Eater (3 page)

The Brit face at the back curled up a lip, squinted eyes, but said nothing. A long moment passed as the colloquium chairman peered toward the back, rocking forward a little, and then saw that there would be no reply.
Game, point, match
, Benjamin thought, breathing in deeply of air that seemed cool and sharp.

There were two more questions, minor stuff about possible implications, easy to get through. In fact, he let himself strut a little. He expanded on some work he contemplated doing in the near future, once he and Channing had the wedding business over with and he could think, plan the next step in his career. He felt that he could get away with a slight, permissible brag.

Then it was over, the ritual incantation from the chairman, “There is wine and cheese in the usual place, to which you are all invited. Let us thank our speaker again…”

This applause was scattered and listless, as usual as everybody got up, and the crowd left. His major professor appeared at his elbow and said, “You handled that very well.”

“Uh, thanks. Who is that guy?” Benjamin glanced at the crowd, not letting any concern into his face.

“Dart. Kingsley Dart.”

“The similarity solutions guy from Oxford?”

“Right. Just blew in yesterday afternoon, visiting for a few days. Thought you had met him.”

“I was squirreled away making viewgraphs.”

“You sure nailed Dart with those last three.”

“I hadn’t really planned it that way—”

An amused grin. “Oh, sure.”

“I didn’t!”

“Nobody gets timing like that without setting it up.”

“Well, my Benjamin did,” Channing said, slipping an arm around his. “I know, because he had them in the very first version of the talk.”

Benjamin smiled. “And you told me to drop them.”

“It worked perfectly, didn’t it?” she said, all innocence.

He laughed, liking the feeling of release it brought, liking that she had made him seem a lot more the savvy Machiavellian than he was, liking the whole damned thing so much it clutched at his heart somehow in the frozen moment of triumph. Off to the side two of the big names of the department were talking about the implications of his work and he liked the sound of that, too, his name wafting pleasantly in the nearly empty room. He could smell the aging, polished wood, the astringent solvent reek of the dry markers from the blackboard, a moist gathering in the cloying air of late afternoon. Channing kept her arm in his and walked proudly beside him up the two flights to the wine and cheese.

“You were
great
.” She looked up at him seriously and he saw that she had feared for him in this last hour. Berkeley was notorious for cutting criticisms, arch comments, savage
seminars that dissected years of research in minutes of coldly delivered condemnation.

She had kept close to him through the aftermath, when white-haired savants of the field came up to him, holding plastic glasses of an indifferent red wine, and probed him on details, implications, even gossip. Treating him like a member of the club, a colleague at last. She had tugged at his arm and nodded when Dart came into view, earnestly talking to a grand old observing astronomer. Dart had a way of skating over a crowd, dipping in where he wanted, like a hummingbird seeking the sweet bulbs. Eventually he worked his way around to Benjamin, lifting eyebrows as he approached, his face in fact running through the entire suite of ironic messages, very Euro, before shooting out a hand and saying, “Kingsley Dart. Liked the talk.”

Firm handshake. “You seemed to disagree with most of it.”

A shrug. “Testing the ideas, just testing.”

He said, a little testily,
Benjamin thought. “I had dropped those viewgraphs, the proof, out of the talk. I didn’t think most of the audience would care.”

Abrupt nods, three very quick, then a long one, as though deliberating. “Probably right. Only people like me and thee care.”

Ah
, Benjamin thought,
instant inclusion in the fraternity of people-like-us
. “It’s a major point, I should have brought it up.”

“No, you were right, would’ve blunted your momentum.”

Why is he being so chummy
? Channing’s glance asked, eyebrows pinched in. He had no idea. Not knowing where to go with this conversation, he said, “My fiancée, Channing Blythe,” and they went through the usual presentations. But Kingsley kept eyeing him with a gaze that lapsed into frowning speculation, as though they were still feeling each other out. And maybe they were. Within minutes they were at it, throwing ideas and clipped phrases back and forth, talking the shorthand of those who spent a lot of time living in their
heads and were glad to meet someone who shared the same interior territory. It was the start of a formal friendship and a real, never acknowledged rivalry, two poles that defined them in the decades that followed.

Twenty years. Could it have been that long?

And now here he was, the famous Royal Astronomer, first on the scene when something potentially big was breaking. Perfect timing was a gift, and Kingsley had it.

Forcing a smile onto his stiff face, Benjamin felt a sharp, hot spike of genuine hatred.

