The Best of Nancy Kress

by Nancy Kress

  “No. Yesterday was…difficult.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, noting the characteristically polite understatement. “Yes.”

  “Should I wake Kane?” Ajit said, almost diffidently.

  “I’ll do it.”

  Kane was hard to wake. I had to shake him several times before he struggled up to consciousness.

  “Tirzah?”

  “Who else? Kane, you must get up. Something’s happened.”

  “Wh-what?” He yawned hugely and slumped against the bulkhead. His whole body reeked.

  I braced myself. “The second mini-cap arrived. Your analogue sent a recording. He says the prelim data was compromised, due to radiation-caused sensor malfunction.”

  That woke him. He stared at me as if I were an executioner. “The data’s compromised? All of it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Kane pushed out of his bunk and ran into the wardroom. Ajit said, “I put the mini-cap data into the system already, but I—” Kane wasn’t listening. He tore into the data, and after a few minutes he actually bellowed.

  “No!”

  I flattened myself against the bulkhead, not from fear but from surprise. I had never heard a grown man make a noise like that.

  But there were no other noises. Kane worked silently, ferociously. Ajit sat at his own terminal and worked, too, not yesterday’s tentative copying but the real thing. I put hot coffee beside them both. Kane gulped his steaming, Ajit ignored his.

  After half an hour, Kane turned to me. Defeat pulled like gravity at everything on his face, eyes and lips and jaw muscles. Only his filthy hair sprang upward. He said simply, with the naked straight-forwardness of despair, “The new data invalidates the idea of shadow matter.”

  I heard myself say, “Kane, go take a shower.”

  To my surprise, he went, shambling from the room. Ajit worked a few minutes longer, then climbed the ladder to the observation deck. Over his shoulder he said, “Tirzah, I want to be alone, please. Don’t come.”

  I didn’t. I sat at the tiny wardroom table, looked at my own undrunk coffee, and thought of nothing.

  10. PROBE

  The data from the probe’s new position looked good, Kane said. That was his word: “good.” Then he returned to his terminal.

  “Ajit?” I was coming to rely on him more and more for translation. He was just as busy as Kane, but kinder. This made sense. If, to Kane, Ajit was a secondary but still necessary party to the intellectual action, that’s what I was to both of them. Ajit had settled into this position, secure that he was valued. I could feel myself doing the same. The cessation of struggle turned us both kinder.

  Kane, never insecure, worked away.

  Ajit said, “The new readings confirm a large gravitational mass affecting the paths of both the infalling gas and the probe. The young stars so close to Sgr A* are a much knottier problem. We’ve got to modify the whole theory of star formation to account for the curvatures of space-time caused by the hole and by the shadow mass. It’s very complex. Kane’s got the computer working on that, and I’m going to take readings on Sgr A West, in its different parts, and on stars on the other side of the mass and look at those.”

  “What about the mass detectors? What do they say?”

  “They say we’re being pulled toward a mass of about a half mil-lion suns.”

  A half million suns. And we couldn’t see it: not with our eyes, nor radio sensors, nor X-rays detectors, nor anything.

  “I have a question. Does it have an event horizon? Is it swallow-ing light, like a black hole does? Isn’t it the gravity of a black hole that swallows light?”

  “Yes. But radiation, including light, goes right through this shadow matter, Tirzah. Don’t you understand? It doesn’t interact with normal radiation at all.”

  “But it has gravity. Why doesn’t its gravity trap the light?”

  “I don’t know.” He hesitated. “Kane thinks maybe it doesn’t interact with radiation as particles, which respond to gravity. Only as waves.”

  “How can it do that?”

  Ajit took my shoulders and shook them playfully. “I told you—we don’t know. This is brand-new, dear heart. We know as much about what it will and will not do as primitive hominids knew about fire.”

  “Well, don’t make a god of it,” I said, and it was a test. Ajit passed. He didn’t stiffen as if I’d made some inappropriate reference to the drawing of Shiva he’d shown me last night. Instead, he laughed and went back to work.

