7
MYTHOLOGIES
“... the German word for Eagle.” Back home again at base camp, Jack Adler was going back over the day’s events for an audience of one.
“And you are certain Hoffman never told the old shaman the meaning of your name?” Luciano Carbone asked.
“He swore not.” Jack shrugged. “Acted insulted I’d even think such a thing. I guess it’s some sort of ethnographic Prime Directive: never reinforce the natives’ belief system. Or challenge it for that matter.”
“And what of your own belief system, Jack? Was it challenged by Jenkoul’s tale?”
Jack rose from his borrowed camp stool and looked around. The silhouette of base camp’s main lodge showed dark against the sunset sky. Off in the distance, he could hear the muted rattle of his diesel generator, faithfully holding the SQUID’s temperature within operating range, reminding him of work still undone.
“Didn’t realize I’d been talking so long,” he said. “It’s getting late.”
“Nonsense.” Luciano glanced upward to where towering thunderheads shone red and gold in the last rays of the sun. “At home in Bologna, we eat dinner later than this. You do not evade the question so easily. What, if anything, might modern physics have to learn from an Evenki shaman?”
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing, if you set aside all the mumbo-jumbo, that old guy’s a pretty credible witness for the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis.”
“But you just finished telling me his stories did not contain anything new.”
Jack nodded. “They didn’t, not about the Tunguska Event, anyway. But there’s one part I haven’t told you: Jenkoul went back.”
“What, back to the Epicenter?”
“Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? I mean if something’d come within a whisker of killing me, you can bet I’d stay the hell away from then on. But Jenkoul’s clan had kind of figured him for their new shaman, even young as he was, on account of what he’d been through and all. And it wasn’t like they didn’t need one. But better to let Jenkoul tell you why in his own words.”
As he’d been doing all along, Jack scanned through his recording of the interview, till he’d found the part he meant to play for Luciano. Once again Jenkoul’s quavering tones alternated with Hoffman’s accented English:
The ring of fire burned itself out,
The sky purged itself of choking haze,
Yet still the world remained unhealed.
Neither winter’s snows nor spring’s floods
Had power to leach from the land its lingering malignancy.
Summer’s new growth came up warped and scabrous,
All creatures feeding upon it sickened and died.
Strange, oozing lesions afflicted the reindeer,
And those of my own clansmen straying too far into the lands now under Ogdy’s curse.
Jack hit the pause button. “It got kind of ritualized in the retelling, I guess. But, to make a long story short, exactly one year after the Event, Jenkoul returned to the heartlands. And built him a sweatlodge in the middle of the Great Swamp, and sat down and waited for this Ogdy to show up.”
“Forgive me, Jack,” Luciano said, “but all this sounds simply like more of what you have already called ‘mumbo-jumbo.’”
“That’s because you haven’t heard the rest of it yet. Once you do, I think you’ll agree it’s a dead-on accurate recollection.”
“But, Jack, a recollection of what?”
“Of what it’d be like to be standing at the Epicenter when the micro-hole came zooming right straight up underneath you.”
The god comes, the god comes.
The earth trembles in fear at the coming of Ogdy.
The earth rises and falls beneath my feet, like waves of water.
My place of purification is overthrown, my lodgepoles topple.
The god comes.
Jack paused the playback again,. “I don’t know about you, Luciano. But, what with the ground shaking and the sweatlodge collapsing, it sure sounds like an earthquake to me.”
“But, but the Epicenter has been surveyed by every seismographic instrument known to science. Nothing of the sort has ever been observed, ever.”
“Oh, sure — now. But, remember, it took twenty years to get anything like a scientific expedition in there. If there was a primordial black hole circling round and round inside the earth all that time, chances are its orbit would’ve degraded by then, down to where any seismic effects would have been undetectable — by 1920s equipment, at least.”
“And you are saying that, by the time we arrive here with our vastly superior instrumentation, it has receded even further.”
“Uh-huh, five-ten kilometers down by now, I’d guess. But my point is: Jenkoul went out there a year after the Event itself, in the summer of 1909. Back then you’d have measured the thing’s closest approach to the surface in inches, not miles. Now, picture a five-billion tonne gravitational point-source plowing up through solid rock at thousands of clicks an hour, up to within a few meters of the surface. This is more your area than mine, Luciano — what’s that going to give you?”
“Mmm. Compression and shear, certainly. And on a massive scale.” The little geologist tugged at his goatee. “I understand what you are saying, Jack: This could perhaps account for Jenkoul’s earthquake. Even so it hardly constitutes definitive proof of your black-hole hypothesis.”
“Hang on.” Jack advanced the recording to the next bookmark. “We’re not done yet.”
The god calls out.
Blinding-bright, his tongue lashes the sky.
His roar echoes off the hills, the heavens ring with it.
Ogdy is calling his avatar from the Lower World.
