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

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 hardware, 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 Sag 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 Sag 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. Looking out through the clear hull, I stared at the myriad of stars on the side of the night sky away from Sag 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 Sag A West. Yet between us lay a huge, massive body of shadow matter, unseen, pulling on everything 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 hundred thousand years. Most of Sag 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 minicap!”

“We’re going to send off the second minicap 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 minicap 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 quicksilver personality in it, but also all the courtesy and hope. “Now I will sleep.”

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 minicap 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 minicap into the system. It’s all corrections to the last minicap’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 minicap 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.”