Brin, David - SS - What Continues And What Fails.pdf

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WHAT CONTINUES … AND WHAT FAILS …
by
David Brin
Black. As deep as night is black between the stars.
Deeper than that. Night isn’t really black, but a solemn, utter shade of red.
As black, then, as Tenembro Nought, which drinks all colour, texture, substance, from around it, giving back only
its awful depth of presence.
But no. She had found redness of an immeasurably profound hue, emerging from that awful pit in space. Not even
the singularity was pure enough to typify true blackness. Nor was Isola’s own dark mood, for that matter – although,
since the visitors’ arrival, she had felt smothered, robbed of illumination.
In comparison, a mere ebony lustre of skin and hair seemed too pallid to dignify with the name ‘black’. Yet, those
traits were much sought after on Pleasence World, one of many reasons a fetch ship had come all this way to claim the
new life within her.
The foetus might know blackness , Isola thought, laying a hand over her curved abdomen, feeling a stirring there.
She purposely used cool, sterile terms, never calling it ‘baby’, or a personalised ‘she’. Anyway, when is a foetus’s
sensory innervation up to ‘knowing’ anything at all? Can one who has never seen light comprehend blackness?
Leaning towards the dimly illuminated field-effect mirror, Isola touched its glass-smooth, silky cool,
pseudo-surface. Peering at her own reflection, she found at last what she was looking for.
That’s it. Where light falls, never to emerge again.
She brought her face closer still, centring on one jet pupil, an inky well outlined by a dark iris – the universe
wherein she dwelt.
“It is said nothing escapes from inside a black hole, but that isn’t quite so.”
Mikaela was well into her lecture when Isola slipped into the theatre, late but unrepentant. A brief frown was her
partner’s only rebuke for her tardiness. Mikaela continued without losing a beat.
“In this universe of ours, the rules seem to allow exceptions even to the finality of great noughts …”
Isola’s vision adapted and she discreetly scanned the visitors – six space travellers whose arrival had disrupted a
quiet, monastic research routine. The guests from Pleasence World lounged on pseudo-life chaises overlooking
Mikaela and the dais. Each sleek-furred settee was specially tuned to the needs of its occupant. While the three
humans in the audience made little use of their couch amenities – only occasionally lifting fleshy tubes to infuse
endorphin-laced oxygen, the squat, toadlike Vorpal and pair of slender Butins had already hooked up for full breathing
symbiosis.
Well, they must have known they were coming to a rude outpost station, built with only a pair of humans in mind.
Isola and Mikaela had not expected guests until a few months ago, when the decelerating starship peremptorily
announced itself, and made its needs known.
Those needs included the use of Isola’s womb.
“Actually, there are countless misconceptions about gravitational singularities, especially the massive variety
formed in the recoil of a supernova. One myth concerns the possibility of communicating across a black hole’s event
horizon, to see what has become of all the matter which left this universe so violently and completely, long ago.”
Mikaela turned with a flourish of puffy sleeves towards the viewing tank. Winking one eye, she called up a new
image to display in mid-air, above the dais. Brilliance spilled across Mikaela’s fair skin and the visitors’ multi-hued
faces, causing several to flinch involuntarily. Isola smiled.
Titanic fields enveloped and deformed a tortured sun, dragging long shreds of its substance towards a spinning,
flattened whirlpool – a disc so bright it searingly outshone the unfortunate nearby star.
“Until now, most investigations of macro black holes have concentrated on showy cases like this one – the
Cygnus A singularity – which raises such ferocious tides on a companion sun as to tear it apart before our eyes. In
galactic cores, greedy mega holes can devour entire stellar clusters. No wonder most prior expeditions were devoted
to viewing noughts with visible accretion discs. Besides, their splashy radiance makes them easy to find.”
Isola watched the victim star’s tattered, stolen essence spiral into the planate cyclone, which brightened painfully
despite attenuation by the viewing software. Shimmering, lambent stalks traced magnetically directed plasma beams,
jetting from the singularity north and south. As refulgent gas swirled inward, jostling and heating, it suddenly reached
an inner lip – the edge of a black circle, tiny in diameter but awesome in conclusiveness. The Event Horizon.
