by Timothy Zahn
“Actually, I’ve already been around the ship a couple of times,” Kosta told her. “Nobody else has anything more interesting to watch.”
Qhahenlo blinked. “When did you do all that?”
“About forty minutes ago.”
Qhahenlo’s lips puckered. “Occasionally, you’ll find I get too engrossed in my work to be a proper host. My apologies.”
“That’s all right,” Kosta assured her.
Qhahenlo looked back at Gyasi. “Anyway. Let’s see; we were about here ...”
Their heads went back together, already lost in the data again. Kosta watched them, a wisp of worried contempt tugging at him. They were the archetypical crystal-tower scientists, all right, both of them. So completely wrapped up in their research that they didn’t notice the rest of the universe. So single-mindedly confident in what they were doing that not even the slightest doubt ever crossed either of their minds.
So infatuated by the angels that they’d lost all sense of perspective.
They’d put an angel on a baby. How long would it be before they were putting angels on all the babies?
“Yaezon?” he asked suddenly. “What kind of numbers are we talking about to get the Empyrean properly fitted out with angels?”
Gyasi looked up again. “Well, we need angels for all politicians from regional level on up. Then there are the judges, corporate executives, EmDef officers, trade officials—”
“Yes, but what I want is the total number of angels we’re talking about.”
Gyasi frowned. “No idea. Doctor?”
“Not offhand,” Qhahenlo said. Without looking up she waved at another terminal. “But all that should be listed under the Empyreal Angel Experiment heading.”
The approaching-zero-gee alarm was beginning to sound as Kosta found the proper sublist; and the ship’s rotation was nearly at a stop by the time he located the current status information.
It was worse than he’d expected. The original estimate had been that it would take forty years to achieve the target level of one angel per hundred Empyreals. Now, barely eighteen years later, updated projections were guessing that goal to be only seven more years away. More hunterships, better shielding and detection equipment, the breakthrough invention of the hyperspace net—there were pages and pages of graphs tracing how each new scientific and technological advance had brought the goal closer. Already over eighteen thousand angels had been collected, with that number growing at an ever increasing rate.
Kosta paused, staring at one of the graphs, a quiet alarm bell going off in the back of his mind. He’d studied great quantities of black hole theory during the astrophysics segment of his tridoctorum degree. But if that graph was correctly drawn …
Strapping himself into the chair, hardly noticing his weightlessness, he got to work.
He was still at it when the announcement came that the ship had landed.
“So. What did you think?”
Kosta looked up from his display, feeling a flicker of annoyance at the interruption. “Of what, Angelmass?”
“Of Dr. Qhahenlo,” Gyasi said. “And our project”
“Oh.” Kosta shrugged, turning his attention to the display again. “I don’t know. Okay, I guess.”
Peripherally, he saw Gyasi put down his stylus and scoot his chair over. “Okay, I give up,” he said. “What in the world is so interesting?”
Kosta hesitated. He was sure now. But whether he ought to tell any of the Empyreals about this …
No. Of course he ought to. He was here to save them, after all. “This,” he told Gyasi, swiveling the display around. “It’s a graph of number of angels captured per huntership per unit time, shown in one-year slices. You can see that it’s gone up in the past couple of years.”
Gyasi glanced at it. “No big surprise,” he said. “There have been some major advances in technology and sensor equipment—”
“I’ve factored those out,” Kosta cut him off.
Gyasi stopped. “Oh.” He looked at the graph again, more carefully this time. “Well, maybe it’s due to the fact that Angelmass is getting smaller. You know—as a quantum black hole gets smaller, it gets hotter and radiates its mass away faster.” He reached for the keyboard. “Let’s see; a hotter effective temperature would shift the mean particle spectrum upwards, creating more angels—”
“I’ve factored that out, too,” Kosta told him.
Gyasi frowned. “You sure?”
