Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

concentric swirls of gas seemed to make one bean-shaped disk whose irregular contour, twisting with the secondary hole, smoothed out almost to an oval with distance from the duel center.
    The sky around that cosmic gullet—if you could call it a sky—was crowded with stars of every possible color, jammed so closely together that in places the blackness of space seemed to be nothing more than pavement showing through. Gigantic irregular blobs of glowing gas wandered among the stars, grazing on them. Every once in a while, the flash of a supernova explosion, speeded up twenty thousand times, could be seen through an engorged blob. The blobs had an average drift toward the black holes; the ones closest to the double maelstrom bulged yearningly toward it.
    A cloud rushed toward them. “Hold on again,” Jao’s voice said. “We’re going through.”
    The tree shook as the fields compensated. Weight fluctuated. Bram hoped nobody was moving about; otherwise, there might be broken bones that couldn’t be attended to for some hours. Starfog enveloped them, dimming the fire ahead but not hiding it. Violet stars bobbed by, bloating themselves on the feast of gas; their violet color was the computer program’s translation of the x-rays kindled by that rain of starmist.
    Outside the clear elastic windows, the cloud manifested itself only as a dull red flicker—random flashes caused by encounters of gas molecules with relativistic electrons and orphaned protons that happened to be traveling in the same direction as Yggdrasil.
    They broke through the cloud a minute later, into the awful radiance of the galaxy’s inner heart. The whirlpool was just ahead, a roaring cataract of flame.
    “Here we go!” Jao’s voice said.
    An enormous force seized the tree. Abruptly, weight was gone. Yggdrasil’s acceleration was insignificant within that tremendous grip; it was like rowing upstream against a waterfall.
    “Stay down!” Bram shouted.
    His voice cut through the sudden babble, and people who had started to move clung to their mats. Bram thumbed the intercom switch and repeated his warning for those in their quarters.
    Tidal forces changed their orientation as Yggdrasil, now in orbit around the outside hole, swung loose on its tether. The probe, uselessly spitting hadronic photons, must similarly have been trying to align its axis with its strange new parent body.
    Bram fervently and irrationally hoped the probe’s drive was pointed down, not up. Not that it would significantly matter in these few minutes and in view of the greater forces acting on the vehicle. In any case, he reminded himself, breaking free of orbit now would be every bit as deadly as diving into the black hole itself.
    Equipment went sliding and crashing. People gasped as they felt the tidal pseudogravity change its direction. The hole didn’t care which axis it struck through the wider diameter of the dumbbell-shaped body it had captured, but Yggdrasil, bless it, did, and the tree’s struggle to “remember” its Bobbing Day vertical saved the humans from injury.
    “Hold on to something if you can!” Bram shouted. “Try to stay in contact with the floor!”
    Yggdrasil held together. Jun Davd had done his calculations well. The smaller black hole, with a solar-system-size circumference of over a billion and a half miles, was big enough, and their orbital distance from it great enough that tidal forces could not pull the tree apart. And the size of an individual human being was too insignificant to matter. Bram could feel the differential in the tug between his head and his feet, but it was no worse than the second-rate artificial gravity to be found in a spinning space vehicle that happened to have a diameter of only forty or fifty feet.
    “Here comes the fun part,” Jao said over the loudspeaker.
    Yggdrasil swooped around the focus of its orbit. It was now attaining the inside loop of its curve. It was no longer speeding around the black hole in a direction contrary to the hole’s own path around the parent hole, but was picking up fifty thousand g’s worth of acceleration from the hole’s orbital motion.
    All for free, as Jao had pointed out. It was fifty thousand gravities that would have crushed them to paste if they had not been in free fall around the body that was providing it.
    The only scary part of it was the fact that the inside loop was taking the treeful of humans between the two black holes.
    “Oh, Bram,” Mim whispered,