Spilling across that boundary, the actinic matter vanished abruptly, completely. Once over the edge, it was no
longer part of reality. Not this reality, anyway.
Mikaela had begun her lecture from a basic level, since some of the visitors weren’t cosmogonists. One of these,
Jarlquin, the geneticist from Pleasence, shifted on her chaise. At some silent order, a pseudo-life assistant appeared to
massage her shoulders. Petite, even for a starfarer, Jarlquin glanced towards Isola, offering a conspiratorial smile.
 
Isola pretended not to notice.
“Most massive noughts don’t have stars as close neighbours, nor gas clouds to feed them so prodigiously and
make them shine.” Closing one eye again, Mikaela sent another command. In a flickered instant, the ostentatious
display of stellar devouring was replaced by serene quiet. Cool, untroubled constellations spanned the theatre.
Tenembro Nought was a mere ripple in one quadrant of the starry field, unnoticed by the audience until Mikaela’s
pointer drew attention to its outlines. A lenslike blur of distortion, nothing more.
“Solitary macro-singularities like Tenembro are far more common than their gaudy cousins. Standing alone in
space, hungry, but too isolated to draw in more than a rare atom or meteoroid, they are also harder to find. Tenembro
Nought was discovered only after detecting the way it bent light from faraway galaxies.
“The black hole turned out to be perfect for our needs, and only fifty-nine years, shiptime, from the colony on
Kalimarn.”
Under Mikaela’s mute guidance, the image enlarged. She gestured towards a corner of the tank, where a long,
slender vessel could be seen, decelerating into orbit around the cold dimple in space. From the ship’s tail emerged
much smaller ripples, which also had the property of causing starlight to waver briefly. The distortion looked similar –
though on a microscopic scale – to that caused by the giant nought itself. This was no coincidence.
“Once in orbit, we began constructing research probes. We converted our ship’s drive to make tailored
micro-singularities …”
At that moment, a tickling sensation along her left eyebrow told Isola that a datafeed was queued with results from
her latest experiment. She closed that eye with a trained squeeze denoting ACCEPT. Implants along the inner lid came
alight, conveying images in crisp focus to her retina. Unlike the digested pap in Mikaela’s presentation, what Isola
saw was in real time … or as ‘real’ as time got, this near a macro black hole.
More rippling images of constellations. She sub-vocally commanded a shift to graphic mode; field diagrams
snapped over the starry scene, showing Tenembro’s mammoth, steepening funnel in space-time. An uneven
formation of objects – miniscule in comparison – skimmed towards glancing rendezvous with the great nought’s eerily
bright-black horizon. Glowing traceries depicted one of the little objects as another space-funnel. Vastly smaller,
titanically narrower, it too possessed a centre that was severed from this reality as if amputated by the scalpel of God.
“… with the objective of creating ideal conditions for our instruments to peer down …”
Columns of data climbed across the scene under Isola’s eyelid. She could already tell that this experiment wasn’t
going any better than the others. Despite all their careful calculations, the camera probes still weren’t managing to
straddle between the giant and dwarf singularities at the right moment, just when the black discs touched. Still, she
watched that instant of grazing passage, hoping to learn something –
The scene suddenly shivered as Isola’s belly gave a churning lurch, provoking waves of nausea. She blinked
involuntarily and the image vanished.
The fit passed, leaving her short of breath, with a prickle of perspiration on her face and neck. Plucking a kerchief
from her sleeve, Isola dabbed her brow. She lacked the will to order the depiction back. Time enough to go over the
results later, with full-spectrum facilities.
This is getting ridiculous , Isola brooded. She had never imagined, w hen the requisition request came, that a
simple clonal pregnancy would entail so many inconveniences!
