by Nancy Kress
Ajit had fabricated that apology and that replacement data. The actual second mini-cap would justify Kane’s work, not undo it. Ajit was saving all three mini-caps to use for himself, to claim the shadow matter discovery for his own. He’d used the second mini-cap to discredit the first; he would claim the third had never arrived, had never been sent from the dying probe.
The real Kane, my Kane, hadn’t found the particle from the first ship’s breach because it had, indeed, been made of shadow matter. That, and not slow speed, had been why the particle showed no radiation. The particle had exerted gravity on our world, but nothing else. The second breach, too, had been shadow matter. I knew that as surely as if Kane had shown me the pages of equations to prove it.
I knew something else, too. If I went into the shower and searched my body very carefully, every inch of it, I would find in some inconspicuous place the small, regular hole into which a sub-dermal tracker had gone the night of the drugged wine. So would Kane. Trackers would apprise Ajit of every move we made, not only large-muscle moves like a step or a hug, but small ones like access-ing my bunk display of ship’s data. That was what my intuition had been warning me of. Ajit did not want to be discovered during his mini-cap thefts.
I had the same trackers in my own repertoire. Only I had not thought this mission deteriorated enough to need them. I had not wanted to think that. I’d been wrong.
But how would Ajit make use of Kane’s stolen work with Kane there to claim it for himself?
I already knew the answer, of course. I had known it from the moment I pattern-blinked at the ceiling, which was the moment I finally admitted to myself how monstrous this mission had turned.
I pushed open the bunk door and called cheerfully, “Hello? Do I smell coffee? Who’s out there?”
“I am,” Ajit said genially. “I cannot sleep. Come have some coffee.”
“Coming, Ajit.”
I put on my robe, tied it at my waist, and slipped the gun from its secret mattress compartment into my palm.
14. PROBE
The probe jumped successfully. We survived.
This close to the core, the view wasn’t as spectacular as it was farther out. Sgr A*, which captured us in orbit immediately, now appeared as a fuzzy region dominating starboard. The fuzziness, Ajit said, was a combination of Hawking radiation and superheated gases being swallowed by the black hole. To port, the intense blue cluster of IRS16 was muffled by the clouds of ionized plasma around the probe. We experienced some tidal forces, but the probe was so small that the gravitational tides didn’t yet cause much damage.
Ajit has found a way to successfully apply Kane’s shadow-matter theory to the paths of the infalling gases, as well as to the orbits of the young stars near Sgr A*. He says there may well be a really lot of shadow matter near the core, and maybe even farther out. It may even provide enough mass to “balance” the universe, keeping it from either flying apart forever or collapsing in on itself. Shadow matter, left over from the very beginning of creation, may preserve creation.
Kane nods happily as Ajit explains. Kane holds my hand. I stroke his palm gently with my thumb, making circles like tiny orbits.
15. SHIP
Ajit sat, fully dressed and with steaming coffee at his side, in front of his terminal. I didn’t give him time to get the best of me. I walked into the wardroom and fired.
The sedative dart dropped him almost instantly. It was effective, for his body weight, for an hour. Kane didn’t hear the thud as Ajit fell off his chair and onto the deck; Kane’s bunk door stayed closed. I went into Ajit’s bunk and searched every cubic meter of it, over-riding the lock on his personal storage space. Most of that was taken up with the bronze statue of Shiva. The mini-caps were not there, nor anywhere else in his bunk.
I tried the galley next, and came up empty.
Same for the shower, the gym, the supply closets.
Ajit could have hidden the cubes in the engine compartments or the fuel bays or any of a dozen other ship’s compartments, but they weren’t pressurized and he would have had to either suit up or pressurize them. Either one would have shown up in my private ship data, and they hadn’t. Ajit probably hadn’t wanted to take the risk of too much covert motion around the ship. He’d only had enough drugs to put Kane and me out once. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have risked subdermal trackers.
I guessed he’d hidden the cubes in the observatory.
