The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “So that’s why you weren’t . . . connected? . . . when you got here.” She pursed her lips appraisingly.

  “Yeah. Keep my options open, I figured.”

  “Open for . . .?”

  “For this—” He swept a rueful, ironic hand in the air at his imaginary assets. For a coveted appointment, a heady way out of the gray postdoc grind—an Assistant Professorship at UC Irvine, smack on the absurdly pricey, sun-bleached coast of Orange County. He had beaten out over a hundred applicants. And why not? He was quick, sure, with fine-honed skills and good connections, plus a narrow-eyed intensity a lot of women found daunting, as if it whispered: careerist, beware. The skies had seemed to open to him, for sure . . .

  But that was then.

  He gave her a crinkled smile, rueful, and yet he felt it hardening. “I’m not quitting. Not now.”

  “Well, just think about it.” She stroked his arm slowly and her eyes were sad now. “That’s all I meant . . .”

  “Sure.” He knew the world she inhabited, had seen her working spreadsheets, reading biographies of the founding fathers and flipping through books on “leadership,” seeking clues about rising in the buoyant atmosphere of business.

  “Promise?” Oddly plaintive.

  He grinned without mirth. “You know I will.” But her words had hurt him, all the same. Mostly by slipping cool slivers of doubt into his own mind.

  * * * *

  Later that night, he lay in her bed and replayed the scene. It now seemed to define the day, despite Irene’s strenuous efforts.

  Damn, Ralph had thought. Scooped!

  And by Andy Lakehurst, too. He had bit his lip and focused on the screen, where he had just gotten a freshly posted paper off the Los Alamos library web site, astro-ph.

  The radio map was of Ralph’s one claim to minor fame, G369.23-0.82. The actual observations were stunning. Brilliant, clear, detailed. Better than his work.

  He had slammed his fist on his disk, upsetting his coffee. “Damn!” Then he sopped up the spill—it had spattered some of the problem sets he’d graded earlier.

  Staring at the downloaded preprint, fuming, he saw that Andy and his team had gotten really detailed data on the—on his—hot new object, G369.23-0.82. They must have used a lot of observing time, and gotten it pronto.

  Where? His eyes ran down the usual Observations section and—Arecibo! He got observing time there?

  That took pull or else a lucky cancellation. Arecibo was the largest dish in the world, a whole scooped bowl set amid a tropical tangle, but fixed in position. You had to wait for time and then synchronize with dishes around the planet to make a map.

  And good ol’ ex-classmate Andy had done it. Andy had a straightforward, no-nonsense manner to him, eased by a ready smile that got him through doors and occasionally into bedrooms. Maybe he had connections to Beth Conway at Arecibo?

  No, Ralph had thought, that’s beneath me. He jumped on G369.23-0.82 and did the obvious next step, that’s all.

  Further, Andy was at Harvard, and that helped. Plenty. But it still galled. Ralph was still waiting to hear from Harkin at the Very Large Array about squeezing in some time there. Had been waiting for six weeks, yes.

  And on top of it all, he then had his conference with the department chairman in five minutes. He glanced over Andy’s paper again. It was excellent work. Unfortunately.

  * * * *

  He sighed in the dark of Irene’s apartment, recalling the crucial hour with the department chairman. This long day wouldn’t be done until he had reviewed it, apparently.

  * * * *

  He had started with a fixed smile. Albert Gossian was an avuncular sort, an old-fashioned chairman who wore a suit when he was doing official business. This unconscious signal did not bode well. Gossian gave him a quick, jowly smile and gestured Ralph into a seat.

  “I’ve been looking at your Curriculum Vitae,” Gossian said. He always used the full Latin, while others just said “CV.” Slow shake of head. “You need to publish more, Ralph.”

  “My grant funding’s kept up, I—”

  “Yes, yes, very nice. The NSF is putting effort into this field, most commendable—” A quick glance up from reading his notes, over the top of his glasses—”and that’s why the department decided to hire in this area. But—can you keep the funding?”

  “I’m two years in on the NSF grant, so next year’s mandatory review is the crunch.”

  “I’m happy to say your teaching rating is high, and university service, but . . .” The drawn-out vowels seemed to be delivering a message independent of the actual sentences.

  All Assistant Professors had a review every two years, tracking their progress toward the Holy Grail of tenure. Ralph had followed a trajectory typical for the early century: six years to get his doctorate, a postdoc at Harvard—where Andy Lakehurst was the rising star, eclipsing him and a lot of others. Ralph got out of there after a mutually destructive affair with a biologist at Tufts, fleeing as far as he could when he saw that UC Irvine was growing fast and wanted astrophysicists. UCI had a mediocre reputation in particle theory, but Fred Reines had won a Nobel there for showing that neutrinos existed and using them to detect the spectacular 1987 supernova.

  The plasma physics group was rated highest in the department and indeed they proved helpful when he arrived. They understood that 99% of the mass in the universe was roasted, electrons stripped away from the nuclei-plasma. It was a hot, rough universe. The big dramas played out there. Sure, life arose in the cool, calm planets, but the big action flared in their placid skies, telling stories that awed him.

  But once at UCI, he had lost momentum. In the tightening federal budgets, proposals didn’t get funded, so he could not add postdocs to get some help and leverage. His carefully teased-out observations gave new insights only grudgingly. Now five years along, he was three months short of the hard wall where tenure had to happen, or became impossible: the cutoff game.

  Were the groves of academe best for him, really? He liked the teaching, fell asleep in the committee meetings, found the academic cant and paperwork boring. Life’s sure erosions . . .

