by Wil McCarthy
She kissed him back. Her hands gripped him, slid over him like warm, soft talons. She moaned quietly.
He found the place where her skirt tucked in back, and he pulled it free. The skirt began to unwrap itself from her body.
We must never underestimate the importance, Jhoe thought, with sudden and peculiar clarity, of a really close look at the native undergarments.
Then, as she bent, leaned, eased back and pulled him slowly down with her: Good heaven, I'm going to take her right here on the floor!
Though surprised, he felt no displeasure or discomfort at this, his last coherent thought for quite some time.
Chapter Twelve
Miguel(1):“Scanning object 29.”
Miguel(2):“Lock.”
Miguel(1):“Scanning object 29.”
Miguel(2):“Lock.”
Miguel(3):“Position comparator. Blink. Blink.”
Miguel(2):“Lock. Angular motion stored.”
Miguel(*):“Hoowee! Look at me go!”
His mind flew, leaped, meshed with itself like a clockwork mechanism! A practiced orchestra had replaced the banjo-plucking of everyday thought. Yes! Yes! The link had become easier and easier for him to use
Miguel(1):Standardized learning score of 0.962 likely a major factor in promotion to Chief Technical Officer. Solar Commercial has always paid attention to that kind of detail.
Miguel(3):They couldn't have anticipated the difficulty of this assignment. Peering into collapsars!
since Lahler had begun helping him. He found he could set problems for himself and then spin them off as separate subprocesses, autonomous mindlets that merged back into him after completing their work. As if he could cast away fingers and toes, then wait for them to return laden with treasure!
Miguel(*):Lahler, can anyone do this? Lordy, I feel I could move mountains!
Lahler:You have a gift for it, I think.
Miguel(*):If every human were hooked up to one of these, just think what we could do!
Lahler shuddered, and spoke with her physical mouth. “Don't say things like that, Miguel. A lot of time has passed back home. Sometimes I'm... afraid I won't recognize it when we get back.”
Won't recognize it. Hmm. A remote, black and chrome and sparkly-diamond, scuttled across the back of Miguel's hand. He flicked it away.
“A sobering thought,” he said.
“Silly, I know.”
“No,” he said, looking up at the link wires sprouting from her head. “Quite sensible. Times do change, sometimes quickly. If we want to really go home again, we'll have to put our faith in the... constancy of human nature.”
Lahler looked uncomfortable with that thought. “Don't you think human nature could change? How human are we right now?”
Miguel(1):Touche'.
“I don't know,” he admitted. “Even if you took the link away right now, forever, it's definitely made a permanent change in me. So yeah, if you define human nature that way, it changes. I wouldn't worry, though; so many hide-headed old windbags on Earth, talking about how great it was in days gone by, banging the rocks together... It would take a long time to change that.”
“Longevity works in our favor, hmm?” Lahler said, looking a little less gloomy.
“I've found that it does. But anyway, if you want even a chance”—he held up two fingers, close together as if pinching something small—“of visiting the planet, we'd better get back to work.”
“Right. The work.” She shifted back into professional posture.
The work: plotting trajectories. The ellipsoidal objects did move, if you looked at them long enough. And so, Miguel Barta and Beth Lahler looked, and recorded and analyzed what they saw. Tedious, for the most part, although some of the higher objects moved almost fast enough to measure in real time. And the games with the link equipment made it... more interesting.
Miguel sent his little servants out again. A bit more cautiously this time, though—Lahler did have a point.
Miguel(1):Scanning object 30.
Miguel(2):Lock.
Miguel(1):Scanning object 30.
Miguel(2):Lock.
Miguel(3):Position comparator. Blink. Blink.
Miguel(2):Lock. Angular motion stored.
Object 30 moved more quickly than the others he'd logged so far. Interesting. He went back to the Coordinates database
Miguel(1):Scanning object 31.
Miguel(2):Lock.
Miguel(1):Scanning object 31.
Miguel(2):Lock.
Miguel(3):Position comparator. Blink. Blink.
Miguel(2):Lock. Angular motion stored.
and examined its records on 30. Higher up than most, almost a hundred meters above the event horizon. Gravity gradient
Miguel(*):gR/R -1.04E+07 ge/m
steep at that distance, but the effects of time dilation
Miguel(*):1 = (1-(V/C)2)0.5
2 = 1-2/(RC2)
= 1 2 (1.06E+03)-1 (nondimensional)
began to taper off sharply. Only a thousand times slow, object 30, where some of its cousins ran a thousand-thousand times slower than that! A half-trapped thing, it seemed, drifting along the beaches of time, well clear of the deeps and yet not wholly ashore.
Miguel(1):Scanning object 32.
Miguel(2):Lock.
Miguel(1):Scanning object 32.
Miguel(2):Lock.
Miguel(3):Position comparator. Blink. Blink.
Miguel(2):Lock. Angular motion stored.
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Something about number 30 bothered Miguel. Something didn't seem right.
Miguel(*):Go back to number 30.
Miguel(1):Acknowledged. Scanning object 30.
Miguel(2):Acknowledged. Lock.
Miguel(1):Scanning object 30.
Miguel(2):Lock.
