Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

he might, for once, have
given Poole a little comfort.
    Tahget said grimly, ’Before you get too dewy-eyed, remember this
was a war zone.’ He told Poole how Chandra had once been surrounded
by technology, a net-like coating put in place by beings who had
corralled a supermassive black hole and put it to work. ’The whole
set-up took a lot of destroying,’ Tahget said evenly. ’When we’d
finished that job, we’d won the Galaxy.’
    Poole stared at him. ’You new generations are a formidable
bunch.’
    There were stars in the accretion disc. Tahget pointed them
out.
    The disc was a turbulent place, where eddies and knots with the
mass of many suns could form - and, here and there, collapse,
compress and spark into fusion fire. These stars shone like jewels in
the murky debris at the rim of the disc. But doomed they were, as
haplessly drawn towards Chandra as the rest of the disc debris from
which they were born. Eventually the most massive star would be torn
apart, its own gravity no match for the tides of Chandra. Sometimes
you would see a smear of light brushed across the face of the disc:
the remains of a star, flensed and gutted, its material still glowing
with fusion light.
    Some stars didn’t last even that long. Massive, bloated, these
monsters would burst as supernovas almost as soon as they formed,
leaving behind remnants: neutron stars - or even black holes,
stellar-mass objects. Even Chandra couldn’t break open a black hole,
but it would gobble up these babies with relish. When a black hole
hit Chandra, so it was said, that immense event horizon would ring
like a bell.
    It was towards one of these satellite black holes that the Ask
Politely now descended.
    Dropping into the accretion disc was like falling into a shining
cloud; billows and bubbles, filaments and sheets of glowing gas
drifted upwards past the ship. Even though those billows were larger
than planets - for the accretion disc, as Poole had noted, was as
wide as a solar system itself - Futurity could see the billows
churning as he watched, as if the ship was falling into a nightmare
of vast, slow-moving sculptures.
    The approach was tentative, cautious. Captain Tahget said the
Shipbuilders were having to be bribed with additional goodies; the
swarming creatures were very unhappy at having to take their ship
into this dangerous place. This struck Futurity as a very rational
point of view.
    In the middle of all this they came upon a black hole.
    They needed the observation lounge’s magnification features to see
it. With twice the mass of Earth’s sun, it was a blister of sullen
light, sailing through the accretion clouds. Like Chandra’s, the dark
mask of its event horizon - in fact only a few kilometres across -
was hidden by the electromagnetic scream of the matter it sucked out
of the universe. It even had its own accretion disc, Futurity saw, a
small puddle of light around that central spark.
    And this city-sized sun had its own planet. ’Greyworld,’ Mara
breathed. ’I never thought I’d see it again.’
    This asteroid, having survived its fall into Chandra’s accretion
disc, had been plucked out of the garbage by the Ideocrats and moved
to a safe orbit around the satellite black hole. The worldlet orbited
its primary at about the same distance as Earth orbited its sun. And
Greyworld lived up to its name, Futurity saw, for its surface was a
seamless silver-grey, smooth and unblemished.
    To Mara, it seemed, this was home. ’We live under the roof,’ Mara
said. ’It is held up from the surface by stilts.’
    ’We used to call this paraterraforming,’ Poole said. ’Turning your
world into one immense building. Low gravity lets you get away with a
lot, doesn’t it?’
    ’The roof is perfectly reflective,’ Mara said. ’We tap the free
energy of the Galaxy centre to survive, but none of it reaches our
homes untamed.’
    ’I should think not,’ Poole said warmly.
    ’It is a beautiful place,’ Mara said, smiling. ’We build our
houses tall; some of them float, or hang from the world roof. And you
feel safe, safe from the violence of the galactic storms outside. You
should see it sometime, Michael Poole.’
    Poole raised his eyebrows. ’But, Mara, your >safe< haven is
about as unsafe as it could get, despite the magical roof.’
    ’He’s right,’ said Tahget. ’This black hole and its orbital
retinue are well on their way into Chandra. After another decade or
so the tides will pull the planetoid free of the