The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  “I can’t see anything. Can’t you brighten the light?”

  I did, and he bumped around some more. Whenever he brushed something, he cursed. I did an inspection even more carefully than usual, but found nothing alarming. We met each other back by the hold door.

  “It’s not here,” Kane said. “The particle. It’s not here.”

  “You mean you didn’t find it.”

  “No, I mean it’s not here. Don’t you think I could find a still hot particle in a hold otherwise filled only with large immobile crates?”

  I keyed in the door code. “So it evaporated on impact. Ice and ions and dust.”

  “To penetrate a Schaad hull? No.” He reconsidered. “Well, maybe. What did you find?”

  “Not much. Pitting and scarring on the outside, nothing unexpected. But no structural stress to worry about.”

  “The debris here is undoubtedly orbiting the core, but we’re so far out it’s not moving all that fast. Still, we should have had some warning. But I’m more worried about the probe – when is the third minicap due?”

  Kane knew as well as I did when the third minicap was due. His asking was the first sign he was as tense as the rest of us.

  “Three more days,” I said. “Be patient.”

  “I’m not patient.”

  “As if that’s new data.”

  “I’m also afraid the probe will be hit by rapidly orbiting debris, and that will be that. Did you know that the stars close in to Sag A* orbit at several thousand clicks per second?”

  I knew. He’d told me often enough. The probe was always a speculative proposition, and before now, Kane had been jubilant that we’d gotten any data at all from it.

  I’d never heard Kane admit to being “afraid” of anything. Even allowing for the casualness of the phrase.

  I wanted to distract him, and, if Kane was really in a resigned and reflective mood, it also seemed a good time to do my job. “Kane, about Ajit – ”

  “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.

  12. PROBE

  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, a
nd 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.

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll send off the minicap and then jump to the event horizon.”

  “Yes,” Kane said.

  Ajit said, “I’m going to go back to work. Tirzah, if you and Kane want to go up to the observation deck, or anywhere, I’ll prepare and launch the minicap.” Carefully he turned his back and sat at his terminal.

  I led Kane to my bunk. This was a first; I always went to the scientists’ bunks. My own, as captain, had features for my eyes only. But now it didn’t matter.

  We made love, and afterward, holding his superb, aging body in my arms, I whispered against his cheek, “I love you, Kane.”

  “I love you, too,” he said simply, and I had no way of knowing if he meant it, or if it was an automatic response dredged up from some half-remembered ritual from another time. It didn’t matter. There are a lot more types of love in the universe than I once suspected.

  We were silent a long time, and then Kane said, “I’m trying to remember pi. I know 3.1, but I can’t remember after that.”

  I said, through the tightness in my throat, “3.141. That’s all I remember.”

  “Three point one four one,” Kane said dutifully. I left him repeating it over and over, when I went to jump the probe to the event horizon of Sag A*.

  13. SHIP

  The second breach of the hull was more serious than the first.

  The third minicap had not arrived from the probe. “The analogues are probably all dead,” Kane said dully. “They were supposed to jump to one-twenty-fifth of a light-year from the event horizon. Our calculations were always problematic for where exactly that is. It’s possible they landed inside, and the probe will just spiral around Sag A* forever. Or they got hit with major radiation and fried.”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “How is the massive-young-star problem coming?”

  “It’s not. Mathematical dead end.”

  He looked terrible, drawn and, again, unwashed. I was more impatient with the latter than I should be. But how hard is it, as a courtesy to your shipmates if nothing else, to get your body into the shower? How long does it take? Kane had stopped exercising, as well.

  “Kane,” I began, as quietly but firmly as I could manage, “will you – ”

  The alarms went off, clanging again at 115 decibels. Breach, breach, breach . . .

  I scanned the displays. “Oh, God – ”

  “Breach sealed with temporary nano patch,” the computer said. “Seal must be reinforced within one half hour with permanent hull patch, type 1-B, supplemented with equipment repair, if possible. For location of breach and patch supply, consult – ” I turned it off.

  The intruder had hit the backup engine. It was a much larger particle than the first one, although since it had hit us and then gone on its merry way, rather than penetrating the ship, there was no way to recover it for examination. But the outside mass detectors registered a particle of at least two kilos, and it had probably been moving much faster than the first one. If it had hit us directly, we would all be dead. Instead it had given the ship a glancing blow, damaging the backup engine.

  “I’ll come with you again,” Kane said.

  “There won’t be any particle to collect this time.” Or not collect.

  “I know. But I’m not getting anywhere here.”

