Strangers Among Us

How Objects Behave on the Edge of a Black Hole-4

On the tape, Jan made a sound between a cough and a laugh. Maggie’s throat tightened. No wonder Jan had kept these recordings separate. They were more like a diary than her research notes.

“So here’s your metaphor. I’m falling toward the event horizon. That’s the cancer diagnosis, in this case. Once I cross over, once I get the test results back, there’s no escape. But from the outside, it appears there’s still hope. I haven’t fallen yet. From the outside, everything looks fine, and there’s still time to make things right.”

Jan paused. When her voice resumed, it was with a hitch.

“I always wanted to see a black hole. Stupid thing for a scientist to say, right? Right before we fired up the collider I was convinced, absolutely convinced, we would find evidence of a miniature black hole, something stable enough for our instruments to detect. But no dice. I guess I’ll just have to be content with metaphors.”

A click, and the audio ended. Maggie unclenched her fingers from her neck. Hands shaking, she slotted the next tape into the machine.

“Then, there’s the sound.” Jan’s voice, picking up a thread in the middle of her one-woman conversation. A rustling as she shifted the recorder closer to the computer and played one of the audio files.

It was the same as listening to it in the video on Jan’s computer—an eerie doubling between two recordings. An echo of an echo. Maggie’s skin puckered. Her sister’s ghost, finally talking to her now that it was too late. But talking nonetheless. Trying to tell her something.

“I don’t understand.” Maggie spoke aloud. On the tape, Jan continued.

“There’s a theory—an object on the edge of a black hole, once it crosses the event horizon, is destroyed. Except a perfect copy is created. Or an imperfect one. Nothing can ever be created or destroyed, so the energy is spread across the surface of the black hole and stuck there, a copy made out of light, and the original is gone, burned up completely. A black hole is a factory for ghosts.”

Maggie’s hand skittered across the desk, an involuntary movement knocking the puzzle box to the floor. The remaining tapes scattered.

“So if we don’t understand everything about black holes, if we in fact understand very little, which is the case, who’s to say metaphor couldn’t be reality? Maybe light and sound and time all bend out there in the deepness of space, and something comes back to us, unrecognizably changed. The original copy is destroyed, but something survives, different, but the same.

“I’d like to think that when I cross the event horizon, that maybe, just maybe the rules are malleable, and maybe some piece of me—the same, but kinder, more patient—will survive.”

Maggie’s hand went to her mouth. The tape clicked to an end, but the echo of it remained, Jan’s voice, coming back to her from the other side of death. Jan’s ghost, in audio form, bent and changed into something kinder, more patient. The same, but different. And what about Jan’s other ghost? What if what Maggie had hoped—even knowing it was impossible—actually wasn’t impossible at all? Both things could be true, her sister’s ghost, both a hallucination and real. Light and time bending, and some fragment, some imperfect and kinder copy of Jan coming back to her years before she died.

There was so little sound in space, only the radio waves that came from the deepest parts in a cosmic roar. No one knew how sound might behave around a black hole. But if a black hole could bend gravity, light, then why not warp sound? Why not form a strange, imperfect copy as Jan had hypothesized and send her voice back to her—stretched, changed, completely unrecognizable?

Maggie shook her head, tears slipping free. The mythology, the metaphor of black holes—that was what mattered. Ghost science. It’s how she had always thought of what Jan did—studying things that couldn’t be seen except for the effect they had on what was around them. Even if Maggie never unraveled the sound Jan had been studying—and she would keep trying, even if it meant staying in this miserable climate for a while longer, and even working with Barston—she had this. Jan’s ghost, real in a way Maggie had never suspected. Her sister’s final gift to her: her words, kinder, gentler, coming back to her from beyond the event horizon. In a way, Jan had bridged the gap. If Maggie kept searching, it would be like they were finally working together after all.

February 7, 2011

“When we grow up, we’ll be scientists. We’ll discover something no one else has discovered before.” Maggie kept her voice to a whisper, glancing over her shoulder occasionally.

On the bed beside hers, Jan didn’t stir. Maggie turned back to the ghost. Her solemn eyes were just like real-Jan’s eyes, but kinder; she waited patiently for Maggie’s next words.

“Maybe we’ll find a new planet. Or a cure for cancer. I bet we could do it together.”

It was a struggle to keep her voice low. She wanted to shake the real Jan awake. Wouldn’t she be excited to know she had a ghost-twin? Three brains were even better than two, after all.

Maggie glanced back at real-Jan and bit her lip, changing her mind. Real-Jan wouldn’t listen. She would roll her eyes at Maggie, or call her names. Ghost-Jan was safer. Maybe one day, Maggie would figure out how to talk to her real sister. But for now, she turned back to ghost-Jan, who continued to wait patiently for Maggie’s words.

“We could even build our own rocket ship,” Maggie said. “Like that movie about the farmer who built a rocket in his backyard. We could explore the farthest stars and find out what’s on the other side of a black hole. What do you think?”

The ghost remained silent. Maggie glanced over her shoulder one last time. It was hard to tell in the dark, but as the real Jan rolled over in her sleep, it looked as if she smiled.