Collette’s stare is boring through me, she has gone a little rigid. The sensation of my skin makes me shift in my seat.
“I have to turn you down,” I say nervously, though she has made me feel somehow obligated. “Since Massimo died, I haven’t much felt the stomach for chance like that. You remember Massimo Giroti, Director Steiner.”
“You must call me Eva. Eva,” she says. Now I see her own nervousness; her eyes are red, twitching slightly. “I suspect he died as he would have preferred. Doesn’t the thought of how you might die excite you, Rawley?”
“No,” I tell her, my skin crawling, “not at all. And something tells me Massimo would rather be alive.”
She shrugs, her smile gone. “Pity you won’t. They are such sleek machines, Rawley. You’re making it very frustrating for me.”
“Answer my question,” I say. “Just how is it that you know about my orders? Just who are you?”
“Come to the bay,” she says after a moment, says with a smile for everyone. Then she looks at me with intense focus. “I do want to talk with you.”
“Say what’s on your mind,” I answer.
“I will,” she says after a long moment, says flatly. But then she wheels and walks away.
Once she’s well settled at her own table, I ask Collette what’s on the east end of the island.
“We are. Or were,” she says. “That’s where the cabana is. And there’s the bird preserve on the island offshore, the one they call Chinaman’s Hat. But she said the west end, Rawley, that’s where a bay is. Please don’t.”
“I heard what she said. That woman makes me nervous. No—and especially not in her boats.”
“God, she scares the hell out of me,” Tonio says quietly, his voice hushed in the way one speaks in the presence of a corpse. “How could you talk to her that way? What people say about her!”
“If we take off for that island this afternoon, say in a Zodiac, bring along Werhner… That island looks like a place to dive. Will we be off limits? Could we get away with it?”
Collette considers the question. “You can dive near it on an aquaplease program,” she says. “I think we could get away with landing—look, they’re pretty lax here. This is one place service personnel don’t much care about and security’s… well, security’s lazy.”
Beyond Erica, who begins to tell me much the same thing, lithe young women begin to slip among the tables, dancing to Balinese gamelan music, graceful as deer, finger cymbals tinkling like wind chimes. At her table, seated, Eva Steiner is keeping time to the music with her heel on the opposite woman’s outstretched leg.
An hour after we leave Erica and Tonio in the cool shade of the gardens, we’ve picked up Werhner from the ship and loaded a boat with the help of an obese Polynesian man at the boathouse. Werhner, Collette, and I are slipping over the small incoming swells in a four-man Zodiac, headed toward Chinaman’s Hat. We wind up going out past the first reef, Collette in the bow hanging on with both hands, laughing as we punch through the surf. The salty air and the spray are invigorating, the unhazed sun hot on my back as I maneuver the light boat lifting and falling with the swells. Werhner steadies the tanks; he’s got some of his own gear from Guam as well.
The windward side of Chinaman’s Hat turns out to be fully hollowed out, a small valley formed by prevailing weather, absolutely desolate. A white beach is at the mouth of the valley, protected by another reef farther out. Well offshore, Werhner puts on his gear and slips into the water to swim in. We power in the rest of the way, pull the boat up on the sand.
I hit the toggles on the electronics built into the center seat. Someone is paging me from the resort—my guess is Eva Steiner—has been paging me off and on for the last ten minutes.
Collette watches me unplugging the battery. “You mean business,” she says.
“I didn’t come here to be bothered,” I say, and look around the spot, what a spot. From here the resort has entirely disappeared. Pristine beach all to ourselves, a thick grove of coconut palms and sprawling sea grape leads up the small valley. A small fresh-water stream drains to the ocean two hundred meters away, then the ridge shoulders over the sand.
I can see the bright red of Werhner’s diving flag bobbing with his float on the swells; it appears, disappears, appears in the blue. The sun is booming at two o’clock, absolutely dazzling, a white-hot specter I can feel in my bones, tingling on my skin. The news about Guam is finally sinking in; I feel lighter, find myself starting to think ahead to what I might do when this trip is over. A trip to South America, I think?
“We won’t be able to tell what time it is,” Collette says amiably as she unloads the mats and the cooler.
“Best news I’ve heard all day,” I laugh.
White beach, warm sand, the surf a low roar since the tide’s come up. There are a few seabirds here, skimming the ocean, wheeling overhead to nesting sites on the rocky slopes behind us. We’ve had to move up the beach because of the rising tide, camp now on a cleared patch above the high-tide line. Collette’s pouring the last of our two bottles of champagne, Werhner lies flat on his back looking up into the sky. I’m still wet, just out of the diving gear. My ears ring slightly and I have a mild sense of unreality as I squat down, dripping, at the corner of the straw mat.
“Black holes,” Werhner says to the sky. “The most interesting phenomenon to a speculative mind. Rawley wisely just flew the ship. I think I began to think too much about them. I haven’t been the same since. Well, neither has he.”
“There’s something I don’t quite understand,” Collette says, passing Werhner a paper cup of warm champagne. “Rawley mentioned that within a black hole, a traveler, assuming there’s the slightest chance he’d live, would be free in time. Could you explain that?”
“That’s a theoretical premise based on what black holes do to light,” Werhner says, up on an elbow. “A black hole is so dense that it attracts rather than emanates light—and once you reverse the physics of light, you reverse the physics of space and time. Here we’re free in space—we can go back to the cabana, walk along the beach, go wherever we’d like. On the other hand, we’re trapped in time—we can’t go backward into the past or forward into the future.”
“Yes,” Collette says.
“Reverse the physics for a black hole and you find yourself like light trapped in its gravity field, trapped in space; but free in time instead, since time depends on the movement of light.”
“Feeling champagne,” Collette laughs. “Still, you’d be crushed, wouldn’t you, by its density, your own gravity? What did you call that state, Rawley? Naked singularity. You’d be pulled to the center of the collapsing black hole and crushed beyond the smallest particle of matter. Staggering to imagine.”
As Collette hands me my champagne I tell her about ring singularity, the kind of naked singularity exhibited by spinning black holes. Because they spin, their naked singularity is expressed along their pole axes. And presumably, along the equator, if the black hole were large enough, a traveler could enter and survive, with enough power to orbit within. One theory suggests passing through. “Though if he did pass through, a traveler would find himself in another universe, one that shares with his universe the identical black hole. And that’s not exactly passing through.”
“Or just be pulsed out somewhere, maybe, pure energy,” Werhner says, pushing back his hair. “I don’t agree that if the Daedalus had gotten into the rotational black hole we were surveying, we’d have wound up in another universe. Vaporized and pulsed out, maybe. Levsky’s idea—Levsky did the physics—is that in the right kind of black hole, with just the right orbit, you’d be caught up in some kind of loop, free in time, so your experience of the loop would be your experience of… Dead enough, Levsky used to say. Stone-cold dead.”