Lake of Darkness

by Adam Roberts

Genres: Alien Invasion

Synopsis

Good is a construct. Evil is a virus.

The Starship Sa Niro and the Starship Sß Oubliette were in orbit around a black hole, one afternoon... by the end of the day, the crews of both starships were dead, victims of a single killer: Captain Alpha Raine.

Raine claims he's acting under the command of a voice emanating from the black hole: Mr Modo. No one believes him.Everyone knows that things go into black holes; nothing comes out.

But something inexplicable has been happening to Raine, and whatever it is seems to be spreading. An historian studying serial killers from the 21st century interviews him... and then nearly kills someone herself. It becomes increasingly undeniable that there's something inside that black hole... and it's found a way out...

Release date: July 25, 2024

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 320

Sample

The Startship Sα-Niro and the Startship Sβ-Oubliette were in orbit around a black hole, one afternoon.

Niro is a Japanese name that means ‘good road’. Oubliette is a French word for a kind of dungeon. Ironically – if I am using that word correctly – the crew of the former were mostly ethnic­ally Euro and the crew of the latter were of mostly Korean, Japanese and Chinese heritage. But that doesn’t really mean anything, because nothing really means anything, which is to say we can at least declare that meaning is not construed in terms of things. Except perhaps for the way. And except, of course, for the dungeon.

‘Afternoon’ was calibrated according to ship-time, which was synchronized between the two ships. An arbitrary frame of temporal reference of course, but important for crew wellbeing.

The Niro and the Oubliette had been sent to gather data about the black hole. Sα-Niro was concentrating on the contouring of the event horizon, Sβ-Oubliette on its spacetime effects immediately outside that impenetrable, inescapable boundary. There had been a lot of long distance investigating of these things of course, but the two ships brought space scale localized instrumentation and the invaluable presence of inquiring human minds close to the object – or as close as was safe, considering the time dilation and gravitational shearing effects liable from too near an approach.

The β in the latter ship’s designation indicated that this startship circumnavigated Einstein’s restrictions on faster-than-light travel by the more recently developed technologies of rapid spacetime bubbling – trillions upon trillions of bubbles, 10^20 each fractosecond, all cascadingly superposed a planck-length apart, sweeping the craft through actual spacetime at immense apparent velocity. This technology was considered safer, and cheaper to run, than the older α-FTL, which circumvented Einsteinian constraints in a different, and some would say cruder, manner. How does this α-tech work? How glad I am you have asked! Spacetime, you see, is a manifold. Of course, you knew that already. You knew already, of course, that this means if you travel close to the speed of light time dilates as space constricts. Space constricts is just a fancy way of saying: you and your destination get closer together, which is what all travelling is, of course – finding ways of bringing your destination and yourself closer together.

So, the reasoning is: if you could actually travel at the speed of light, time would stop. The alpha tech bleeds energy from the spatial friction of the craft’s relativistic expansion and space’s relativistic contraction to dilate the temporal. The kindergarten version of this is: it takes you a million years to travel to your distant star, but your craft takes you back a million years in time during the journey, and so you arrive pretty much as soon as you set out. Not exactly the same time: you cannot use α-FTL to travel in time before your departure point – for a great many, mostly obvious reasons. Even the theoretical best would be instantaneous travel. But in fact, a degree of lossiness is inherent in the process, such that you lose a few seconds per day of travel. The net result is that the ‘apparent’ velocity of an α-FTL startship is a little slower than the ‘apparent’ velocity of a β-FTL startship. Moreover, crews of the α-ships complain that the temporal retardation has queer and unpleasant effects upon them: their mental health, the telomeres in their cellular DNA, sometimes the language centres of their brains. Sometimes they gabble, afterwards, and speak in tongues.

