Angelmass

by Timothy Zahn

  A muscle in Kosta’s jaw twitched. “I’ve got a theory. But you’re not going to like it.”

  “More than I don’t like impossible gravity fluctuations?” Gyasi countered. “Come on, let’s hear it.”

  Kosta hesitated, then shook his head. “Let’s wait on the mass reading,” he said. “This is crazy enough that … no, let’s just wait.”

  “I hate waiting,” Gyasi declared, getting to his feet “I’m going to go check on the tracer.”

  He left the room. “So which way are you hoping it goes?” Chandris asked.

  Kosta rubbed his eyes. “I’m a scientist, Chandris,” he reminded her. “We’re not supposed to hope data goes one way or the other.”

  “Yeah,” she sniffed. “Right.”

  “Besides, I’m not even sure it matters anymore,” he conceded. “Whether angels are standard quanta or Dr. Qhahenlo’s quantum bundles, something weird has definitely happened to Angelmass.”

  He gestured toward the row of computer terminals on the long lab table beside them. “I wish I could get into the files and check some of the details of her theory. I know it predicts some mass loss here, but I don’t know how much.”

  “Can’t you do the calculation on your own?”

  “This isn’t like looking up the mass of a hydrogen atom or calculating a force vector,” he said. “The mathematics involved are way too complicated to do by hand. And with my funds frozen, I don’t have access to the computers.”

  Chandris looked at the terminals. “You want me to get you in?”

  He threw her a startled look; suddenly seemed to remember who it was he was talking to. “You can do that?”

  “Probably,” she said, swiveling the closest terminal over into easy reach. “Want me to try?”

  For a pair of heartbeats he stared at her hands as they hovered over the terminal, a battle going on behind his eyes. She waited … “No,” he said quietly, reaching over to take one of her hands away from the keyboard. “We can’t risk getting caught. Not now.”

  His hand was cold and rigid; and as she held it, Chandris found herself looking into his face. Into those foreign eyes, into the dark tension behind them.

  Earlier, waiting in the darkness of the Gazelle’s angel storage room, she’d thought a lot about whether confronting a Pax spy alone was really a smart thing to do. He’d persuaded her to give him the benefit of the doubt for now, but she’d been ready to chop and hop the second he showed what he was really up to.

  But now, suddenly, she realized her mental preparations had been unnecessary. Kosta had no sinister private plan, because Kosta was exactly what he claimed to be: a simple academic who’d been thrown into the deep end of the tiger pit. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not going to turn you in.”

  He shook his head, his gaze drifting outward into space. “I’m not worried about myself, Chandris.”

  “Then what—?”

  She broke off as, behind them, the door opened and Gyasi came back in. “Well?” Kosta demanded, letting go of Chandris’s hand.

  “It should be finished,” Gyasi said, crossing toward them. “See if you can pull it up.”

  “Right,” Kosta said, punching at the keyboard as Gyasi slid back into the seat beside him. The numbers came up …

  Gyasi muttered something under his breath. “There it is,” he murmured. “You were right again, Jereko.”

  “It lost mass?” Chandris asked, running her eye down the numbers and trying to make sense of them.

  “Mass and charge both,” Kosta told her, his voice tight. “Almost three percent each.”

  “And it lost them right through the outer mass coating,” Gyasi added. “You know, if the angel’s breaking down, the mass loss ought to show up as high-energy particles leaking through the shell. Let me go see if there’s a radiation detector setup free.”

  “Don’t bother,” Kosta said. “This isn’t any spontaneous breakdown. The damage has already been done.”

  “Yes,” Chandris murmured, a sudden ache in her heart as she stared at the numbers. She’d tried so hard to convince herself that the angel’s presence hadn’t been what had kept Hanan and Ornina working so peaceably together all these years. Apparently, that had been nothing but wishful puff-think.

  “Chandris?”

  She started out of her thoughts. Kosta was frowning at her. “What?” she said, turning her face away from him.

  “It’s not the Daviees who did this to it,” he said quietly.

