Angelmass

by Timothy Zahn

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, and—uh—please come, uh, come back here. Again.”

  “I certainly will,” Hanan said. Picking up one of the packages, he led the way outside.

  “Well?” he asked Chandris as the TransTruck pulled away from the curb. “What did you think?”

  She shrugged. “I was right the first time. It’s just like scoring a track.”

  “How so?”

  “You play off human nature,” she said. “People don’t like to ask questions they think will make them look stupid. So they don’t, and you wind up getting away with things you otherwise wouldn’t.”

  “Huh,” Hanan grunted thoughtfully. “I never really thought about it that way, but you’re right.” He looked over at her. “I guess we’re not as different as either of us would have thought.”

  Chandris felt her lip twist. Except that you’d never stoop to anything so rude as actually taking money away from people this way, she added silently. Scrubbed saints, both of you.

  And yet …

  No, he didn’t take any money. But he kept pulling these stunts. Even though they sometimes made people look foolish.

  Even though Ornina clearly didn’t like them.

  The first wisps of uneasiness began to curl around her stomach. They’d seemed to work so well together, he and Omina; friendly, with a sort of harmony in their activities. People who cared for each other.

  Just like she and Trilling had been at the beginning.

  She glanced surreptitiously at Hanan, now humming softly to himself as he gazed out at the passing cityscape, the knot in her stomach tightening. Was that the real reason they kept the extra angel around? Not for any stupid soft-touch thing about helping the poor unfortunate downtrodden, but because they couldn’t live together without it?

  A shiver ran up her back. All along she’d known there had to be something else lurking behind this deal. But this hadn’t been what she’d had in mind. Fellow scorers she could handle, and maybe even score right back again. But psycho defectives …

  She gritted her teeth. All right, let’s not go and pop any cords here, okay? she growled at herself. After all, this was all pure guesswork. And hadn’t Hanan just said that angels weren’t active?

  And that was the real problem, she realized suddenly. She knew next to nothing about these nurking angel things. And most of what she did know had come from the Daviees. What she needed was more information. “That Angelmass Studies Institute ship you showed me,” she said. “Is it based with the rest of the hunterships?”

  Hanan looked at her, mild surprise on his face. “Yes, it’s got a service building at the southwest edge of the landing strip. Why?”

  “I thought it might be nice to learn a little more about angels,” she said. “Especially if I’m going to be helping you hunt them.”

  “Well, then, you don’t want the ship but the Institute itself,” Hanan advised her. “It’s out in the eastern part of Shikari City, at One Hundred U San Avenue. There are public terminals on the first floor that should tell you everything you need to know. You want to go over today, after we drop off these coils?”

  Chandris hesitated. As far as she was concerned, the sooner she tracked this down the better.

  But in her mind’s eye she saw Ornina, worried about whether or not Hanan could handle the coils by himself. “Thanks,” she told Hanan. “I’d rather stick around and watch you put these coils in. I’ve still got a lot to learn about the Gazelle.”

  Hanan glanced at her, and she could tell what he was thinking: wanted by the police, she was skittish about going out alone in public. “Okay,” he said. “Just let Ornina or me know when you want to go and we’ll show you how to call a Gabriel line car.”

  “Thanks,” she said again. Tomorrow, or maybe the next day, she told herself, she’d go.

  And after that she would decide if she was ever coming back.

  CHAPTER 15

  “Jereko?” Gyasi’s voice came from the open doorway.

  Kosta looked up, being very careful not to move his head too quickly lest it fall off. “Mm?” he muttered, wondering vaguely if he looked as rotten as he felt.

  If Gyasi’s expression was anything to go by, he did. “I take it,” Gyasi said, “that you haven’t had much experience with zero-gee space travel.”

  There was room there for some kind of witty reply, but Kosta was too ill to bother. “I’d say that’s a fair statement,” he said instead.

  “Uh-huh,” Gyasi nodded. “Well, if it helps any, they’ll probably be rotating the ship on the way back to the catapult. Unfortunately, they can’t do that on the way in—it would foul up too many of the experiments.” Gyasi looked at his watch, a frown creasing his forehead. “You know, that stuff you took should have taken effect long ago.”