Looking there involved digging. By the time I’d finished, the exotics lay yanked up in dying heaps around the room. The stones of the fountain had been flung about. I was filthy and sweating, my robe smeared with soil. But I’d found them, the two crystal cubes from the second and third mini-caps, removed from their heavy shielding. Their smooth surfaces shed the dirt easily.
Forty-five minutes had passed.
I went downstairs to wake Kane. The expedition would have to jump immediately; there is no room on a three-man ship to confine a prisoner for long. Even if I could protect Kane and me from Ajit, I didn’t think I could protect Ajit from Kane. These mini-caps held the validation of Kane’s shadow-matter work, and in another man, joy over that would have eclipsed the theft. I didn’t think it would be that way with Kane.
Ajit still lay where I’d dropped him. The tranquilizer is reliable. I shot Ajit with a second dose and went into Kane’s bunk. He wasn’t there.
I stood too still for too long, then frantically scrambled into my s-suit.
I had already searched everywhere in the pressurized sections of the ship. Oh, let him be taking a second, fruitless look at the starboard hold, hoping to find some trace of the first particle that had hit us! Let him be in the damaged back-up engine compartment, afire with some stupid, brilliant idea to save the engine! Let him be—
“Kane! Kane!”
He lay in the starboard hold, on his side, his suit breached. He lay below a jagged piece of plastic from a half-open supply box. Ajit had made it look as if Kane had tried to open a box marked SENSOR REPLACEMENTS, had torn his suit, and the suit sealer nanos had failed. It was an altogether clumsy attempt, but one that, in the absence of any other evidence and a heretofore spotless reputation, would probably have worked.
The thing inside the suit was not Kane. Not anymore.
I knelt beside him. I put my arms around him and begged, cried, pleaded with him to come back. I pounded my gloves on the deck until I, too, risked suit breach. I think, in that abandoned and monstrous moment, I would not have cared.
Then I went into the wardroom, exchanged my tranquilizer gun for a knife, and slit Ajit’s throat. I only regretted that he wasn’t awake when I did it, and I only regretted that much, much later.
I prepared the ship for the long jump back to the Orion Arm. After the jump would come the acceleration-deceleration to Skillian, the closest settled world, which will take about a month standard. Space physics which I don’t understand make this necessary; a ship cannot jump too close to a large body of matter like a planet. Shadow matter, apparently, does not count.
Both Ajit’s and Kane’s bodies rest in the cold of the non-pressurized port hold. Kane’s initial work on shadow matter rests in my bunk. Every night I fondle the two cubes which will make him famous—more famous—on the settled Worlds. Every day I look at the data, the equations, the rest of his work on his terminal. I don’t understand it, but sometimes I think I can see Kane, his essential self, in these intelligent symbols, these unlockings of the secrets of cosmic energy.
It was our shadow selves, not our essential ones, that destroyed my mission, the shadows in the core of each human being. Ajit’s ambition and rivalry. Kane’s stunted vision of other people and their limits. My pride, which led me to think I was in control of murderous rage long after it had reached a point of no return. In all of us.
I left one thing behind at the center of the galaxy. Just before the Kepler jumped, I jettisoned Ajit’s statue of Shiva dancing, in the direction of Sgr A*. I don’t know for sure, but I imagine it will travel to
ward the black hole at the galaxy’s core, be caught eventually by its gravity, and spiral in, to someday disappear over the event horizon into some unimaginable singularity. That’s what I want to happen to the statue. I hate it.
As to what will happen to me, I don’t have the energy to hate it. I’ll tell the authorities everything. My license as a Nurturer will surely be revoked, but I won’t stand trial for the murder of Ajit. A captain is supreme law on her ship. I had the legal authority to kill Ajit. However, it’s unlikely that any scientific expedition will hire me as captain ever again. My useful life is over, and any piece of it left is no more than one of the ashy, burned-out stars Kane says orbit Sgr A*, uselessly circling the core until its final death, giving no light.
A shadow.