The earth at my feet burns at the touch of his fiery tongue.
The god calls out.
Jack stopped the recording there. “Hoffman says that’s all shaman-speak for a lightning bolt, one that may have just barely missed frying our friend, in fact.”
“But, Jack — lightning at midnight? From a cloudless sky?”
“That’s a tough one, all right. But, in a way, it’s maybe the key to the whole thing.”
“How so?”
“Well, these preferential lightning strikes say to me that whatever’s coming at Jenkoul is carrying a whole lot of charge, electric or magnetic. I’m betting magnetic, on account of the object’s age.”
“What would age have to do with it?” Luciano asked.
“Given enough time, an electrically-charged object would neutralize itself by attracting opposite charges. And my hole’s had the whole lifetime of the universe to do it in.”
“But magnetism is even worse in that regard, no? The force must always cancel itself out, since every magnet possesses two poles of opposite charge, north and south.”
“Nowadays, sure.” A faraway look glowed in Jack’s eyes. “But there was a time, a long, long time ago — within an eyeblink of the Beginning itself — when things could’ve been different. That’s when the primal superforce broke down. And, when it did, it tied the fabric of spacetime in knots.”
“Knots?”
“Uh-huh.” Jack nodded. “Very peculiar knots. Particles with an unpaired magnetic charge, a single pole — what we call monopoles. I think that may be what my hole’s made out of.”
“So, you believe the Tunguska Cosmic Body to be a black hole with a magnetic charge?”
“Not just any magnetic charge. A single pole without an opposite to offset it: a north, say, with no south.”
Luciano whistled. “That would be much more powerful than an ordinary magnet.”
“Uh-huh. Powerful enough to call down lightning out of a clear sky. Powerful enough to’ve trapped the thing here in the first place.”
“Yes, yes, now that you say it, I am eager to hear of this — your solution to the ‘exit event’ problem. You told Medvedev that your black hole must have remained within the earth. But you did not explain how this is possible. Should not its speed have carried it out the other side?”
“Should have,” Jack conceded, “always assuming nothing slowed it down first.”
“But, Jack, what could slow something so small and yet so massive? My understanding is that it should have passed through the atmosphere and the solid earth with no resistance at all.”
“The earth, yes. But the atmosphere’s a whole different story. A story that starts with Hawking radiation.”
Luciano’s face showed a flicker of recognition, but Jack would’ve bet that was more due to Stephen Hawking’s name than to any familiarity with the weird quantum process the man had discovered. A process by which black holes could give off particles. Radiation, in other words, heat. And the smaller the hole, the more particles it’d give off.
“Just take it from Steve Hawking,” Jack went on, “my micro hole’d be plenty hot. Surface temperature into the billions of degrees. Hot enough to strip the electrons off any nearby atoms on its way down — and leave an ionization contrail that’d put an Airbus-II to shame.”
“The ‘bright blue tube’ reported by the eyewitnesses,” Luciano said.
“Exactly. But now watch what happens when you add a monopolar magnetic charge in on top of the radiation effects: The hole’s magnetic flux-lines are going to be sticking radially outward, like the spines on a Koosh-ball. And the ions it’s churning out aren’t going to want to go crossing those lines of force. They’re going to latch onto the hole instead, and hang on for dear life. Get dragged along with it, sped up till they’re going faster than the speed of sound. And that means —”
“Sonic booms,” Luciano said half to himself. “All along the flight path, as the individual air molecules break the sound barrier.” Then he snapped his fingers. “That would explain the cannonades that accompanied the object’s descent.”
Jack nodded. “Plus, when that trailing column of superheated air slams into the ground, it’s going to destroy everything for miles around.”
“All the Tunguska phenomena, then.”
“Right,” Jack said, “but those are all just side effects, compared to the main event.”
Luciano stared at him expectantly. “Which is —?”
“Air-braking!”
“Air-braking, Jack?”
“Sure. See, the atmospheric drag just keeps piling up and up. It’s like the micro-hole’s this humungous broom, sweeping tons of atmosphere along in front of it, and every additional gram just slows it down more. Slows it down maybe to below escape velocity, to where it can’t climb back up out of earth’s gravity-well anymore.”
Heeding the god’s call, the Avatar arises.
Night-walker, Spawn of Darkness, Beast of Evil Heart,
From the Lower World he arises.
Insatiable, All-devouring, he arises.
He seizes me.
His monstrous jaws engulf my head,
His great claws pin my feet,
As wild dogs tear at entrails of their kill, so the Wolf tears me limb from limb ..
Jack clicked off the recorder. “Final piece of the puzzle,” he said, “I’ll admit, that one’s not so obvious. But it’s got to be the tides.”
Luciano raised an eyebrow. “The tides, Jack? As in the oceans?”