Channing planned her invasion of the High Energy Astrophysics Center carefully. First, what were the right clothes to stage a dramatic reappearance at work, after a month away, presumed by all to be no longer a real player?

When she had worked at NASA Headquarters the dress code had been easy: modified East Coast style, basically a matter of getting her blacks to match. Did a mascara-dark midlength skirt go with a charcoal turtleneck? Close enough and she was okay for either NASA’s labyrinths, the opera, or a smoky dive.

But amid tropical glare and endless vibrant bougainvillea, her outfits had seemed like dressing as a vampire at an Easter egg hunt. Here, slouchy sweaters and scuffed tennis shoes appeared at “dressy casual” receptions, right next to Italian silk ties, subtle diamond bracelets, and high heels sinking into the sandy sod. She had seen jeans worn with a tiara, “leisure gowns” looking like pajamas, and a tux top with black shorts. Yet finding a studied casual look took her an hour of careful weighing, all to seem as though she had thrown them on fifteen minutes ago without a second thought. On top of that, you never knew how the day would proceed later, whether you were dressing for an evening on a humid, warm patio or inside, in air-conditioning set for the comfort zone of a snow leopard.
Maddening
.

She eyed herself carefully in the mirror. Now, thanks to
weight loss, she had a great, tight butt:
Gluteus to the Maximus
! But her breasts, once ample enough, thank you, were sagging, or as she preferred to think in TV terms, losing their vertical hold.

Getting over vanity had been the hardest part of adjusting to the cancer. A vain man would check himself out passing a mirror. An absolutely ordinary woman could pick out her reflections in store windows, spoons, bald men’s heads. Channing, as a photogenic astronaut type, had been ever-aware of How She Looked. All women faced the Looks Issue, as she had thought of it as a teenager, whether as a positive element or a negative one. Not that it had not done her good now and then. At NASA it had helped her through earnest committee meetings in which she was the only woman in the room. Now, thank God, all that was behind her.

Still, she was not at all ready to enter the working bay, looking for Benjamin, and find Kingsley Dart in his uniform: slightly pouchy brown suit, white shirt, tie drawn tight in a knot of unknown style. Down-market Oxford, so utterly out of place that his attire advertised Dart’s unconcern for such trivial matters. Since she had seen him in a tux when the situation demanded, and yet he had somehow achieved the same effect of unconscious indifference, she was sure it was all quite conscious.

She went through the clothes analysis automatically while trying to absorb the shock. She was suddenly self-conscious, and then angry about being so. He still had the power to throw her into momentary confusion. And the way he lifted his head to smile, with just a whiff of hauteur, still delighted her.
Damn him
.

“Channing, how wonderful to see you,” Kingsley said smoothly.

He looked into her face with a worried frown, much as everyone did these days, as if they could read the state of her health there. Well, maybe they could; she was past the stage of trying to hide behind cosmetics. She knew that her skin
was yellow and papery, her eyes rimmed with a dark under-layer, her once strong arms thin and showing swelling at the joints. It no longer even bothered her that people glanced at her out of the corner of their eyes, not wanting to stare but still drawn to hints of the eternal mystery—of what her mother called “passing,” as if there were a clear destination firmly in mind.

“Thought I’d come in, see what all the excitement’s about.”

“Is there much?” Kingsley said to Benjamin with deceptive lightness. “Have you made any announcement?”

“Oh no, much too soon for that,” Benjamin said quickly.

“Don’t want to just announce a mystery,” Amy put in.

“But it’s all over the IAU Notices,” Kingsley said.

This was the global notification system of the International Astronomical Union, used to focus workers on the newest comet or supernova or pulsar of interest. “Sure, but we’ve got to be cautious,” Benjamin said. “If this is a new class of object—”

“Then you should enlist as many people and observing windows as possible,” Kingsley finished for him.

Channing smiled, remembering. Kingsley had the annoying pattern of quickly disagreeing with you and often being right, plus the even worse property of agreeing with you and getting there first.

Benjamin pursed his lips and plowed on. “I think the big issue is how this thing can repeat.”

Kingsley said carefully, “I must admit, when I saw your Notices piece, I thought it most likely an error.”

Amy said flatly, “It’s not an error, I can tell you that.”

“I’m quite relieved to hear it.” Channing noted that with this phrase Kingsley was not actually agreeing with Amy, only reacting, but his choice of words avoided rankling her.

“Look at it this way,” Benjamin put in. “At the very least, this object throws into doubt the standard picture of gamma-ray bursters.”