  “Tirzah! Tirzah!”

  The automatic wake-up brought me out of shut-down. Ajit must have been brought back on-line a few moments before me, because he was already calling my name. Alarm bells clanged.

  “It’s Kane! He’s been hit!”

  I raced into Kane’s bunk. He lay still amid the bedclothes. It wasn’t the maintenance program that had taken the hit, because every part of his body was intact; so were the bedclothes. But Kane lay stiff and unresponsive.

  “Run the full diagnostics,” I said to Ajit.

  “I already started them.”

  “Kane,” I said, shaking him gently, then harder. He moved a little, groaned. So his upload wasn’t dead.

  I sat on the edge of the bunk, fighting fear, and took his hand. “Kane, love, can you hear me?”

  He squeezed my fingers. The expression on his face didn’t change. After a silence in which time itself seemed to stop, Ajit said, “The diagnostics are complete. About a third of brain function is gone.”

  I got into the bunk beside Kane and put my arms around him.

  Ajit and I did what we could. Our uploads patched and copied, using material from both of us. Yes, the copying would lead to corruption, but we were beyond that.

  Because an upload runs on such a complex combination of computer and nano-constructed polymer networks, we cannot sim-ply be replaced by a back-up program cube. The unique software/ hardware retes are also why a corrupted analogue is not exactly the same as a stroke- or tumor-impaired human brain.

  The analogue brain does not have to pump blood or control breathing. It does not have to move muscles or secrete hormones. Although closely tied to the “purer” programs that maintain our illusion of moving and living as three-dimensional beings in a three-dimensional ship, the analogue brain is tied to the computer in much more complex ways than any fleshy human using a terminal. The resources of the computer were at our disposal, but they could only accomplish limited aims.

  When Ajit and I had finished putting together as much of Kane, or a pseudo-Kane, as we could, he walked into the wardroom and sat down. He looked, moved, smiled the same. That part is easy to repair, as easy as had been replacing Ajit’s head or the exotics on the observation deck. But the man staring blankly at the terminal was not really Kane.

  “What was I working on?” he said.

  I got out, “Shadow matter.”

  “Shadow matter? What’s that?”

  Ajit said softly, “I have all your work, Kane. Our work. I think I can finish it, now that you’ve started us in the right direction.”

  He nodded, looking confused. “Thank you, Ajit.” Then, with a flash of his old magnificent combativeness, “But you better get it right!”

  “With your help,” Ajit said gaily, and in that moment I came close to truly loving him.

  They worked out a new division of labor. Kane was able to take the sensor readings and run them through the pre-set algorithms. Actually, Ajit probably could have trained me to do that. But Kane seemed content, frowning earnestly at his displays.

  Ajit took over the actual science. I said to him, when we had a moment alone, “Can you do it?”

  “I think so,” he said, without either anger or arrogance. “I have the foundation that Kane laid. And we worked out some of the preliminaries together.”

  “We have only one more jump left.”

  “I know, Tirzah.”

  “With the risk of radiation killing us all—”

  “Not yet. Give
me a little more time.”

  I rested a moment against his shoulder. “All right. A little more time.”

  He put his arm around me, not in passion but in comradeship. None of us, we both knew, had all that much time left.

  11. SHIP

  Kane was only temporarily defeated by the contamination of the probe data. Within half a day, he had aborted his shadow-matter theory, archived his work on it, and gone back to his original theories about the mysteriously massive young stars near the hole. He used the probe’s new data, which were all logical amplifications of the prelim readings. “I’ve got some ideas,” he told me. “We’ll see.”

  He wasn’t as cheerful as usual, let alone as manically exuberant as during the shadow-matter “discovery,” but he was working steadily. A mountain, Kane. It would take a lot to actually erode him, certainly more than a failed theory. That rocky insensitivity had its strengths.

  Ajit, on the other hand, was not really working. I couldn’t follow the displays on his terminal, but I could read the body language. He was restless, inattentive. But what worried me was something else: his attitude toward Kane.

