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Authors: Nancy Kress

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The Best of Nancy Kress (49 page)

BOOK: The Best of Nancy Kress
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“Then we’ll get more data in a few days,” Ajit said. “But the radiation on the other side of Sgr A West is still intense. We must hope nothing gets damaged in the probe programs, or in the uploads themselves, before we get the new data.”

“We better hope nothing gets damaged long before that in my upload,” Kane said, “or they won’t even know what data to collect.” He turned back to his screen.

The brutal words hung in the air.

I saw Ajit turn his face away from me. Then he rose and walked into the galley.

If I followed him too soon, he would see it as pity. His shame would mount even more.

“Kane,” I said in a low, furious voice, “you are despicable.”

He turned to me in genuine surprise. “What?”

“You know what.” But he didn’t. Kane wasn’t even conscious of what he’d said. To him, it was a simple, evident truth. Without the Kane upload, no one on the probe would know how to do first-class science.

“I want to see you upstairs on the observation deck,” I said to him. “Not now, but in ten minutes. And you announce that you want me to see something up there.” The time lag, plus Kane’s suggesting the trip, would keep Ajit from knowing I was protecting him.

But now I had put up Kane’s back. He was tired, he was stressed, he was inevitably coming down from the unsustainable high of his discovery. Neither body nor mind can keep at that near-hysterical pitch for too long. I had misjudged, out of my own anger at him.

He snapped, “I’ll see you on the observation deck when I want to see you there, and not otherwise. Don’t push me around, Tirzah. Not even as captain.” He turned back to his display.

Ajit emerged from the galley with three glasses on a tray. “A celebratory drink. A major discovery deserves that. At a minimum.”

Relief was so intense I nearly showed it on my face. It was all right. I had misread Ajit, underestimated him. He ranked the magnitude of Kane’s discovery higher than his own lack of participation in it, after all. Ajit was, first, a scientist.

He handed a glass to me, one to Kane, one for himself. Kane took a hasty, perfunctory gulp and returned to his display. But I cradled mine, smiling at Ajit, trying with warmth to convey the admiration I felt for his rising above the personal.

“Where did you get the wine? It wasn’t on the ship manifest!”

“It was in my personal allotment,” Ajit said, smiling.

Personal allotments are not listed nor examined. A bottle of wine, the statue of Shiva…Ajit had brought some interesting choices for a galactic core. I sipped the red liquid. It tasted different from the Terran or Martian wines I had grown up with: rougher, more full-bodied, not as sweet.

“Wonderful, Ajit.”

“I thought you would like it. It is made in my native New Bombay, from genemod grapes brought from Terra.”

He didn’t go back to his terminal. For the next half-hour, he entertained me with stories of New Bombay. He was a good story-teller, sharp and funny. Kane worked steadily, ignoring us. The ten-minute deadline I had set for him to call me up to the observation deck came and went.

After half an hour, Kane stood and staggered. Once before, when he’d broken Ajit’s statue, stiffness after long sitting had made Kane unsteady. That time he’d caught himself after simply bumping the wardroom table. This time he crashed heavily to the floor.

“Kane!”

“Nothing, nothing…don’t make a fuss, Tirzah! You just won’t leave me alone!”

This was so unfair that I wanted to slap him. I didn’t. Kane rose by himself, shook his head like some great beast, and said, “I’m just exhausted. I’m going to bed.”

I didn’t try to stop him from going to his bunk. I had planned on sleeping with Ajit, anyway. It seemed that some slight false note had crept into his storytelling in the last five minutes, some forced exaggeration.

But he smiled at me, and I decided I’d been wrong. I was very tired, too. All at once I wished I could sleep alone this night.

But I couldn’t. Ajit, no matter how well he’d recovered from Kane’s unconscious brutality, nonetheless had to feel bruised at some level. It was my job to find out where, and how much, and to set it to rights. It was my job to keep the expedition as productive as possible, to counteract Kane’s dismissing and belittling behavior toward Ajit. It was my job.