Miguel(3):Acknowledged. Position comparator. Blink. Blink.
Miguel(2):Lock. Angular motion stored.
Okay. Now in order to let the object move, he had to wait a few seconds. Lordy, what a long time that had become! Waiting... Waiting...
Miguel(*):Repeat.
Miguel(1):Scanning object 30.
Miguel(2):Lock.
Miguel(1):Scanning object 30.
Miguel(2):Lock.
Miguel(3):Position comparator. Blink. Blink.
Miguel(2):Lock. Angular motion stored.
Miguel(*):Feed all angular positions for object 30 back through Coordinates. Cut an ellipse through five points and compare to the sixth point. Run all possible combinations.
Miguel(1):Transforming angular coordinates. Triangulating. Performing regressions.
Miguel(2):Performing regressions.
Miguel(3):Performing regressions.
Miguel(1):Max residual 3.01E-04 meters.
Miguel(*):So large!
What did this mean? Miguel pulled his “fingers” back, pulled a bit more of his mind from the link, back down into his own squidgy gray matter. The ellipses he'd used to map object 30's trajectory did not fit the measurements with expected accuracy. Nearly a millimeter off, a huge distance considering the precision and special Malsato-tuning of his instruments.
That could only mean... That the trajectory was not an ellipse?
Miguel(*):Cut a hyperbola through five points and compare to the sixth point. Run all possible combinations.
Miguel(1):Performing regressions.
Miguel(2):Performing regressions.
Miguel(3):Performing regressions.
Miguel(1):Max residual 7.94E-08 meters.
His stomach lurched. The clarity of the link began to blur a little as, beneath the harness, his forehead went cold and sweaty.
Miguel(*):Compute V of object 30. Compute departure asymptote and integrate trajectory. At what time will the object emerge into ( < 1.2-1 (nondimensional)) spacetime?
Miguel(1):V 1.56 m/s 0.52C
Miguel(2):Integrating.
Miguel(3):T( = 0.83) TNOW + 5.78E+06s
He opened his mouth to scream at Beth Lahler. “Did you follow that? Did you follow that? Thanks to Doctor Manaka's 'time capsule' theory we assumed an approximately circular orbit, but how would it get down there? How would it get down there?”
“Chief?” Lahler sounded entirely nonplused.
He waved his hands, impatiently sketching figures in the air. “A hyperbola, that's how! Oh, just think of it: you fire an object across the edge of the collapsar. You see? You understand? Gravity deflects your straight line into a hyperbolic trajectory, but the periapsis lies just above the event horizon, eyeball deep in relativistic effects. Assuming your object has a way to survive the tidal stress, as the ellipsoids clearly have, it gets caught in the time dilation and it hangs there. For as long as you want it to! For a billion years, if you want it to!”
Lahler sat straight and motionless in her chair. “Chief Barta, you are frightening me.”
“This should frighten you! It very well should! Tech Aid, we don't know what object 30 is, or what it does, or what it's for. But in sixty-seven days, it will be clear of the hypermass and moving toward us at half the speed of light!”
Miguel(1):As will object 34.
Miguel(2):As will object 35.
Miguel(3):As will object 39.
Miguel(*):Enough. Time for this later.
He unbuckled his link harness and, gripping its medusa wires, pulled it slowly off his head. He looked at Lahler the whole while. “Do you understand what I've told you? Would you like to check the work?”
“Yes,” she said. “I would.” Her face went blank for several seconds. Then: “Checked. I agree with your assessment.”
Her face remained neutral for a moment, but then fear began to creep back into it. All at once, their cute little mystery had lost its hypotheticality. As if they had plucked up a strange flower, only to find it squirming and buzzing in their hands!
“Yes,” Miguel said to her. “Think about it. Think about it a lot.” He rose from his chair. “But call the captain right away. Before you do anything else. All right?”
“Where are you going?” she demanded, her eyes large, her mouth pursed small with anxiety.
“To the bathroom, Tech Aid. I've got an emergency of my own.”
Chapter Thirteen
Jafre Shem felt like something was gnawing at him down in his guts. A word kept flashing visually in his mind, like a restaurant sign: Emergence! Emergence! But the last letter was flickery and vague, looking sometimes less like an “e” than a “y.”
Never, in three decades of Presidency, had he faced such clear and immediate threat to public safety. Alien invasion!
Chelsea had tried to calm him, tried to tell him the objects were probably harmless, probably solid and inert. “No living creature could survive the gravitational stress,” she had said.
“You told me nothing could survive it!” he'd shouted back at her. “But something has! You can talk all you want about your time capsules and your flies in amber, but where's the motivation behind that? Mark my words, Captain, those objects are far from harmless. Far from harmless.”
He had waited long, long for her reply. And argued with it when it came! Had the woman no sense at all?
Now is the time, his little voices whispered in his head. Villain or hero, leader or fool. Some have greatness thrust upon them.
“Shut up,” he told the voices. He keyed his desk and picked up a stylus, spinning it thoughtfully in his fingers. Public address was called for here, obviously. Planetary address, systemwide address! No situation had ever needed it more.
No more shall you be painted small on this tiny canvas, the voices tried.