“… taking advantage of a loophole in the rules of our cosmos, which allow for a slightly offset boundary when the
original collapstar possessed either spin or charge. This offset from perfection is one of the features we hope to
exploit …”
Isola felt a sensation of being watched. She shifted slightly. From her nearby pseudo-life chaise, Jarlquin was
looking at Isola again, with a measuring expression.
She might have the courtesy to feign attention to Mikaela’s presentation , Isola thought, resentfully. Jarlquin
seems more preoccupied with my condition than I am .
The Pleasencer’s interest was understandable, after having come so far just for the present contents of Isola’s
womb. My anger with Jarlquin has an obvious source. Its origin is the same as my own .
An obsession with beginnings had brought Isola to this place on the edge of infinity.
How did the universe begin?
Where did it come from?
Where do I come from?
It was ironic that her search would take her to where creation ended. For while the expanding cosmos has no
‘outer edge’, as such, it does encounter a sharp boundary at the rim of a black hole.
Isola remembered her childhood, back on Kalimarn, playing in the yard with toys that made pico-singularities on
demand, from which she gained her first experience examining the warped mysteries of succinct event horizons. She
recalled the day these had ceased to be mere dalliances, or school exercises in propulsion engineering, when they
instead became foci for exaltation and wonder.
The same equations that describe an expanding universe also tell of a gravity trough’s collapse. Explosion,
implosion … the only difference lay in reversing time’s arrow. We are, in effect, living inside a gigantic black hole!
Her young mind marvelled at the implications.
Everything within is aleph. Aleph is cut off from contact with that which is not aleph. Or that which came before
aleph. Cause and effect, forever separated.
As I am separated from what brought me into being.
 
As I must separate from what I bring into being …
The foetus kicked again, setting off twinges, unleashing a flood of symbiotic bonding hormones. One side-effect
came as a sudden wave of unasked-for sentimentality. Tears filled Isola’s eyes, and she could not have made
image-picts even if she tried.
Jarlquin had offered drugs to subdue these effects – to make the process ‘easier’. Isola did not want it eased. This
could be her sole act of biological creation, given the career she had chosen. The word ‘motherhood’ might be archaic
nowadays, but it still had connotations. She wanted to experience them.
It was simple enough in conception.
Back in the eighteenth century, a physicist, John Mitchell, showed that any large enough lump of matter might
have an escape velocity greater than the speed of light. Even luminous waves should not be able to escape. When
John Wheeler, two hundred years later, performed the same conjuring trick with mass density , the name ‘black hole’
was coined.
Those were just theoretical exercises. What actually happens to a photon that tries to climb out of a singularity?
Does it behave like a rocket, slowing down under gravity’s insistent drag? Coming to a halt, then turning to plummet
down again?
Not so. Photons move at a constant rate, one single speed, no matter what reference frame you use. Unless
physically blocked or diverted, light slows for no one.
But tightly coiled gravity does strange things. It changes time . Gravitation can make light pay a toll for escaping.
Photons lose energy not by slowing down, but by stretching redder, ever redder, as they rise from a space-time well,
elongating to microwave lengths, then radio, and onward. Theoretically, on climbing to the event horizon of a black
hole, any light wave has reddened down to nothing.
Nothing emerges. Nothing – travelling at the speed of light. In a prim, legalistic sense, that nothing is still light.
Isola spread her traps, planning tight, intersecting orbits. She lay a web designed to ambush nothing … to peer
down into nowhere.
“You know, I never gave it much thought before. The whole thing seemed such a bother. Anyway, I always
figured there’d be plenty of time later, after we finished our project.”
Mikaela’s non-sequitur came by complete surprise. Isola looked up from the chart she had been studying. Across
the breakfast table, her colleague wore an expression that seemed outwardly casual, but studied. Thin as frost.
“Plenty of time for what?” Isola asked.
Mikaela lifted a cup of port’ha to her lips. “You know … procreation.”
“Oh.” Isola did not know what to say. Ever since the visitor-ship announced itself, her partner had expressed
nothing but irritation over havoc to their research schedules. Of late her complaints had been replaced with pensive
moodiness. So this is what she’s been brooding about , Isola realised. To give herself a moment, she held out her own
cup for the pseudo-life servitor to refill. Her condition forbade drinking port’ha, so she made do with tea.