16. PROBE
We remain near the galactic core, Kane and Ajit and I. The event horizon of Sgr A* is about one-fiftieth of a light year below us. As we spiral closer, our speed is increasing dramatically. The point of no return is one-twentieth of a light year. The lethal radiation, oddly enough, is less here than when we were drifting near the shadow matter on the other side of Sgr A West, but it is enough.
I think at least part of my brain has been affected, along with the repair program to fix it. It’s hard to be sure, but I can’t seem to remember much before we came aboard the probe, or details of why we’re here. Sometimes I almost remember, but then it slips away. I know that Kane and Ajit and I are shadows of something, but I don’t remember what.
Ajit and Kane work on their science. I have forgotten what it’s about, but I like to sit and watch them together. Ajit works on ideas and Kane assists in minor ways, as once Kane worked on ideas and Ajit assisted in minor ways. We all know the science will go down into Sgr A* with us. The scientists do it anyway, for no other gain than pure love of the work. This is, in fact, the purest science in the universe.
Our mission is a success. Ajit and Kane have answers. I have kept them working harmoniously, have satisfied all their needs while they did it, and have captained my ship safely into the very heart of the galaxy. I am content.
Not that there aren’t difficulties, of course. It’s disconcerting to go up on the observation deck. Most of the exotics remain, bloom-ing in wild profusion, but a good chunk of the hull has disappeared. The effect is that anything up there—flowers, bench, people—is drifting through naked space, held together only by the gravity we exert on each other. I don’t understand how we can breathe up there; surely the air is gone. There are a lot of things I don’t under-stand now, but I accept them.
The wardroom is mostly intact, except that you have to stoop to go through the door to the galley, which is only about two feet tall, and Ajit’s bunk has disappeared. We manage fine with two bunks, since I sleep every night with Ajit or Kane. The terminals are intact. One of them won’t display any more, though. Ajit has used it to hold a holo he programmed on a functioning part of the computer and superimposed over where the defunct display stood. The holo is a rendition of an image he showed me once before, of an Indian god, Shiva.
Shiva is dancing. He dances, four-armed and graceful, in a circle decorated with flames. Everything about him is dynamic, waving arms and kicking uplifted leg and mobile expression. Even the flames in the circle dance. Only Shiva’s face is calm, detached, serene. Kane, especially, will watch the holo for hours.
The god, Ajit tells us, represents the flow of cosmic energy in the universe. Shiva creates, destroys, creates again. All matter and all energy participate in this rhythmic dance, patterns made and unmade throughout all of time.
Shadow matter—that’s what Kane and Ajit are working on. I remember now. Something decoupled from the rest of the universe right after its creation. But shadow matter, too, is part of the dance. It exerted gravitational pull on our ship. We cannot see it, but it is there, changing the orbits of stars, the trajectories of lives, in the great shadow play of Shiva’s dancing.
I don’t think Kane, Ajit, and I have very much longer. But it doesn’t matter, not really. We have each attained what we came for, and since we, too, are part of the cosmic pattern, we cannot really be lost. When the probe goes down into the black hole at the core, if we last that long, it will be as a part of the inevitable, endless, glorious flow of cosmic energy, the divine dance.
I am ready.
Afterword to “Shiva in Shadow”
There is a lot going on at the heart of the galaxy: a black hole, massive radiation, stars being torn apart. I knew none of this before Robert Silverberg asked me to write a story set there for his anthology Between Worlds. I started to research and was astonished at all the activity near Sagittarius A*. No life, however, and no possibility of putting characters there; humans cannot survive anywhere near that environment. So how was I going to set a hard-SF story at the brink of the black hole? I could have used aliens, I guess, but I didn’t want to. I wanted humans. Thus were born the computer uploads of Tirzah, Kane, and Ajit, and once I had that, the two tracks of the story grew naturally. The other contributor to this story—one never knows what will spark fiction!—was a statue I have of Shiva, the Hindu god of creation and destruction. To me, Shiva represents the ceaseless flow of energy in the universe.
Chaos theory—and there is a lot of chaos at the heart of the Milky Way—says that even small changes can eventually have large consequences. So does any realistic theory of human relationships.
