The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [91]
The round cluster of stars was seething. It was boiling away like hornets at war. It took computers to prove that a jeweled globe of stars was unstable. In any telescope, a globular cluster looked as solid as a baseball, but it was a temporary enterprise. Stars tumbled into the core. They suffered unbearable close encounters there. They got slung like shot out of their family. They flew into the awesome darkness and solitude of intergalactic space.
The sight of it set the hair up all over Van’s head. What if you were living around a star like that, thought Van, just living on some nice, sweet little planet. What if your daylight sky was boiling with neighboring suns as big as beachballs. And then, oh, my God, what if you flew too low and too close to one. In just a few dozen human lifetimes, the constellations would warp like putty. The heavens would turn against you and your world, and would blow you away at half the speed of light. You and yours, your innocent civilization, expelled into some unbearable icy exile, never to be retrieved.
“We call this process ‘evaporation,’ ” Dottie said. “Sooner or later, all the stars have to leave the cluster family. Let me run you this other model, the one with the galactic tidal action.”
This time the unhappy cluster was taken in hand by forces beyond its ken. What could a little cluster do in the horrendous grip of a superpower galaxy? Clusters were mere golden bubbles. Galaxies were vast flat saucers, cold, spinning, implacable. The uneven force of their gravity bent and tore at the bubbles. There was a mighty tide.
Van could see it. The attraction of the galaxy was too much for the globular cluster. The stars peeled loose, they struggled toward exile, clinging fitfully to one another. They were ripped out of the cluster in long trains of refugees. Some fell into the galaxy, alien migrants falling down from high off the plane, strangers from an angelic height, doomed to meet some alien fate. The broken cluster, wrecked into mere rags of gas and dust, hung there, half obliterated . . .
“We’re talking twenty orders of temporal magnitude here,” Dottie told him. “Two neutron stars have a close passage in milliseconds. But the death of a globular cluster . . .”
“They die?” Van said.
“Of course they die, honey. All stars die. So do all clusters. But here”—she waved at the screen—“my clusters don’t die quite properly. The universe is only thirteen billion years old, so I don’t have any good observed case studies for a cluster’s late-period dynamical interaction. I’m pushing at the limit of this instrument. I’m going thirty billion years into the future.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, those numerical errors do accumulate, when I do that.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“I really have to fight with that problem,” Dottie said. “Thirty billion years, it’ll take me quite a while to push that. A long time, maybe. Maybe the rest of my life.”
Van patted her shoulder. “Baby, honey, you’re doing just great!”
After a fabulous Szechuan dinner, they took Ted with them for the last night at their Pinecrest love nest. Van was no longer impressed by the place. There was something comical and squalid about this aging zillionaire’s bachelor pad.
The place was not childproofed. Ted had to live inside his stroller and pen. This was not any kind of home for the three of them, a place like this. Their lives had gone wrong. His wounded pride had stopped hurting now, but he’d made some kind of serious misstep. He could feel it in his bones.
At two in the morning, Ted’s whimpering woke him. Van got up and stalked across the floorboards. “We’re gonna let your mom sleep this time,” he told the baby. He changed Ted’s diapers and stuffed him into his walker. Ted had a nifty walker that Van had shipped to him in a lonesome moment. It was made of cool cast-plastic, a toddler’s bumper car.
Ted was clearly thrilled to be up with his dad after midnight inside a brightly lit bathroom. Ted’s mother always made Ted sleep, but here Ted was finally getting to do what Ted most ached to do in the wee hours of the morning. Ted wanted