“Shut up!” He repeated. Personal considerations be damned, this was truly something larger than Jafre's ego. For the first time he could recall, his primary concern really was the safety of the Unuan public.
What should he do? What could he do?
Order the Fleets of Malhela to alert status. Well, have Asia do it, of course. But yes, that was good for starts.
Build shelters in the cities? Shockproof, fireproof, radiation-proof? Yes, absolutely! As many as they could cast before the emergence! Sensible precaution was something nobody could argue with, in the face of such uncertainty.
He should find jobs for the Youth Coalition, as well. This was exactly the sort of time they'd been waiting for, the chance to make mischief while their elders were distracted. Making him look bad, undermining the public confidence... Damn them, he shouldn't even have to think about such trivia right now. But by striking pre-emptively, with appeals to their vanity and demands on their time, he could neutralize them as source of dissent. Quakes, they'd be eating out of his hand.
What else was he forgetting?
Of course: water. He would have to increase H2O mining activities at the poles, open up the ocean pipeline. Damn, would that still work after so long? Anyway, fill the city tanks up and build new tanks if there was time. And cut domestic water rations, and increase the penalties for speculation and profiteering. Ruinous penalties—let nobody dare even to try it.
And fire up the old antennae, contact the Earth again: Send help! Alien invasion! Never mind the 37.6 standard years it would take the message to arrive, the fifty or more it would take to ship the cavalry back here. If something really terrible really did happen, if alien monsters swept down to smash the cities of Unua... Better the scream of futility than no scream at all.
Damn Lin Chelsea and her smug Solar Commercial attitude! Introspectia should be his greatest asset right now, his source of advanced technologies, of devastating energies and micron-precise instrument readings. But Chelsea had, she said, reference handbooks to be used in case of alien contact, and she would be doing what they told her to. Handbooks! Some weasel-faced office bureaucrats somewhere, cooking up hypothetical protocol for the event they never dreamed would really happen... And Jafre Shem, here in the thick of it and charged with the safety of an entire planet, was expected to stand impotently aside!
He would find some way to make her listen. Failing that, he would doodle-run right past her like a kicker after the ball, dodging the other players and aiming to score.
Even if she jumped correctly, then, he would never, never let her share the point.
~~~
Uriel Zeng burst into the office, her face ashen. “I've just heard the most terrible rumor!”
Luna cupped her hand over the telkom receiver. “Uriel, I'm on the telkom here.”
“The egg thingies are emerging from Malsato!” Uriel said, breathlessly, ignoring Luna's words. “They're hostile alien spaceships, made of centrokrist and armed, and they're coming out!”
Inwardly, Luna sighed. Uriel was young, and never had learned much in the way of politeness. And she hadn't learned the ways of rumor.
“I've just heard that same one,” she said, trying to project a sense of calm onto her young protege'. “I've also heard that the aliens are the egg thingies. And that they eat babies, or they eat black hole matter, or they don't eat anything at all because they're creatures of pure and radiant light, or that they're planning to kick us out of this star system because they were here first... Where have you been all morning?”
“Out on the Zulamie cables.”
“Well, walk around for a few minutes and you'll get caught up on the rumors. Right now I'm talking to Jhoe, who's a little closer to the source than the rest of us.” She took her thumb off the microphone. “Jhoe, Uriel just came in. She seems to be panic-stricken.”
“Hi, Uriel,” said Jhoe's little face on the telkom.
Uriel, who could see only the telkom's plastic back, paused for a moment to flash a look of displeasure. “Salutes, Doctor,” she said coolly. “What can you tell us?”
Luna slapped the top of her desk. “Uriel! I'm talking to the man, here. Do you mind?”
Uriel snorted angrily, then turned to leave. She slammed the door heavily behind her.
“Has somet
hing happened?” Jhoe's image asked.
“Oh, Uriel is just being her usual charming self. Anyway, you were saying?”
“Uh, yes. I'd been wondering how the objects could get out of the black hole once they'd fallen into it, but when I asked Tomus he said they were never really in it at all. Just grazing past it or something, somehow taking advantage of the time dilation.”
“Right,” Luna said, “I got that part.”
Jhoe's image nodded. “Okay. He said Introspectia had observed two separate groups of objects, emerging on slightly different paths. Fourteen large objects, I think, followed by eight smaller ones. Or something like that—anyway, I know we're not looking at a large fraction of the total population. Three hundred of them? Something close to that. He said all the objects will come out eventually, but the times range from centuries to, well, to millions of years.”
“Huh,” Luna said. “Not much of invasion.”
“Enough of one for my taste,” Jhoe admitted, looking uncomfortable. “Doesn't this... worry you?”
“Of course it worries me. But I can't really fall apart over it, right? Whatever ends up happening, it will eat up lots of electricity. Crises always do.”
“Well then, I suppose you're lucky to have the job you do.” Jhoe ran a hand through his hair. Long strands in disarray, it looked like it hadn't been combed since he'd slept on it last. “I... don't feel so good about this. People keep looking to me as the Earthman, the Star Traveler, the Social Scientist, as if that somehow means I know what to do. But I don't. I wish they'd stop asking.”