“And what have you concluded?” she asked, evenly.
“That I’d be foolish to waste this opportunity.”
“Opportunity?”
Mikaela shrugged. “Look, Jarlquin came all this way hoping to requisition your clone. You could have turned her
down –”
“Mikaela, we’ve gone over this so many times …” But Isola’s partner cut her off, raising one hand placatingly.
“That’s all right. I now see you were right to agree. It’s a great honour. Records of your clone-line are on file
throughout the sector.”
Isola sighed. “My ancestresses were explorers and star messengers. So, many worlds in the region would have –”
“Exactly. It’s all a matter of available information! Pleasence World had data on you, but not on a semi-natural
variant like me, born on Kalimarn of Kalimarnese stock. For all we know, I might have what Jarlquin’s looking for, too.”
Isola nodded earnestly. “I’m sure of that. Do you mean you’re thinking –”
“– of getting tested?” Mikaela watched Isola over the rim of her cup. “Do you think I should?”
Despite her continuing reservations over having been requisitioned in the first place, Isola felt a surge of
enthusiasm. The notion of sharing this experience – this unexpected experiment in motherhood – with her only friend
gave her strange pleasure. “Oh, yes! They’ll jump at the chance. Of course …” She paused.
“What?” Mikaela asked, tension visible in her shoulders.
Isola had a sudden image of the two of them, waddling about the station, relying utterly on drones and pseudo-life
servitors to run errands and experiments. The inconvenience alone would be frightful. Yet, it would only add up to a
year or so, altogether. She smiled ironically. “It means our guests would stay longer. And you’d have to put up with
Jarlquin…”
Mikaela laughed. A hearty laugh of release. “Yeah, dammit. That is a drawback!”
Relieved at the lifting of her partner’s spirit, Isola grinned too. They were in concord again. She had missed the
old easiness between them, which had been under strain since that first surprise message disrupted their hermit’s
regime. This will put everything right , she hoped. We’ll have years to talk about a strange, shared experience after
it’s all over.
The best solutions are almost always the simplest .
 
Within a sac of amniotic fluid, a play is acted out according to a script. The script calls for proteins, so amino
acids are lined up by ribosomes to play their roles. Enzymes appear at the proper moment. Cells divide and jostle for
position. The code demands they specialise, so they do. Subtle forces of attraction and repulsion shift them into
place, one by one.
It is a script that has been played before.
A script designed to play again.
The pair of nano-noughts – each weighing just a million tons – hovered within a neutral gravity tank. Between the
microscopic wells of darkness, a small recording device peered into one of the tiny singularities. Across the room,
screens showed only the colour black.
Special fields kept each nought from self-destructing – either through quantum evaporation or by folding space
around itself like a blanket and disappearing. Other beams of force strained to hold the two black holes apart,
preventing gravity from slamming them together uncontrollably.
It was an unstable situation. But Isola was well-practised. Seated on a soft chaise to support her overstrained
back, she used subtle machines to manipulate the two funnels of sunken metric towards each other. The outermost
rims of their space-time wells merged. Two microscopic black spheres – the event horizons themselves – lay
centimetres apart, ratcheting closer by the second, as Isola let them slowly draw together.
Tides tugged at the camera, suspended between, and at the fibre-thin cable leading from the camera to her
recorders. Peering into one of those pits of blackness, the mini-telescope saw nothing. That was only natural.
Nothing could escape from inside a black hole.
A special kind of nothing, though. Nothing that had formerly been light, before being stretched down to true
nothingness in the act of climbing that steep slope.
The two funnels merged closer still. The microscopic black balls drew nearer.
Light trying to escape a black hole is reddened to non-existence. Nevertheless, virtual light can theoretically
escape one nought, only to be sucked into the other. There, it starts blue -shifting exponentially, as gravity yanks it
downward again.