“Uh-huh. Tides are just a byproduct of gravity, after all — more specifically, of how gravity grows stronger the closer you get to its source, and vice versa. Take the moon, for instance: its gravity pulls strongest on the piece of ocean nearest to it, so the waters right underneath the moon get lifted up relative to the earth as a whole.”
“But there is also a tide on the opposite side of the earth, is there not?”
“Right. The waters there are furthest away from the moon. They feel its gravity the least so they tend to stay in place. But since everything else on earth is getting pulled at more, it’s as if that part of the ocean humps out away from the moon. When all’s said and done, you wind up with two standing waves of seawater moving through the oceans at twelve-hour intervals.”
“The tides.”
“Uh-huh. Now picture that same effect, only generated by a gravitational point-source like my micro-hole. The mass is a whole lot less, but so’s the distance. Now, figure Jenkoul stood maybe a meter and a half, two meters tall. And figure back in those days the hole came to within four-five meters of the surface, with him standing right over it. That’d mean —” Jack closed his eyes to do the math. “Um, call it a difference of about one full gravity between the crown of his head and the soles of his feet.”
From the look on Luciano’s face, he wasn’t seeing the implications.
Jack tried again. “Think of it this way: say our friend the shaman weighed eighty kilograms. A one-gravity differential top to toe is going to feel like his head’s been clamped in a vise while a hundred and seventy-five pound weight dangles from his ankles.”
That came across loud and clear. Luciano gave another of his low whistles. “Poor Jenkoul, no wonder he felt he was being torn apart by monstrous teeth and claws! Lucky for him it was over in an instant.”
“Except it wasn’t,” Jack said, “Not by a long shot. Oh, sure, the hole itself would hit its apogee and be gone in milliseconds. But the aftermath… Well, Jenkoul barely made it back out of that swamp alive. In the days to come he nearly died of a raging fever, huge sores all over his body. He showed me the scars. Toothmarks of the Wolf, he called them.”
“And this too can be explained, I assume?” Luciano said.
Jack shrugged. “Radiation burns, pure and simple. I told you, that hole is hot. As close as it must’ve come to the surface back then, it’s a wonder it didn’t — What’s the matter, Luciano?”
“Nothing, Jack, nothing. It’s just that, well, you must admit Jenkoul’s version was far more … poetic.” The little Italian sighed. “I suppose I am something of a romantic. Some part of me hates to see all the mysteries of the world fade in the light of prosaic scientific explanation.”
“Read your Keats — there’s beauty in the truth, too. The world’s got more than enough mysteries as it is. Me, I’ll take all the explanation I can get.”
Jack chuckled then at his friend’s crestfallen look. “Oh, come on, Luciano. You didn’t seriously believe there was a real Wolf out there waiting for me, did you?”
The long subarctic summer day was dying. Through thickening light, Yuri poled his canoe along the Khushmo’s densely wooded banks, occasionally checking distance to the target on his handheld’s Global Positioning display. Five kilometers still to go, and upstream at that. But drought had shrunk the swollen torrents of spring to a gentle flow. The river in mid-summer could no longer offer much resistance to a determined traveler.
Low as it was, the Khushmo still ran fresh and clear, its waters so limpid that the enormous trout drifting motionless in its deep pools seemed almost to be levitating in midair. Above the river’s near-invisible surface, swarms of gnats hovered in clouds dense as evening mist. Beaver paddled through the twilit water, breasting the canoe’s wake on the way to their lodges. From either shore choruses of birdsong floated out across the tranquil current, swelling toward one final crescendo against the onset of night.
The peace of the river and the Siberian summer evening was lost on Yuri Vissarionovich Geladze. He had no use for wilderness. Cities were where he needed to be. Cities were the home of the well-off, the comfortable, the human sheep. And, so, the natural hunting ground of the human wolves who preyed on them.
The stray thought prompted him to glance down to where his four-legged passenger — accomplice, more properly — lay sedated beneath the concealing tarp, in a steel cage that took up half the canoe. Prompted him to think, as well, of the strange implement he had been given to do the job. Needless complications of a simple business, all in the name of making the death appear an accident.
An accident! Yuri shook his head: Accidents, disappearances without trace — his employers simply had no appreciation of the uses of violent death. A killing should instill fear, should intimidate the living even as it silenced the dead. All this effort to ensure that the act would not be known for what it was went against Yuri’s grain.
Other than that, the plan was sound. Grishin Enterprises had managed the logistics with customary efficiency, even here at the ends of the earth. Rumor had it that Grishin himself had spent time out here some fifteen or twenty years ago. Though what he could have been seeking in this emptiness was beyond Yuri’s imagination.
No matter, imagination was hardly an asset in Yuri’s line of work. The client’s business was his own — until and unless it affected Yuri’s.
The pole found bottom again. A flex of muscle propelled the craft soundlessly forward through the hush of evening.
Beneath its canvas shroud, the wolf in the cage dozed fitfully.