Asimov's SF, January 2012 (12 page)

"Wait,” I call. “Dad. Wait."

He turns back.

"Do you even understand what we've lost?” I ask.

"Yes,” he says. “Do you?"

This is a thing I have to consider. My wife. I lost my wife. My son. I lost my son. I moved away from family and friends. I work in a building dedicated to loss. Who knows more about it than me? I breathe in and out, and the flutter inside me increases. It becomes painful, and I realize something needs to be fixed between Dad and me. If whatever it is that's broken isn't mended, we'll never work right again.

Do I understand what I've lost?

I almost say no. I almost do the right thing and tell him the truth.

Instead, I say yes.

Copyright © 2011 Zachary Jernigan

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C.W. Johnson's fiction has appeared in
Realms of Fantasy, Analog,
and other venues. He is a professor of physics at a large university in California. The author teaches quantum mechanics and uses it in his research into nuclear physics and nuclear astrophysics, as well as in the writing of poignant science fiction stories like . . .

Later, Cayla would think of it as The Lump, but that discovery still awaited her. Coming home, her brain was humming with thoughts of her data, her other discovery.

It was two in the morning. Cayla undressed quietly in the dark, then sat down on the bed and stroked the shadowed mound of bedclothes. After a while Rish stirred. “Everything okay?” he murmured.

"Yes,” Cayla said. “Wonderful."

Into his pillow Rish said, “And. . . ?"

"I found another event, another burst. From 2017."

"Mmm. This the stuff you haven't shown to him?"

"I don't know if—” she hesitated. “I have data in several bands, but soft x-rays are missing.” She slid into bed. “But this one, this one was
definitely
within our galaxy, smack in front of a dust lane so I could nail down the luminosity. Though I should see what Maune thinks first,” she added, talking more to herself than to Rish. She sighed. “And
of course
he'll find a stupid flaw in my analysis. . . .” She frowned.

"You sound excited,” said Rish, his voice now fully awake.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I woke you up,” said Cayla, although she was and was not.

"'S okay. So these . . . bursts are still a mystery?"

"I think, or I hope,” she whispered, snuggling closer, “it could be something totally, completely new.” If only she knew what it was.

Rish yawned. “Of course Maune will ride off with the credit and the Nobel Prize. Like that student who discovered neutron stars."

"Maune's not like that. He's tough, but fair."

"Frankly, the way you describe Maune, he sounds like a cold fish."

It was as if Rish touched a wire to her fear. She pushed away the darkness clenching her stomach, ran her hands over Rish's smooth, lean body, pressed her breasts against him.

"Frisky tonight?” said Rish softly.

"I'm wide awake,” Cayla whispered in his ear. “I don't think I could sleep right now. Not without something to relax me."

Rish turned on his side and kissed her. Their hands wandered down dark lanes and over each other's body, twisting under the sheets, pressing closer.

And that was when Cayla discovered The Lump.

"Uh, there's something—"

"What?” asked Rish, distracted.

"There's a bump or a lump on . . .” She paused. They had been sexually intimate for eight months now, but still the words stuck in her mouth. She opted for the clinical. “On your testicles. On the right testicle."

"Huh? There's nothing, I'm sure, let me, look, uh, feel . . ."

"I mean, maybe it's supposed to be like that or something, but I've felt, well, I've felt your—"

"That's new, I think,” Rish said in a hollow voice. “Oh God. I don't think that's right.” And he reached over Cayla to turn on the light.

Cayla Kalinauskas had grown up under thick Louisiana skies. One June midnight her stepfather herded the family into the car and headed down a country road. When they coasted to a stop, the cicadas were sawing noisy songs. Up among a watery swarm of stars they saw the comet, a pale thumbprint smudged across the night sky. Cayla felt a pinch to her heart, as if a fishhook had lodged there, and ever after the cosmos tugged her upward.

After making top of her class at LSU, she headed west to UC San Diego for graduate school. She had been warned of the fierce competition in Ph.D programs, and so was surprised when, after her second quarter, she was invited to join Olivia Huerta's astrophysics theory seminar.