  All Ajit’s anger was gone.

  I watched carefully, while seemingly bent over ship’s log or embroidery. Anger is the least subtle of the body’s signals. Even when a person is successfully concealing most of it, the signs are there if you know where to look: the tight neck muscles, the turned-away posture, the tinge in the voice. Ajit displayed none of this. Instead, when he faced Kane, as he did in the lunch I insisted we all eat together at the wardroom table, I saw something else. A sly superiority, a secret triumph.

  I could be wrong, I thought. I have been wrong before. By now I disliked Ajit so much that I didn’t trust my own intuitions.

  “Ajit,” I said as we finished the simple meal I’d put together, “will you please—”

  Ship’s alarms went off with a deafening clang. Breach, breach, breach.

  I whirled toward ship’s display, which automatically illuminated. The breach was in the starboard hold, and it was full penetration by a mass of about a hundred grams. Within a minute, the nanos had put on a temporary patch. The alarm stopped and the computer began hectoring me.

  “Breach sealed with temporary nano patch. Seal must be rein-forced within two hours with permanent hull patch, type 6-A. For location of breach and patch supply, consult ship’s log. If unavailability of—” I shut it off.

  “Could be worse,” Kane said.

  “Well, of course it could be worse,” I snapped, and immediately regretted it. I was not allowed to snap. That I had done so was an indication of how much the whole situation on the Kepler was affecting me. That wasn’t allowed, either; it was unprofessional.

  Kane wasn’t offended. “Could have hit the engines or the living pod instead of just a hold. Actually, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before. There’s a lot of drifting debris in this area.”

  Ajit said, “Are you going into the hold, Tirzah?”

  Of course I was going into the hold. But this time I didn’t snap; I smiled at him and said, “Yes, I’m going to suit up now.”

  “I’m coming, too,” Kane said.

  I blinked. I’d been about to ask if Ajit wanted to go with me. It would be a good way to observe him away from Kane, maybe ask some discreet questions. I said to Kane, “Don’t you have to work?”

  “The work isn’t going anywhere. And I want to retrieve the particle. It didn’t exit the ship, and at a hundred grams, there’s going to be some of it left after the breach.”

  Ajit had stiffened at being pre-empted, yet again, by Kane. Ajit would have wanted to retrieve the particle, too; there is nothing more interesting to space scientists than dead rocks. Essentially, I’d often thought, Sgr A* was no more than a very hot, very large dead rock. I knew better than to say this aloud.

  I could have ordered Ajit to accompany me, and ordered Kane to stay behind. But that, I sensed, would only make things worse. Ajit, in his present mood of deadly sensitivity, would not take well to orders from anyone, even me. I wasn’t going to give him the chance to retreat more into whatever nasty state of mind he currently inhabited.

  “Well, then, let’s go,” I said ungraciously to Kane, who only grinned at me and went to get our suits.

  The holds, three of them for redundancy safety, are full of supplies of all types. Every few days I combine a thorough ship inspection with lugging enough food forward to sustain us. We aren’t uploads; we need bodily nurturing as well as the kind I was supposed to be providing.

  All three holds can be pressurized if necessary, but usually they aren’t. Air generation and refreshment doesn’t cost much power, but it costs some. Kane and I went into the starboard hold in heated s-suits and helmets.

  “I’m going to look around,” Kane said. He’d brought a handheld, and I saw him calculating the probable trajectory of the particle from the ship’s data and the angle of the breach, as far as he could deduce it. Then he disappeared behind a pallet of crates marked soysynth.

  The breach was larger than I’d expected; that hundred-gram particle had hit at a bad angle. But the nanos had done their usual fine job, and the permanent patch went on without trouble. I began the careful inspection of the rest of the hull, using my hand-held instruments.

  Kane cursed volubly.

  “Kane? What is it?”‘

  “Nothing. Bumped into boxes.”

  “Well, don’t. The last thing I want is you messing up my hold.” For a physically fit man, Kane is clumsy in motion. I would bet my ship that he can’t dance, and bet my life that he never tries.