It’s not so bad. I wouldn’t want you to think that it was so bad. Startships are basically hospitals anyway. Most of a startship’s interior function is keeping the crew alive, and in the high-radiation and alienating environment of space that requires constant medical intervention. Mental health and physical health are not separate elements. They are, rather, a manifold, like spacetime, and must be considered together. Any startship, but especially an α-FTL, devotes a majority of its time and energy budget to maintaining the health of its crew. The reason this is a larger portion of the business of an α-craft is that α-tech, because it simultaneously forces human beings massively forward in time and drags them massively backwards in time, messes with the brain in peculiar and sometimes pathological ways. But we know a lot about these effects and have developed a comprehensive package of treatments for handling it.

Because Sα-Niro set out from Earth just under a year or so before Sβ-Oubliette, it arrived at the black hole a few days before the sister ship.

The name of the black hole was HD 167128. It is more commonly known as QV Telescopii, abbreviated QV Tel. The object is 1120 light years from Earth. It took Sα-Niro four years to reach this place, and Sβ-Oubliette three years and three months.

Sα-Niro undertook a raft of experiments. The captain, Alpha Raine, was both a serving officer in the military, and a specialist in the physics of time-variation in fundamental constants. He was the winner of seven Nobel prizes, a fact which you will find less impressive when you understand that the Nobel was democratized in the 2170s, and that hundreds of thousands are awarded each year. Still! Raine was a smart chap. A clever geezer. A brainbox.

On the thirty-seventh day after their arrival in the system, Raine killed all eleven members of his crew, sealed all airlocks and entrances, and accelerated his ship into a lower, faster orbit around QV Tel.

The first that Sβ-Oubliette knew anything was wrong was when the intership communication pathways all sealed up, abruptly and without warning.

One of the eleven murdered individuals almost got away. Almost but not quite. Chronofficer Stone Ferry Longley made it to a pressure pod, and got outside the radiation dampeners, thereby enabling her to upload her feed to the shared pathway – before Raine used an exterior manipulator claw to smash the fabric of the pod and eject her body into the deathspace of vacuum.

But her feed got out.

The crew of the Sβ-Oubliette studied this feed with consternation. Raine had seemed normal, had done his job, had indeed possessed a reputation for kindness and sympathy. He talked excitedly with his crew over meals, and in their social time, about a technique he was exploring to utilize the Hawking radiation emitted by QV Tel to back-derive what he called ‘soundings’ from beyond the event horizon of the black hole. It sounded screwy, but he excitedly gabbled his rationale at the other crewmembers. Of course, nothing can escape the event horizon of a black hole: not matter, not light, not information. Everyone knows that! But Raine said, that’s wrong. He said: as the Hawking radiation is emitted, so an equal and opposite radiation falls into the singularity – and that equality and opposition allow us to intuit certain contours – certain qualities – about the—

Pull the other one, said Sylvie, the Sα-Niro alt-captain, who was downtiming after steering the ship to its destination, but who was still interacting with her crewmates on both ships.

But, no, seriously: let us consider Stone Ferry’s feed. What do we see? Raine’s blubbery face, blotched red, his nose marked with miniature lightning-strikes of red capillaries, gabbling. ‘The radiation is particles manifesting right on the edge of the event horizon,’ he was saying. We are before the crimes were committed, although you can discern the shift in Raine’s demeanour, his slide towards psychopathy. Stone Ferry was trying to fit her feet into the exercise frame, but Raine kept getting in her way. He was really, really excited about this, and really-really wanted to tell her. ‘So one particle is emitted and one anti-particle sinks into the singularity, balancing out. But these are entangled events so we can use the radiation to map the shape of the anti-radiation, beyond the horizon.’ Stone Ferry mumbled something about how it’s an absolute rule that information can’t pass the horizon, but she really wasn’t in the mood to engage him and kept jinking past him to fit her body into the frame. Eventually he got the message and left her alone. But as she went about her business, working her muscles, stressing her bones, she could see him, button­holing a different member of the crew, saying that he had built a device not only to measure the antiradiation on the far side of the event horizon, but that he was able to use it as a receiver, to listen in to the noise over there – ‘a waterfall of matter, plunging forever into an inescapable singularity,’ he chattered. ‘It’s amazing.’

