The Best of Nancy Kress (48 page)

Ajit said flatly, “I told you I wanted to leave it broken.”

With Kane, frank opposition is fine; he’s strong enough to take it and, in fact, doesn’t respect much else. But Ajit is different. I lowered my eyes and reached for his hand. “I know. I took the liberty of fixing it anyway because, well, I thought you might want to see it whole again and because I like the statue so much. It has so much meaning beyond the obvious, especially here. In this place and this time. Please forgive me.”

Ajit was silent for a moment, then he raised my hand to his lips. “You do see that.”

“Yes,” I said, and it was the truth. Shiva, the endless dance, the endless flow of energy changing form and state—how could anyone not see it in the gas clouds forming stars, the black hole destroying them, the violence and creation outside this very hull? Yet, at the same time, it was a profound insight into the very obvious, and I kept my eyes lowered so no glimpse of my faint contempt reached Ajit.

He kissed me. “You are so spiritual, Tirzah. And so sweet-natured.”

I was neither. The only deceptions Ajit could see were the para-noid ones he assumed of others.

But his body had relaxed in my arms, and I knew that some part of his mind had been reassured. He and I could see spiritual beau-ties that Kane could not. Therefore he was in some sense superior to Kane. He followed me back down the ladder to lunch, and I heard him hum a snatch of some jaunty tune. Pleased with myself, I made for the galley.

Kane stood up so abruptly from his terminal that his eyes glowed. “Oh, my shitting stars. Oh, yes. Tirzah, I’ve got it.”

I stopped cold. I had never seen anyone, even Kane, look quite like that. “Got what?”

“All of it.” Suddenly he seized me and swung me into exuberant, clumsy dance. “All of it! I’ve got all of it! The young stars, the gas orbits, the missing mass in the universe! All shitting fucking all of it!”

“Wwwhhhaaatttt…” He was whirling me around so fast that my teeth rattled. “Kane, stop!”

He did, and enveloped me in a rib-cracking hug, then abruptly released me and dragged my bruised body to his terminal. “Look, sweetheart, I’ve got it. Now sit right there and I’m going to explain it in terms even you can understand. You’ll love it. It’ll love you. Now look here, at this region of space—”

I turned briefly to look at Ajit. For Kane, he didn’t even exist.

6. PROBE

“The probe has moved,” I said to Ajit and Kane. “It’s way beyond the calculated drift. By a factor of ten.”

Kane’s eyes, red with work, nonetheless sharpened. “Let me see the trajectory.”

“I transferred it to both your terminals.” Ordinarily ship’s data is kept separate, for my eyes only.

Kane brought up the display and whistled.

The probe is under the stresses, gravitational and radiational, that will eventually destroy it. We all know that. Our fleshy counter-parts weren’t even sure the probe would survive to send one mini-cap of data, and I’m sure they were jubilant when we did. Probably they treated the mini-cap like a holy gift, and I can easily imagine how eager they are for more. Back on the ship, I—the other “I”—had been counting on data, like oil, to grease the frictions and tensions between Ajit and Kane. I hoped it had.

We uploads had fuel enough to move the probe twice. After that, and since our last move will be no more than one-fiftieth of a light year from the black hole at the galactic core, the probe will eventually spiral down into Sgr A*. Before
that
, however, it will have been ripped apart by the immense tidal forces of the hole. However, long before that final death plunge, we analogues will be gone.

The probe’s current drift, however, considerably farther away from the hole, was nonetheless much faster than projected. It was also slightly off course. We were being pulled in the general direction of Sgr A*, but not on the gravitational trajectory that would bring us into its orbit at the time and place the computer had calculated. In fact, at our current rate of acceleration, there was a chance we’d miss the event horizon completely.

What was going on?

Kane said, “Maybe we better hold off moving the probe to the other side of Sgr A West until we find out what’s pulling us.”

Ajit was studying the data over Kane’s shoulder. He said hesitantly, “No…wait… I think we should move.”

“Why?” Kane challenged.

“I don’t know. I just have…call it an intuition. We should move now.”

I held my breath. The only intuition Kane usually acknowledged was his own. But, earlier, things had subtly shifted. Kane had said, “Ajit’s right. That region is the source of whatever pull is distort-ing the gas infall.” Ajit had not changed expression, but I’d felt his pleasure, real as heat. That had given him the courage to now offer this unformed—“half-baked” was Kane’s usual term—intuition.

Kane said thoughtfully, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe the—” Suddenly his eyes widened. “Oh my God.”

“What?” I said, despite myself. “What?”

Kane ignored me. “Ajit—run the sims for the gas orbits in correlation with the probe drift. I’ll do the young stars!”

“Why do—” Ajit began, and then he saw whatever had seized Kane’s mind. Ajit said something in Hindi; it might have been a curse, or a prayer. I didn’t know. Nor did I know anything about their idea, or about what was happening with the gas orbits and young stars outside the probe. However, I could see clearly what was happening within.

Ajit and Kane fell into frenzied work. They threw comments and orders to each other, transferred data, backed up sims and equation runs. They tilted their chairs toward each other and spouted incomprehensible jargon. Once Kane cried, “We need more data!” and Ajit laughed, freely and easily, then immediately plunged back into whatever he was doing. I watched them for a long time, then stole quietly up to the observation deck for a minute alone.

