Asimov's SF, January 2012 (14 page)

"Talk, yes. Understand, no. All I remember is, dark energy something something expanding universe something something accelerating something something, or something."

Cayla smiled. “Actually, that's a reasonable summary. We know the universe is expanding, we know the rate of expansion is accelerating, and something must cause that acceleration. But no one knows what that something something is. Or knew.” Her smile grew into a grin.

"Let me guess. . . ."

"The energy from these bursts,
my
bursts, roughly equals the kinetic energy added to the expansion of the universe. Hard to dismiss it as a coincidence."

"So you've found the dark energy? That's exciting. It is exciting, right?"

She frowned. “If it's true. Maune will probably figure out in eight seconds where I went wrong."

"So see what he says. Come on, it's Friday, you won't see him until Wednesday. Tell me you can wait that long without going crazy."

When she rang Maune his voice sounded distant, as if under water. “Hello."

"Hi, Professor Maune? It's Cayla. Kalinauskas.” She thought her voice sounded tremulous; she swallowed and forced herself to speak evenly. “I'm sorry to bother you at home, but I found some interesting data—some
really
interesting data. I've been going over it and—"

"I don't wish to talk now.” The line went dead, and Cayla stared at her phone.

"Oh,” said Rish. “Bad idea?"

Cayla glared at him. “I am
never
going to listen to you again,” she said.

The entire weekend Cayla felt like throwing up. “Think about it,” Rish said as she paced back and forth. “He's not going to fire you for calling him at home, one time."

"Who knows what he's capable of?” Cayla muttered.

Monday morning she was calmer. But when Wednesday rolled around, she could not help but stand in the second floor hallway, waiting and watching out a window. At nine twenty-eight Maune entered the building. She sighed and went back to her office. Better to give him a few minutes, maybe half an hour, than to ambush him. But to her surprise he came straight to her office.

"Good morning, Miss Kalinauskas,” he said, looking paler than usual, and although he had shaved he had missed a few spots. “I know I was abrupt when you called. You see, Kaija, my dog, had passed away."

He stood there for a few uncomfortable moments. “You said you have some data.” Cayla took a deep breath, and was about to launch into her prepared speech, when he said, “Write it up, send it to me,” spun on his heel, and marched away, leaving Cayla feeling all twisted inside.

Cayla found it hard to focus as they anxiously awaited the scan results. Rish was pacing again, muttering to himself. “I'm not one to create catastrophes,” he said at one point, “but what if it's serious? Is just waiting around for weeks really a good idea?"

In the meantime, Cayla forced her attention on the paper, although sometimes the words swam before her eyes and she found herself crying with frustration and fear. She imagined Maune saying,
It's the worst rubbish I've ever read, Miss Kalinauskas
. She sighed and soldiered on.

When she couldn't stand the sight of her sentences any more, she sent it to Maune by v-mail.
He'll probably tear it to polite bits, then tell me it was a good exercise
.

And she waited.

She heard nothing.

As the hours and days ticked past, she felt an uncomfortable tide of rage rise inside her. “He could at least acknowledge he received it,” she said to Rish. “All this waiting is terrible.” Then she quickly added, “It's not like you having to wait, which is really terrible."

"Ahh, we're both on edge,” Rish said. “Years from now, I'll still be waiting for the results of my hundred and twentieth scan, and you'll still be sitting, watching your v-mail icon. Terror fades into dull boredom. Are you going in tomorrow? It's Wednesday."

"Yeah, I guess."

Cayla dragged herself onto campus with a sense of dread she could not explain, most of all to herself. But Maune did not show at nine-thirty, or by ten. Cayla didn't dare call him at home, not after her previous fiasco.

Wandering the halls, she saw an open office door. “Professor Huerta?” she said, peeking in.

She expected a scowl, but instead Huerta smiled broadly. “Cayla! Come in. I'm on sabbatical this year—Princeton—but came back this week for a Ph.D defense. How are you doing? I'm having lunch with Howel today, and I was going to ask him how your research is going. But you can tell me yourself."

Cayla eased herself into a chair, hugging her arms close to her body. “Okay, I guess."

"That doesn't sound very promising."

"Well, I have these odd events I've found."