Kingsley’s lips drew into a thin, skeptical line. “With many thousands observed, one exception does not disprove the model.”

Since he had taken a major hand in building up the conventional view of gamma-ray bursters, this was predictable, Channing felt. She said amiably, “Similar appearance does not mean similar cause.”

Kingsley nodded but Amy said, “Shouldn’t we follow Occam’s razor—prefer the simplest explanation? Then this is an odd kind of burster, but one in our galaxy.”

Benjamin said, “Sure, but don’t throw out data just because it makes your job harder. We don’t understand the visible light data, either.”

This led to a long discussion of the mysterious Doppler shifts. Channing had come up today mainly to see this data, and it was strange indeed. “It’s as though some of the thing’s coming toward us, some away. A rotating disk? We’d get the red shifts from the receding edge, blue shifts from the approaching one.”

They all looked at her. “Good idea,” Benjamin said happily, winking and grinning. She could see that they were surprised in two ways—by the proposal itself, and because she had made it. She had come into astronomy as an observing astronaut, doing yeoman labor in the last stages of the space shuttle era, then doing dutiful time on the space station. The more academically based astronomers regarded these as rather showy, unserious pursuits. She had never risen very far here at the Center and had always wondered if that bias held her back. In the slightly startled expressions of Dart and Amy—but not, bless him, Benjamin—she saw confirmation.

Kingsley said incisively, “I rather like that.”

“But a disk?” Amy frowned doubtfully. “I’d say these are kinda large, but I’ll have to check…”

“Good,” Kingsley said quickly. “At the moment we
have
no other hypothesis to test. I wish we did.”

Channing was not the only one to notice that his use of
we
included Kingsley in the team. Benjamin’s eyes narrowed in a way she understood and he said, “Just wait. Theorists will jump on this like it was candy.”

“They can theorize all they like,” Amy said. “We have all the data.”

“Which we should make quick use of,” Kingsley said. “Let’s do some preliminary calculations, shall we?”

Channing went with them to a seminar room and they reviewed the data. Some fresh observations came in over the satellite links as they worked, providing fresh fodder. She kept up with the discussions, but to her this branch of astrophysics was like a French Impressionist painting of a cow: suggestive, artful maybe, but some things never looked quite right and it was in the end not a reliable source of nourishing milk. Plus, she was woefully out of date on current theory. Still she found pleasure in watching Benjamin and Kingsley spar, using quickly jotted equations as weapons. Amy joined in, too, her tone a bit less canny and insidious, but holding her own.

Kingsley jabbed verbally, challenging others’ ideas while seeming at first to be going along with them, inserting doubt slyly as he carried the discussion forward, ferret-eyed in his intensity. Just as decades before, he saw this as a delightful game played with chalk and sliding tones of voice.

Channing found her attention drifting. Looking back, she could remember liking contests like this from decades past. Benjamin would always see Kingsley as a rival; that was set in his mind like a fossil print of their first meeting. Benjamin was a perfectly respectable theorist, but not in Kingsley’s class. That was simply a fact, but she knew quite well that Benjamin would never fully accept it. After all, who did not need a little illusion to get through life?

Having bested Kingsley in a colloquium encounter set their relationship, as far as Benjamin was concerned. Never mind that Kingsley had done better work on bigger problems, and on top of it displayed remarkable skills in the political circus that science had become. She could barely
recall that incident, but knew that it burned in Benjamin’s mind whenever he crossed Kingsley’s path. Probably Kingsley had forgotten it entirely. This seemingly small difference was precisely why they seldom saw each other. Too bad, really, because she had always found Kingsley more amusing than the usual run of academic astronomers. In their bull moose rivalries, men missed a lot.

Would her own career at NASA have gone better, she mused, if she had been a man? Nobody in passing conversation would glance at your chest. You wouldn’t have to pretend to be “freshening up” to go to the goddamn john. Nobody cared if you didn’t remember their birthday. You could rationalize any behavior error with the all-purpose “Screw it.” In late-night jokes in a bar, you could really see something hilarious in punting a small dog, preferably a poodle. You didn’t give a rat’s ass whether anybody heeded your new haircut. Thank God, they never noticed if you’d lost or gained weight. Men had some things so easy! With the Other Side, flowers fixed anything. And as the years closed in, gray hair and wrinkles would add character. Hell, you could dine out on that alone. Lean over the bar, belch originally, and declaim about the old days when rocket boosters kicked you in the ass so hard you thought you had a prostate problem. And what the hell, you could always look forward to being a dirty old man.