The White-Hole Situation

DeNovo

By the year 2517 September had had enough of the starship Kathandra. It had become too intense, too tight-quartered, like growing up in a very small town where by the time they reach the age of twenty everyone there has been romantically or otherwise involved with everybody else. So it was in outer space. How could it be otherwise? After Roddy left she had no one to confide in, though of course she did, to her great regret, confide in pretty much everyone at one time or another. There was Geronimo's faux gallantry, Pagan's suffocating jealousy, Pisco's pathetic hanging on and a cast of ten or twelve other bit players who rotated in and out of the ship's crew at the various stations where they docked along the way. And then there were the crop of alien races who for some reason or another used their advanced telepathic abilities to play matchmaker. There were a surprising quantity of those. It seemed to be a galactic trope.

The Kathandra herself had been upgraded a couple of times, and by then was permitted into the triple digit sectors (up to 256) and through the letter O. September had made Lieutenant, a title which at first made her feel a little proud, and later made her feel ridiculous. Lieutenant Mood Detector? What was the deal with that? Geronimo was bidding for Commander and all he had to do was broker seven more peace deals and uncover eleven previously unknown simian-type species, each on their own planet of course. There could be no double-dipping. Yet it seemed an impossible task. Everywhere he went in the 100 to 255 M and N regions the only officially recognizable sentient life forms they came across were lizard people or bug eyes, and none of them needed peace treaties because none of them were at war with anyone at all. He was getting softer and rounder by the outing, and little by little his nom de guerre made less and less sense. He ought to have renamed himself Captain Ho Hum or something along those lines.

September enjoyed the various lizard peoples. Many of those species were not vocal but communicated through relative position and tail swishing. She had learned to wiggle her own behind in increasingly meaningful ways and had learned how to move among them. She disembarked the Kathandra for the final time on one of those stopovers, electing to remain with the Oedimums of Pranxis Five for a sabbatical or two. During that time she had to learn how to harvest roots and fruits for herself, and lost a lot of weight. By the time the starship DeNovo came along, September was ready to shake her own tail out of there, and head back to the stars. Lucky for her, the DeNovo was heading back home to Earth, with only one stop in between, a quagmire known as the Flatiron Deluge.

The DeNovo was captained by a surprisingly terrestrial Octopod, a scrawny thing all arms and arms (or legs and legs, one couldn't tell) and brilliant and insightful brains all over. Captain Sherrod, as his name loosely translated, had a passion for canines and the Golden Poo-poos of the Quagmire were said to be the most intelligent dog-like species that side of Sirius. September was cool with that. As much as she had liked her lizard people, enough was enough, and simple old-fashioned tail-wagging seemed just the ticket for her. The captain came to be disappointed in them, but September was not. Her gyrations were roundly appreciated and she could express the sentiments of "yo" and "got food" as if she were born to it. The Flatiron Deluge itself was yet another letdown. The Octopod had been led to believe, and had so instructed his crew, that they were going to have to slash and burn their way through quadrant after quadrant of randomly fluctuating hypothetical particles, but in the end it was only dark matter they kept bumping into and having to shovel out of the way like so many snow drifts.

September was down on the planet, wagging and barking in a pack of eleven quite elegant Poo-poos, when she had a moment of forgetfulness and asked the I.B.U. ("everywhere and nowhere") what the weather was going to be like later that day because she thought she might like to take these fellows out for a walk. It was then the vertigo struck again. Her voicepad did not instantly reply (though after a moment or two she was informed the temperature would be seventy five degrees, the suns would be out, and the winds would be gentle coming out of the north, north east) and in that instant she felt the planet fall away beneath her feet. The ground fell and the dogs fell and the sky was falling all around her while she felt herself rising slowly, or stretching out, or growing, she couldn't really be sure if her feet were still on that planet which suddenly seemed so far away.

She was feeling that way again now, and she didn't believe for a moment that any old white holes were to blame for it.