  “Oh, it is,” Kosta told him. “Starting to, anyway. I’m not feeling quite as queasy as I was.”

  “Ah. Good.” Gyasi peered at him. “You must have a pretty exotic metabolism for it to have taken this long.”

  If you only knew how exotic, Kosta thought. But he was feeling better, and improving by the minute. “How long till we get to Angelmass?” he asked.

  “Maybe twenty minutes,” Gyasi said. “That’s to the inner radiation region. We’ve been inside the outer field since we ’pulted.”

  “I know.” It wasn’t something Kosta could have missed; the gamma-ray clicks from the ship’s electronics were pretty distinctive. Also just a little bit scary. “That base—Angelmass Central—it sits out here permanently?”

  “Sure does,” Gyasi nodded. “Has to, you see—hunterships come and go across the clock, and the net and catapult have to be running at all times.”

  “Is it manned?”

  “Usually, though the people are mostly there to help in case of huntership emergencies. The station is automated enough that you could set it up to run pretty much by itself if you had to. You can also turn the major systems on and off from Seraph.”

  Kosta nodded, thinking about people sitting in the outer radiation field of a blazing quantum black hole for weeks or months on end. The shielding technology alone that that implied was incredible. No wonder the Komitadji’s lasers and plasma jets hadn’t put a dent in those Lorelei defense ships. “The gamma-ray clicking must drive them nuts,” he murmured.

  Gyasi grinned. “You get used to it. Just like you do riding around in zero-gee. You look like you’re feeling better.”

  “I am,” Kosta confirmed, nodding. This time his head didn’t even threaten to come off. “That stuff works fast when it finally gets around to it.”

  “Only the best for us folks at the Institute,” Gyasi said. “You feel up to heading forward and checking out some of the gear?”

  “Sure.” Carefully, Kosta gave himself a push away from the restraint straps and drifted across the room. Gyasi caught his arm as he approached, deftly helping him through the door. “I never got a chance to ask if you had any experiments aboard,” he said as they headed down the corridor.

  Gyasi shook his head. “I don’t personally, though the head of my team does. Most of what I’m working on can be done easier in the lab.” He grinned, his face a little dreamy looking. “I just like to come out here and look at Angelmass.”

  “So to speak,” Kosta murmured.

  “Well, not directly at it of course,” Gyasi agreed. “But even through fifteen filters it’s still an impressive sight. Here we are.”

  They had arrived outside a door marked STARBOARD ANALYSIS ROOM. It slid open at a tap on the touch plate, and Gyasi led the way inside.

  The view in here was impressive, too. The room was long and relatively narrow, its entire length taken up on both sides by displays and tangles of equipment. Perhaps thirty people floated around and through it all, making adjustments or taking notes or just watching. A murmur of quiet conversation competed with the hum of cooling fans and cryogenic pumps, all of it punctuated every few seconds by a gamma-ray click. “Did they leave anything at all behind i
n their labs?” he asked.

  Beside him, Gyasi chuckled. “This is nothing. On some trips the place gets really crowded.”

  “Right,” Kosta said dryly. A monstrous apparatus at the far end caught his eye: a huge spherical tank wrapped with cables and metal coils. “What’s that thing?” he asked, indicating it.

  “Ah, that,” Gyasi said. “Dr. Ciardi’s angel decay detector. One of the three permanent experiments aboard; and heaven only knows how they’re going to get it out of the ship if and when they’re done with—”

  “Wait a second,” Kosta interrupted him. “Decay detector?”

  “Right,” Gyasi nodded. “Dr. Ciardi’s one of those who isn’t ready to believe in the Acchaa theory—he still wants angels to be nothing more than highly metastable subatomic particles. If his theory is right, an angel should spontaneously decay into a particular group of other subatomic particles. That thing is busy looking for that specific particle-track signature.”

  “Wouldn’t it be simpler to just take one into his lab and sit on it?”

