Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

“Silent running,” I said to Rosa.

“What do you mean?”

“Just like a submarine, trying to evade the sonar of the surface ships. We’re in a great, static, underground submarine …”

It struck me then that the Order, whatever its powers and wealth, being stuck immovably in this Crypt, this hole in the ground, was terribly vulnerable. No wonder Rosa had reacted so strongly to Peter’s incursion. For the Crypt to be revealed was about the worst thing that could happen, because once exposed it would stay exposed. The silent running must be instinctive, I thought, a reaction bred in over generations. A great wave of fear and despondency must have rippled out through the tight-packed, touching, gossiping members of the Order, a wave of alarm but not of information, a wave that left silence and caution where it passed.

We descended to Level 2 and hurried past the great galleries of hospital wards and dormitories. Eventually we began to pass through quieter, darker corridors. I sensed we were moving out of the core of the sprawling complex, reaching areas I hadn’t seen before. Perhaps the ventilation shaft Peter had used was old, long abandoned, unguarded.

At last we came to a wall, not of concrete or interior partition, but of tufa, honest, solid lava. I ran my hand along the wall. I felt oddly reassured to think that I wasn’t in the middle of things anymore — that beyond my hand there were no more galleries and chambers, no more people , nothing but a tremendous mass of patient, silent rock.

A knot of people stood before a cleft in the rock wall, all Order members. The lighting here, coming from fluorescent lamps bolted crudely to the tufa wall, was sparse and dim, and as they watched us approach, their faces, all so similar, seemed to float, disembodied, in the gloom. I recognized none of them. There were ten of them — only one was a man — but they were all tall and hefty looking inside their smocks. They were here for physical work, I thought, perhaps to wrestle Peter to the ground.

And they were old , I realized with a shock; with crow’s-feet eyes and sunken cheeks, they all showed far more visible signs of aging than I had seen in the Crypt before. Uneasily I remembered Peter’s talk of aging ant warriors, of elderly mole rats sacrificed to the jackals; it was another unwelcome parallel.

Rosa spoke briskly to these guardians and came back to me. “He’s still in there.”

“Where?”

She jerked her thumb at the cleft in the rock.

I moved past her to take a look. The cleft was a crack in the tufa, barely wide enough for me to have squeezed into sideways. It looked as if it had been caused by a mild earthquake, and then widened by seeping water. The glow from the wall-mounted lamps didn’t penetrate very far, and I cupped my hands over my eyes, peering into silent blackness.

Suddenly light flared in my face. I fell back, rubbing my eyes. “ Ow. Shit.”

A sardonic voice, made hollow by echoes, came drifting out of the cleft. “You took your time.”

“Hello, mate. How did you get yourself in there?”

“Let’s just say it wasn’t easy,” he said gnomically.

“What are you doing?”

“Saving the future.”

“We can’t get him out,” Rosa said to me. “The cleft is too narrow. We haven’t been able to find the way he got in — presumably from above. We might get one or two people in from the front, but they could never get behind him to bring him out. And besides, we’re afraid he might harm them.”

I frowned. “Harm them? Harm them how? You think he’s sitting in there with a revolver?”

Rosa said heavily, “Remember San Jose.”

“Look, Rosa, I don’t know why he’s got himself stuck in a hole in the rock. But I can’t see what harm he can do you in there. I mean, all you have to do is wait a few hours, or days even, and you’ll starve him out. In fact you might have to if you want him to get through that gap.”

“This isn’t funny, George.”

“Isn’t it?” I felt a little light-headed.

“Talk to him. You say he’s your friend. Fine. Find out what he’s doing here, what he wants, what he intends. And then find a way to resolve this situation. Because if you don’t, I will .”

I tried to read her. “Will you call the police? … You won’t, will you? Or the FBI, or Interpol. You don’t want to bring them here into the Crypt, despite the danger you perceive. What are you planning, Rosa?”

She said evenly, “I’m responsible for the safety of the Crypt. As is every member of the Order. I will do whatever it takes, at whatever cost, to ensure that safety. I suggest you make sure it doesn’t come to that.” In the gloom her face was hard, set — almost fanatical — I thought she had never looked less like me, or my parents.

I nodded, chilled. “I believe you.”

I approached Peter’s wall again.

“Don’t listen to her,” he said. “Don’t let her whisper in your ear.”

“Or overwhelm me with chimp pant-hoots or pheromones? …”

“George, just get out of here.”

“Why?”

“It doesn’t concern you. Just get away—”

“Of course it concerns me. That’s my sister, standing over there. But that’s not why I’m staying, Peter.”

“Then why?”

“For you, you arsehole.”

He laughed, sardonic. “I didn’t see you once in twenty years.”

“But you were a good friend to my dad. Even if I didn’t know about it until too late.”

Silence for a while. When he spoke again, his tone was softer. “Okay, then. Do what you like. Arsehole yourself.”

“Yes … Peter, we need to talk.”

“About—”

“About San Jose.”

He hesitated. “So you know about that.”

“Interpol send their best. Peter, what happened over there?”

He sighed noisily. “You really want to know?”

“Tell me.”

“I warn you now we will have to discuss black holes. Because that’s what they were trying to build in that lab.”

Even now, more spooky stuff. “Oh, for God’s sake …”

The drones, unaware of the odd grammar of our relationship, stirred, baffled, nervous.

Peter began to describe “geometric optics.” “A black hole is a space-time flaw, a hole out of which nothing can escape, not even light. Black holes suck in light through having ultrapowerful gravity fields …”

Black holes in nature are formed by massive collapsed stars, or by aggregates of matter at the centers of galaxies like ours — or they may have been formed in the extreme pressures of the Big Bang, the most tremendous crucible of all. It used to be thought that black holes, even microscopic ones, would be so massive and would require such immense densities that to make or manipulate them was forever beyond human reach.

But that wisdom, said George, had turned out to be false. “Light is the fastest thing in the universe — as far as we know — which is why it takes the massive gravity of a black hole to capture it. But if light were to move more slowly, then a more feeble trap might do the job.”

Tense, with the gazes of the drones boring into me, I took the bait. “Fine. How can you slow down light?”

“Anytime light passes through a medium it is slowed from its vacuum speed. Even in water it is slowed by about a quarter — still bloody fast, but that’s enough to give you refraction effects.”

Memories of O-level physics swam into my mind. “Like the way a stick in a stream will seem bent—”

“Yes. But in the lab you can do a lot better. Pass light through a vapor of certain types of atom and you’re down to a few feet per second. And if you use a Bose-Einstein condensate—”