He'd booked them on a cruise to the Tannhäuser Gate, first-class, all-inclusive, for their anniversary, even though he knew perfectly well that she'd have preferred the Moon. She couldn't decide whether it was a romantic gesture or a selfishly practical one. Either way, he'd effectively forestalled any objection by presenting the trip as a fait accompli; a gift.
The ship, the Picaydee, was elderly and smelled of the staleness of space. The discoloured titanium corridors creaked and cried alarmingly. The atmosphere onboard had the permanent deodorant whiff of recycled air, and on the lower decks the fixtures were peeling and worn.
“A lovely old girl,” Theo had said approvingly, eyeing the ship's pitted hull as they'd watched it draw in to the orbital dock. But the stateroom was smaller than their bathroom at home, and the carpet clung to their deckshoes and slippers with staticky ardour. Blue sparks glanced from it at night, when one of them got up to pee.
“You sure this thing'll get us to Orion?” she said quietly at dinner, when the artificial gravity blinked off for a second and everybody's food and cutlery and glasses suddenly rose, tumbling, above the linen for a moment before splashing and smashing back down. He'd given her a hard look and hadn't replied.
It wasn't that she wasn't grateful, just that she'd expected it to be more ... well, spectacular. The Gate was famous, and everybody said you had to see the C-beams even though, still, nobody really knew what they were, exactly: whether they were living or dead or something in between, alien or machine or both, or neither. You had to see them, though.
The brochure described the C-beams as enigmatically majestic, or majestically enigmatic, Caron couldn't remember which. They swam the stardusted depths around the cluster of white dwarfs off Orion's shoulder silently, endlessly glittering, huge and mysterious. She'd watched a documentary about them on the inhouse TV station: they reminded her of those big old underwater animals from way back, whales or icthyosomethings. Some xenologists thought that their constant twinkling and shimmering and pulsing was a way of communicating through light, like whalesong. Or so the documentary said.
The Gate itself was a popular tourist destination, but not because there was anything to see: in fact, quite the opposite. The twinned black holes, orbiting one another like courteous figurines on a Swiss clock, formed a portal to the Horsehead Nebula, a shortcut between galaxies. It had been discovered by accident. Nothing came out of the Gate, only went in – the cargo liners were all automated, because nothing living could withstand the jump.
When there was a big shipment you stood on the observation deck and watched the cargo cruisers for ages, growing tinier and tinier, and then suddenly they were gone. It was quite boring, and if you blinked at the wrong time you could completely miss it. Theo filmed the whole thing, and even took a couple of pics and movettes when the Gate wasn't in use. The sightseeing group was up on the bridge and the guide was explaining the system. Caron was annoyed at Theo's mindless tourist reflex to record absolutely everything, however unimpressive and dull.
“It's a black hole,” she said. “What's there to photograph?”
Theo just sighed and kept snapping.
In the onboard gift shop you could buy plain black T-shirts with scrolling text at the bottom that said THE TANNHAUSER GATE BY NIGHT. You could also buy teeny coloured tees for kids. The styles were called White Dwarf and Red Dwarf. At dinner the live band played old jazz standards badly while they ate their food and swapped well-worn, semi-apocryphal holiday anecdotes with other couples. The limited skill of the ship's chefs couldn't disguise the dry, salty tang of rehydrates. Caron wore a dress and jewellery for the first few nights, but seeing most other passengers slope up in sweatpants and sneakers, she soon decided not to bother.
Theo seemed to find space stimulating. The gentler, cardiac-friendly gravity on board the ship gave him more energy and agility; his big frame was no longer so awkward to drag around, although his skull still scraped the bulkheads on the lower decks where they went, on Saturdays, to gamble and watch movies. He started to refer to the cruise as their 'second honeymoon', and when his thick, warm hands moved over her hips in the narrow one-and-a-half-width bed, Caron didn't have the heart to halt them with her own.
Instead, she turned over resignedly and did what they usually did when (with ever-decreasing frequency, these days) they actually did it, and that seemed to satisfy him. He didn't do the things she liked in return, but it occurred to her that perhaps he had forgotten or indeed never really known what she liked. Perhaps she hadn't been sufficiently grateful or enthusiastic when he first did them, and he'd become dispirited and confused? She didn't know. She wasn't sure it mattered. Here they were, in far-flung space, on vacation, their second honeymoon. That was something, wasn't it?
He fell asleep very quickly after sex, as though he were a canary and she'd put a cloth over his cage, or as if someone had switched off a light, although they always did it in the dark. She'd always imagined deep space as completely black, but the thickly-sprinkled stars were laser-white and shone intrusively through their single porthole if she didn't pull down the blind.
Sometimes, when Theo is snoring and she can't sleep, she gets up and stares through the inch-thick glass at the smooth ocean of darkness outside. She stares until her eyes blur and then she closes them to feel the starlight on her face, listening hard until she can hear the singing silence that presses like a lover against the ship's hull.
She dreams of diving into the vortex of a black hole, through the airless frozen dark of space like a velvet rope pulled tight around the chest and eyes. She imagines emerging into the pure, unarguable white of exploding light, the unsullied heart of a sun.
~
Black holes, white dwarfs by Sam Carter was read by Paul Clarke at the Liars' League Black & White event at The Wheatsheaf, London on Tuesday 11 August 2009
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