  “Oh, he’s doing that, too,” Gyasi said. “But that could take a while—his theory predicts a half-life in the fifty-thousand-year range. I’ve heard he tried to get hold of a whole bunch of angels to help speed things up, but Director Podolak turned him down.”

  “Academic censorship?”

  “Simple arithmetic. The High Senate and most of the top EmDef people have angels now, along with all the planetary governors and senators and a lot of judges. But there are still lower-level politicians, leaders of industry—you know the list. Maybe in ten years or so Director Podolak will be able to take fifty or a hundred angels out of the pool for that kind of study. But not now.”

  Kosta nodded, feeling more hopeful than he had in days. If the plan was going to require another ten years to complete, then perhaps there was still time to save these people.

  Provided he, Kosta, did his job.

  And finding out more about this Ciardi’s theory might be a good place to start. If he could help sow doubt as to what the angels really were—

  “Mr. Gyasi?” a woman’s voice called from the other end of the room. “Can you give me a hand?”

  “Sure,” Gyasi called back. He kicked off the wall, bouncing his hands against walls and ceiling to skillfully maneuver himself through the maze of other occupants. Kosta followed more slowly, wondering just how often Gyasi had taken this trip.

  He arrived at the far end of the room to find Gyasi and a middle-aged woman poring over a maze of circuit cables. “Ah—Jereko,” Gyasi said, glancing up. “Dr. Qhahenlo, this is my new officemate, Jereko Kosta. This is Dr. Rae Yanda Qhahenlo, my supervisor.”

  “Honored, Mr. Kosta,” Qhahenlo said briefly, not bothering with the usual greeting routine. “You know anything about mid-range samplers?”

  “A little,” Kosta said cautiously, hovering over their shoulders. He knew a great deal about mid-range samplers, actually. But Pax samplers, not their Empyreal counterparts. Even if the designs turned out to be parallel, translating the terminology might be tricky. “What’s the trouble?”

  “Output signal is way too noisy,” Qhahenlo grunted. “I thought it was the ’sponder, but replacing it didn’t seem to help.”

  “Um.” Kosta looked over the apparatus. “What’s in all that tubing?”

  “Siitalon,” Qhahenlo said. “Cryogenic heat-pump fluid— keeps the detectors cool.”

  “Fluorine-based?”

  Qhahenlo frowned at him. “I think so. Why?”

  “Well, it looks like you’ve got one of the line connections right over the ’sponder feed,” he pointed out. “If you’ve got a small leak there, you may be getting some fluorine adsorption onto the line. Maybe enough to cause your noise.”

  Gyasi blinked. “You’re kidding. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

  “Actually, I have,” Qhahenlo said, already searching through her tool kit. “I’d completely forgotten it, though. Let’s see …”

  For a minute she worked in silence, tightening down the suspect connection with a zero-gee wrench and then molding extra sealant around it. “Okay, give it a try.”

  Gyasi busied himself with the control board. “Well, it looks a little better,” he said doubtfully, studying the display. “Wait a minute; there it goes.” He looked up. “Nice call, Jereko.”

  “Thanks,” Kosta said, letting out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Somehow, it had been vitally important to him to be right on this. “Lucky guess.”

  “One of my own favorite investigative tools,” Qhahenlo said dryly. “Thank you, Mr. Kosta.” She eyed him thoughtfully. “You must be new to the Institute.”

  Kosta nodded. “Just got here a couple of days ago. Still finding my way around.”

  “Any of the other research teams press-gang you yet?”

  “Uh …” Kosta glanced at Gyasi, found no cues there. “No. Should they have?”

  She cocked an eyebrow. “If this is a sample of your skills, they certainly will. Good diagnosticians are in high demand.”

  Kosta glanced at Gyasi again. Was Qhahenlo trying to hire him? And if so, did he have any say in the matter? “I do have some projects of my own I’m working on,” he said carefully.

  She smiled. “Don’t worry—I’m not talking about kidnapping you away from your other work,” she assured him. “But I would like you to work with my team. Even just on a consulting basis, if that’s all the time you can spare.”

  “Though as a matter of fact,” Gyasi put in, “you’ll probably wind up working with Dr. Qhahenlo sooner or later anyway. That ion shell project of yours could be useful when the V/E experiment is finished.”