"
Beginning
theory,” Huerta emphasized the first day. She was short and squat, with thick black glasses that looked as if they had been drawn on in crayon. “And, for most of you,
ending
theory as well. It's unlikely any of you will be the next Hubble, Zwicky, or Hoyle. Many years have taught me this."

Students were assigned papers to explicate. Huerta coiled in silence, tilted her head like an owl watching a mouse, then pounced on mistakes. After a week the first student dropped out, crying. Others followed.

At the end of the quarter the five stubborn enough to remain were allowed to choose a final paper.

Cayla was up late working on her presentation when her phone chirped in her purse. Her maternal grandmother had passed away. Cayla sent a hurried v-mail to her professors and rushed back to Louisiana. The fierce June heat wrapped its sweaty arms around her, making her both homesick and longing to return to California.

A week later she was knocking on Huerta's office door.

"Amazing how grandmothers die when a project is due,” Huerta said from behind teetering stacks of papers.

Cayla reddened. “I'm sorry,” she said, unsure why she should be. “I had to go."

Huerta took off her thick glasses and rubbed at her eyes. “No. You had a choice.” She put her glasses back on; her eyes, hugely magnified, blinked at Cayla. “Listen carefully. It's not your grandmother. If you want a nine-to-six job, weekends off, you can succeed as a teacher or an engineer. Not science. Jobs are too scarce, competition too cutthroat. Science doesn't care about grandmothers.” When Cayla started to protest Huerta cut her off. “I have two days before I turn in grades. Give me your presentation."

"Now?"

Huerta nodded.

Cayla slowly walked to the e-board and picked up a stylus. She had chosen a paper on the appeal of its boldness. For a hundred years physicists had argued over how to interpret the mathematics of quantum mechanics: the magical collapse of wavefunctions in the Copenhagen interpretation, the jittery smearing of phases in decoherence, the handshake in the transactional interpretation, and so on.
This
paper suggested killing two persistent problems with one theoretical stone. It championed Everett and Wheeler's many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics as real, and suggested that cosmological dark energy, the mysterious pressure that accelerates the flight of distant galaxies, is caused by the crowding of new universes as they split off into alternate realities.

She had hardly gotten off two sentences when Huerta interrupted. “This isn't science,” she said. “It's philosophy. The observer doesn't cause the wavefunction to change—"

"I know,” Cayla interrupted. “But the numbers, the rate of random quantum events matches the rate of creating new universes, which matches the pressure from dark energy."

"The
evidence
is nil."

"All you need is a slight nonlinearity in the Schrodinger equation. . . ."

Huerta sighed, threw her glasses on the desk, and buried her head in her hands. When she emerged at last she said slowly, “Cayla, you are not dumb. You are quick and you pay careful attention to details. Excellent qualities. But that alone is not enough. . . .” She sighed. “I looked up your asteroid papers, from your undergraduate days. If you enjoy that kind of science, are willing to work hard, and don't dawdle, you could make a competent observer."

She drummed her fingers on the desk. “And as it turns out, Howel Maune mentioned the other day he's looking for a student. He hasn't had one for a few years, but he's willing to try you out."

Cayla's guts suddenly found themselves on a rollercoaster of emotions. J. Howel Maune had mapped out the extreme low-mass end of the initial mass function, observed double-star formation, and proved the existence of strange quark stars. Cayla remembered now Maune was at UCSD, but hadn't seen him listed for courses or at colloquia. To her, he had remained just a famous name in her textbooks. To work with Maune . . .

Huerta scribbled on a piece of paper. “Here's his e-address. He's old-fashioned, doesn't do v-mail. Only comes in Wednesday mornings. Mostly he works at home.” She paused before handing the scrap to Cayla. “Try to not make me regret this."

Cayla and Rish spent the stretched hours of the early morning scanning the v-net for information on lumps, although beyond vague descriptions and bland admonitions to
Check with a physician if you have a concern
they found little help. The earliest appointment Rish could make online was two weeks in the future. At five in the morning they found a phone number, but: “Hours are eight a.m. to four p.m."

They lay on the bed in the dark, Cayla watching the digits on the alarm clock slowly shuffle through the hours.

