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

“Tirzah, not sleep now!” Kane snapped.

“Now.”

He looked up at me like a sulky child. But Kane is not a child; I don’t make that mistake. He knows an upload has to shut down for the cleansing program to run, a necessity to catch operating errors before they grow large enough to impair function. With all the radiation bathing the probe, the program is more necessary than ever. It takes a few hours to run through. I control the run cues.

Ajit looked at me expectantly. It was his night. This, too, was part of habit, as well as being an actual aid to their work. More than one scientist in my care has had that critical flash of intuition on some scientific problem while in my arms. Upload sex, like its fleshy analogue, both stimulates and relaxes.

“All right, all right,” Kane muttered. “Good night.”

I shut him down and turned to Ajit.

We went to his bunk. Ajit was tense, stretched taut with data and with sixteen hours with Kane. But I was pleased to see how completely he responded to me. Afterward, I asked him to explain the prelim data to me.

“And keep it simple, please. Remember who you’re talking to!”

“To an intelligent and sweet lady,” he said, and I gave him the obligatory smile. But he saw that I really did want to know about the data.

“The massive young stars are there when they should not be… Kane has explained all this to you, I know.”

I nodded.

“They are indeed young, not mashed-together old stars. We have verified that. We are trying now to gather and run data to examine the other two best theories: a fluctuating ring of matter spawning stars, or other black holes.”

“How are you examining the theories?”

He hesitated, and I knew he was trying to find explanations I could understand. “We are running various programs, equations, and sims. We are also trying to determine where to jump the probe next—you know about that.”

Of course I did. No one moves this ship without my consent. It has two more jumps left in its power pack, and I must approve them both.

“We need to choose a spot from which we can fire beams of various radiation to assess the results. The heavier beams won’t last long here, you know—the gravity of the superhole distorts them.” He frowned.

“What is it, Ajit? What about gravity?”

“Kane was right,” he said, “the mass detectors aren’t damaged. They’re showing mass nearby, not large but detectable, that isn’t manifesting anything but gravity. No radiation of any kind.”

“A black hole,” I suggested.

“Too small. Small black holes radiate away, Hawking showed that long ago. The internal temperature is too high. There are no black holes smaller than three solar masses. The mass detectors are showing something much smaller than that.”

“What?”

“We don’t know.”

“Were all the weird mass-detector readings in the prelim data you sent back to the Kepler?”

“Of course,” he said, a slight edge in his voice.

I pulled him closer. “I can always rely on you,” I said, and I felt his body relax.

I shut us down, as we lay in each other’s arms.

It was Ajit who, the next day, noticed the second anomaly. And I who noticed the third.

“These gas orbits aren’t right,” Ajit said to Kane. “And they’re getting less right all the time.”

Kane moved to Ajit’s terminal. “Tell me.”

“The infalling gases from the circumnuclear disk… see… they curve here, by the western arm of Sag A West…”

“It’s wind from the IRS16 cluster,” Kane said instantly. “I got updated readings for those yesterday.”

“No, I already corrected for that,” Ajit said.

“Then maybe magnetization from IRS7, or—”

They were off again. I followed enough to grasp the general problem. Gases streamed at enormous speeds from clouds beyond the circumnuclear disk which surrounded the entire core like a huge doughnut. These streaming gases were funneled by various forces into fairly narrow, conelike paths. The gases would eventually end up circling the black hole, spiraling inward and compressing to temperatures of billions of degrees before they were absorbed by the maw of the hole. The processes were understood.

But the paths weren’t as predicted. Gases were streaming down wrong, approaching the hole wrong for predictions made from all the forces acting on them.

Ajit finally said to Kane, “I want to move the probe earlier than we planned.”

“Wait a moment,” I said instantly. Ship’s movements were my decision. “It’s not yet the scheduled time.”

“Of course I’m including you in my request, Tirzah,” Ajit said, with all his usual courtesy. There was something beneath the courtesy, however, a kind of glow. I recognized it. Scientists look like that when they have the germ of an important idea.

I thought Kane would object or ridicule, but something in their technical discussion must have moved him, too. His red hair stood up all over his head. He glanced briefly at his own displays, back at Ajit’s, then at the younger man. He said, “You want to put the probe on the other side of Sagittarius A West.”

“Yes.”

I said, “Show me.”

Ajit brought up the simplified graphic he had created weeks ago for me to gain an overview of this mission. It showed the black hole at the center of the galaxy, and the major structures around it: the cluster of hot blue stars, the massive young stars that should not have existed so close to the hole, the red giant star IRS16, with its long fiery tail. All this, plus our probe, lay on one side of the huge, three-armed spiraling plasma remnant, Sagittarius A West. Ajit touched the computer and a new dot appeared on the other side of Sag A West, farther away from the hole than we were now.

“We want to go there, Tirzah,” he said. Kane nodded.

I said, deliberately sounding naïve, “I thought there wasn’t as much going on over there. And besides, you said that Sag A West would greatly obscure our vision in all wavelengths, with its own radiation.”

“It will.”

“Then—”

“There’s something going on over there now,” Kane said. “Ajit’s right. That region is the source of whatever pull is distorting the gas infall. We need to go there.”

We .

Ajit’s right .

The younger man didn’t change expression. But the glow was still there, ignited by Ajit’s idea and fanned, I now realized, by Kane’s approval. I heated it up a bit more. “But, Kane, your work on the massive young stars? I can only move the probe so many times, you know. Our fuel supply—”

“I have a lot of data on the stars now,” Kane said, “and this matters more.”

I hid my own pleasure. “All right. I’ll move the probe.”

But when I interfaced with ship’s program, I found the probe had already been moved.

Kane and Ajit fell on the minicap of prelim data like starving wolves. There were no more games of go. There was no more anything but work, unless I insisted.

At first I thought that was good. I thought that without the senseless, mounting competition over go, the two scientists would cooperate on the intense issues that mattered so much to both of them.

“Damn and double damn!” Kane said, admiringly. “Look at that!”

Ajit reacted as if Kane had spoken to him, but of course Kane had not. He was just thinking aloud. I put down my embroidery and went to stand behind them at their terminals.

Ajit said, with the new arrogance of the go wins in his voice, “Those readings must be wrong. The sensors were damaged after all, either in hypertransit or by radiation.”

Kane, for a change, caught Ajit’s tone. He met it with a sneer he must have used regularly on presumptuous postgrads. “‘Must be wrong’? That’s just the kind of puerile leaping to conclusions that gets people nowhere.”