Nobody on the Sα-Niro thought there was any real science in this, of course. But Raine’s manner was surely indicative of a mania and therefore of mental debility. So the crew did the proper thing: they used the Ship System protocols to relieve Raine of command. He took this in pretty good grace, all things considered.

Sylvie took notional command, though her downtime period was not yet completed, and the whole crew staged an intervention to press Raine into medical treatment. He didn’t exactly refuse to do this, but instead of conventional psychotropics he proposed an alternative: to spend a period of time in religious-mandated meditation.

The ship contained a sensory deprivation chamber, and the conventions of absolute religious toleration meant that any crewmember could opt for prayer as an alternative to medical treatment (although advised that medical treatment would become mandatory if prayer did not work). So they let him go off and pray.

This, it soon became apparent, was a mistake.

Raine took his device into the prayer room and spent three days in conversation, as he later insisted, with an entity living inside the black hole.

Of course he didn’t do this. Because he couldn’t. Information, like matter, can pass over the threshold of an event horizon, but it can never come back out again. More to the point: with whom was he ‘conversing’? Nothing can live inside a black hole. No creature could survive the immense gravitational shear and pressure of that place – if we can even call the interior of a black hole a place! Say rather, an annex to reality in which the logic of place stops being operative. Life was so fragile that, in thousands of solar systems explored, humanity had never encountered anything more advanced than bacteria, and even then only in the most balanced and hospitable places. No life, beyond the event horizon. Had there been some impossible creature, living inside this black box, inside this ebon sphere, inside this ultimate sinkhole, it would not have been able to communicate with creatures on the outside.

But on this point Raine was insistent.

‘You’ve tried prayer,’ Sylvie told him. ‘It hasn’t dialled-down your mania. I’m therefore mandating medical intervention.’

‘Wait,’ said Raine, excitedly. ‘Wait a moment – stop a moment – wait wait wait – this is the greatest breakthrough in human history! I’m in conversation with an intelligent extra-terrestrial! How are you guys not also excited by this? Our first encounter, as human beings, with intelligent alien life! Ten thousand stars explored and no aliens discovered. But now – this!’

Stone Ferry’s feed: crew members looking at one another. ‘Raine,’ said Marta Pita. ‘Listen to yourself.’

‘You listen to me!’ Raine demanded, growing agitated, his face flushing berry red. ‘You should listen to me!’

‘What language are you holding these conversations in, Raine?’ Stone Ferry asked.

Had Raine been canny, he would have answered mathematics or chemistry or something along those lines. But he was unguarded: ‘English!’

‘Modern English?’

‘It’s a little stilted on his side, a touch antique, but I figured he’s deduced it from me, perhaps read it out of my mind, and perhaps it’s not being perfectly transferred across.’

‘On his side?’ asked Sylvie. ‘This ET is gendered?’

‘Sure, sure, sure. He is a gentleman, Modo he’s called and Mahu.’

Everyone’s network alerted them to the fact that Raine was now quoting Shakespeare, which presumably meant that he was trolling them. The mood around the crew relaxed a little. It was only Raine, after all.

‘What do you, hmm,’ asked Marta, ‘what do you talk about with Mr Modo?’

‘He wants out,’ said Raine, excitedly. ‘He’s had enough of being cooped up in there. And good golly good gracious can you blame him?’

‘He’s not a native, then? Not a form of life that has evolved inside the event horizon?’ asked Sylvie.

‘Maybe he did evolve there,’ said Marta ‘But maybe he’s gotten bored, too. Wants to explore new horizons. Like humanity did, on Earth.’

‘That’s a pretty interesting hypothesis,’ said Stone Ferry. ‘I mean, why might life not evolve inside a black hole’s event horizon? It couldn’t be anything like us, of course. But it’s certainly a massively energy rich environment, inside there. Maybe a unique form of life could . . .’