  Did I say it was? the defensive retort bubbled automatically up into her throat. To her vague surprise, it stayed there. “Then who did?” she asked instead. “You? Me?”

  “No,” Kosta said. “Angelmass.”

  She turned back, half expecting to see something on his face that would show he was making some stupid joke. But his expression was deadly serious. “What do you mean, Angelmass? What does Angelmass have to do with it?”

  “It’s the source of the angels,” Kosta said. “Hawking radiation, remember? A particle-antiparticle pair are created at the event horizon. One falls in, the other escapes outward.”

  “But there aren’t any anti-angels,” Gyasi objected.

  “Yes, there are,” Kosta said. His voice was firm, and just as serious as his expression. “We just haven’t found them yet. But they’re there.”

  He waved toward the display. “That alone proves it, as far as I’m concerned. Dr. Qhahenlo’s theory allows for both quantum bundles and field effects, remember? Angelmass has a huge field—the corrosion of the Daviees’ angel shows that much. If that field isn’t being generated by an equally huge mass of anti-angels inside the black hole, where’s it coming from?”

  “Maybe from the Daviees?” Gyasi suggested. “I don’t know these people. Maybe they’re—” He waved a hand helplessly.

  “What, evil incarnate?” Kosta scoffed. “Come on, Yaezon. Anyway, there’s an easy way to check. Remember that mass murderer you’ve got on the grounds with the angel in his cell? When was the last time that angel was checked?”

  Gyasi made a face. “It’s checked every six weeks,” he conceded. “You’re right; if there’d been any change the whole Institute would have heard about it But if there are anti-angels, why hasn’t anyone ever seen them?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Kosta admitted. “But try this. An angel has a huge negative charge, which means that as soon as it’s created it starts pulling positively charged particles to it.”

  “Which is what creates the matter shell,” Chandris put in.

  “Right,” Kosta nodded. “And the most common positive particles out there are the protons and helium nuclei from the solar wind, plus heavier particles from Angelmass itself.”

  Gyasi muttered something startled sounding. “Of course. Of course.”

  “Of course what?” Chandris demanded, looking back and forth between them.

  “Anti-angels would be positively charged,” Gyasi told her, his voice the sour tone of someone who’s just failed a child’s brain-tweaker. “That means they would be pulling mostly electrons. And electrons, being a lot lighter than protons, will get yanked in to it that much faster.”

  “Which means an anti-angel could go neutral so fast that your average huntership would never even see it,” Kosta concluded.

  “So simple.” Gyasi shook his head. “You said you had a theory about Angelmass. Did it have something to do with possible structure?”

  “I don’t know,” Kosta said. “Maybe.”

  “Well, spit it out,” Chandris said.

  Kosta braced himself. “What would you say,” he said, “if I told you I think Angelmass has become sentient?”

  For a long minute the only sound in the room was the humming of the computer cooling fans. “I’d probably say you’d been working too hard,” Gyasi said at last. “Jereko, it’s a black hole. A fruitcake would have more chance of spontaneously developing sentience than it would.”

  “Would it?” Kosta countered. “You’re fo
rgetting Che and his nine angels.”

  “Easy,” Gyasi warned, jerking his head urgently toward Chandris. “We’re keeping that quiet, remember?”

  “Keeping what quiet?!’ Chandris asked.

  “Che Kruyrov found that a cubic array of nine angels mimics a Lantryllyn logic circuit,” Kosta told her. “That was a system that people once thought could form the basis for a fully sentient computer.”

  Chandris blinked. “So now your quanta of good have become quanta of sentience?”

  “We don’t know what it means,” Gyasi said, looking pained. “But I’ m sure it doesn’t mean you can make a jump from a single Lantryllyn circuit straight to a sentient black hole.”

  “It attacks hunterships,” Kosta said flatly. “It’s done it twice, firing dead-on at moving targets.”

  “Maybe more than twice,” Chandris said, staring at the white line as the image on the screen continued its slow rotation. “You said there were other radiation surges before the one that hit the Hova’s Skyarcher. Were they all pointed at hunterships?”

