Furious Gulf (23 page)

Toby stared, blinked. Quath’s tone gave no hint that she shared the surprise Toby felt. The outside time digits now fled by
in a blur.

Killeen still stood on the creaking deck, shifting his weight to counter random thrusts. Face tense, he did not take his eyes
from the stretching, spreading mass on the screens. “How much deeper can we go?”

“Ummm,” Killeen said sardonically. “What
isn’t
possible here?”

Jocelyn said tersely. “Fuel rate’s up.”

Killeen nodded. “It’s been climbing all along. What’s our remaining margin?”

“To be able to get free of this place?”

“Yeasay—this ‘ergosphere.’” The word sat awkwardly on Killeen’s lips, Aspect jargon, like a language he only pretended to
speak.

The popping of strains running through
Argo
had distracted Toby from the gut-deep pulse of their engines. The laboring rumble rose, sending tremors through his couch.

Jocelyn worked a moment, eyes dancing as she listened to her direct link with the ship’s systems. Worry-lines creasing her
brow, she said, “The board’s working hard, calc’lating how much it’ll take to get out of here. These numbers keep jumping
around. We’re getting close. Gobbling up fuel just to keep in an orbit, seems like.”

“How long?”

“Maybe fifty minutes left.”

Even to Toby’s practiced eye Killeen seemed unmoved by this. “I see.”

Argo
flew by sucking in plasma with magnetic mouths, burning it in fusion chambers, and spewing it out the back. But it needed
catalysts for this, and they were running low.

us.>

Toby was shocked at the matter-of-fact way Quath stated this, without even a softening further remark. Killeen also gave nothing
away, his eyes fixed on the strange oily-black thing. “This object, it’s like a rock that grows. You sure it has nothing to
do with this ‘event horizon’?”

“How come you’re sure?”

“That’ll be the star stuff, taking a nosedive into the black hole?” Killeen asked.

Toby put in, “How come we’re okay here?”

a million times the mass of a star. Though its great mass attracts, the tidal forces are lesser here near the lip of the Eater.
Near a smaller black hole, we would be shredded before we could venture in.>

“I don’t want to go any closer, not when we can’t see what’s happening. Or figure out what that thing is.” He pointed to the
glinting complexities of the mass oozing into being before them, like a strange crystalline mud. Their engines shook the walls,
but to no avail; the great bulk swam nearer.

Jocelyn said, “Cap’n, I don’t think we’ve got the power to do any maneuverin’, anyway.”

Killeen compressed his lips. “Can we get far from that thing?”

“Doubt it. I’m gunnin’ her hard as I can.”

“Quath, what can we do?” Killeen at last made a naked appeal.

space slides forever down the throat of the Eater of All Things. But this object—it is different.>

“I . . . we . . . came all this way.” Killeen watched the screens with a strange expression, one Toby had seldom seen these
last few years—uncertainty. “Family Bishop has always known that the Eater was important. But where should we go?”

The way they both spoke made Toby’s hair stand up on end. It was like two old friends discussing suicide.

A part of Toby welcomed Killeen’s hesitation. He realized how much he missed the many-sided man he had known all his life,
yet who now showed only one flinty face to the world. But then, as he watched, an edge returned to Killeen’s gaze. He whispered,
“It’s
got
to be here.”

Jocelyn gave Quath a skeptical glance and worked through the long silence that hung in the fevered air. Then she quietly reported
to Killeen. “
Argo
says there’s an orbit we can follow, to bring us to a place it calls ‘perigee.’ That’s just above the lip of the black hole.
But if we go that near, we can never fight our way back out of the, well, the whirlpool.”

“You’re sure?” Killeen’s voice was clipped, flat.

“Near as I can be in this crazy place.”

Toby’s Isaac Aspect put in dryly,

The correct term is “peribarythron.” “Perigee” refers to Old Earth, and orbits near it. These ship computers must have been
programmed by someone with a classical education, but little concern for proper technical detail. I hope such sloppiness does
not extend—

Toby squeezed the Aspect back down. Its outraged squawk ended with what felt like an audible pop.

“Why’s the clock running so hard?” Killeen asked, pointing. Numerals flickered faster and faster.

Quath clattered her legs uneasily. is warping the space-time flow even more than they expected.>

“That?” Killeen pointed at the slick, ever-swelling darkness before them.

In the mass, Toby could see complex ribs and valleys, arches and long columns. “It’s
built,
not natural,” he said.

Killeen blinked. “Yeasay! I knew! We came and—Abraham, the Magnetic Mind—they all lead to this.”