Huerta folded her hands and leaned back. “Tell me."

So Cayla repeated her story about the bursts, ending with the rate of energy deposition. Huerta laughed aloud. “Oh, wow, that's marvelous! So you think you've discovered dark energy?"

Cayla ducked her head. “It's probably just a coincidence or something,” she mumbled.

Huerta scratched her arm. “I don't believe in coincidences. But do you have a mechanism? Can you explain
why
your picobursts cause dark energy?"

"Well, actually . . .” Cayla started, then stopped.

"You have a mechanism?"

"It's pretty crazy."

"Crazy is better than none."

That's not what I remember you saying,
Cayla thought. But she plunged on. “Remember that, uh, crazy paper I did for your seminar? The one that took the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics seriously, and suggested that dark energy was the pressure from multiplying worlds?"

"Of course. But the power was several orders of magnitude too low to be detected."

"Uh-huh. But that's only if the power is distributed evenly—linearly. I went back and reread that paper. And they used a linearized approximation.” She stood up. “The whole point is, you only get a coupling between different, whatever, universes through a nonlinearity.” Quickly she wrote out Schrodinger's wave equation on Huerta's e-board, with a nonlinear term. “But they never checked the stability of their linearization. It's not stable at all. You should get Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities, just as in shock waves in the interstellar medium. And the instabilities are going to be larger and faster in galaxies, because there are more quantum events."

Huerta held up a hand and shook her head. “No, no. As appealing as this is, it's too much to swallow. Surely we'd see some effect in quantum mechanics. But all the searches in beryllium frequency shifts in the 1990s failed."

"About that . . ."

"Yes?"

"I dug around a bit, and about ten years ago some experiments found that if you measured the Casimir effect with a cavity filled with radon, the force was significantly different. It was published in an obscure journal and no one connected it to nonlinearities in the Schrodinger equation. But the magnitude of the effect is exactly right."

Huerta stared at Cayla, then chuckled.

Cayla hung her head. “I know, I know it's silly. . . ."

Huerta waved a hand. “No, no. I was just laughing because I had told Howel you were the best student I'd seen in five years. I was wrong. You're the best I've seen in twenty years."

"You don't think this theory is stupid?” Cayla asked.

"Have you written it up?” Huerta asked.

"Yeah, although I imagine Professor Maune will want me to take out the crazy bits."

"Has he said so?"

Cayla looked down at the stained carpet in Huerta's office. “I sent it to him, but he hasn't said anything.” She almost blurted out,
I think he hates it,
but she couldn't bring herself to confess that to Huerta.

"I'm sure it gave him a lot to think about. He—oh, good morning, Howel."

And there was Maune, in Huerta's doorway. He looked so pale he was almost translucent.

"Howel, Cayla has been telling me about these bursts she's found in the LMC and in the Milky Way, and this most extraordinary theoretical interpretation she has. It's fascinating, don't you think?"

Maune's eyes took a moment to focus on Cayla. “Yes, Miss Kalinauskas has done some good work, yes, good. . . .” He gave the smallest of smiles. A picosmile.

Standing up, Huerta said, “Listen, Howel, if you don't mind, why doesn't Cayla join us for lunch?"

After what seemed like a long pause, Maune nodded again. Cayla felt anxiety, and anger, rise inside her. “I don't have to, really,” she said.

"Cayla, I would like you to,” Huerta said.

"Okay, let me get my wallet."

She ran up two flights of stairs to her office and found Rish sitting at her desk. He stood up and hugged her, which surprised her; the office was full of other grad students and Rish was not one for public displays of affection. “Good news,” he whispered in her ear. “The scan, it's not malignant, not even a benign tumor; just fatty cells. I didn't quite understand all of the diagnosis, but the lump's nothing to worry about."

"Come to lunch with us,” she said, grabbing his hand. “Please. With me and Maune and Huerta. We can celebrate."

"Sure,” said Rish as they walked down the stairs. “But let's just keep it to ourselves, shall we? I'm a little uncomfortable discussing my testicles in public."

Cayla laughed, feeling light-hearted for the first time in weeks. “I'm going to need you at lunch. I told Huerta about my work and she didn't yell or laugh at me, and she's very smart, as smart as Maune, and very tough. But
he's
acting strange."

