there seemed to be a compulsion to watch in groups.
“Hold on, everybody,” Jao’s voice said over the loudspeakers. “We just have to give it one more nudge.”
The tree lurched. Tortured wood fibers groaned. Something somewhere gave with a snap. Interior lights flickered.
“How did Yggdrasil come through that?” Bram asked the tree systems center through the portable console on the floor next to his head.
The voice of Jao’s granddaughter, Enyd, answered. “We’re all right. We lost a few minor branches—all deadwood, anyway. Yggdrasil’s reacting to the increased g-forces by acting to strengthen its compartments, but it won’t last long enough to cause any serious imbalance.”
“How are you people doing in there?” he asked.
Her voice softened, lost its formality. “We’re all right, Captain,” she said.
He switched off. The view in the forward screen was astonishing. A maelstrom of star-stuff churned around and around, fast enough to see. The private whirlpool of the satellite hole could be seen at this flattened angle of approach as an eddy in the main vortex—an eddy that itself circled around the main swirl of gases, dragging streamers with it. The tilt of its precession gave a peek into its heart of brightness every time it came around. Rags of plasma glittering with embedded stars enclosed the double whirlpool like a disintegrating bird’s nest made of fire.
The background stars were squashed, stretched around the immediate vicinity of the holes, their light bent. A circle of splashed stars followed the smaller hole around, snapping back when it had passed.
Nowhere could Bram see a path through the torrent of radiance. The concentric swirls of gas seemed to make one bean-shaped disk whose irregular contour, twisting with the secondary hole, smoothed out almost to an oval with distance from the dual center.
The sky around that cosmic gullet—if you could call it a sky—was crowded with stars of every possible color, jammed so closely together that in places the blackness of space seemed to be nothing more than pavement showing through. Gigantic irregular blobs of glowing gas wandered among the stars, grazing on them. Every once in a while, the flash of a supernova explosion, speeded up twenty thousand times, could be seen through an en-gorged blob. The blobs had an average drift toward the black holes; the ones closest to the double maelstrom bulged yearningly toward it.
A cloud rushed toward them. “Hold on again,” Jao’s voice said. “We’re going through.”
The tree shook as the fields compensated. Weight fluctuated. Bram hoped nobody was moving about; otherwise, there might be broken bones that couldn’t be attended to for some hours. Starfog enveloped them, dimming the fire ahead but not hiding it. Violet stars bobbed by, bloating themselves on the feast of gas; their violet color was the computer program’s translation of the x-rays kindled by that rain of starmist.
Outside the clear elastic windows, the cloud manifested itself only as a dull red flicker—random flashes caused by encounters of gas molecules with relativistic electrons and orphaned protons that happened to be traveling in the same direction as Yggdrasil.
They broke through the cloud a minute later, into the awful radiance of the galaxy’s inner heart. The whirlpool was just ahead, a roaring cataract of flame.
“Here we go!” Jao’s voice said.
An enormous force seized the tree. Abruptly, weight was gone. Yggdrasil’s acceleration was insignificant within that tremendous grip; it was like rowing upstream against a waterfall.