  “What ion shell project is this?” Qhahenlo asked, looking interested.

  “I’m trying to see whether it’s possible to strip off an angel’s collected ion shell,” Kosta said, feeling awkward. It was a little unsettling to have someone of Qhahenlo’s obvious status and experience listening so closely to what he had to say. “My original thought was to see whether the shell had anything to do with the angel effect, but Yaezon tells me it’s probably a dead-end approach.”

  “Never underestimate dead-end approaches,” Qhahenlo advised. “At worst, they often generate useful spin-offs; at best, they sometimes turn out to be not so dead-end as everyone expected.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Kosta said. “May I ask what this V/E experiment is?”

  “Certainly—it’s not a secret,” Qhahenlo said. “The Variable Exposure experiment is a long-term test of angel stability.”

  “Not like Dr. Ciardi’s, though,” Gyasi put in. “This one’s based on a variant on the Acchaa theory that Dr. Qhahenlo’s come up with. Instead of the angel being a single quantum of good, you assume it’s a bundle of many quanta, with the angel particle being a kind of threshold for creation rather than the absolute minimum size that a strict quantum would imply. When you do that, the angel effect can be explained as a slow decay of these constituent quanta into fields of good that directly affect people nearby. Saves you a whole bunch of the headaches the theorists are having trying to come up with a workable mechanism for the angel/personality interaction—”

  He broke off suddenly, looking at Qhahenlo with a somewhat sheepish expression. “Sorry, Dr. Qhahenlo. I interrupted, didn’t I?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Qhahenlo told him with an amused smile. “The general rule is that enthusiasm is worth two to three extra lab techs. Anyway, that’s basically where we’re starting from, Mr. Kosta. Since all angel theories allow both positive and negative solutions, it seems reasonable to assume that there can be fields of evil—or anti-good, if you prefer—that might be able to affect the rate of decay of the quanta bundles in a given angel.”

  “Which is where the Variable Exposure experiment comes in,” Gyasi said.

  “Right,” Qhahenlo nodded. “What we’ve done is to take four newly captured angels and put them in radically different environments. The
first is locked in a deep underground vault, some fifty meters from any human being; that one’s our control. The second is in a special cell with a convicted serial murderer. The third is being worn by Director Podolak herself, replacing one she’d been wearing for the previous five years. And the fourth has been sewn into a special harness being worn by a one-month-old child.”

  Something icy ran up Kosta’s back. “A one-month-old child?” he repeated carefully. “A baby?”

  “That’s the layman’s term for them, yes,” Gyasi said dryly. “He’s the son of two Institute employees—they’ve got an apartment on the grounds.”

  “We plan to run the test for about a year,” Qhahenlo said. “If angels do in fact absorb evil, then there should be detectable differences between the four. Though what those differences will be we’re still not sure of.”

  “I see,” Kosta said mechanically. A baby. They’d put an angel on a baby. An unknown but very real force … and they’d turned it loose on an innocent and helpless child.

  “We’d of course appreciate any suggestions you might have along the way,” Qhahenlo continued. “And Mr. Gyasi’s right; finding a way to strip off the angels’ ion shells could be very useful when it comes time to compare them.”

  With an effort, Kosta forced his mind away from the image of that baby. “Yes,” he managed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Good.” Qhahenlo looked at her watch. “We should be getting close to our target zone. Give me a hand, Mr. Gyasi, and let’s get this thing going.”

  “Attention, all passengers,” the cool voice came over the speakers. “De-rotation will begin in three minutes. Repeating: de-rotation will begin in three minutes.”

  Hunched head to head with Qhahenlo over a display, Gyasi looked up at Kosta. “You going to be okay?”

  Kosta nodded. “I think I’ve got the hang of it now,” he said.

  Qhahenlo looked up, too, as if noticing Kosta for the first time. “Incidentally, Mr. Kosta, you really don’t have to wait around here if you’ve got something else you want to do. Watching other people sift their data isn’t the most thrilling way to spend an afternoon.”