Creation node, p.1
Creation Node, page 1
To the memory of my father Eric Augustine Baxter (1929–1983), my grandfather William Henry Baxter (1882–1946), and my great-grandfather William Charles Baxter (1844–1919).
Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Year 0 AD 2255
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Year 4 AD 2259
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Year 5 AD 2260
Chapter 18
Year 6 AD 2261
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Year 11 AD 2266
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Elsewhere, Elsewhen
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Year 54 AD 2309
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Elsewhere, Elsewhen
Chapter 49
Afterword
Credits
Also by Stephen Baxter
Copyright
Year 0
AD 2255
1
In the year 2255, of all the sentient beings in her universe, it was a woman named Salma, twenty years old, who was the first fully to see the object called Planet Nine. See with her own eyes, albeit moderated by her ship’s instruments. If not to recognise what it was, not yet.
And not that the object had turned out to be a planet, or the ‘ninth’ of anything.
But when she inspected the startling results of her first analysis of the radiation leaking out of Nine, and although she wouldn’t know it for some time, Salma’s universe had changed for ever.
In essence, she was the first person Nine spoke to.
As these observations were made, as the first analyses ran, the first conclusions tentatively formulated, Salma took her time before even telling her crewmates.
Even before calling Hild Kanigel, captain of this small crew since the Shadow’s launch thirty-five years ago. Or Meriel Breen, hydroponic farmer and doctor, who Salma had come to think of as an honorary aunt since the death of her own mother. The two closest human beings in Salma’s world, two of just six crew aboard the Shadow. She needed to be sure this wasn’t some careless glitch. Pride mandated that.
Her detection had been a chance sighting. Anybody else could have made it. But, to be fair, the odds were relatively good that it would have been Salma who would make that key observation, given that she so often volunteered for the longest stretches up on the science deck.
Salma was the product of the Shadow’s only onboard birth. All her life she had been the only growing child on the huge, slow ship. And for that reason, maybe, she had grown to love the hours she spent here alone. Work filled her days.
You were in a big bubble of toughened glass, sparingly fashioned from Oort-cloud materials – comet stuff, like most of the fabric of the Shadow – and held away from the ship’s main hull by a transit tube. The glass itself was nearly perfectly transparent, the view spoiled only by your own ghostly reflection, illuminated as you were by the dimmest of emergency lighting, and by banks of analysis screens beneath the bubble’s attachment to the base structure.
You sat surrounded by a sphere of deep space. If you wanted to be alone, this was quite some place to be alone in.
And what a view. You, and the edge of the Solar System, and the distant stars.
The edge of the Solar System … She knew she was about seven hundred astronomical units from the Sun. Seven hundred times Earth’s distance from the central star – Earth, a place she had only ever glimpsed in the ship’s records.
Over twenty times as far out as the furthest major planet, Neptune. Around fifteen times further out than the outer edge of the ragged cloud of primordial debris beyond the planets that was the Kuiper belt. She was five or six times further out even than the limit of the heliosphere, where the wind from the Sun, a breeze of fast-racing charged particles, finally dissipated into the cooler interstellar medium.
And if she looked back that way she saw the inner Solar System only as a puddle of misty light, the light of an inner space cluttered with planets, moons and asteroids, the debris of planet formation. It would be a strain to find the Sun itself, still the brightest star in the sky – just – its light having taken nearly four days to reach across the gulf of space to the Shadow. But that much-scattered sunlight was still intense enough to push at the Shadow’s enormous solar sail.
And all the people that existed, the teeming billions, even those far away from Earth itself – even those aboard the busy spacebound industrial hubs of the Consortium, even those in other Conserver colonies and craft scattered around the inner edge of the Oort cloud – all of them were down in that puddle of light.
All save the six aboard the Shadow.
But as she had grown, the only ship-born child without sentimental attachment to the birth planets and their teeming crowds, Salma had come to relish the view in the opposite direction. Amid the sprawling light of star clouds, she knew where to seek the Galaxy’s very centre, with its supermassive black hole – a centre readily found behind the curtain of relatively close stars that was the spectacular Sagittarius constellation.
In fact that giant black hole was a big sibling of what some theorists had long guessed ‘Planet Nine’ to be, long before a crewed ship ever got here. Not a planet at all, to the chagrin of some other theorists.
A black hole, at the edge of the Solar System itself.
Now, at last, beyond all the theorising and the arguments and the heroic engineering, the Shadow had made it out here, and there was Nine itself: revealed, yes, as a black hole, unmistakable from its gravity profile if nothing else – even if it had not been visible to human eyes before, thanks to the storm of glowing gases that surrounded it.
But now it was visible. Glimpsed through brief gaps in the light storm, the glowing nebula, that it itself created. As mediated by her instruments, Salma saw it at last.