‘No!’ cried Raine, losing it. ‘No no no! He was marooned there.’

‘Marooned?’

‘Imprisoned. Locked away. That’s why he wants out.’

Everyone greeted this news with embarrassed silence. ‘And he’d like us to – open the door?’ asked Sylvie. ‘Your nice Mr Modo? Did you tell him that that’s not how black holes work? Doesn’t he understand the nature of his, eh, prison?’

‘Raine,’ said Marta, gently. ‘It’s time for some psychiatric treatment. Let’s get you to the bay.’

That was when the first murder happened. In the horror and confusion, a blood-spattered Raine got away, and the rest of the crew had to put on riot gear and go looking to apprehend him with taserifles. He had, it seemed, had the knife about him from before he even went into his prayer retreat.

He was now, evidently, criminally insane. It was no longer a question of rehabilitation, but of incarceration – until the startship was able to return to Earth, and Raine could be tried, and treated, or negated.

And alt-Captain, Sylvie took charge. In retrospect this was probably a mistake. She was a fine navigator and had a brace of Nobel Prizes for medicine, but she did not think like a soldier. To be fair, none of the remaining crew did, exactly, think this way. Soldiering was, by this point in human history, a niche and historical-cosplay business. The problem was that she underestimated how belligerent, how ruthless and indeed how bloodthirsty Raine had become. Their Raine! Their friend and colleague, with whom they had lived and worked, laughed and fucked and prayed, for so many years! Changed, changed, utterly.

Marta and Soc were killed by blunt force trauma. Grei was noosed from behind, and as he struggled with the choking loop around his neck, Raine cut pieces from his legs and belly and chest, until he bled to death. These are the last murders concerning which we have specific details, because these were reported as such by Stone Ferry. She reported that all other crewmembers had died, although she did not provide particularities as to how. Then she herself was killed.

The crew of the Sβ-Oubliette considered the likelihood that Raine, growing used to killing, was increasing the cruelty and baroque complexities of his murdering as he went. Not a very comfortable thought.

You were born, in all likelihood, towards the end of the twentieth or towards the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Yes? I have no desire to condescend to you. Many of the features of life today will be readily comprehensible to you, if you can only – as surely you can – extrapolate from your past into our present with a little common sense.

Take the ship. There are lots of imaginary startships in your popular culture, but many of these are only vaguely thought-through: naval ships, or land-based buildings, foolishly projected into deep space. Corridors? Why would we want corridors in a startship? Rigid external superstructures and frame, containing decks and floor – very fragile, under the kinds of shearing forces and pressures of spaceflight. But you already knew this, if you had ever thought about it for a moment. The Sβ-Oubliette did not look like a skyscraper lying on its side, or a pyramidically-stacked aircraft carrier. It looked, if you prefer an aquatic analogy, like one of those semi-lucent glittering blobs that pulse through the depths of the ocean.

Some of a startship is its drive and power-systems: propulsion, guidance and AI. But most of it – nine-tenths, as I mentioned above – is a hospital. Human animals are not built for living in space, and any enterprise that puts human beings in space for long stretches of time must spend most of its time attending to the health of those humans. This is not – or, let’s say, it is rarely – a matter of broken bones, or infectious disease, as with older mundane hospitals. It is a congeries of related problems, chief amongst them radiation poisoning and bone-health from calcium loss, with modal health, mental-emotional wellbeing and temporal dysphasia coming close behind. Deep space is suffused with high levels of various rays and fields that degrade the human body on a cellular level: burns, mutations, cancers, decadences. Much of a deep space mission is attending to these injuries. Cancer cannot be inoculated against, but it can be treated. Cellular and DNA damage cannot be prevented, but can be addressed post hoc. Psychological derangement and distress, and spiritual emptiness, are perennials, and more likely to occur in the constricted environments of a startship than in the stimulus-rich homes and habitats of our utopian collectives, but even they can be coaxed back towards wholeness and health by the right strategies. Solace is possible. And so the mission goes on. For the crew, about a third of their waking hours are given over to ship’s business, a third to health-checks and treatments, leaving a few hours of leisure time per artificial day.