“How can something stay here?” Toby stared at it wonderingly. He could not guess what Killeen had envisioned, through the
long years of their journey to this moment—some things his father never discussed—but plainly it wasn’t this. A puzzled frown
stirred Killeen’s brow, then passed like a forgotten irritant.

“Doesn’t matter,” Killeen said flatly. “Plenty time later to figure out such stuff.”

Toby watched the screens with foreboding. The slick blackness grew and grew. It was as though it was drawing
Argo
to it with a slow, remorseless clutch. But the thing was not just getting closer. It seemed to swell into existence, emerging,
being born from some unknowable place.

He had to put all this together in his mind, figure what it could mean. Toby closed his eyes to blot out the eerie sight.
“Dad . . . Those Cyaneans, the places the Cosmic Circle cut through—didn’t the Magnetic Mind say the mechs made them?”

“Yeasay,” Killeen said. “Some kind of barrier, like a sand trap or something. But
this . . .”

Killeen’s words trailed away. Toby opened his eyes as the spreading structure became sharper, showing them how large it truly
was. Honeycomb terraces, valleys, shelves. Ranks and ranks of hexagonal openings, spider-fine webs of struts and cabling.
Or was that just a way for the human eye to put together a comprehensible picture, Toby wondered, make patterns it could comprehend?

The Bridge was silent.
Argo creaked and strummed with random stretchings and compressions. Toby wondered how long the ship could take this massaging
by forces far vaster than itself.

Jocelyn called, “Cap’n, we’re burning fuel hard and heavy.”

“I know.”

“It’s, it’s—we’ve got just minutes left. Unless—”

Something firmed in Killeen’s face. “In the old days at Citadel Bishop we’d go out scavenging. No matter what we found, we’d
haul it back and claim that’s what we’d gone looking for.”

He looked slowly around the Bridge. Everybody, including Toby and Quath, regarded him blankly. “Might’s well do the same here.”
He pointed at the honeycombed patterns bathed in slippery, flickering light. “That’s our goal, Lieutenant Jocelyn. Take us
in, and be quick about it.”

A long silence. Toby saw in the drawn faces the knowledge that this was their last gamble. They would throw the dice, throw
them now and forever, into inky shadows.

Then the moment passed. Jocelyn moved quickly, crisply. She drew maximum thrust from the ramscoop engines, her fingers flying
over the boards. In his sensorium Toby could sense the ship’s magnetic fields surge as they spread wider, an invisible net
that snagged passing matter, sucked it into the reaction chambers, and spewed it out the back. The deck vibrated. Joints rasped
and shrieked. Acceleration felt like a kick in the rump. They shot over the ebony landscape.

“Where exactly, sir?” Jocelyn was cool and efficient. Toby admired the collected way she turned to Killeen, one eyebrow raised.
Might as well meet Fate in style. “Ah . . .” Killeen’s eyes swept the details that skated by beneath them. A high whine cut
the air as
Argo
fought against storming yet invisible forces. “There.”

A small green dot winked at the very tip end of a long, pointed peninsula. Jocelyn said, “That wasn’t there a moment ago.”

Into the hovering silence Toby said, “Maybe somebody’s turned on the porch light.”

He recalled his mother doing that in Citadel Bishop, when he went out late to play with his friends in the soft summer nights.
A familiar yellow-white glow, shielded against mech detection. Feeble in the gathering dark, fitful, but always there. He
had liked to chase the little birds that glowed when they flapped their wings. No matter how far into the brush he had pursued
them, following their rustling and cawing, he could always see the distant beacon of home. Stay within view of the light,
she had said.

A lamp tuned to human eyes, not mechs. Not that it did any good in the end, Toby thought ruefully.

The green glow seemed to swim up toward them. A cavern yawned below it. With a nod Killeen told Jocelyn to slip down into
it.

A swift, silky glide. They braked to a stop between enormous inky cliffs.

Here, too, the honeycomb design repeated on smaller and smaller scales. Fitful technicolor displays sparked all along the
great ebony flanks, reflecting the spikes of doomed matter streaking through the darkness above. It was as though this place
was the very end of creation, solid and immovable, a night land beneath a restless, dying sky.

Then the honeycomb seemed to swell, to flicker—and they were
inside
the oily black walls. Inside whatever this thing was. With no visible transition.

Jocelyn eased the engines back. Killeen ordered the ship powered down to conserve energy. This brought a welcome calm to the
deck. Quietness settled among them. There was nothing left to do now. No place left to go.

Still, Toby was startled when the watch officer at the main airlock hoarsely reported in. Everyone in the ship, Toby realized,
was pulled tight enough to snap.

The watch Officer heard something. He patched it through. In the general sensorium the noise swelled, impossibly large and
booming. It sounded for all the world like someone knocking on a door.