Finally, a few minutes before eight, Rish got on the phone. Cayla made tea, and brought it in as Rish was dialing. He listened, then slammed down the phone. “Busy."

Finally he got through, although it took some cajoling to get an appointment. “I know it doesn't sound like an emergency to you,” Rish said. “But I'm feeling a bit anxious about this, don't you see?” He listened, then shouted, “No, I do
not
think I am a danger to myself! Can you
please
make me an appointment before I die of old age?"

When Rish hung up he said, with rain in his voice, “The best they could do was next Monday."

Neither ate breakfast. Rish made chai and said casually, “You're usually off by now, saving the universe one star at a time."

Cayla shook her head, but she was thinking,
Wednesday, nine-thirty, Maune will be in by now
. “I'll just check my v-mail or something."

Rish shrugged. “It's not like we can do anything until next Monday. But if you don't think you can focus—I know I can't stand to think about the Tang dynasty right now—surely Maune will understand."

Cayla stared down into her chai. If science didn't care about grandmothers, what was its opinion on boyfriends? When once, in an unguarded moment, she had commented she could never be smart enough to catch up, Maune had airily replied, “It isn't about being brilliant, Miss Kalinauskas. It's just hard work.” The only thing he took time off for was to walk his dog twice a day.

"I don't know,” she murmured, an unseen hand clutching her stomach. “I don't know what he would understand."

When Cayla first met Maune, she thought he was ill. Later she learned he often worked all night, analyzing data, writing review papers, churning out pages of calculations. But when she first saw him ghosting down the hall, he looked like a driftwood branch carried downstream.

"Right,” he said as they seated themselves in his office. “Miss Kalinauskas, Professor Huerta speaks highly of you,” a statement that startled Cayla so much she missed the rest of his words. She suddenly felt stiff and awkward in Maune's office, which smelled of old paper and coffee.

He told her, “I have a large backlog of data on the Large Magellenic Cloud,” which she explained to Rish, much later, is one of a pair of dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. “Since I've already looked for the things we
know
to look for,” Maune continued, in a voice so quiet that Cayla had to resist the urge to reach over and turn up the volume knob, “we have to be imaginative and look for things we
don't
know to look for. We can guess. Or we can look for something everyone expects, something so boring no one has bothered to do it yet. I find the latter good for students. And on occasion,” and here he bobbed his head, “something doesn't add up and we find something new."

So he wanted her to look at shock fronts in star forming regions. The space between the stars is not a pure vacuum, and supernova explosions drive hot gas into cold dense molecular clouds, triggering star formation and subsequent starbursts. The Large Magellenic Cloud offered a clear view. “Of course, we don't understand this nearly as well as we think we ought to. It's turbulence, and even now we still struggle with nonlinear problems."

Maune gave Cayla access privileges to his archived data and told her, “Come back round in a week."

And off she went, clutching her notes to her chest, excitement and trepidation lapping at the top of her skull.

Saturday morning Cayla was making sandwiches for a hike and picnic in Torrey Pines, to cheer them both up, when her phone jangled. She stared at it for a moment. It
couldn't
carry bad news, not yet. Not about Rish. And not on her phone. Unless it was some other bad news. She slid open her phone carefully, as if it were hot.

"Miss Kalinauskas?” Maune's voice carried a touch of hesitation. “I don't wish to be intrusive, but are you all right?"

"What? Oh, yeah, I'm fine."

"When I didn't see you on Wednesday and you didn't respond to v-mail. . . ."

"Oh, well, my connection at home is down and I've been waiting for a repairman,” she lied smoothly.

"Ah. Right. One gets used to certain patterns. . . ."

After Maune rang off, Cayla relayed the conversation to Rish. “Maybe he was really worried about you. Maybe he has a crush on you,” Rish teased. Cayla blushed. Rish went on: “It wouldn't be the first time."

"He knows I have a boyfriend. I'm sure I've mentioned you or something.” Although, as she searched her memory, Cayla could not recall when she had done so.

"So he's the perfect Brit and keeps his feeling to himself. Even an old crust like him must love something besides his telescope."