GRANT US THIS DAY
When I finally found God, he was slumped at the counter in a Detroit diner, stirring his coffee. The dissolving creamer made little spiral galaxies. He had a bad sunburn. I slid onto the next stool.
“God?”
He looked up. A little gray flecked his dark beard but on the whole he looked younger than I’d expected. Maybe thirty. Maybe twenty-eight. His jeans were grimy. “Who wants to know?”
“Daniel Smith.” I held out my hand. He didn’t take it. “Listen, God, I’ve been looking for you for a long time.”
He said, “You got to read me my rights.”
“What?”
“My Miranda rights. I know I screwed up, all right? But at least do it by the local rules. Let’s get at least one part of this right.”
“I’m not a cop,” I said.
“Not a cop?”
“No.”
“Just my luck.” He slumped even lower on the stool, elbows resting on the counter, which bore some deep indescribable stain the shape of Africa. God traced it with one finger. Two teenage boys banged noisily through the front door; the waitress eyed them warily. “Then you’re a divinity student, right? Colgate? Loyola?”
“No.”
“You didn’t find some ancient manuscript proving I exist in corporeal form?”
“No.” The boys slid into a corner booth. Their jackets rode up, and I caught the flash of steel.
“You didn’t consult a lama in a monastery on top of a Tibetan mountain—old, most old?”
“Not that either.”
God sipped his coffee and made a face. “Then who the hell are you?”
“I’m from the Committee.”
Even with his sunburn, he paled. “Oh, man.”
“Well, that was one of the problems, certainly.”
God slammed his spoon onto the counter and sat up straight. “Look, I know I screwed up. I know the work has problems. I’ve already admitted that.” He glanced around the diner. In the booth opposite the boys, a hooker sat with an enormously fat man eating a taco salad. He talked with his mouth full; she was asleep. The fat man hadn’t noticed. The waitress limped past, carrying a platter of greasy burgers. She had one leg shorter than the other.
“Nonetheless,” God said, surly now, “from the Committee’s view-point I did everything right, so why bother me? I filled out the application in triplicate. I listed my previous work. I filed by the deadline. I submitted work that met your bureaucratic guidelines: neatness, originality, aptness of thought. What’s more original than kangaroos? Or the Hundred Years’ War?
A hundred years for a single war! So why hassle me now?”
“Maybe,” I said, looking at the fat man, who had noticed the hooker was asleep and was kicking her viciously, “you could have worked a little harder on ‘neatness.’”
“Yeah, well, everybody’s a critic.” He slumped again, his brief surliness over. I couldn’t read the expression on his face. “But that still doesn’t explain what you’re doing here. I know I didn’t make the finals. I saw the list.”
“Yes and no.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” He rubbed his nose; it really was a wicked sunburn. It was going to peel something awful.
I said, “The list’s changed. One finalist withdrew. You were the first name on the waiting list.”
His eyes opened wide. “Really? Who withdrew?”
“I’m not at liberty to say. But now you’re on the short list.”
God bent his head to stare into his coffee. The flush on his neck wasn’t all sunburn. This means so damn much to some of them. The waitress delivered the burgers to an old couple at a center table, both of them thin and quavery as parchment.
He said, “So what happens now?”
“The rules say you have a thousand years to revise, before the next round of voting. Off the record, let me say I think you should consider fairly substantial revision. The Committee liked certain aspects of your work, but the consensus was that the tone is uneven, and the whole lacks coherence.”
“I’m not creating some cheap commercial piece here!”
“I know that. And nobody says you should. But still, any good work has a voice all its own, a coherence, a thematic pattern that clearly identifies the artist. Your work here—well, frankly, son, it’s all over the map. The pieces don’t adhere. The proportions are skewed. It lacks balance and unity.”
God signaled for a piece of pie. The waitress limped over from the center table, where the old couple were holding hands. The fat man spoke low and fast to the hooker, leaning forward, his mouth twisted. The boys passed a plastic bag across the table, smirking at the room, daring anyone to notice.