In the case of a ship’s emergency – as now, aboard the Sβ-Oubliette – the leisure time is eaten into, and the duty absorbs more of the day. But the healthcare is never stinted.

As for corridors: the interior of any given startship will be different, depending on design and purpose and aesthetics, but the basic structure is a cluster of moveable Meissner tetrahedra, linked together with smartcable. The interiors of these structures, being non-spheres of uniform diameter, are spun in a complex of spiral trajectories to mimic gravity. It’s a poor imitation, and extra work pushing limbs in exercise bands, compressing the body and – most of all – addressing calcium loss and density with medical interventions are also needful. But Meissner bodies make more liveable interiors than the circular strips of ribbon rotated like a merry-go-round, like in your moving-along picture show Two Thousand and One Odysseys. Those are very tricky to live in, believe me. Some places do operate them: usually as temporary structures while larger, more stable ones are being built. But you wouldn’t want to live in such a rotating strip. Turn around suddenly – turn your head too quickly – and you’ll start puking. Large-diameter slow-spinning Meissner bodies, by slowly moving the 3D space on an in-logic inaround, is a much more tolerable arrangement.

You don’t care about any of that. Why would you?

My point is no corridors – no corridors at all. If you wish to move from room to room, rooms are tugged and brought to you, or else other spaces are brought to you through which you can easily access your destination. So that’s how we live, when we’re shipboard.

Each ship has a committee of at least seven AIs, and they triage the needs of all crew members to get where they’re going or avoid interference by others in the search for solitude, and the whole system is in motion like Baoding Balls.

The captain of the Oubliette was called Kim Red. The alt-captain was an individual called Ko Kyung-Joon.

Now they were faced with a problem. It was clear that the Niro was a disaster zone – in all likelihood everyone on the other ship was dead save Raine, and it was certainly not impossible that Raine had killed himself after his murder spree, as is often the way with such lamentable and luckily rare derangements.

What to do?

Understand this: with immense expenditure of energy it is possible to move startships faster than light. But there was no technology that permitted the propagation of mere communication faster than light. This universe of ours is an ansibleless zone. Accordingly the only way to get the news back to Earth – or to other outposts of human settlement – was by bringing the news in person.

‘I have never experienced anything like this,’ said Ko Kyung-Joon. ‘I asked our AI to game possibilities, but she was just as bamboozled as I am.’

Kim Red said: ‘It is clear the crew of the Niro are all dead, and that Raine may or may not be dead. The Niro’s AI is, we assume, non-functional, or it would have intervened to prevent slaughter, sealed Raine in a chamber, protected the other crewpeople. Presumably Raine disabled it. We must make a decision. Our options are twofold: we can dock with the Niro, and attempt to reclaim the ship – if we are able to do this, we can put the dead to rest with prayer and ceremony, and then transfer a short crew to pilot the craft home. But there are reasons to believe that we might not be able to do this. Assume Raine is still alive, and still possessed by the murderous thirst that prompted him to kill his comrades. If so, then he would try to kill any of us who boarded that ship.’

‘But would he succeed?’ asked Chung Stitch. ‘We are aware of the danger he represents. We would not be easy prey.’

‘He killed his entire crew,’ noted Ko Kyung-Joon. ‘The first few were taken by surprise, yes, but after that the remaining crew were on guard. They hunted him. The remaining crewmembers would have worn protective clothing, like beekeepers, and carried weapons. And yet they are all dead. Can we be sure we wouldn’t share their fate, if we attempted to board the Niro?’

‘That,’ said Kim Red, ‘suggests we pursue option 2: leave.’

‘Leave the Niro in orbit here?’