Between one event horizon and the other, the light doesn’t ‘officially’ exist. Not in the limiting case. Yet ideally,
there should be a flow.
They had not believed her on Kalimarn. Until one day she showed them it was possible, for the narrowest of
instants, to tap the virtual stream. To squeeze between the red-shifted and blue-shifted segments. To catch the
briefest glimpse –
It happened too fast to follow with human eyes. One moment two black spheres were inching microscopically
towards each other with the little, doomed instrumentality tortured and whining between them. The next instant, in a
sudden flash, all contents of the tank combined and vanished. Space-time backlash set the reinforced vacuum
chamber rocking – side-effect of that final stroke which severed forever all contact between the noughts and this
cosmos where they’d been made. In the moment it took Isola to blink, they were gone, leaving behind the neatly
severed end of fibre cable.
Gone, but not forgotten. In taking the camera with them, the singularities had given it the moment it needed. The
moment when ‘nothing’ was no longer nothing but merely a deep red.
And red is visible …
This was what had won her funding to seek out a partner and come here to Tenembro Nought. For if it was
possible to look inside a micro-hole, why not a far bigger one that had been born in the titanic self-devouring of a star?
So far, she and Mikaela hadn’t succeeded in that part of the quest. Their research at the micro end, however, kept
giving surprising and wonderful results.
Isola checked to make sure all the secrets of the vanished nano-nought had been captured during that narrow
instant, and were safely stored in memory. Its rules. Its nature as a cosmos all its own. She had varied the formation
recipe again, and wondered what physics would be revealed this time.
Before she could examine the snapshot of a pocket universe, however, her left eyelid twitched and came alight with
a reminder. Time for her appointment. Damn.
But Jarlquin had shown Isola how much more pleasant it was to be on time.
The temperature of the universe is just under three degrees, absolute. It has chilled considerably, in the act of
expanding over billions of years, from fireball to cosmos. Cooling in turn provoked changes in state. Delicately
balanced forces shifted as the original heat diffused, allowing protons to form from quarks, then electrons to take
orbit around them, producing that wonder, Hydrogen. Later rebalancings caused matter to gather, forming
monstrous swirls. Many of these eddies coalesced and came alight spectacularly – all because the rules allowed it.
Because the rules required it.
Time processed one of those lights – by those selfsame rules – until it finished burning and collapsed,
precipitating a fierce explosion and ejection of its core from the universe.
Tenembro Nought sat as a fossil relic of that banishment. A scar, nearly healed, but palpable.
All of this had come about according to the rules.
“We’ve liberated ourselves from Darwin’s Curse, but it still comes down to the same thing.”
The visitor made a steeple of her petite hands, long and narrow, with delicate fingers like a surgeon’s. Her lips
 
were full and dyed a rich mauve hue. Faint ripples passed across her skin as pores opened and closed rhythmically. A
genetic graft, Isola supposed. Probably some Vorpal trait inserted into Jarlquin’s genome before she was even
conceived.
Fortunately, laws limit the gene trade , Isola thought. All they can ask of me is a simple cloning .
Over Jarlquin’s shoulder, through the window of the lounge, Isola saw the starscape and realised Smolin Cluster
was in view. Sub-vocally, she ordered the magni-focus pane to enlarge one quadrant for her eye only. Flexing gently,
imperceptibly to other visitors across the room, the window sent Isola a scene of suns like shining grains. One golden
pinpoint – Pleasence Star – shone soft and stable. Its kind, by nature’s laws, would last eons and never become a
nought.”
“You see,” Jarlquin continued, blithely ignorant of Isola’s distraction. “Although we’ve pierced much of the code
of Life, and reached a truce of sorts with Death, the fundamental rule’s the same. That is successful which continues.
And what continues most successfully is that which not only lives, but multiplies.”
Why is she telling me this? Isola wondered, sitting in a gently vibrating non-life chair across from Jarlquin. Did the
biologer-nurturist actually care what her subject thought? Isola had agreed to disrupt her research and donate a clone,
for the genetic benefit of Pleasence World. Wasn’t that enough?
