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• CORE
It was a laser.
He still couldn’t get used to the idea. A gravity laser. Imagine that.
I wonder where the power comes from.
“Mr. Sullivan? May I freshen your drink, sir?”
The flight attendant’s smile was professional. Her features and coloration clearly Malay. “Yes, thank you,” he replied as she bent to pour, her delicate aroma causing him to inhale deeply. “That’s a lovely scent. Is it Lhasa Spring?”
“Why… yes sir. You are perceptive.”
She met his eyes, and for an instant her smile seemed just that much more than perfunctory. It was a well-measured look that fell short of provocative, but also seemed to promise a little more than mere professionalism during the long flight ahead.
Alex felt content as she moved on to serve the next passenger. It was nice flirting amiably with an exotic beauty, without the slightest temptation to ruin it by trying for too much. The last few months had left his libido in a state of suspension, which had the pleasant side effect of allowing him the freedom to appreciate a young woman’s smile, the fine, well-trained grace of her movements, with-out flashing hormones or unwarranted hopes getting in the way.
It had been different during his first year of graduate school, when he temporarily forsook physics to explore instead the realm of the senses. Applying logic to the late-blooming quandaries of maturity, he had parsed the elements of encounter, banter, negotiation, and consummation, separating and solving the variables one by one until the problem — if not generally solved — did appear to have tractable special solutions.
The mapping wasn’t exact, of course. According to Jen, biological systems never translated exactly onto mathematical models, anyway. Still, at the time he acquired certain practical skills, which garnered him a reputation among his classmates and friends.
Then, curiosity sated, his interests changed trajectory. Companionship and compatibility became desiderata more important than sex, and he even aspired for joy. But these proved more elusive. Seduction, it seemed, contained fewer variables and relied less on fate than did true love.
Disappointment never banished hope exactly, but he was persuaded to shelve aspiration for a while and return to science. Only at Iquitos did hope suffer truly mortal wounds. Compared to that loss, sex was a mere incidental casualty.
I know what Jen would tell me, he thought. We moderns think sex can be unlinked from reproduction. But the two are co
Alex knew most of the time he was in denial about the coming end of the world. He had to be, in order to do his work. In such a state he could even enjoy studying Beta, the elegant, deadly monster in the Earth’s core.
But denial can only rearrange pain, like a child re-sorting unloved vegetables on his plate, hoping a less noticeable pattern will deceive parental authority. Alex knew where he’d quarantined his bitter outrage. It still affected the part of him most intimately tied to life and the propagation of life.
Alex imagined how his grandmother might comment on all this.
“Self-awareness is fine, Alex. It helps make us interesting beasts, instead of just another band of crazy apes.
“But when you get right down to it, self-awareness is probably overrated. A complex, self-regulating system doesn’t need it in order to be successful, or even smart.”
Thinking about Jen made Alex smile. Perhaps, after the hard work of the months ahead was done, there’d be time to go home and visit her before the world ended.
Stan Goldman had been left in charge in New Zealand, continuing to track Beta while Alex went to California on a mission to beg, wheedle, and cajole ten years’ raw data from the biggest observatory in the world. This was a mission he had to take on himself, for it required calling in many old favors.
From a small building on the UC Berkeley campus, his old friend Heinz Reichle ran three thousand neutrino detectors dispersed all over the globe. The planet was almost transparent to those ghostly particles, which penetrated rock like X rays streaming through soft cheese, so Reichle could use the entire worldwide instrument round the clock to track nuclear reactions in the sun and stars. For his part though, Alex hoped the disks full of data in his luggage would show a thing or two about the Earth’s interior as well, perhaps helping the Tangoparu team track the awful Beta singularity to its source.
Alex still wanted to meet the person or persons responsible — almost as badly as George Hutton did.
I’d like to know how they were able to create such a complex, twisted knot of space. They can’t have used anything as simple as a Witten mapping. Why, even renormalization would have taken—
The airplane’s public address system came to life, interrupting his thoughts. From the seat back in front of him projected the smiling, confident visage of their captain, informing everyone that the Hawaiian Islands were coming into view.
Alex shaded his window against internal reflections and gazed down past layers of stratospheric clouds to a necklace of dark jewels standing out from the glittering sea. Back in the days of turbojets, this would have been a refueling stop. But modern hypersonic aircraft — even restricted by the ozone laws — just streaked on by.
He had seen Hawaii much closer than this anyway, so it wasn’t the chain itself but the surrounding waters that suddenly interested him. From this height he saw patterns of tide and color — resonant standing waves and subtly shaded shoals of plankton luminance — outlining each bead in the nearly linear necklace of islands. Polarized sunglasses, especially, brought out a richness of detail.
Once, Alex would have looked on this phenomenon with pleasure but little understanding. Time spent with George Hutton’s geologists had corrected that. The islands weren’t static entities anymore, but epic, rocky testimonials to change. From the big island westward, beyond the thousand-meter cliffs of Molokai, all the way past lowly Midway, a chain of extinct volcanoes continued arrow straight for thousands of miles before zigging abruptly north toward the Aleutians. That bent path to the arctic circle was also a trip back in time, from the towering, ten thousand cubic mile basalt heap of Mauna Loa, past weathered, craggy elder isles like Kauai, to ancient coral atolls and eventually prehistoric, truncated seamounts long conquered by the persistent waves.
On the big island, two memorable volcanoes still spumed. But most activity had already shifted still further east, where the newest sibling was being born — an embryonic, as yet unemerged isle already named Loihi.
Most of the planet’s volcanoes smoldered where the edges of great crustal plates met gratingly, or rode up over each other — as along this great ocean’s famous Ring of Fire. But Hawaii’s trail of ancient calderas lay smack in the middle of one of the biggest plates, not at its rim. The Hawaiian Islands had their origins in a completely different process. They were the dashed scars left as the Central Pacific Plate cruised slowly above the geological equivalent of a blowtorch, a fierce, narrow tube of magma melting through anything passing over it.
George Hutton had likened it to pushing thick aluminum foil slowly over an intermittent arc welder. Part of George’s wealth had come from tapping power from such hot spots in the mantle.
Oh, yes. Hawaii certainly testified that there was energy down there.
But you can’t generate a laser… or a gazer… from just any lump of hot matter. You need excited material in an inverted state…
There it was again — his thoughts kept drawing back to the problem, just as the taniwha kept pulling in atoms as it orbited round and round the Earth’s core.