The White-Hole Situation

Cause and Effect

Over time Geronimo and his crew earned enough value points for promotion to a larger craft, the starship Kathandra. It was there they first met September Rodgers and Roderick Stern. September had garnered her advanced linguistic credentials at the academy where Roddy was burnishing his reputation as a jack-of-all-trades-master-of none. They onboarded Kathandra as associate communications officer and engineering intern respectively, which meant, in concrete terms, a collection of maroon-based outfits for her and grayish for him. They were young, still in their twenties when they joined up. Pagan, Pisco and Geronimo were a decade their seniors, and were no longer stuck with merely number one science officer Jai but now a crowd of more than thirty personnel in all. Where they were previously restricted to even-numbered, single-digit, lower alphabetical sectors of the galaxy, they were now given access to anywhere, even or odd, within two digits and up to the letter K.

Roddy and September were wide-eyed rookies who were quickly enlightened by their more experienced peers. Their rather exaggerated expectations were significantly dampened upon hearing some of those adventures. The tusk-laden mollusks of Frebasia, for example, had not turned out to be, at least during Pisco's encounter with them, as glamorous as depicted on countless episodes of The Great Beyond, but seemed to him to be rather dull creatures with limited imaginations. It was true they could grant wishes, but those were limited to a fairly meager selection offered up on well-worn index-card-sized decorative platters, and consisted mainly of tasks readily achieved by anyone by merely asking the I.B.U. ("easy for you").

The famous "Battle of X", which included the Kathandra along with a dozen other human-laden ships battling against the T-Cart empire, was a sudden affair in which, after hours of tense and sweaty negotiations, the enemy vessels were pretty much wiped out in a matter of milliseconds in utter silence. No one left alive had a good feeling about that. The opposing T-Cartians were vulgar, to be sure, and ugly as anything, but did they all deserve to be extincted just like that? Pagan was left dissatisfied by the entire encounter, though she gained a promotion along with lots of media attention for her role in the whole business. There was no one back on Earth who didn't know her name and her face after watching her stare down the T-Cart Empress and utter the famous words "I'll see you in hell". Ever since then she couldn't walk down the street in any Earth city without strangers lighting up and shouting the same at her.

The Kathandra gained its own reputation as it plowed its way through several sensational adventures in the years to come, and September and Roddy climbed their own ladders to higher and higher levels, contributing each in their own way to the success of various missions. Roddy had salvaged breaking and broken engines any number of times at the last critical moment, while Zeppo had smooth-talked her way through diplomatic and political encounters with all sorts of species and specimens sprinkled throughout the permitted regions. They followed Geronimo faithfully, leaping after his leaps and occasionally managing to help pull him back from some decidedly dangerous brinks.

A lot of it seemed like a dream to September now. Had she and Geronimo really spent one hundred and eighty three dawns chained to each other in an underground cavern held hostage by the Brinx of Sciom? Had they really swam, naked and fasting, across the snake-infested sea of Tuberka in order to prove their value to the Landlady of Chalm? On and off, her off-world career spanned nearly twenty years before she finally quit it for good, and now she was wishing she had written some of it down, because it was fading fast and maybe there had been something in all that time that could help with the problems of the current day.

"You too?" she asked Roddy when she next saw him again.

"Never seen it happen before," he nodded.

"Computer glitch?" she asked. She had left the house and gone for a long hike along the canyon rim trail. She usually thought better when she walked, but today she was coming up empty.

"The I.B.U?" Roddy said, "glitch? I don't think so. Smells like a cover-up to me."

"But why?" September asked. "Why tell us about the white holes, and then deny it, even though it has to know we have confirmation from other sources?"

"Maybe it doesn't care what we think we know," Roddy said. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground before a roaring campfire. September's visage took a seat to his right. Looking up she noticed his guest.

"Hello Gerard," she said. Roddy's dead father nodded in greeting.

"What do you know about all this?" she asked him. The old man opened his mouth and for a moment, no sound came out though his lips were moving. Then a flurry of words followed, somewhat out of sync.

"The final laws of ergo-dynamics state that matter is itself a concept, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that once you eliminate the effect you will find that its cause had never existed."

"Come again?" Roddy said. These were very un-dead-dad things for him to say, but he said no more, but just sat there gazing at the flickering flames. Roddy and September tried to get him to speak again but he wouldn't, and eventually they stopped trying.

"Computer, remove this man," Roddy finally said and as if that incantation really worked, Gerard disappeared.

"Usually he just scolds me for wasting my life," Roddy shrugged.

"Matter is a concept," September repeated. "Yeah, well, what isn't?"

"Eliminate the effect," Roddy said. "That was more interesting. Maybe it's saying they already fixed the white-hole situation so don't worry about it?"

"Maybe," September said. "Still, I don't like being lied to."

"I bet we never find out," Roddy said. "I bet this whole thing turns out to be another Clamshell Distortion."

"Oh god," September said, "anything but that!"