The Road to Amber (37 page)

Again, he drifted.

When Nik rescued him, he told him the story.

“…So, either way I lose,” he concluded.

“So it would seem,” Nik said.

When the CTC ran its course and Nik went off to report the results ofthe latest trip to Vik, Jeremy looked toward the event horizon with his enhanced senses.

He was aware of his antigrav field now, could even manipulate it with his mind. He was certain that he could control it sufficiently to keep himself unstretched or unsquashed at least between here and the layer beneath the violet band.

“What the hell,” he said.

He wondered what sort offinal image he would leave for eternity.

H
e descended quickly toward the devouring sphere, and soon it was as if he fled among the curtains of an Aurora Borealis. At one point it seemed that Nik might have called after him, but he could not be certain. Not that it mattered. What had he left of life even with the kindly Fleep? His suit’s oxygen, water, and nutrients would dwindle toward an unpleasant end and there was no chance of anyone coming to his rescue. Best to pass in this blaze of glory seeing what no man had seen before, leaving his small signature upon the universe.

As the waves rose to embrace him, the colors darkened, darkened, were gone. He was alone in a black place and without sensation. Had he actually penetrated the black hole and survived, or was this but his final, drawn-out thought in a time-distorting field?

“The former,” Nik said from a place that seemed nearby.

“Nik! You’re here with me!”

“Indeed. I decided to follow you and give what assistance I could.”

“As you entered did you see the image I left behind on the event horizon?”

“Sorry, I didn’t look.”

“Are we into the singularity?”

“Perhaps. I don’t know. I’ve never been this way before. The process may be one of infinite infall.”

“But I thought that all information was destroyed once it entered a black hole.”

“Well, there is more than one school of thought on that. Information is necessarily bound up with energy, and one notion is that it might remain coherent in here but simply become totally inaccessible to the outside world. The information cannot exist independently from the energy, and this way of considering it has the advantage of preserving energy conservation.”

“Then it must be so.”

“On the other hand, when your body was destroyed as we entered here I was able to run you quickly through the process by which I became an immortal energy being. Thought you might appreciate it.”

“Immortal? You mean I might be an infinitely infalling consciousness here for the effective life of the universe? I don’t think I could bear it.”

“Oh, you’d go mad before too long and it wouldn’t make any difference.”

“Shit!” Jeremy said.

There was a long silence, then a chuckle from Nik.

“I remember what that is,” he finally said.

“And we’re in it without paddles,” Jeremy noted.

“T
here is another factor in our case,” Nik said after an eternity or a few minutes, whichever came first.

“What is that?” Jeremy asked.

“When I talked to Vik he mentioned that we’ve messed so much with this black hole and its rotation that we might have provoked an unusual situation.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s theoretically possible for a black hole to explode. He thought that this one was about to. Seeing it happen is sort of a once-in-a-lifetime affair.”

“What goes on when it blows?”

“I’m not sure and neither was Vik. The cornucopion hypothesis would seem most in keeping with our present situation, though.”

“Better tell me about it so it won’t come as a complete surprise.”

“It holds that when it blows it leaves behind a horn-shaped remnant smaller than an atom, weighing about a hundred-thousandth of a gram. Its volume would be unlimited, though, and it would contain all of the information that ever fell into the black hole. That, of course, would include us.”

“Would it be any easier to get out of a cornucopion than out of a black hole?”

“Not here it wouldn’t be. Once our information leaves our unio verse it stays gone.”

“What do you mean ‘not here’? Is there a loophole if it gets moved someplace else?”

“Well, if it could be bounced past the Big Crunch and the next Big Bang and wind up in our successor universe its contents might be accessible. We only know for sure that they’re barred from release in this universe.”

“Sounds like a long wait.”

“You never know what time will be doing in a place like that, though. Or this.”

“It’s been interesting knowing you, Nik. I’ll give you that.”

“You, too, Jeremy. Now I don’t know whether to tell you to open your sensory channels to the fullest or to shut them down as far as you can.”

“Why? Or why not?”

“I can feel the explosion coming on.”

There followed an intense sensation of white light which seemed to go on and on and on until Jeremy felt himself slipping away. He struggled to retain his coherency, hoped he was succeeding. Slowly, he became aware that he inhabited a vast library, bookshelves sweeping off in either direction, periodically pierced by cross-corridors.

“Where are we?” he finally asked.

“I was able to create a compelling metaphor, allowing you to coordinate your situation,” Nik replied. “This is the cornucopion within which all ofthe information is stored. We inhabit a bookshelf ourselves. I gave you a nice blue leather cover, embossed, hubbed spine.”

“Thanks. What do we do now, to pass the time?”

“I think we should be able to establish contact with the others. We can start reading them.”

“I’ll try. I hope they’re interesting. How do we know whether we’ve made it into the next universe and freedom?”

“Hopefully, somebody will stop by to check us out.”

Jeremy extended his consciousness to a smart red volume across the way.

“Hello,” he said. “You are…?”

“History,” the other stated. “And yourself?”

“Autobiography,” Jeremy replied. “You know, we’re going to need a catalogue, so we can leave a Recommended Reading List on top.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ll write it myself,” he said. “Let’s get acquainted.”

“[This story] used theoretical concepts in physics recently put forth by respectable physicists. I thought it would be fun to try to combine them all into one story.”
[1]

Hawking radiation
is thermal radiation thought to be emitted by black holes due to quantum effects, causing the black hole to shrink (Hawking evaporation) if it emits more energy than it takes in. The
Aurora Borealis
or Northern Lights is the glow in the northern sky created by collisions of charged particles in the upper atmosphere. The
cornucopion hypothesis
refers to the theoretical horn-shaped particles that occur as an end point of a black hole’s Hawking evaporation.

1. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
   , July 1995.
   

NAME:
Croyd Crenson.

AGE:
Depends on how you look at it. Mentally, he’s missed a lot of living time during his comas—put all of his periods of wakefulness together and he’s probably somewhere in his twenties; physiologically, he is regenerated and changed each time that he sleeps; chronologically, he was born in 1933.

APPEARANCE:
Varies, from sleeping time to waking time. Nothing about it seems to be an invariant.

HISTORY AND CHARACTERISTICS:
Abnormally great strength at almost all times. Is capable of sustaining a fantastic beating and still functioning. During his comas he recovers fully from all injuries. Has an enormous appetite because of his fierce waking metabolism, though he never seems excessively overweight. Tended to pig out on anything in his earlier years, but grew more discriminating with the passage of time, eventually becoming something of a gourmet. He is perhaps the only person who can match Hiram Worchester mouthful for mouthful at dining.

He’d completed 8th grade and achieved puberty at the time of Jetboy’s death. He vividly recalls the years of chaos which followed.

He saw his father die during the panic in ‘46. His mother (Janet) and his younger brother and sister (Carl and Claudia) made it to New Jersey with him. There, he succumbed to the spore infection and experienced his first coma. (Neither of his siblings was infected.) Upon awakening he had enhanced strength and the ability to levitate. He immediately employed these abilities to steal food and feed the family. The following day he slept. He was still strong upon awakening ten days later, his hair and eyes having grown lighter; he had lost the ability to levitate, and he now possessed ultrasensitive hearing and the ability to see polarized light. The next time it was a TK ability. The next, an ability to build up electrical charges within himself and release them at will. And so on. He remains strong. He loses his extra ability and gains a new one each time that he sleeps. He lives in fear of waking up, hideously deformed, diseased, dying—or of not waking up at all. As a result ofthis uncertainty and the length of the coma (anywhere from a week to a month) he comes to dread sleep as if it were death itself.

When society stabilizes later, he cannot return to school because of his affliction. Nor can he hold a job. He tries amphetamines when he is 15, to prolong his periods of wakefulness. The pills become a way of life for him. He takes one to stay awake “a little longer,” promising himself that this time he’ll not go too far, that he’ll go to bed “the next day.” Later he takes another, for “a little more time.” After that he loses count.

He goes without the pills for the first few days after awakening, during which time he is a normal-seeming, relatively decent fellow who drinks a lot of coffee. He thinks nothing of stealing because he has no other way of getting things he wants and needs, but he will not normally use his powers to harm anyone. When he goes on the speed, though, he grows progressively manic, becoming extremely dangerous near the end of a week-long waking cycle. Like a rabid animal he tries to avoid others then, but this is difficult in a large urban center. Finally, he crashes, sleeps, wakes, and the cycle is repeated.

His mother dies in the mid-’50s. His brother and sister marry and go their ways. He eventually works out a survival pattern. He maintains numerous apartments about town—including Jokertown. He pays their rents far in advance. He tries to make it to the nearest of these before he crashes. There are a few people he trusts, of necessity—usually Jokers he has helped in one way or another or whom he pays. If any of these find him in an alley or doorway or on a park bench, they transport him to one of his hideaways, put him to bed, and turn on the radio. (He has a feeling that he might subconsciously absorb something of the news or educational programming while he sleeps. There may be something to this, as he occasionally awakens knowing things which transpired while he was out.) He burns out a lot of radios.

His usual routine on awakening is to bathe, shave if he needs to, don fresh clothing, go out and buy a newspaper, a copy of
Life
and/or
Time
, and head for a diner or restaurant for an enormous hours-long meal. He reads while he eats, visits an acquaintance or two afterwards to let them know he’s back in circulation and to continue whatever deals they might be involved in. He then plans and executes a robbery or rwo to keep up his supply of rent money, ready cash and pills. (By the ’80s he is more sophisticated, having developed some taste in the decoration of his numerous hideaways. He has also invested some of his excess loot and usually no longer has to steal, unless the market is bad or unforeseen expenses arise. This frees the use of his lucid time from survival imperatives and permits him to begin seeking some means of ameliorating his condition. He tries other drugs and techniques but usually winds up back on speed.)

He is capable of friendship, though he has fewer opportunities than most for making friends. In his lucid phases he feels guilt for some of the things he did during his manic phases.

In that his nervous system is involved in his condition in some very intricate ways, Dr. Tachyon gives him only one chance in four of returning to full normalcy following a “cure.” It is more likely that he would suffer damages equivalent to a cerebrovascular accident on being restored to powerlessness and a normal sleep cycle. Partial paralysis, speech impediment, or impaired mental ability—or all of the above—strike Croyd as the equivalent of being a Joker without any of the possible benefits. Tachyon encourages him to crash at his clinic whenever he can, so that he can study the condition further. But Croyd doesn’t like the place. It brings back bad memories of the ’40s.

He likes the food at Aces High and usually dines there at least once a month. Because of his changing appearance he is seldom recognized even by those he has fought in the past, though a telepathic Ace can sometimes spot him by more basic means. (Not always, though. His eccentric neurophysiology may on occasion provide an effective mental screen.) Many of his rampages over the years have been attributed to a whole succession of different individuals, rather than the quiet-looking man seated at the next table.