A perfect black sphere.
Salma pored over the data once again.
The black hole – as Nine did seem to be – was both very small and very large. As expected from the theory.
Small in human dimensions, in one way, in its physical size – no larger than a human head. But larger than most planets in terms of its mass – and, crucially, its gravity field – for it massed some ten times the mass of Earth.
And as Nine had followed its own twenty-thousand-year orbit around the Sun, that hungry planetary-scale gravity well had drawn in whatever nature could provide. Not that there was much per cubic metre out this far – scattered dust and ice, the remnants of ancient comets from within the Solar System, and debris from destructive events far, far away. But in time Nine had passed through an awful lot of cubic metres, and Nine had a deep, wide gravity well, and it had had a lot of time to gather an irregular cloud around itself.
A cloud that the electromagnetic fields of the spinning hole worked on assiduously, ionising material drawn in by gravity, then grabbing it magnetically and hurling it around – ‘like a matador’s cape,’ Hild had once said, a reference that baffled Salma. The result was changeable, asymmetric, startlingly messy, given the pure geometry of the object at its centre. A ‘damn fireworks show,’ as grumpy old Boyd contemptuously had put it, another baffling reference.
But if you wanted to see Planet Nine for yourself, you had to penetrate this cloud, this light show. And that was what the Shadow had been doing for more than a year already, ever more cautiously, since it had slowed to a near halt relative to Nine. Edging into the inner cloud, trying to avoid the more angry-looking masses of this rootless storm – not an easy trick when you were propelled only by a solar sail nearly forty kilometres wide.
Closer and closer to the demon in its cage of light.
And at the key first moment of clarity, it happened to be Salma’s place in the duty roster on this science deck, maintaining ‘eyeball lock’ on Nine, as instructed by Hild. Salma who finally got to see the object hidden within. Salma who was there when, briefly, miraculously, the storm cleared along the ship’s line of sight. A chance adjustment of the ship’s trajectory, an unexpected break in the glowing debris cloud—
It was as if a corridor of light had opened up. And there, at last …
Salma worked feverishly, observing, recording, studying the data as it poured in.
Especially the visuals.
It was a perfect sphere, just as the theory said it must be – a sphere you could wrap your arms around, and yet with a gravitational influence that extended across the whole of the Sun’s outer domain, and the chill bodies that inhabited it. This was the most
She touched the medallion she wore on a thread around her neck.
A heavy pendant, a disc, shadow-black – it had been a gift from a mother she had never known ‒ she wore it habitually, had worn it as long as she could remember.
A muddle of memes, of feelings.
She tried to be analytical. Her mother’s pendant. A black hole. Perfect circles, featureless …
She was dreaming. On her consoles, more flags lit up.
Something had changed.
With the veil of hot gas temporarily parting, she was picking up a paler signal, a more tenuous radiation, coming not from the glowing gases, but from deep within the hole’s gravity well itself.
She had studied black holes, theoretically. She knew what that deep signal must be: Hawking radiation, random noise created at the event horizon itself, called after the long-dead sage who had predicted its existence. She recorded it all.
But on her consoles, still more attention flags lit up. Now, she saw, scanning the data quickly, there were anomalies in the data-gathering. The event-horizon radiation was not quite featureless, not quite random, it turned out. There were patterns in that trickle of radiation.
Patterns that must be coming from the hole itself. From the event horizon, that spherical knot of distorted spacetime.
Radiation from a black hole, with a complex structure.
Almost like … a signal.
Startled, she considered the results.
They checked out. She was baffled. Overwhelmed.
Overjoyed.
A signal?
Enough wallowing in triumph, she told herself. Nobody else knows what you have found, not yet. Time to make your report.
With a murmur into the air, she sent Hild, the captain, a private page – a quick summary, a quicker headline, a simple verbal tag: ‘About Nine. There are anomalies, Captain. You’d better get up here.’
Hild called straight back. ‘Anomalies? Not just a miniature black hole? Well, I guess we didn’t come all the way out here to be bored. On my way. Be ready to show me what you have.’
‘I’ll be ready.’
But what did she have? Only a hunch.
A hunch that the black hole was trying to talk to them.
2
When she arrived, Hild wasted no time on pleasantries. ‘Let me look.’ Hild leaned forward to see the data, the images.
Then she spent a good quarter of an hour studying the readouts Salma selected for her.
Salma drifted back in the gravity-free air of the deck, as she knew the captain preferred, as she perused the data for herself, in silence. Hild was seventy years old, whip-thin – kept that way by regular use of the ship’s exercise facilities – and with thick white hair shaved efficiently close to her scalp. And as she worked, Salma noticed, Hild kept one eye on a small ship-wide notification and alarm screen. Hild was captain of a ship parked in a hazardous place, and was never off duty.
