Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

the
orbital period around the black hole.’
    ’But that’s just gravity, the inverse square law, defined by one
number: the black hole’s mass. All right, what else have we got?’
Inexpertly Poole tapped at a Virtual clone of Futurity’s desk. He
magnified an image of the hole itself. It was a flaring pinprick,
even under heavy magnification. But Poole played with filters until
he had reduced the central glare, and had brought up details of the
background sky.
    A textured glow appeared. A rough sphere of pearly gas surrounded
the black hole and much of its accretion disc, and within the sphere
a flattened ellipsoid of brighter mist coalesced closer to the
hole.
    ’Well, well,’ said Poole.
    Futurity, entranced, leaned closer to see. ’I never knew black
holes had atmospheres! Look, Michael Poole, it is almost like an eye
staring at us - see, with the white, and then this iris within, and
the black hole itself the pupil.’
    Tahget listened to this contemptuously. ’Evidently neither of you
has been around black holes much.’ He pointed to the image of the
accretion disc. ’The hole’s magnetic field pulls material out of the
disc, and hurls it into these wider shells. We call the outer layers
the corona.’
    Futurity said, ’A star’s outer atmosphere is also a corona.’
    ’Well done,’ said Tahget dryly. ’The gas shells around black holes
and stars are created by similar processes. Same physics, same
name.’
    Poole said, ’And the magnetic field pumps energy into these
layers. Futurity, look at this temperature profile!’
    ’Yes,’ said Tahget. ’In the accretion disc you might get
temperatures in the millions of degrees. In the inner corona’ - the
eye’s ’iris’ - ’the temperatures will be ten times hotter than that,
and in the outer layers ten times hotter again.’
    ’But the magnetic field of a spinning black hole and its accretion
disc isn’t simple,’ Poole said. ’It won’t be just energy that the
field pumps in, but complexity.’ He was becoming more expert with the
data desk now. He picked out a section of the inner corona, and
zoomed in. ’What do you make of that, Futurity?’
    The acolyte saw wisps of light, ropes of denser material in the
turbulent gases, intertwined, slowly writhing. They were like ghosts,
driven by the complex magnetic fields, and yet, Futurity immediately
thought, they had a certain autonomy. Ghosts, dancing in the
atmosphere of a black hole! He laughed with helpless delight.
    Poole grinned. ’I think we just found our structure.’
    Mara was smiling. ’I told you,’ she said. ’And that’s where my
daughter is.’

 
VIII
     
     
    It took a detailed examination of the structures in the black hole
air, a cross-examination of Mara, input from the experienced Captain
Tahget, and some assiduous searching of the ship’s data stores -
together with some extremely creative interpolation by Michael Poole
- before they had a tentative hypothesis to fit the facts about what
had happened here.
    Like so much else about this modern age, it had come out of the
death of the Interim Coalition of Governance.
    Poole said, ’Breed, fight hard, die young, and stay human: you
could sum up the Coalition’s philosophy in those few words. In its
social engineering the Coalition set up a positive feedback process;
it unleashed a swarm of fast-breeding humans across the Galaxy, until
every star system had been filled.’ Poole grinned. ’Not a noble way
to do it, but it worked. And we did stay human, for twenty thousand
years. Evolution postponed!’
    ’It wasn’t as simple as that,’ Futurity cautioned. ’Perhaps it
couldn’t have been. The Shipbuilders slid through the cracks. There
were even rumours of divergences among the soldiers of the front
lines, as they adapted to the pressures of millennia of war.’
    ’Sure.’ Poole waved a hand. ’But these are exceptions. You can’t
deny the basic fact that the Coalition froze human evolution, for the
vast bulk of mankind, on epic scales of space and time. And by doing
so, they won their war. Which was when the trouble really
started.’
    The heirs of the Coalition were if anything even more fanatical
about their ideology and purpose than their predecessors had ever
been. They had called themselves the Ideocracy, precisely to
emphasise the supremacy of the ideas which had won a Galaxy, but of
which everybody else had temporarily lost sight.
    In their conclaves the Ideocrats sought a new strategy. Now