I ought to be flattered. Tenembro Nought may be ‘close’ to their world by interstellar standards, still, how often
does a colony send a ship so far, just to collect one person’s neonate clone?
Oh, the visitors had also made a great show of scrutinising their work here, driving Mikaela to distraction with their
questions. The pair of Butins were physicians and exuded enthusiasm along with their pungent, blue perspiration.
But Jarlquin had confided in Isola. They would never have been approved to come all this way if not also to seek her
seed. To treasure and nurture it, and take it home with them.
As I was taken from my own parent, who donated an infant duplicate to Kalimarn as her ship swept by. We are a
model in demand, it seems.
The reasons were clear enough, in abstract. In school she had learned about the interstellar economy of genes,
which prevented the catastrophe of inter-breeding and spread the boon of diversity. But tidal surges of hormone and
emotion had not been in her syllabus. Isola could not rightly connect abstractions with events churning away below
her sternum. They seemed as unrelated as a sonnet and a table.
Two pseudo-life servitors entered – no doubt called when Jarlquin winked briefly a moment ago – carrying hot
beverages on a tray. The blank-faced, bipedal protoplasmoids were as expressionless as might be expected of beings
less than three days old … and destined within three more to slip back into the vat from which they’d been drawn.
One servant poured for Isola as it had been programmed to do, with uncomplaining perfection no truly living being
could have emulated.
“You were speaking of multiplication,” Isola prompted, lest Jarlquin lose her train of thought and decide to launch
into another recital of the wonders of Pleasence. The fine life awaiting Isola’s clone.
“Ah?” Jarlquin pursed her lips, tasting the tea. “Yes, multiplication. Tell me, as time goes on, who populates the
galaxies? Obviously, those who disperse and reproduce. Even though we aren’t evolving in the old way – stressed
by death and natural selection – a kind of selection is still going on.”
“Selection?”
“Indeed, selection. For traits appropriate to a given place and time. Consider what happened to those genes
which, for one reason or another, kept individuals from leaving Beloved Earth during the first grand waves of
colonisation. Are descendants of those individuals still with us? Do those genes persist, now that Earth is gone?”
Isola saw Jarlquin’s point. The impulsive drive to reproduce sexually had ebbed from humanity – at least in this
sector. She had heard things were otherwise, spinward of galactic West and in the Magellanics. Nevertheless, certain
models of humanity seemed to spread and thrive, while other types remained few, or disappeared.
“So it’s been in other races with whom we’ve formed symbioses. Planets and commonwealths decide what kinds
of citizens they need and requisition clones or new variants, often trading with colonies many parsecs away.
Nowadays you can be successful at reproduction without ever planning to.”
Isola realised Jarlquin must know her inside and out. Not that her ambivalence was hard to read.
To become a mother, she thought. I am about to … give birth. I don’t even know what it means, but Jarlquin
seems to envy me.
“Whatever works,” the Pleasencer continued, sipping her steaming tea. “That law of nature, no amount of
scientific progress will ever change. If you have what it takes to reproduce, and pass on those traits to your offspring,
then they will likely replicate as well, and your kind will spread.”
What came before? And what came before that?
As a very little girl, back on Kalimarn, she had seen how other infants gleefully discovered a way to drive parents
and guardians to distraction with the game of ‘Why’. It could start at any moment, given the slightest excuse to ask
that first, guileless question. Any adult who innocently answered with an explanation was met with the same simple,
efficient rejoinder – another ‘why?’. Then another … Used carefully, deliciously, it became an inquisition guaranteed
to provoke either insanity or pure enlightenment by the twentieth repetition. More often the former.
To be different, Isola modified the exercise.
What caused that? she asked. Then – What caused the cause? and so on.
She soon learned how to dispense quickly with preliminaries. The vast, recent ages of space travel and
colonisation were quickly dealt with, as was the Dark Climb of man, back on old Beloved Earth. Recorded history was
like a salad, archaeology an aperitif. Neanderthals and dinosaurs offered adult bulwarks, but she would not be
 

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