The White-Hole Situation

Something Else

Halfway down the Pacific coast of the former Central America, a tiny fishing village surrounded a peaceful harbor. Consisting of a couple dozen thatch-roofed, cane stalk yurts scattered unevenly about, the village was a replica of one that might have existed in that very spot a thousand years before. Named XTilixh after the legendary serpent god said to have guarded its entrance, the hamlet offered no services, no shops, no landing strip, no visible power source or even roads in and out of the jungle beyond. There were no permanent ships or boats docked along the one potential wharf, a natural outcropping of volcanic boulders. Instead, when a resident wanted to venture out, they just asked for what they wanted.

"Computer," they might say, "a two-person kayak, brown and light, oh and paddles please." A small battalion of barely visible nodes would congregate and voila, there's your boat and there are the paddles. Since life jackets were not requested, none were provided. How do they make these things out of nothing? It's simple science, chemistry and physics. Matter is matter and the world we know is all about exterior decorating, combining all the proper elements in the right combinations. You already know all this. You know there are no actual boundaries between things, it only seems that way to our clod-bound brains, unable (and for good reasons) to perceive the intricate complexity and perpetual dance of the atoms. All of our substance is linked to all other substance. We never came from nothing. We never return to that but on our death we gradually release the bundled matter we held together as bodies. Time to let it go.

"Let it go?" Pagan said, climbing into the back of the kayak. "I'd love to. Where's the box marked Returns? Where do I put all that I feel?"

"That's not what I said," Pisco grumbled, piling into the front and grabbing a paddle. Pagan pushed off from the shore and began splashing furiously. "I said let's go."

And now we're going, he added to himself as the little boat hurried out to sea. They had brought no other equipment with them, no fishing gear, no diving outfits, no picnic lunch. They weren't going anywhere in particular, just getting some exercise. Pagan had woken up especially irritable today and she was someone who best expressed herself through the expense of energy. Pisco would have been content to stay at home but wherever Pagan went, Pisco followed, like the moon has no choice but to follow the sun. He had just started working on his latest project, a stuffed Celurian Snitwolf. He'd designed it the night before in his mind, and requested the required materials in the morning - yellow and gray wool, cardboard and plaster, glue and blue marbles, and biologically accurate bones. The wolf was to be a cub - they were cute when young, before developing those massive jaws - and about a foot square at most. He had just sat down to organize the bits and pieces into more convenient piles when his permanent companion rushed into his hut.

"I can't," she declared before starting to pace in circles around him. Pagan was nearing sixty but was as fit and strong as she'd been half her life earlier, when the pair had spent most of their time roaming among the stars, eager for battle. She'd turned down numerous captaincies to remain at most lieutenant, chiefly in charge of security for any number of starships. As larger-than-life as she was, with her wound-up springs and tightly coiled head, Pisco was smaller-than in nearly every way. Understated, quiet and patient, he was nevertheless as deadly to any foe, as he had proven on countless occasions. He was a half-decade younger, but readier for retirement in some ways. It was his idea to settle there in XTilixh. In fact, if it weren't for his idea, there would have been no village. He'd picked the location and invented the whole thing. At first there had only been two huts, but Pagan was continually restless, so she ordered a third and moved into that, and then a fourth, and a fifth. Pisco thought that either she'd build a whole city soon or else start returning to previously rejected dwellings. He had a private bet on the side about that with their old friends Roderick and Geronimo.

Captain Geronimo, that is, of the starship Remicade. He was the one most proximately responsible for Pagan's latest outburst. He'd contacted her at dawn, their time, apologized for the intrusion although he knew that wasn't necessary because time zones are notoriously difficult to pin down when you are halfway across the galaxy. Naturally, he needed her help. It wasn't Celurian wolves this time, or vicious enemies like the T-Cart Empire who, despite their seemingly domestic name had been responsible for more human fatalities than any other species yet encountered. This time the danger was more opaque.

"At first we thought it was just an anomaly," Geronimo said, his imposing face encrusted with wear and concern, "one of those mysteries of the cosmos best left to the I.B.U., but even the system seems to have no answer."

That fact made Pagan sit up and pay attention. When had there ever been no answer from the I.B.U. ("for all your needs")?

"Not even a guess? Not even a name?" she asked, rising to her feet. She did her best thinking while walking, so she started doing that and the hologram of the captain strode along beside her on the beach. Geronimo was very tall, still after all these years sporting the long, straight black hair which had contributed to his nickname. He'd been born Morton Doolittle, but had long since become officially what he was called now.

"They're calling them white holes," Geronimo said after the usual ten minute interval.

"Them? It's more than one?" Pagan said, and sat back to wait for the transmission round trip.

"More all the time," his reply eventually came, "though distribution seems to be uneven, and where they appear seems to be random, or at least it started out that way. The I.B.U. says they're becoming more predictable as they become more numerous. I don't know how it works. I don't really know anything about it."

"So what's the danger?" Pagan asked.

"Something happens to everything they touch," Geronimo said, "Everything living and everything non-living, it doesn't matter, it all becomes something else, or it all becomes nothing. We have no idea."