‘It is three years and four months since we left Earth, and we can be there again in three years three, if we push the drive as hard as possible. Add in the time dilation of our proximity to QV Tel, and we will arrive home after a month or two shy of twelve years after we departed. Assume a mission is then mounted – with trained volunteer soldiers, and a military-style startship, rather than mere scientists and priests like us – and assume that the startship is fitted with a β-drive . . .’

‘. . . then,’ Choe Eggs finished for her captain, ‘by the time we return, fifteen years or more will have passed.’

‘Not for Raine,’ said Ko Kyung-Joon.

‘Nonetheless – can we leave him alone for such a long time?’

‘There is the question of solitude,’ Kim Red noted. ‘It would amount to cruel and unusual punishment.’

One of the logics of space exploration was that no person be allowed to voyage solus. Loneliness is a tough enough psychological experience at home, on a planet surrounded by billions. To be alone light years away from the nearest fellow creature can do terrible things to a person’s psyche. This was so well-established a feature of space exploration that a mission committee would no more send a single individual alone into space than they would send a ship without supplies of food and water.

‘After what he has done . . .’ growled Ko Kyung-Joon. But even he, of them all the crewmember with the sternest temperament, could not complete the sentiment. Even considering the monstrous and cruel actions Raine had undertaken, he could not be treated so barbarously. Incarceration, to protect others and himself, and punishment, to set him on the road towards atonement, yes. But not this cruelty. It is an essential part of the logic of utopia that cruelty has no place in it.

‘My concern,’ said Choe Eggs, ‘is otherwise. The ship has been, it seems, a little damaged by the actions of its former captain – but not much damaged, and there is no question but that the drive still works. What if Raine jury-rigs the Niro and flies it away?’

‘Flies it where?’

‘The fact is,’ Choe Eggs replied, sardonically enough, ‘that Raine is not in his right mind. Predicting his actions cannot, given the psychiatric circumstances here, be a matter of accuracy. But my concern is: he has proven himself murderous. If he boots-up the ship and flies away, he could visit disaster and death on – well, upon wherever he decided to go.’

The crew consulted their networks to get a quick sense of where, in the local stellar environment, a rogue captain might steer his ship. It depended, of course, on what said rogue captain was looking for. A settled world? An adjuvant facility? An orbital habitat? A port station? ‘Assume the worst,’ suggested Ko Kyung-Joon. ‘That he is thirsty for murder, that his sociopathy wants to kill human beings and as many as possible. Then I suggest he would fly to the Adjuvant at Caro77. He could reach it in a year. It has a population of over sixty thousand.’

‘Himsted is half the distance and millions live there.’

‘Himsted is a world. Caro77 is an Adjuvant. He might kill some of the people who live on the former, but with the latter he could destroy the whole facility and murder them all.’

The crew were shocked at this observation. It had literally not occurred to any of them that a human being might even consider such an enormity.

‘Do you really think . . .’ asked Sima Shi, but could not finish the sentiment.

There was silence for a while.

‘We are the faster ship,’ noted Chung Stitch. ‘We could arrive at Caro77 before Raine.’

‘And he would plot our direction of travel,’ said Ko Kyung-Joon, ‘and know not to go there. There are many other Adjuvants, and smaller platforms and stations he could choose.’

It was a dilemma.

‘So, Ko, you are suggesting,’ asked Kim Red, ‘that we stay here and attempt to recover the Niro and apprehend Raine.’

‘It is not ideal,’ Ko Kyung-Joon conceded. ‘We are not soldiers. There is a chance Raine will kill some, or all, of us.’

‘And if he kills us, then what good have we achieved?’ demanded Sima Shi, hotly. ‘He will then be able to fly to any target he chooses and kill again. Better we return home, and tell people, such that startships be sent to all possible targets to warn and protect.’

‘There is also the chance,’ Ko Kyung-Joon pressed, ‘that we will capture Raine without losing any of our own. There is even the chance that he is dead – he may have killed himself. We must consider the balance of possibilities. It is an actuarial decision. Which ha. . .