Free Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 3, July 2013 by Mike Resnick [Editor] Page B

a forelock out of his eyes, averting his glance from the omnipresent and dreadful portholes, “there’s little enough to be done about this situation. You’ve fallen into a neutron star, a black funnel. It is utterly beyond the puny capacities and possibilities of man. I’d accept my fate if I were you.” His model was a senior scientist working on quasar theory, but in reality he appears to be a metaphysician. “There are corners of experience into which man cannot stray without being severely penalized.”
    “That’s very easy for you to say,” Lena says bitterly, her whine breaking into clear glissando, “but you haven’t suffered as I have. Also, there’s at least a theoretical possibility that I’ll get out of here if I do the build-up without acceleration.”
    “But where will you land?” the third says, waving a trembling forefinger. “And when? All rules of space and time have been destroyed here; only gravity persists. You can fall through the center of this sun, but you do not know where you will come out or at what period of time. It is inconceivable that you would emerge into normal space in the time you think of as contemporary.”
    “No,” the second says, “I wouldn’t do that. You and the dead are joined together now; it is truly your fate to remain with them. What is death? What is life? In the Galaxy Called Rome all roads lead to the same, you see; you have ample time to consider these questions, and I’m sure that you will come up with something truly viable, of much interest.”
    “Ah, well,” the first says, looking at Lena, “if you must know, I think that it would be much nobler of you to remain here; for all we know, your condition gives substance and viability to the universe. Perhaps you are the universe. But you’re not going to listen anyway, and so I won’t argue the point. I really won’t,” he says rather petulantly and then makes a gesture to the other two; the three of them quite deliberately march to a porthole, push a curtain aside and look out upon it. Before Lena can stop them—not that she is sure she would, not that she is sure that this is not exactly what she has willed—they have been reduced to ash.
    And she is left alone with the screams of the dead.
     
    XI
    It can be seen that the satiric aspects of the scene above can be milked for great implication, and unless a very skillful controlling hand is kept upon the material, the piece could easily degenerate into farce at this moment. It is possible, as almost any comedian knows, to reduce (or elevate) the starkest and most terrible issues to scatology or farce simply by particularizing them; and it will be hard not to use this scene for a kind of needed comic relief in what is, after all, an extremely depressing tale, the more depressing because it has used the largest possible canvas on which to imprint its message that man is irretrievably dwarfed by the cosmos. (At least, that is the message which it would be easiest to wring out of the material; actually I have other things in mind, but how many will be able to detect them?)
    What will save the scene and the story itself, around this point will be the lush physical descriptions of the Black Galaxy, the neutron star, the altering effects they have had upon perceived reality. Every rhetorical trick, every typographical device, every nuance of language and memory which the writer has to call upon will be utilized in this section describing the appearance of the black hole and its effects upon Lena’s (admittedly distorted) consciousness. It will be a bleak vision, of course, but not necessarily a hopeless one; it will demonstrate that our concepts of “beauty” or “ugliness” or “evil” or “good” or “love” or “death” are little more than metaphors, semantically limited, framed in by the poor receiving equipment in our heads; and it will be suggested that, rather than showing us a different or alternative reality, the black hole may