  “I don’t know,” Kosta said grimly. “We’ll have to check on that. And it’s had to alter its internal structure and even its gravitational field to do so.”

  “A black hole hasn’t got an internal structure,” Gyasi snapped.

  “Then it’s altered its event-horizon environment,” Kosta said. “I don’t know what the hell it’s doing, or how it’s doing it. But you can’t deny it is doing something.”

  Gyasi snorted. “Next you’re going to try to tell me this has some bearing on the increase in angel production you calculated.”

  “As a matter or fact, I’m sure it does,” Kosta said. “Hawking radiation is caused by strong tidal forces at the event horizon. A side effect of Angelmass’s gravitational and radiation surges could well be an increase in the number of angels it turns out.”

  Gyasi exhaled loudly, looking back at the display showing the rotating vector field. Kosta stirred, as if preparing to speak; Chandris touched his arm warningly, and he subsided.

  “So what do we do?” Gyasi asked at last. “We put something like this on the net and we’re going to have a lot of scared people out there.”

  “Agreed,” Kosta said. “I was thinking of telling Director Podolak and a couple of others. Dr. Qhahenlo, certainly, and probably Che and Dr. Frashni, too.”

  “What are you going to use for data?” Chandris asked.

  Kosta frowned at her. “What do you mean? The angel, of course.”

  “The Daviees’ angel?” she asked pointedly. “The one it’s illegal for them to have?”

  “Yes, the—” Kosta broke off. “Illegal?”

  “I looked it up earlier, while I was waiting for you to show,” Chandris told him. “Angel hunters are required by law to turn in any angel they find.”

  Gyasi waved a hand impatiently. “Sure, but in this case—”

  “No,” Chandris said flatly.

  “She’s right,” Kosta seconded. “They’ve got enough trouble right now, with Hanan in the hospital and a half-wrecked ship.” He looked at Chandris. “Anyway, I promised we’d put the angel back when we were done testing it.”

  “Then what do we do?” Gyasi asked.

  “We dig up some independent data,” Kosta said. “Let’s start by seeing if we can find evidence of anti-angels.”

  He reached for the terminal; checked the motion with a muttered curse. “Yaezon, if you would?” he said. “Check for me when the last time was anyone went out looking for one.”

  “We’ve done a complete bio-chemical analysis on Mr. Ronyon,” the white-jacketed doctor said, punching keys on the nurses’ station computer. “There are still remnants of the stress-created chemicals, but we can’t find anything that might have triggered the stress itself. We’re still waiting on the results of the neural scan, but I’m not expecting to find anything.” He paused, just noticeably. “Aside from the obvious malfunctions in a brain like his, of course.”

  “Then what caused it?” Forsythe asked.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know,” the doctor conceded. “Though with someone with Mr. Ronyon’s congenital problems, I imagine things like this just happen every now and again.”

  “No,” Forsythe said icily. “They don’t.”

  The doctor blinked as he looked into Forsythe’s eyes. What he saw there made him shrink back a little. “My apologies, High Senator,” he said hastily. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “This was not something random caused by his physical or mental disabilities,” Forsythe continued in the same tone of voice. “Something happened to him out there. I want to know what.”

  The doctor bobbed his head nervously. “Of course, High Senator, of course. We’ll do all we can.”

  “I expect nothing less.” The woman manning the nurses’ station, Forsythe noted peripherally, was puttering around in the back of her alcove, striving to look invisible. “When can I see him?”

  “Ah … not until morning, I’m afraid,” the doctor said. “I mean, you could see him, but he won’t be awake until then. The neural scans require the subject to be sedated—”

  “I understand,” Forsythe cut him off. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  The doctor gulped. “Certainly. Until morning, then.”

  He turned and hurried down the corridor toward Ronyon’s room and the examination room beyond. Forsythe watched him go, thinking quietly contemptuous thoughts in his direction. He disappeared through the doorway, and Forsythe turned around—

  “You were a little hard on him, weren’t you?” Pirbazari commented quietly.