  “I can’t see anything. Can’t you brighten the light?”

  I did, and he bumped around some more. Whenever he brushed something, he cursed. I did an inspection even more carefully than usual, but found nothing alarming. We met each other back by the hold door.

  “It’s not here,” Kane said. “The particle. It’s not here.”

  “You mean you didn’t find it.”

  “No, I mean it’s not here. Don’t you think I could find a still-hot particle in a hold otherwise filled only with large immobile crates?”

  I keyed in the door code. “So it evaporated on impact. Ice and ions and dust.”

  “To penetrate a Schaad hull? No.” He reconsidered. “Well, maybe. What did you find?”

  “Not much. Pitting and scarring on the outside, nothing unexpected. But no structural stress to worry about.”

  “The debris here is undoubtedly orbiting the core, but we’re so far out it’s not moving all that fast. Still, we should have had some warning. But I’m more worried about the probe—when is the third mini-cap due?”

  Kane knew as well as I did when the third mini-cap was due. His asking was the first sign he was as tense as the rest of us.

  “Three more days,” I said. “Be patient.”

  “I’m not patient.”

  “As if that’s new data.”

  “I’m also afraid the probe will be hit by rapidly orbiting debris, and that will be that. Did you know that the stars close in to Sgr A* orbit at several thousand clicks per second?”

  I knew. He’d told me often enough. The probe was always a speculative proposition, and before now, Kane had been jubilant that we’d gotten any data at all from it.

  I’d never heard Kane admit to being “afraid” of anything. Even allowing for the casualness of the phrase.

  I wanted to distract him, and, if Kane was really in a resigned and reflective mood, it also seemed a good time to do my job. “Kane, about Ajit—”

  “I don’t want to talk about that sniveling slacker,” Kane said, with neither interest not rancor. “I picked badly for an assistant, that’s all.”

  It hadn’t actually been his “pick;” his input had been one of many. I didn’t say this. Kane looked around the hold one more time. “I guess you’re right. The particle sublimed. Ah, well.”

  I put the glove of my hand on the arm of his suit—not exactly
an intimate caress, but the best I could do in this circumstance. “Kane, how is the young-star mystery going?”

  “Not very well. But that’s science.” The hold door stood open and he lumbered out.

  I gave one last look around the hold before turning off the light, but there was nothing more to see.

  The mended statue of Shiva was back on the wardroom table, smack in the center, when Kane and I returned from the hold. I don’t think Kane, heading straight for his terminal, even noticed. I smiled at Ajit, although I wasn’t sure why he had brought the statue back. He’d told me he never wanted to see it again.

  “Tirzah, would you perhaps like to play go?”

  I couldn’t conceal my surprise. “Go?”

  “Yes. Will you play with me?” Accompanied by his most winning smile.

  “All right.”

  He brought out the board and, bizarrely, set it up balanced on his knees. When he saw my face, he said, “We’ll play here. I don’t want to disturb the Cosmic Dancer.”

  “All right.” I wasn’t sure what to think. I drew my chair close to his, facing him, and bent over the board.

  We both knew that Ajit was a better player than I. That’s why both of us played: he to win, me to lose. I would learn more from the losing position. Very competitive people—and I thought now that I had never known one as competitive as Ajit—relax only when not threatened.

  So I made myself non-threatening in every way I knew, and Ajit and I talked and laughed, and Kane worked doggedly on his theories that weren’t going anywhere. The statue of the dancing god leered at me from the table, and I knew with every passing moment how completely I was failing this already failing mission.

  12. PROBE

  Kane was gentler since the radiation corruption. Who can say how these things happen? Personality, too, is encoded in the human brain, whether flesh or analogue. He was still Kane, but we saw only his gentler, sweeter side. Previously that part of him had been dominated by his combative intellect, which had been a force of nature all its own, like a high wind. Now the intellect had failed, the wind calmed. The landscape beneath lay serene.