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

I said quickly, “What readings?”

It was Ajit who answered me, and although the words were innocuous, even polite, I heard the anger underlying them. “The mass readings are wrong. They’re showing high mass density for several areas of empty space.”

I said, “Maybe that’s where the new young stars are forming?”

Not even Ajit answered this, which told me it was a stupid statement. It doesn’t matter; I don’t pretend to be a scientist. I merely wanted to keep them talking, to gauge their states of mind.

Ajit said, too evenly, “It would be remarkable if all probe equipment had emerged undamaged from the jump into core radiation.”

“Kane?” I said.

“It’s not the equipment.” And then, “Supersymmetry.”

Ajit immediately objected to this, in terms I didn’t understand. They were off into a discussion I had no chance of following. What I could follow was the increasing pressure of Ajit’s anger as Kane dismissed and belittled his ideas. I could almost see that anger, a hot plasma. As Kane ridiculed and belittled, the plasma collapsed into greater and greater density.

Abruptly they broke off their argument, went to their separate terminals, and worked like machines for twenty hours straight. I had to make them each eat something. They were obsessed, as only those seized by science or art can obsess. Neither of them would come to bed with me that night. I could have issued an executive order, but I chose not to exert that much trust-destroying force until I had to, although I did eventually announce that I was shutting down terminal access.

“For God’s sake, Tirzah!” Kane snarled. “This is a once-in-a-species opportunity! I’ve got work to do!”

I said evenly, “You’re going to rest. The terminals are down for seven hours.”

“Five.”

“All right.” After five hours, Kane would still be snoring away.

He stood, stiff from the long hours of sitting. Kane is well over a hundred; rejuves can only do so much, so long. His cramped muscles, used to much more exercise, misfired briefly. He staggered, laughed, caught himself easily.

But not before he’d bumped the wardroom table. Ajit’s statue of Shiva slid off and fell to the floor. The statue was old—four hundred years old, Ajit had said. Metal shows fatigue, too, although later than men. The statue hit the deck at just the right angle and broke.

“Oh… sorry, Ajit.”

Kane’s apology was a beat too late. I knew—with every nerve in my body, I knew this—that the delay happened because Kane’s mind was still racing along his data, and it took an effort for him to refocus. It didn’t matter. Ajit stiffened, and something in the nature of his anger changed, ionized by Kane’s careless, preoccupied tone.

I said quickly, “Ship can weld the statue.”

“No, thank you,” Ajit said. “I will leave it as it is. Good night.”

“Ajit—” I reached for his hand. He pulled it away.

“Good night, Tirzah.”

Kane said, “The gamma-ray variations within Sag A West aren’t quite what was predicted.” He blinked twice. “You’re right, I am exhausted.”

Kane stumbled off to his bunk. Ajit had already gone. After a long while I picked up the pieces of Ajit’s statue and held them, staring at the broken figure of the dancing god.

The preliminary data, Kane had declared when it arrived, contained enough information to keep them both busy until the second minicap arrived. But by the next day, Kane was impatiently demanding more.

“These gas orbits aren’t right,” he said aloud, although not to either me or Ajit. Kane did that, worked in silence for long stretches until words exploded out of him to no particular audience except his own whirling thoughts. His ear was raw with rubbing.

I said, “What’s not right about them?” When he didn’t answer, or probably even hear me, I repeated the question, much louder.

Kane came out of his private world and scowled at me. “The infalling gases from beyond the circumnuclear disk aren’t showing the right paths to Sag A*.”

I said, repeating something he’d taught me, “Could it be wind from the IRS 16 cluster?”

“No. I checked those updated readings yesterday and corrected for them.”

I had reached the end of what I knew to ask. Kane burst out, “I need more data!”

“Well, it’ll get here eventually.”

“I want it now,” he said, and laughed sourly at himself, and went back to work.

Ajit said nothing, acting as if neither of us had spoken.

I waited until Ajit stood, stretched, and looked around vaguely. Then I said, “Lunch in a minute. But first come look at something with me.” Immediately I started up the ladder to the observatory, so that he either had to follow or go through the trouble of arguing. He followed.

I had put the welded statue of Shiva on the bench near clear hull. It was the wrong side of the hull for the spectacular view of the core, but the exotics didn’t press so close to the hull here, and thousands of stars shone in a sky more illuminated than Sol had seen since its birth. Shiva danced in his mended circle of flames against a background of cosmic glory.

Ajit said flatly, “I told you I wanted to leave it broken.”

With Kane, frank opposition is fine; he’s strong enough to take it and, in fact, doesn’t respect much else. But Ajit is different. I lowered my eyes and reached for his hand. “I know. I took the liberty of fixing it anyway because, well, I thought you might want to see it whole again and because I like the statue so much. It has so much meaning beyond the obvious, especially here. In this place and this time. Please forgive me.”

Ajit was silent for a moment, then he raised my hand to his lips. “You do see that.”

“Yes,” I said, and it was the truth. Shiva, the endless dance, the endless flow of energy changing form and state—how could anyone not see it in the gas clouds forming stars, the black hole destroying them, the violence and creation outside this very hull? Yet, at the same time, it was a profound insight into the very obvious, and I kept my eyes lowered so no glimpse of my faint contempt reached Ajit.

He kissed me. “You are so spiritual, Tirzah. And so sweet-natured.”

I was neither. The only deceptions Ajit could see were the paranoid ones he assumed of others.

But his body had relaxed in my arms, and I knew that some part of his mind had been reassured. He and I could see spiritual beauties that Kane could not. Therefore he was in some sense superior to Kane. He followed me back down the ladder to lunch, and I heard him hum a snatch of some jaunty tune. Pleased with myself, I made for the galley.

Kane stood up so abruptly from his terminal that his eyes glowed. “Oh, my shitting stars. Oh, yes. Tirzah, I’ve got it.”

I stopped cold. I had never seen anyone, even Kane, look quite like that. “Got what?”

“All of it.” Suddenly he seized me and swung me into exuberant, clumsy dance. “All of it! I’ve got all of it! The young stars, the gas orbits, the missing mass in the universe! All shitting fucking all of it!”

“Wwwhhhaaatttt…” He was whirling me around so fast that my teeth rattled. “Kane, stop!”

He did, and enveloped me in a rib-cracking hug, then abruptly released me and dragged my bruised body to his terminal. “Look, sweetheart, I’ve got it. Now sit right there and I’m going to explain it in terms even you can understand. You’ll love it. It’ll love you. Now look here, at this region of space—”

I turned briefly to look at Ajit. For Kane, he didn’t even exist.

“The probe has moved,” I said to Ajit and Kane. “It’s way beyond the calculated drift. By a factor of ten.”