I smiled back at him.

 

8. PROBE

 

When Ajit’s head disappeared, no one panicked. We’d expected this, of course; in fact, we’d expected it sooner. The probe drifted in a sea of the most intense radiation in the galaxy, much of it at lethal wavelengths: gamma rays from Sagittarius East, X-rays, powerful winds of ionized particles, things I couldn’t name. That the probe’s shielding had held this long was a minor miracle. It couldn’t hold forever. Some particle or particles had penetrated all the shielding and reached the computer, contaminating a piece of the upload-maintenance program.

It was a minor glitch. The back-up kicked in a moment later and Ajit’s head reappeared. But we all knew this was only the beginning. It would happen again, and again, and eventually programming would be hit that couldn’t be restored by automatic back-up, because the back-up would go, too, in a large enough hit—or because uploads are not like other computer programs. We are more than that, and less. An upload has back-ups to maintain the shadows we see of each other and the ship, the shadows that keep our captured minds sane. But an upload cannot house back-ups of itself. Even one copy smudges too much, and the copy contaminates the original. It has been tried, with painful results.

Moreover, we uploads run only partly on the main computer. An upload is neither a biological entity nor a long stream of code, but something more than both. Some of the substratum, the hard-ware, is wired like actual neurons, although constructed of sturdier stuff: thousands of miles of nano-constructed organic polymers. This is why analogues think at the rate of the human brain, not the much faster rate of computers. It’s also why we feel as our originals do.

After Ajit’s maintenance glitch our mood, which had been exuberant, sobered. But it didn’t sour. We worked steadily, with focus and hope, deciding where exactly to position the probe and then entering the coordinates for the jump.

“See you soon,” we said to each other. I kissed both Kane and Ajit lightly on the lips. Then we all shut down and the probe jumped.

Days later, we emerged on the other side of Sgr A West, all three of us still intact. If it were in my nature, I would have said a prayer of thanksgiving. Instead I said to Ajit, “Still have a head, I see.”

“And a good thing he does,” Kane said absently, already plunging for the chair in front of his terminal. “We’ll need it. And—Ajit, the mass detectors…great shitting gods!”

It seems we were to have thanksgiving after all, if only perversely. I said, “What is it? What’s there?” The displays showed nothing at all.

“Nothing at all,” Ajit said. “And everything.”

“Speak English!”

Ajit—I doubt Kane had even heard me, in his absorption—said, “The mass detectors are showing a huge mass less than a quarter light year away. The radiation detectors—all of them—are showing nothing at all. We’re—”

“We’re accelerating fast.” I studied ship’s data; the rate of acceleration made me blink. “We’re going to hit whatever it is. Not soon, but the tidal forces—”

The probe was small, but the tidal forces of something this big would still rip it apart when it got close enough.

Something this big. But there was, to all other sensors, nothing there.

Nothing but shadows.

A strange sensation ran over me. Not fear, but something more complicated, much more eerie.

My voice sounded strange in my ears. “What if we hit it? I know you said radiation of all types will go right through shadow matter just as if it isn’t there—” because it isn’t, not in our universe “—but what about the probe? What if we hit it before we take the final event-horizon measurements on Sgr A*?”

“We won’t hit it,” Ajit said. “We’ll move before then, Tirzah, back to the hole. Kane—”

They forget me again. I went up to the observation deck. Look-ing out through the clear hull, I stared at the myriad of stars on the side of the night sky away from Sgr A West. Then I turned to look toward that vast three-armed cloud of turning plasma, radiating as it cools. Nothing blocked my view of Sgr A West. Yet between us lay a huge, massive body of shadow matter, unseen, pulling on every-thing else my dazed senses could actually see.

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 100,000 years. Most of Sgr 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 mini-cap!”

“We’re going to send off the second mini-cap 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 mini-cap 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 quick-silver 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 mini-cap 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 mini-cap into the system. It’s all corrections to the last mini-cap’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 mini-cap 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.

BOOK: The Best of Nancy Kress
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