"Stranger than usual?” Rish asked as he draped a warm arm around Cayla's shoulders. She didn't answer, only leaned against Rish, burrowing into the fragrance of his body.

They ate at the new faculty club. Huerta ordered sparkling wine with which to toast Cayla's work. At Huerta's urging, Cayla recited the facts of her data, the way she had used Maune's own trick to sift the events from the data. But Maune seemed inert, almost glassy-eyed.

Then he suddenly rumbled, without looking at Cayla, “While your data are solid, I'm sure, it might be good to speculate on possible mechanisms for your bursts."

There was a cold silence. “But I put that in my paper.” She wasn't sure if she wanted to yell at Maune or run out of the room. She took a deep breath. “Did you even read it?"

Huerta interjected, “She's got quite a puzzle, and quite a story. The power is similar to dark energy, and she thinks—” Huerta broke off. “Cayla should tell you herself."

Maune pushed the food around on his plate with a knife. Rish said, “Actually, you've never really explained your big idea to me, either."

So, slowly, Cayla laid out her explanation, adding technical details for Maune and Huerta and translating for Rish.

"Whoa, wait a minute,” Rish said. “You're talking about
alternate universes?
Where China colonized the Americas, the Nazis won World War Two, that kind of thing?"

"When you say it like that, it sounds crazy,” Cayla said.

"A mistake,” Maune said with a hollow voice. He was hunched over, like a curled bit of dried meat.

Cayla's heart turned to a block of ice. “My . . . mechanism?"

Huerta said with some urgency, “Listen to her, remember what we talked about,” but Maune shook his head.

"So I'm wrong,” Cayla said, and she could not keep the tremulousness out of her voice. “Could you at least tell me where I went wrong?"

"I shouldn't,” Maune rasped. He turned to Huerta. “Shouldn't have taken her on."

Cayla felt faint. Her mouth was dry as she said, “I'm sorry I wasn't good enough. I tried
so
hard,” she added, her voice rising, even as she was astonished at the words coming out of her mouth, “I spent every second of it trying to live up to
your
standards, but I'm sorry I was such a disappointment you didn't even bother to read my paper—"

"You didn't—” Maune's mouth hung open and his eyes fluttered upward, as if looking for his next line. “It's like . . . like . . . a bit of Las Vegas, gone bad. Betting the odds will go your way. More than a little bit of wish fulfillment. . . ."

Cayla drew in a sharp breath. “You think I'm making this up?”
Maybe he means I was a bad bet as a student
, she thought.

"I think we're all just making . . .” He pushed back his chair and stood. To Huerta he said, “I wasn't ready. I tried, but I keep thinking, if only, if only . . ."

People were staring at them. Maune said to Huerta in a tight whisper, “I have to go to the cemetery.” Maune drifted out through the door of the faculty club, a stick figure listing to one side.

Huerta quickly settled the bill and they went out into the brilliant sunlight. They could smell the salt scent of the sea on a light breeze.

"Cayla,” Huerta began.

"He didn't even listen to me, did he?” Cayla said. “So I was wrong to think I'd discovered something, something
huge
. I mean, I know I'm just a student, but he didn't even read my paper.” Inside she was thinking,
And all this time I was agonizing over Rish and I didn't let it show, I didn't let it affect me. . . .

Huerta's dark eyes tightened, and Cayla's stomach jumped, but the wine kept her words flowing even when she knew she should stop: “So he's sad about his dog, but why snub me like that and rush out to the pet cemetery? It's childish."

The professor's head tilted slightly to one side, just like all the times in seminar when she corrected Cayla. Huerta said, “He's not going to the
pet
cemetery,” and Cayla felt a very cold spot at the back of her skull.

Huerta paused, looked up at the blue, blue sky. “Howel is a very private man, so I am reluctant to talk about it. But you don't know. He is going to his wife's grave. She died about five years ago. Six years now."

The sun shone and Cayla thought she could feel the world spinning beneath the sun, but that could have been the alcohol. Huerta continued, “It was an aneurysm. I was having dinner with them when it burst. She just slumped—” Huerta took a deep breath, blew it back out. “It was
her
dog. His last link to her."