Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

The supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, the lethal heart of the galaxy, shone gauzily with the heated gases it was sucking downward into oblivion. Around Sag A* circled Sagittarius West, a three-armed spiral of hot plasma ten light-years across, radiating furiously as it cooled. Around that , Sagittarius East, a huge shell left over from some catastrophic explosion within the last hundred thousand years, expanded outward. I saw thousands of stars, including the blazing blue-hot stars of IRS 16, hovering dangerously close to the hole, and giving off a stellar wind fierce enough to blow a long fiery tail off the nearby red giant star. Everything was racing, radiating, colliding, ripping apart, screaming across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. All set against the sweet, light scent of my brief-lived flowers.

Nothing going on . But Kane had never been interested in spectacle.

Ajit said in his musical accent, “No, not much to see. But much to pray for. There go we.”

Kane snapped, “I don’t pray.”

“I did not mean ‘pray’ in the religious sense,” Ajit said calmly. He is always calm. “I mean hope. It is a miraculous thing, yes? There go we.”

He was right, of course. The probe contained the Ajit-analogue, the Kane-analogue, the Tirzah-analogue, all uploaded into a crystal computer no bigger than a comoralia bloom. “We” would go into that stellar violence at the core, where our fragile human bodies could not go. “We” would observe, and measure, and try to find answers to scientific questions in that roiling heart of galactic spacetime. Ninety percent of the probe’s mass was shielding for the computer. Ninety percent of the rest was shielding for the three minicapsules that the probe would fire back to us with recorded and analyzed data. There was no way besides the minicaps to get information out of that bath of frenzied radiation.

Just as there was no way to know exactly what questions Ajit and Kane would need to ask until they were close to Sag A*. The analogues would know. They knew everything Ajit and Kane and I knew, right up until the moment we were uploaded.

“Shiva, dancing,” Ajit said.

“What?” Kane said.

“Nothing. You would not appreciate the reference. Come with me, Tirzah. I want to show you something.”

I stopped straining to see the probe, unzoomed my eyes, and smiled at Ajit. “Of course.”

This is why I am here.

Ajit’s skin is softer than Kane’s, less muscled. Kane works out every day in ship’s gym, scowling like a demon. Ajit rolled off me and laid his hand on my glowing, satisfied crotch.

“You are so beautiful, Tirzah.”

I laughed. “We are all beautiful. Why would anyone effect a genetic alteration that wasn’t?”

“People will do strange things sometimes.”

“So I just noticed,” I teased him.

“Sometimes I think so much of what Kane and I do is strange to you. I see you sitting at the table, listening to us, and I know you cannot follow our physics. It makes me sad for you.”

I laid my hand on top of his, pushing down my irritation with the skill of long practice. It does irritate me, this calm sensitivity of Ajit’s. It’s lovely in bed—he is gentler and more considerate, always, than Kane—but then there comes the other side, this faint condescension. “I feel sad for you.” Sad for me! Because I’m not also a scientist! I am the captain of this expedition, with master status in ship control and a first-class license as a Nurturer. On the Kepler , my word is law, with virtually no limits. I have over fifty standard-years’ experience, specializing in the nurture of scientists. I have never lost an expedition, and I need no one’s pity.

Naturally, I showed none of this to Ajit. I massaged his hand with mine, which meant that his hand massaged my crotch, and purred softly. “I’m glad you decided to show me this.”

“Actually, that is not what I wanted to show you.”

“No?”

“No. Wait here, Tirzah.”

He got up and padded, naked, to his personal locker. Beautiful, beautiful body, brown and smooth, like a slim polished tree. I could see him clearly; Ajit always makes love with the bunk lights on full, as if in sunlight. We lay in his bunk, not mine. I never take either him or Kane to my bunk. My bunk contained various concealed items that they don’t, and won’t, know about, from duplicate surveillance equipment to rarely used subdermal trackers. Precautions, only. I am a captain.

From his small storage locker, Ajit pulled a statue and turned shyly, even proudly, to show it to me. I sat up, surprised.

The statue was big, big enough so that it must have taken up practically his entire allotment of personal space. Heavy, too, from the way Ajit balanced it before his naked body. It was 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 explanation sounded weak to me—a holo of Shiva would have accomplished the same thing, without using up nearly all of Ajit’s weight allotment. Before I could say this, Ajit said, “This statue has been in my family for four hundred years. I must bring it home, along with the answers to my scientific questions.”

I don’t understand Ajit’s scientific concerns very well—or Kane’s—but I know down to my bones how much they matter to him. It is my job to know. Ajit carries within his beautiful body a terrible coursing ambition, a river fed by the longings of a poor family who have sacrificed what little they had gained on New Bombay for this favored son. Ajit is the receptacle into which they have poured so much hope, so much sacrifice, so much selfishness. The strain on that vessel is what makes Ajit’s lovemaking so gentle. He cannot afford to crack.

“You’ll bring the Shiva statue back to New Bombay,” I said softly, “and your answers, too.”

In his hands, with the bright lighting, the bronze statue cast a dancing shadow on his naked body.

I found Kane at his terminal, so deep in thought that he didn’t know I was there until I squeezed his shoulder. Then he jumped, cursed, and dragged his eyes from his displays.

“How does it progress, Kane?”

“It doesn’t. How could it? I need more data!”

“It will come. Be patient,” I said.

He rubbed his left ear, a constant habit when he’s irritated, which is much of the time. When he’s happily excited, Kane runs his left hand through his coarse red hair until it stands up like flames. Now he smiled ruefully. “I’m not much known for patience.”

“No, you’re not.”

“But you’re right, Tirzah. The data will come. It’s just hard waiting for the first minicap. I wish to hell we could have more than three. Goddamn cheap bureaucrats! At an acceleration of—”

“Don’t give me the figures again,” I said. I wound my fingers in his hair and pulled playfully. “Kane, I came to ask you a favor.”

“All right,” he said instantly. Kane never counts costs ahead of time. Ajit would have turned gently cautious. “What is it?”

“I want you to learn to play go with Ajit.”

He scowled. “Why?”

With Kane, you must have your logic ready. He would do any favor I asked, but unless he can see why, compliance would be grudging at best. “First, because go will help you pass the time until the first minicap arrives, in doing something other than chewing the same data over and over again until you’ve masticated it into tastlessness. Second, because the game is complex enough that I think you’ll enjoy it. Third, because I’m not too bad at it myself but Ajit is better, and I think you will be, too, so I can learn from both of you.”