In-fall

In-fall

By Ted Kosmatka

Excerpt. You can read the full text in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, twenty-eighth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, first edition July 2011

The disc caved a hole in the starshine.

Smooth, grapheme skin reflected nothing, blotting out the stars as it swung through the vacuum – black on black, the perfect absence of color.

It was both a ship and not a ship.

The disc lacked a propulsion system. It lacked navigation. Inside, two men awakened, first one and then the other.

In truth, the disc was a projectile – a dark bolus of life support fired into distant orbit around another, stranger kind of darkness.

This second darkness is almost infinitely larger, massing several hundred thousand sols; and it didn’t blot out the stars behind it, but instead lensed them into a bright, shifting halo, bending light into a ring, deforming the fabric of spacetime itself.

From the perspective of the orbiting disc, the stars seemed to flow around an enormous, circular gap in the star field. It had many different names, this region of space. The astronomers who discovered it centuries earlier had called it Bhat 16. Later physicists would call it “the sink”. And finally, to those who came here, to those who dreamed of it, it was known simply as “the maw”.

Adverse univers. And the universe ticked on (Ted Kosmatka). Illustration by © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

A black hole like none ever found before.

By the disc’s third day in orbit, it had already traveled three-hundred and eighteen million miles, but this is only a tiny fraction of its complete trajectory. At the end of the disc’s seventy-second hour in orbit, a small lead weight, 100 kilograms, was fired toward the heart of the gravity well – connected to the ship by a wire so thin that even mathematician called it a line.

The line spooled out, thousands of kilometers of unbreakable tetravalent filament stretching toward the darkness until finally pulling taut. The line held fast to its anchor point, sending a musical resonance vibrating a musical resonance vibrating through the disc’s carbon hull.

Inexorable gravity, a subtle shift.

Slow at first, but gradually, on the fourth day, the ship that was not a ship changed course and began to fall.