Kosta nodded. “It’s a simpler calculation even than the technological advancements. Check it yourself if you want.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” For a long minute Gyasi gazed at the display, lips moving soundlessly. “Interesting and a half,” he admitted at last. “What do you think is causing it?”
Kosta shook his head. “I don’t know. But it’s for sure that something strange is going on out there. Something in the Hawking process that current theory doesn’t cover.”
“Angels don’t come from Hawking radiation,” Gyasi said absently, eyes still on the graph. “At least not directly.”
Kosta frowned. “What do you mean? I thought all particle radiation from a quantum black hole was Hawking process.”
“Not angels, apparently,” Gyasi shrugged. “Classical Hawking process is a tidal-force creation of particle-antiparticle pairs at the event horizon, one of which escapes while the other falls into the black hole. Right? So if angels are Hawking process, we should see anti-angels too. Only we don’t.”
“Never?”
Gyasi shrugged again. “No one’s ever found one.”
Kosta rubbed his chin. “But if it’s not Hawking process, then what’s the mechanism?”
“The theorists over in the west wing have been trying to answer that one for twenty years,” Gyasi said dryly. “So far nothing they’ve come up with has been solid enough to hold soup.” He shook his head. “I wonder why no one’s ever noticed this before.”
Because you’ve all got terminal tunnel vision where angels are concerned. “Probably because no one’s thought to look,” Kosta said instead. “That’s why you bring in people like me who don’t know what the unspoken assumptions are.”
“I guess,” Gyasi conceded. “You ought to get this written up and onto the nets as soon as possible.”
Kosta felt his stomach tighten. For a moment there he’d almost forgotten who and what he was. Now, all of that came rushing back like a splash of cold water.
He was a spy in enemy territory. And spies were not supposed to draw attention to themselves by publishing inflammatory academic papers. “Actually, I thought I’d do a little more work on it first,” he said cautiously. “Make sure I’m not seeing things that aren’t there.”
“Bosh,” Gyasi snorted. “What are you afraid of, looking silly? No one cares about that.” He held up a hand. “Okay, okay, I know you’re new here. Tell you what: if it’ll make you feel any better, you can have three days to run all the numbers back and forth through the sand sifter. But after that, either you write it up or I will. Deal?”
Kosta hesitated. But he really didn’t have a choice. And if it made the Empyreals even slightly more cautious about these angels of theirs, it would be worth the risk. “Deal.”
“Good.” Gyasi waved a hand imperiously at Kosta. “Well, don’t just sit there—get to work. The entire Empyreal scientific community is waiting for this.”
“Yeah,” Kosta muttered. “I’m sure they can hardly wait.”
“That’s the spirit,” Gyasi said. “Hey, relax—even if you’re totally wrong, no one’s going to hang you.”
Kosta shivered. If he only knew.
CHAPTER 16
Ornina looked up from the circuit board, a slightly bemused expression on her face. “Stop me if you’ve heard this before, Chandris, but you are absolutely amazing. Are you sure you’ve never done this sort of work before?”
Chandris shook her head, feeling her cheeks warming under Ornina’s praise. It was embarrassing to stand here
and listen to the woman go on like this. Embarrassing, and pretty stupid besides.
But she had to admit that, down deep, it felt kind of nice. “Not before last week,” she said. “You must be a good teacher.”
“Fiddlies,” Ornina said firmly. “It’s sweet of you to say so, but fiddlies nonetheless.” She twisted her head around to look across the room at Chandris’s assembly table. “That was the last of them, too, wasn’t it? Well, let’s see; what else needs doing around here?”
Chandris cleared her throat. “Actually, I was wondering if maybe I could have a couple of hours off. I thought I might go into Shikari City for awhile.”
“Why, certainly,” Ornina said. “Hanan showed you how to call a line car, didn’t he?”
“Yes, but I thought I’d just walk. I feel sometimes like I haven’t been outside the Gazelle for more than ten minutes since I first got here.”