The show outside was more spectacular than ever, perhaps because we’d been pulled closer to it than planned. Clouds of whirling gases wrapped and oddly softened that heart of darkness, Sgr A*. The fiery tail of the giant red star lit up that part of the sky. Stars glowed in a profusion unimaginable on my native Station J, stuck off in a remote arm of the galaxy. Directly in front of me glowed the glorious blue stars of the cluster IRS16.

I must have stayed on the observation deck longer than I’d planned, because Kane came looking for me. “Tirzah! Come on down! We want to show you where we’re moving and why!”

We.

I said severely, gladness bursting in my heart, “You don’t show me where we’re going, Kane, you ask me. I captain this ship.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, you’re a dragon lady. Come on!” He grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the ladder.

They both explained it, interrupting each other, fiercely correcting each other, having a wonderful time. I concentrated as hard as I could, trying to cut through the technicalities they couldn’t do without, any more than they could do without air. Eventually I thought I glimpsed the core of their excitement.

“Shadow matter,” I said, tasting the words on my tongue. It sounded too bizarre to take seriously, but Kane was insistent.

“The theory’s been around for centuries, but deGroot pretty much discredited it in 2086,” Kane said. “He—”

“If it’s been discredited, then why—” I began.

“I said ‘pretty much,’” Kane said. “There were always some mathematical anomalies with deGroot’s work. And we can see now where he was wrong. He—”

Kane and Ajit started to explain why deGroot was wrong, but I interrupted. “No, don’t digress so much! Let me just tell you what I think I understood from what you said.”

I was silent a moment, gathering words. Both men waited impatiently, Kane running his hand through his hair, Ajit smiling widely. I said, “You said there’s a theory that just after the Big Bang, gravity somehow decoupled from the other forces in the universe, just as matter decoupled from radiation. At the same time, you scientists have known for two centuries that there doesn’t seem to be enough matter in the universe to make all your equations work. So scientists posited a lot of ‘dark matter’ and a lot of black holes, but none of the figures added up right anyway.

“And right now, neither do the orbits of the infalling gas, or the probe’s drift, or the fact that massive young stars were forming that close to the black hole without being ripped apart by tidal forces. The forces acting on the huge clouds have to condense to form stars that big.”

I took a breath, quick enough so that neither had time to break in and distract me with technicalities.

“But now you think that if gravity did decouple right after the Big Bang—”

“About 10
^-43
seconds after,” Ajit said helpfully. I ignored him.

“— then two types of matter were created, normal matter and ‘shadow matter.’ It’s sort of like matter and antimatter, only normal matter and shadow matter can’t interact except by gravity. No inter-action through any other force, not radiation or strong or weak forces. Only gravity. That’s the only effect shadow matter has on our universe. Gravity.

“And a big chunk of this stuff is there on the other side of Sgr A West. It’s exerting enough gravity to affect the path of the infalling gas. And to affect the probe’s drift. And even to affect the young stars because the shadow matter-thing’s exerting a counterpull on the massive star clouds, and that’s keeping them from being ripped apart by the hole as soon as they otherwise would be. So they have time to collapse into young stars.”

“Well, that’s sort of it, but you’ve left out some things that alter and validate the whole,” Kane said impatiently, scowling.

“Yes, Tirzah, dear heart, you don’t see the—you can’t just say that ‘counterpull’—let me try once more.”

They were off again, but this time I didn’t listen. So maybe I hadn’t seen the theory whole, but only glimpsed its shadow. It was enough.

They had a viable theory. I had a viable expedition, with a goal, and cooperatively productive scientists, and a probability of success.

It was enough.

Kane and Ajit prepared the second mini-cap for the big ship, and I prepared to move the probe. Our mood was jubilant. There was much laughing and joking, interrupted by intense bursts of incomprehensible jabbering between Ajit and Kane.

But before I finished my programming, Ajit’s head disappeared.

7. SHIP

Kane worked all day on his shadow-matter theory. He worked ferociously, hunched over his terminal like a hungry dog with a particularly meaty bone, barely glancing up and saying little. Ajit worked, too, but the quality of his working was different. The terminals both connect to the same computer, of course; whatever Kane had, Ajit had, too. Ajit could follow whatever Kane did.

But that’s what Ajit was doing: following. I could tell it from the timing of his accesses, from the whole set of his body. He was a decent scientist, but he was not Kane. Given the data and enough time, Ajit might have been able to go where Kane raced ahead now. Maybe. Or, he might have been able to make valuable additions to Kane’s thinking. But Kane gave him no time; Kane was always there first, and he asked no help. He had shut Ajit out completely. For Kane, nothing existed right now but his work.

Toward evening he looked up abruptly and said to me, “They’ll move the probe. The uploads—they’ll move it.”

I said, “How do you know? It’s not time yet, according to the schedule.”

“No. But they’ll move it. If I figured out the shadow matter here, I will there, too. I’ll decide that more data is needed from the other side of Sgr A West, where the main shadow mass is.”

I looked at him. He looked demented, like some sort of Roman warrior who has just wrestled with a lion. All that was missing was the blood. Wild, filthy hair—when had he last showered? Clothes spotted with the food I’d made him gulp down at noon. Age lines beginning, under strain and fatigue and despite the rejuve, to drag down the muscles of his face. And his eyes shining like Sgr A West itself.

God, I loved him.

I said, with careful emphasis, “You’re right. The Tirzah upload will move the ship for better measurements.”