Timon said, “Be nice.”
The Dive team had decided against any parting of the clones; their frozen snapshots would be incorporated into the blueprint for Cartan Null without ever being run outside Chandrasekhar. When Gisela had told Prospero this, he’d been appalled, but he’d cheered up almost immediately; it left him all the more room to invent some ritual farewell for the travelers, without being distracted by the truth.
The whole team did gather in the control scape, though, along with Prospero and Cordelia, and a few dozen friends. Gisela stood apart from the crowd as Vikram counted down to the deadline. On “ten,” she instructed her exoself to clone her. On “nine,” she sent the snapshot to the address being broadcast by an icon for the Cartan Null file—a stylized set of counter-rotating light beams—hovering in the middle of the scape. When the tag came back confirming the transaction, she felt a surge of loss; the Dive was no longer part of her own linear future, even if she thought of the clone as a component of her extended self.
Vikram shouted exuberantly, “Three! Two! One!” He picked up the Cartan Null icon and tossed it into a map of the spacetime around Chandrasekhar. This triggered a gamma-ray burst from the polis to a probe with an eight-M orbit; there, the data was coded into nanomachines designed to re-create it in active, photonic form—and those nanomachines joined the stream cascading into the hole.
On the map, the falling icon veered into a “motionless” vertical world line as it approached the two-M shell. Successive slices of constant time in the static frame outside the hole never crossed the horizon, they merely clung to it; by one definition, the nanomachines would take forever to enter Chandrasekhar.
By another definition, the Dive was over. In their own frame, the nanomachines would have taken less than one-and-a-half milliseconds to fall from the probe to the horizon, and not much longer to reach the point where Cartan Null was launched. And however much subjective time the Divers had experienced, however much computing had been done along the way, the entire region of space containing Cartan Null would have been crushed into the singularity a few microseconds later.
“If the Divers tunneled out of the hole, there’d be a paradox, wouldn’t there?” Gisela turned; she hadn’t noticed Cordelia behind her. “Whenever they emerged, they wouldn’t have fallen in yet—so they could swoop down and grab the nanomachines, preventing their own births.” The idea seemed to disturb her.
Gisela said, “Only if they tunneled out close to the horizon. If they appeared further away—say here in Cartan, right now—they’d already be too late. The nanomachines have had too much of a head start; the fact that they’re almost standing still in our reference frame doesn’t make them an easy target if you’re actually chasing after them. Even at light-speed, nothing could catch them from here.”
Cordelia appeared to take heart from this. “So escape isn’t impossible?”
“Well…” Gisela thought of listing some of the other hurdles, but then she began to wonder if the question was about something else entirely. “No. It’s not impossible.”
Cordelia gave her a conspiratorial smile. “Good.”
Prospero cried out, “Gather round! Gather round now and hear The Ballad of Cartan Null!” He created a podium, rising beneath his feet. Timon sidled up to Gisela and whispered, “If this involves a lute, I’m sending my senses elsewhere.”
It didn’t; the blank verse was delivered without musical accompaniment. The content, though, was even worse than Gisela had feared. Prospero had ignored everything she and the others had told him. In his version of events, “Charon’s passengers” entered “gravity’s abyss” for reasons he’d invented out of thin air: to escape, respectively, a failed romance/vengeance for an unspeakable crime/the ennui of longevity; to resurrect a lost flesher ancestor; to seek contact with “the gods.” The universal questions the Divers had actually hoped to answer—the structure of spacetime at the Planck scale, the underpinnings of quantum mechanics—didn’t rate a mention.
Gisela glanced at Timon, but he seemed to be taking the news that his sole version had just fled into Chandrasekhar to avoid punishment for an unnamed atrocity extremely well; there was disbelief on his face, but no anger. He said softly, “This man lives in Hell. Mucous on the face plate is all he’ll ever see.”
The audience stood in silence as Prospero began to “describe” the Dive itself. Timon stared at the floor with a bemused smile. Tiet wore an expression of detached boredom. Vikram kept peeking at a display behind him, to see if the faint gravitational radiation emitted by the inflowing nanomachines was still conforming to his predictions.
It was Sachio who finally lost control and interjected angrily, “Cartan Null is some ghostly image of a scape, full of ghostly icons, floating through the vacuum, down into the hole?”
Prospero seemed more startled than outraged by the interruption. “It is a city of light. Translucent, ethereal…”
The owl in Sachio’s skull puffed its feathers out. “No photon state would look like that. What you describe could never exist, and even if it could it would never be conscious.” Sachio had worked for decades on the problem of giving Cartan Null the freedom to process data without disrupting the geometry around it.
Prospero spread his arms in a conciliatory gesture. “An archetypal quest narrative must be kept simple. To burden it with technicalities—”
Sachio inclined his head briefly, fingertips to forehead, downloading information from the polis library. “Do you have any idea what archetypal narratives are?”
“Messages from the gods, or from the depths of the soul; who can say? But they encode the most profound and mysterious—”
Sachio cut him off impatiently. “They’re the product of a few chance attractors in flesher neurophysiology. Whenever a more complex or subtle story was disseminated through an oral culture, it would eventually degenerate into an archetypal narrative. Once writing was invented, they were only ever created deliberately by fleshers who failed to understand what they were. If all of antiquity’s greatest statues had been dropped into a glacier, they would have been reduced to a predictable spectrum of spheroidal pebbles by now; that does not make the spheroidal pebble the pinnacle of the artform. What you’ve created is not only devoid of truth, it’s devoid of aesthetic merit.”
Prospero was stunned. He looked around the room expectantly, as if waiting for someone to speak up in defense of the Ballad.
No one made a sound.
This was it: the end of diplomacy. Gisela spoke privately to Cordelia, whispering urgently: “Stay in Cartan! No one can force you to leave!”
Cordelia turned to her with an expression of open astonishment. “But I thought—” She fell silent, reassessing something, hiding her surprise.
Then she said, “I can’t stay.”
“Why not? What is there to stop you? You can’t stay buried in Athena—” Gisela caught herself; whatever bizarre hold the place had on her, disparaging it wouldn’t help.
Prospero was muttering in disbelief now, “Ingratitude! Base ingratitude!” Cordelia regarded him with forlorn affection. “He’s not ready.” She faced Gisela, and spoke plainly. “Athena won’t last forever. Polises like that form and decay; there are too many real possibilities for people to cling to one arbitrary sanctified culture, century after century. But he’s not prepared for the transition; he doesn’t even realize it’s coming. I can’t abandon him to that. He’s going to need someone to help him through.” She smiled suddenly, mischievously. “But I’ve cut two centuries off the waiting time. If nothing else, the trip did that.”