‘It is a hard life,” Ornina agreed quietly. “If it helps any, we aren’t always going to be quite this busy. It’s just that the Gazelle’s going to have to have some major overhauling done soon, and we need to get a bit ahead of schedule before then. Time-wise and money-wise both.”
“I understand,” Chandris said. “I won’t be gone long.”
“Oh, well, don’t worry about that. Though you probably ought to take a phone along—it’s possible we might need to get in touch with you.” Ornina’s forehead creased in thought. “Not to put you off or anything … but should you be wandering the streets this soon after your, ah, trouble aboard the Xirrus?”
Chandris had wondered about that, too. But this whole angel question had been hanging over her head for more than a week, and she was tired of not knowing what she was up against. She needed more information than the Gazelle’s library could provide, and going out was the only way to get it. “I can’t hide forever,” she told Ornina, heading for the door to cut off further argument “Don’t worry, I’ve had a lot of practice at not being recognized. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
“Okay,” Ornina called after her. “See you later. And don’t forget the phone.”
It was a brisk fifteen minute walk from the Gazelle to the edge of Shikari City proper, and another ten to the huge glass-and-stone monstrosity that the Gazelle’s maps had identified as the Angelmass Studies Institute. Circling until she found the front door, she went inside.
“Public access terminals? Right over there.” The receptionist pointed past a large stairway to a long room containing rows of low-walled carrels, about half of them occupied. “You have a ship’s sign-on, I presume?” the woman added, her eyes taking in Chandris’s coveralls.
“Of course,” Chandris told her automatically. She got two steps toward the room before it belatedly dawned on her that the lack of privacy in there would keep her from using any of her normal techniques to crack into the computer.
It was another two steps before it likewise dawned that, for a change, cracking wasn’t going to be necessary. A quick phone call to Ornina for the Gazelle’s sign-on, and she was in business.
Only to realize, forty minutes later, that the whole trip had been for nothing.
“Can I help you?” the receptionist smiled.
“I hope so,” Chandris said, smiling back through the best poor/lost/vulnerable expression in her repertoire. “I’m trying to locate some special information on angels, and I can’t seem to find it in those files. Have I missed some special access or sign-on or something?”
“I doubt it,” the woman said. “There really isn’t all that much information available on angels that most people don’t already know from the news and learning channels.”
“I guess not,” Chandris agreed. “But there must be some other files here somewhere. I mean, you people study angels all day, don’t you?”
“Sometimes far into the night, too,” the other woman said wryly. “The problem is that most of what’s done here is still in the preliminary stage. They prefer to wait until they’re sure about something before releasing it to the general public. Otherwise you get conflicting stories and retractions and general confusion all around.”
“I understand,” Chandris told her, letting a bit of pleading creep into her tone. “But I’m not just general public. I’m a crewer on a huntership. Isn’t there—oh, I don’t know; some kind of special procedure for us to get the information we need to do our jobs safely?”
The receptionist’s forehead wrinkled in thought. She was on Chandris’s side now—her body language showed that much. The question was whether there was anything she could do to help. Keeping quiet, Chandris waited, letting her work through it.
“There isn’t any way to let you into the main computer files,” the woman said at last. “However—” Her eyes flicked past Chandris’s shoulder, her hand darting up to beckon someone over.
Chandris’s muscles tensed, and she had to fight to keep from turning around to look. If the receptionist had recognized her—if that was a guard coming over—she’d have a better chance if she looked harmless and blissfully unaware that anything was going down. A fist-sized decorative crystal adorned the receptionist’s desk; easing a few centimeters to her left brought Chandris within reach of it.
“—maybe one of our researchers can tell you what you need to know.”
“That would be wonderful,” Chandris said, keeping her voice steady and her eyes on the receptionist’s face. It still might be a trap, but if it was the woman was a nurking good actress. Footsteps sounded behind her now; casually, she turned around—
And froze. The man approaching was not, as she’d feared, a guard.
It was worse.
It was the young man from the spaceport. The one she’d scored into getting her past the guards.
