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

“I don’t want to talk about that sniveling slacker,” Kane said, with neither interest not rancor. “I picked badly for an assistant, that’s all.”

It hadn’t actually been his “pick”; his input had been one of many. I didn’t say this. Kane looked around the hold one more time. “I guess you’re right. The particle sublimed. Ah, well.”

I put the glove of my hand on the arm of his suit—not exactly an intimate caress, but the best I could do in this circumstance. “Kane, how is the young-star mystery going?”

“Not very well. But that’s science.” The hold door stood open and he lumbered out.

I gave one last look around the hold before turning off the light, but there was nothing more to see.

The mended statue of Shiva was back on the wardroom table, smack in the center, when Kane and I returned from the hold. I don’t think Kane, heading straight for his terminal, even noticed. I smiled at Ajit, although I wasn’t sure why he had brought the statue back. He’d told me he never wanted to see it again.

“Tirzah, would you perhaps like to play go?”

I couldn’t conceal my surprise. “Go?”

“Yes. Will you play with me?” Accompanied by his most winning smile.

“All right.”

He brought out the board and, bizarrely, set it up balanced on his knees. When he saw my face, he said, “We’ll play here. I don’t want to disturb the Cosmic Dancer.”

“All right.” I wasn’t sure what to think. I drew my chair close to his, facing him, and bent over the board.

We both knew that Ajit was a better player than I. That’s why both of us played: he to win, me to lose. I would learn more from the losing position. Very competitive people—and I thought now that I had never known one as competitive as Ajit—relax only when not threatened.

So I made myself nonthreatening in every way I knew, and Ajit and I talked and laughed, and Kane worked doggedly on his theories that weren’t going anywhere. The statue of the dancing god leered at me from the table, and I knew with every passing moment how completely I was failing this already failing mission.

Kane was gentler since the radiation corruption. Who can say how these things happen? Personality, too, is encoded in the human brain, whether flesh or analogue. He was still Kane, but we saw only his gentler, sweeter side. Previously that part of him had been dominated by his combative intellect, which had been a force of nature all its own, like a high wind. Now the intellect had failed, the wind calmed. The landscape beneath lay serene.

“Here, Ajit,” Kane said. “These are the equations you wanted run.” He sent them to Ajit’s terminal, stood, and stretched. The stretch put him slightly off balance, something damaged in the upload that Ajit and I hadn’t been able to fix, or find. A brain is such a complex thing. Kane tottered, and Ajit rose swiftly to catch him.

“Careful, Kane. Here, sit down.”

Ajit eased Kane into a chair at the wardroom table. I put down my work. Kane said, “Tirzah, I feel funny.”

“Funny how?” Alarm ran through me.

“I don’t know. Can we play go?”

I had taught him the ancient strategy game, and he enjoyed it. He wasn’t very good, not nearly as good as I was, but he liked it and didn’t seem to mind losing. I got out the board. Ajit, who was a master at go, went back to Kane’s shadow-matter theory. He was making good progress, I knew, although he said frankly that all the basic ideas were Kane’s.

Halfway through our second game of go, the entire wardroom disappeared.

A moment of blind panic seized me. I was adrift in the void, nothing to see or feel or hold onto, a vertigo so terrible it blocked any rational thought. It was the equivalent of a long anguished scream, originating in the most primitive part of my now blind brain: lost, lost, lost, and alone…

The automatic maintenance program kicked in and the wardroom reappeared. Kane gripped the table edge and stared at me, white-faced. I went to him, wrapped my arms around him reassuringly, and gazed at Ajit. Kane clung to me. A part of my mind noted that some aspects of the wardroom were wrong: the galley door was too low to walk through upright, and one chair had disappeared, along with the go board. Maintenance code too damaged to restore.

Ajit said softly, “We have to decide, Tirzah. We could take a final radiation hit at any time.”

“I know.”

I took my arms away from Kane. “Are you all right?”

He smiled. “Yes. Just for a minute I was…” He seemed to lose his thought.

Ajit brought his terminal chair to the table, to replace the vanished one. He sat leaning forward, looking from me to Kane and back. “This is a decision all three of us have to make. We have one minicap left to send back to the Kepler , and one more jump for ourselves. At any time we could lose… everything. You all know that. What do you think we should do? Kane? Tirzah?”

All my life I’d heard that even very flawed people can rise to leadership under the right circumstances. I’d never believed it, not of someone with Ajit’s basic personality structure: competitive, paranoid, angry at such a deep level he didn’t even know it. I’d been wrong. I believed now.

Kane said, “I feel funny, and that probably means I’ve taken another minor hit and the program isn’t there to repair it. I think… I think…”

“Kane?” I took his hand.

He had trouble getting words out. “I think we better send the minicap now.”

“I agree,” Ajit said. “But that means we send it without the data from our next jump, to just outside the event horizon of Sag A*. So the Kepler won’t get those readings. They’ll get the work on shadow matter, but most of the best things on that already went in the second minicap. Still, it’s better than nothing, and I’m afraid if we wait to send until after the jump, nothing is what the Kepler will get. It will be too late.”

Both men looked at me. As captain, the jump decision was mine. I nodded. “I agree, too. Send off the minicap with whatever you’ve got, and then we’ll jump. But not to the event horizon.”

“Why not?” Kane burst out, sounding more like himself than at any time since the accident.

“Because there’s no point. We can’t send any more data back, so the event horizon readings die with us. And we can survive longer if I jump us completely away from the core. Several hundred light-years out, where the radiation is minimal.”

Together, as if rehearsed, they both said, “No.”

“No?”

“No,” Ajit said, with utter calm, utter persuasiveness. “We’re not going to go out like that, Tirzah.”

“But we don’t have to go out at all! Not for decades! Maybe centuries! Not until the probe’s life-maintenance power is used up—” Or until the probe is hit by space debris. Or until radiation takes us out. Nowhere in space is really safe.

Kane said, “And what would we do for centuries? I’d go mad. I want to work.”

“Me, too,” Ajit said. “I want to take the readings by the event horizon and make of them what I can, while I can. Even though the Kepler will never see them.”

They were scientists.

And I? Could even I, station bred, have lived for centuries in this tiny ship, without a goal beyond survival, trapped with these two men? An Ajit compassionate and calm, now that he was on top. A damaged Kane, gentle and intellectually gutted. And a Tirzah, captaining a pointless expedition with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

I would have ended up hating all three of us.

Ajit took my left hand. My right one still held Kane’s, so we made a broken circle in the radiation-damaged wardroom.