  “I’m not going to stand here and let him push off what happened on vague he-was-born-that-way excuses,” Forsythe said tartly, moving away from the nurses’ station. “Nothing like that has ever happened to him before. I want an explanation.”

  “I wasn’t there, so I can’t comment on what happened,” Pirbazari said diplomatically. “I would merely suggest that jumping down the doctor’s throat isn’t going to help.”

  “The fear of God can do wonders for someone’s motivation,” Forsythe growled.

  “Or else freeze them up completely.”

  “You let me worry about that,” Forsythe said shortly. “What’s happening with the Angelmass gravitational data?”

  “It’s been collected, compiled, and sent on to Kosta,” Pirbazari said, his voice going a little grimmer. “And I’m no expert, but it’s obvious even to me that something weird is going on out there. I’ve got a copy if you want to take a look.”

  “Later,” Forsythe said, blinking his eyes a few times to moisten them. “What about the other matter?”

  Pirbazari glanced around, making sure no one was in hearing range. “Slavis went through the local police records for the past few months,” he said in a quiet voice. “No reported con games involving anyone even close to their descriptions.”

  Forsythe stroked his lower lip. “Interesting,” he murmured. “Especially on the girl’s part.”

  “You think she’s gone straight?”

  “Do you?”

  Pirbazari shrugged uncertainly. “She has been working around angels.”

  “Tigers don’t change their stripes, Zar,” Forsythe said firmly. “Once a con artist, always a con artist. If she hasn’t pulled anything since arriving on Seraph, it just means she’s got something long-term in the works.”

  ‘Teamed up with Kosta?”

  “That’s the logical assumption,” Forsythe agreed. “The problem is, what could it be? Something involving the Institute? Then why didn’t they cut and run when we froze Kosta’s account? That should have been a dead giveaway that we were on to them.”

  “Maybe it has to do with that huntership,” Pirbazari suggested. “The Gazelle.”

  Forsythe shook his head. “That makes even less sense than an Institute con. I was on that ship, and there’s nothing aboard worth stealing. At least, nothing that would require more than a lock-breaker and a TransTruc
k to haul the stuff away.”

  He paused as a sudden thought struck him. Turning on his heel, he retraced his steps back to the nurses’ station. “May I help you, High Senator?” the duty nurse asked as he approached.

  “I’d like you to pull up the record for Hanan Daviee,” he said. “He came in the same time as my aide Mr. Ronyon.”

  “Yes, we all saw it on the news,” the nurse murmured, pressing keys on her board. “Terrible situation … here it is. He suffered severe damage to his exobraces, with feedback damage to his own neural system. He’s currently stable, but weak.”

  “Prognosis?”

  The corners of her mouth tightened as she scanned the listing. “He’ll need to have some reconstructive work done on his spinal cord,” she said. “How much he’ll be able to recover will depend on how much work they can do.”

  “What are the limiting factors?” Pirbazari asked from Forsythe’s side.

  Her mouth tightened a bit more. ‘To put it crassly, money,” she told him. “The work involved is complex and expensive. Very simply, the more he can afford, the more of a recovery he can make.”

  “I thought Gabriel paid for work-related health problems,” Pirbazari said.

  “Some of them, yes,” the nurse said. “The entire hospital stay will be taken care of, for instance. But his long-term neural problems are congenital, not work-related, and they aren’t covered.”

  “Thank you,” Forsythe said, taking Pirbazari’s arm and turning away. “Interesting,” he commented as they headed down the corridor again. “Maybe you were at least partially right, Zar. The tiger may not change his stripes, but he may occasionally roll over and purr.”

  Pirbazari shook his head. “You’ve lost me.”

  Forsythe nodded back toward the nurses’ station. “Our friend Mr. Daviee needs large amounts of money for an operation. Our other friend, Chandris Lalasha, is a lady whose profession is to separate people from large amounts of money. Coincidence?”

  Pirbazari frowned. “Are you suggesting the Daviees hired her to get money for them?”

  “Or else she’s taken them on as a charity case,” Forsythe said. “Either way, she still bears watching.”