Nurk! she thought viciously, twisting way too quickly back toward the desk to try and hide her face. Nurk, nurk, damn, nurk! If he remembered her …
He did. The footsteps behind her faltered suddenly, then came to an abrupt stop. Chandris kept her eyes on the receptionist’s face, waiting for her to realize there was something wrong—
“Mr. Kosta, this is a huntership crewer who’s looking for some information about angels,” the woman said. “I saw you heading upstairs and thought you might have a few minutes to talk with her.”
There was just the slightest pause. “I see,” the man said from behind her. No mistake; it was his voice. “Well … sure, why not? Miss—ah—?”
Chandris ground her teeth. “Chandris,” she told him, turning around.
His eyes seemed to dig into her face, his expression stony but with an odd undercoating of nervousness to it. She met the gaze evenly; and he blinked first. “Right,” he said, and turned away. “Come on.”
He led the way across the entrance foyer toward what looked like a small lounge, his whole back a solid mass of tight muscles. Chandris followed, wondering why she was following him instead of going for a straight chop and hop.
Though if she did, chances were she wouldn’t even make it outside the building.
They went into the lounge, Kosta heading back toward an unoccupied corner. “Have a seat,” he grunted, pointing her to a chair as he eased himself down into the one facing it.
“Thank you.” Chandris sat down, casually taking in her surroundings as she did so. The archway to the entrance foyer and one unmarked door nearby seemed to be the only exits, aside from several tall and probably unbreakable windows.
“So you’re a huntership crewer today, are you?”
She focused on him. “As a matter of fact, I am,” she said, annoyed despite herself at his tone. “Is that so hard to believe?”
He snorted. “Coming from you?” he asked pointedly.
Chandris unhooked the phone from her belt and held it out. “Huntership Service Yard Number S-33,” she told him. “The ship’s named the Gazelle; operators are Hanan and Ornina Daviee. Go ahead—call them. I’ll wait.”
Kosta’s eyes flicked to the phone. “Maybe I should just call security ins
tead.”
She could take him, she knew. She could stand up—he would stand up, too—a short, quick jab in the stomach with the tapered top end of the phone— “Maybe you should,” she said. “But you won’t.”
“What makes you so sure?”
She looked him straight in the eye. “Because if you didn’t turn me in at the spaceport, you won’t turn me in here.”
He glared at her. But his tight throat muscles showed that she was right. “I’ll answer your questions,” he bit out. “But when you walk out that door I don’t ever want to see you again. Is that clear?”
Chandris felt her lip twitch with contempt. A typical overschooled cloud-head, the type who’d rather look the other way than get involved with anything sticky. “Perfectly,” she told him. “Actually, all I want to know is whether angels can make people love each other.”
His jaw dropped. “Make them do what?”
“Love each other. What, are you deaf?”
“What, are you stupid?” he shot back. “There are a dozen aphrodisiac perfumes on the market. Go use one of those.”
With an effort, Chandris held her temper. She’d hit something in there, all right, something all his noise couldn’t quite cover up. If she could just wheedle it out of him …
“You misunderstand,” she said, putting her best imitation of quiet professional dignity into her face and voice. “Let me explain. As I mentioned, the owner/operators of the Gazelle are named Hanan and Ornina Daviee. Brother and sister, both in their forties, and they’ve apparently been working together for quite a few years. As you may or may not know, angel hunting is grueling work, the sort that tends to enhance personality differences between people. You understand?”
“Yes,” Kosta nodded. He was falling for it, Chandris saw; slipping into a student/professor pattern in reaction to her newly adopted persona. He must not be all that long out of school for the pattern to have kicked in so quickly.
“All right,” she continued, fine-tuning her act a bit. “Now, during the past few days I’ve noticed several strong personality differences between the two of them, differences I would consider strong enough to put a strain on their relationship. Yet they stay together, working for the most part in harmony. The obvious question arises as to whether their close work with angels has something to do with this continued partnership.”