  Kane and I, s-suited, went into the backup engine compartment. As soon as I saw it, I knew there was nothing I could do. There is damage you can repair, and there is damage you cannot. The back end of the compartment had been sheared off, and part of the engine with it. No wonder the computer had recommended a 1-B patch, which is essentially the equivalent of “Throw a tarp over it and forget it.”

  While I patched, Kane poked around the edges of the breach, then at the useless engine. He left before I did, and I found him studying ship’s display of the hit on my wardroom screen. He wasn’t trying to do anything with ship’s log, which was not his place and he knew it, but he stood in front of the data, moving his hand when he wanted another screen, frowning horribly.

  “What is it, Kane?” I said. I didn’t really want to know; the patch had taken hours and I was exhausted. I didn’t see Ajit. Sleeping, or up on the observation deck, or, less likely, in the gym.

  “Nothing. Whatever that hit was made of, it wasn’t radiating. So it wasn’t going very fast, or the external sensors would have picked up at least ionization. Either the mass was cold, or the sensors aren’t functioning properly.”

  “I’ll run the diagnostics,” I said wearily. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. I want to move the ship.”

  I stared at him, my suit half peeled from my body, my helmet defiantly set on the table, pushing the statue of Shiva to one side. “Move the ship?”

  Ajit appeared in the doorway from his bunk.

  “Yes,” Kane said. “Move the ship.”

  “But these are the coordinates the minicap will return to!”

  “It’s not coming,” Kane said. “Don’t you listen to anything I say, Tirzah? The uploads didn’t make it. The third minicap is days late; if it were coming, it would be here. The probe is gone, the uploads are gone, and we’ve got all the data we’re going to get from them. If we want more, we’re going to have to go after it ourselves.”

  “Go after it?” I repeated, stupidly. “How?”

  “I already told you! Move the ship closer into the core so we can take the readings the probe should have taken. Some of them, anyway.”

  Ajit said, “Moving the ship is completely Tirzah’s decision.”

  His championship of me when I needed no champion, and especially not in that pointlessly assertive voice, angered me more than Kane’s suggestion. “Thank you, Ajit, I can handle this!”

  Mistake, mistake.

  Kane, undeterred, plowed on. “I don’t mean we’d go near the event horizon, of course, or even to the probe’s first position near the star cluster. But we could move much closer in. Maybe ten light-years from the core, positioned between the northern and western arms of Sag A West.”

  Ajit said, “Which would put us right in the circumnuclear disk! Where the radiation is much worse than here!”

  Kane turned on him, acknowledging Ajit’s presence for the first time in days, with an outpouring of all Kane’s accumulated frustration and disappointment. “We’ve been hit twice with particles that damaged the ship. Clearly w
e’re in the path of some equivalent of an asteroid belt orbiting the core at this immense distance. It can’t be any less safe in the circumnuclear disk, which, I might remind you, is only shocked molecular gases, with its major radiation profile unknown. Any first-year astronomy student should know that. Or is it just that you’re a coward?”

  Ajit’s skin mottled, then paled. His features did not change expression at all. But I felt the heat coming from him, the primal rage, greater for being contained. He went into his bunk and closed the door.

  “Kane!” I said furiously, too exhausted and frustrated and disappointed in myself to watch my tone. “You can’t – ”

  “I can’t stand any more of this,” Kane said. He slammed down the corridor to the gym, and I heard the exercise bike whirr in rage.

  I went to my own bunk, locked the door, and squeezed my eyes shut, fighting for control. But even behind my closed eyelids I saw our furious shadows.

  After a few hours I called them both together in the wardroom. When Kane refused, I ordered him. I lifted Ajit’s statue of Shiva off the table and handed it to him, making its location his problem, as long as it wasn’t on the table. Wordlessly he carried it into his bunk and then returned.

  “This can’t go on,” I said calmly. “We all know that. We’re in this small space together to accomplish something important, and our mission overrides all our personal feelings. You are both rational men, scientists, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Don’t patronize us with flattery,” Ajit said.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to do that. It’s true you’re both scientists, and it’s true you’ve both been certified rational enough for space travel.”

  They couldn’t argue with that. I didn’t mention how often certification boards had misjudged, or been bribed, or just been too dazzled by well-earned reputations to look below the work to the worker. If Kane or Ajit knew all that, they kept it to themselves.

  “I blame myself for any difficulties we’ve had here,” I said, in the best Nurturer fashion. Although it was also true. “It’s my job to keep a ship running in productive harmony, and this one, I think we can all agree, is not.”