The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  To my left, all the exotic plants in the observatory disappeared.

  Ajit and Kane worked feverishly, until once more I made them shut down for “sleep.” The radiation here was nearly as great as it had been in our first location. We were right inside Sagittarius A East, the huge expanding shell of an unimaginable explosion sometime during the last hundred thousand years. Most of Sag A East wasn’t visible at the wavelengths I could see, but the gamma-ray detectors were going crazy.

  “We can’t stop for five hours!” Kane cried. “Don’t you realize how much damage the radiation could do in that time? We need to get all the data we can, work on it, and send off the second minicap!”

  “We’re going to send off the second minicap right now,” I said. “And we’ll only shut down for three hours. But, Kane, we are going to do that. I mean it. Uploads run even more damage from not running maintenance than we do from external radiation. You know that.”

  He did. He scowled at me, and cursed, and fussed with the mini-cap, but then he fired the minicap off and shut down.

  Ajit said, “Just one more minute, Tirzah. I want to show you something.”

  “Ajit – ”

  “No, it’s not mathematical. I promise. It’s something I brought onto the Kepler. The object was not included in the probe program, but I can show you a holo.”

  Somewhere in the recesses of the computer, Ajit’s upload created a program and a two-dimensional holo appeared on an empty display screen. I blinked at it, surprised.

  It was a statue of some sort of god with four arms, enclosed in a circle of flames, made of what looked like very old bronze.

  “This is Nataraja,” Ajit said. “Shiva dancing.”

  “Ajit – ”

  “No, I am not a god worshipper,” he smiled. “You know me better than that, Tirzah. Hinduism has many gods – thousands – but they are, except to the ignorant, no more than embodiments of different aspects of reality. Shiva is the dance of creation and destruction, the constant flow of energy in the cosmos. Birth and death and rebirth. It seemed fitting to bring him to the galactic core, where so much goes on of all three. This statue has been in my family for four hundred years. I must bring it home, along with the answers to our experiments.”

  “You will bring Shiva back to New Bombay,” I said softly, “and your answers, too.”

  “Yes, I have begun to think so.” He smiled at me, a smile with all the need of his quicksilver personality in it, but also all the courtesy and hope. “Now I will sleep.”

  9. SHIP

  The next morning, after a deep sleep one part sheer exhaustion and one part sex, I woke to find Ajit already out of bed and seated in front of his terminal. He rose the moment I entered the wardroom and turned to me with a grave face. “Tirzah. The minicap arrived. I already put the data into the system.”

  “What’s wrong? Where’s Kane?”

  “Still asleep, I imagine.”

  I went to Kane’s bunk. He lay on his back, still in the clothes he’d worn for three days, smelling sour and snoring softly. I thought of waking him, then decided to wait a bit. Kane could certainly use the sleep, and I could use the time with Ajit. I went back to the wardroom, tightening the belt on my robe.

  “What’s wrong?” I repeated.

  “I put the data from the minicap into the system. It’s all corrections to the last minicap’s data. Kane says the first set was wrong.”

  “Kane?” I said stupidly.

  “The Kane-analogue,” Ajit explained patiently. “He says radiation hit the probe’s sensors for the first batch, before any of them realized it. They fired off the preliminary data right after the jump, you know, because they had no idea how long the probe could last. Now they’ve had time to discover where the radiation hit, to restore the sensor programs, and to retake the measurements. The Kane analogue says these new ones are accurate, the others weren’t.”

  I tried to take it all in. “So Kane’s shadow-matter theory – none of that is true?”

  “I don’t know,” Ajit said. “How can anybody know until we see if the data supports it? The minicap only just arrived.”

  “Then I might not have moved the probe,” I said, meaning “the other I.” My analogue. I didn’t know what I was saying. The shock was too great. All that theorizing, all Kane’s sharp triumph, all that tension . . .

  I looked more closely at Ajit. He looked very pale, and as fatigued as a genemod man of his youth can look. I said, “You didn’t sleep much.”

  “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 minicap 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 minicap 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 straightforwardness 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 Sag A* are a much knottier problem. We’ve got to modify the whole theory of star formation to account for the curvatures of spacetime 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 Sag 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 million suns.”

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

  “I have a question.
Does it have an event horizon? Is it swallowing 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 shutdown. Ajit must have been brought back online 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 simply be replaced by a backup 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 during 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 reinforced 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 preempted, 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, Sag 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 handheld 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.