At last she looked up at Salma. ‘So, your report on this?’
Salma took a breath. ‘It’s clearly a black hole,’ she said. ‘As has long been suggested, even from Earth. This is the final confirmation. Ten times the mass of Earth, hence our cautious orbit. But small in size, only a quarter of a metre across—’
‘Amazing we found it at all. And its size pins down its origin, correct?’
Salma had grown up with this kind of provocative questioning, as Hild, or some other meddler, had tried to get her to think for herself. She had been born the only child, the only pupil, on a ship crammed with easy-access information outlets, and a crew of clever, bored adults. But given her mother’s illness and death, an orphan, effectively – with unknown donor father presumably back in the main Solar System.
Anyhow her answer was inadequate, she knew before saying it.
‘Sort of.’
‘Sort of? We may as well have stayed at home if that’s the only observation you can give me—’
‘This is apparently a primordial black hole,’ Salma said hastily.
‘Apparently?’
Salma treated it like a test and trotted out the facts. ‘We know of three types of black hole in nature. There are massive black holes at the hearts of galaxies – including our own …’
And Hild absently looked out through the wide windows at the glowing heart of the Galaxy, away in Sagittarius – or at least at the veil of dust and gas and stars that concealed that object.
Salma said cautiously, ‘These are black holes with the masses of millions of suns, presumably formed in the early days of the universe where huge gas clouds were gathered in by turbulent dark matter fields. Naked objects that then settled into the hearts of the new galaxies …’
‘And?’
‘And then you have stellar-size holes, relics of later generations of star-making. Formed when a large star runs out of fusion fuel, cools, and leaves remains massive enough to implode through the white dwarf stage – past even the neutron star stage, where the pressure of gravity overcomes quantum effects that resist collapse – you are left with a remnant many times the mass of our Sun.’
‘But this thing has multiples of Earth’s mass, not Sol’s mass. Even further down the scale from all that. So now you are going to tell me that, if Nine is a black hole, it must be primordial. Right?’
‘Right,’ Salma said. ‘Meaning, not a relic of star formation, but a by-product of the high-energy quantum-gravity field that created the universe itself. When spacetime itself was unfolding, expanding, in places falling back, perhaps creating black holes of a whole range of masses and sizes. Even as small as an atomic nucleus.’ She frowned. ‘But I thought the smallest ones should have quickly evaporated—’
‘So the theorists have been speculating, for a couple of centuries, I think,’ Hild said. ‘And at the same time they were wondering about Planet Nine. Evidently a massive object, with a planet-sized mass and so exerting Solar System-wide effects – just as if you threw planet Uranus itself out here, its gravity dragging comets and planets out of their orbits – but never seen. Makes you think. If this is a primordial black hole, it’s as old as our universe. Billions of years older than Sun and Earth. Older than any of the stars in the sky. Older than the galaxies.’ She eyed Salma. ‘You aren’t old yet. You haven’t seen anybody really old, not yet. Even I’m only seventy. You get more interested in the ages of things, and their survival, the older you get, I think. And if this is a relic of the birth of the universe, a direct relic – well, even the raw science data might sell well. And there are even more exotic possibilities. Some cosmologists have argued for centuries that maybe these ancient black holes were formed in another universe … An earlier cosmos, which collapsed into the Big Bang which created our cosmos, a vast cataclysm which these older black holes survived … I think the main candidates for survival are the big galaxy-centre holes, but …’
Salma listened absently. She knew that the Conservers were not above selling such data to academies on Earth – even to the miners on the Moon, the so-called Consortium, who generally concentrated on such practical priorities as how to squeeze a little more helium-3 fusion fuel out of a given kilogram of dry lunar soil.
But she knew this wasn’t the point, just now. When Hild slowed down a little, she said so.
Hild frowned. ‘Then what is the point?’
Now Salma hesitated, and not for the first time in her life she wished she had someone her own age to back her up.
‘This black hole seems to have some – unusual – features.’
‘Unusual? Not that we handle primordial black holes every day of the week.’
Salma had never been entirely sure what a ‘week’ was, or what the point of it was.
‘No. Maybe unusual is not the right word. Puzzling, then. For one thing it’s spinning,’ she said firmly. ‘Rotating very rapidly.’
Hild frowned again. ‘All right. And you can tell that by—’
‘Drag effects. Even light suffers drag effects near a black hole. I’ll show you.’
Trying not to look too eager, she produced images of Nine taken against a background of distant stars. And these images, carefully magnified, showed distorted halos around the hole, as, Salma knew, starlight itself was deflected as it passed the horizon of the hole.