  Studying fast-moving neutron stars had been fashionable a few years back, but in Gossian’s careful phrasings he heard notes of skepticism. To the Chairman fell the task of conveying the senior faculty’s sentiments.

  Gossian seemed to savor the moment. “This fast-star fad—well, it is fading, some of your colleagues think.”

  He bit his lip. Don’t show anger. “It’s not a ‘fad.’ It’s a set of discoveries.”

  “But where do they lead?”

  “Too early to tell. We think they’re ejected from supernova events, but maybe that’s just the least imaginative option.”

  “One of the notes here says the first ‘runaway pulsar,’ called the Mouse, is now well understood. The other, recent ones will probably follow the same course.”

  “Too early to tell,” Ralph persisted. “The field needs time—”

  “But you do not have time.”

  There was the crux of it. Ralph was falling behind in paper count. Even in the small ‘runaway pulsar’ field, he was outclassed by others with more resources, better computers, more time. California was in a perpetual budget crisis, university resources were declining, so pressure was on to Bring In the (Federal) Bucks. Ralph’s small program supported two graduate students, sure, but that was small potatoes.

  “I’ll take this under advisement,” Ralph said. The utterly bland phrase did nothing to help his cause, as was clear from the chairman’s face, but it got him out of that office.

  * * * *

  He did not get much sleep that night. Irene had to leave early and he got a double coffee on the way into his office. Then he read Andy’s paper carefully and thought, sipping.

  Few astronomers had expected to find so many runaway neutron stars.

  Their likely origin began with two young, big stars, born circling one another. One went supernova, leaving a neutron st
ar still in orbit. Later, its companion went off, too, spitting the older neutron star out, free into interstellar space.

  Ralph had begun his UCI work by making painstaking maps in the microwave frequency range. This took many observing runs on the big radio antennas, getting dish time where he could around the world. In these maps he found his first candidate, G369.23-0.82. It appeared as a faint finger in maps centered on the plane of the galaxy, just a dim scratch. A tight knot with a fuzzy tail.

  He had found it with software that searched the maps, looking for anything that was much longer than it was wide. This retrieved quite a few of the jets that zoomed out of regions near black holes, and sometimes from the disks orbiting young stars. He spent months eliminating these false signatures, looking for the telltales of compact stellar runaways. He then got time on the Very Large Array—not much, but enough to pull G369.23-0.82 out of the noise a bit better. This was quite satisfying.

  Ralph got more coffee and went back and studied his paper, published less than half a year ago. Until today, that was the best data anybody had. He had looked for signs of rotation in the point-like blob in front, but there were none. The first runaway seen, the Mouse, discovered many years before, was finally shown to be a rotating neutron star—a pulsar, beeping its right radio beams out at the cupped ears of radio telescopes.

  Then he compared in detail with Andy’s new map:

  Clean, smooth, beautiful. He read the Conclusions section over again, mind jittery and racing.

  We thus fail to confirm that G369.23-0.82 is a pulsar. Clearly it has a bow shock, creating a wind nebula, undoubtedly powered by a neutron star. Yet at highest sensitivity there is no trace of a pulsed signal in microwaves or optical, within the usual range of pulsar periods. The nebular bow shock cone angle implies that G369.23-0.82 is moving with a Mach number of about 80, suggesting a space velocity ≅ 120 km/s through a local gas of density ≅ 0.3 per cubic cm. We use the distance estimate of Eilek et.al. for the object, which is halfway across the galaxy. These dynamics and luminosity are consistent with a distant neutron star moving at a velocity driven by ejection from a supernova. If it is a pulsar, it is not beaming in our direction.

  Beautiful work. Alas.

  The bright region blazed forth, microwave emission from high energy electrons. The innermost circle was not the neutron star, just the unresolved zone too small for even Arecibo to see. At the presumed distance, that circle was still bigger than a solar system. The bow shock was a perfect, smooth curve. Behind that came the microwave emission of gas driven back, heated and caught up in what would become the wake. At the core was something that could shove aside the interstellar gas with brute momentum. A whole star, squeezed by gravity into a ball about as big as the San Francisco Bay area.

  But how had Andy gotten such fine resolution?

  Ralph worked through the numbers and found that this latest map had picked up much more signal than his earlier work. The object was brighter. Why? Maybe it was meeting denser gas, so had more radiating electrons to work with?

  For a moment he just gazed at the beauty of it. He never lost his sense of awe at such wonders. That helped a bit to cool his disgruntlement. Just a bit.

  * * * *

  There wasn’t much time between Andy’s paper popping up on the astro-ph web site and Ralph’s big spring trip. Before leaving, he retraced his data and got ahead on his teaching.

  He and Irene finessed their problems, or at least delayed them. He got through a week of classes, put in data-processing time with his three graduate students, and found nothing new in the radio maps they worked on.

  Then came their big, long-planned excursion. Irene was excited, but he now dreaded it.

  His start-up money had some travel funds left in it, and he had made the mistake of mentioning this to Irene. She jumped at the chance, even though it was a scientific conference in a small town—”But it’s in France,” she said, with a touch of round-eyed wonder he found endearing.

  So off they jetted to the International Astronomical Union meeting in Briancon, a pleasant collection of stone buildings clinging to the French Alps. Off season, crouching beneath sharp snowy peaks in late May, it was charming and uncrowded and its delights went largely ignored by the astronomers. Some of the attendees went on hikes in the afternoon but Ralph stayed in town, talking, networking like the ambitious workaholic he was. Irene went shopping.

  The shops were featuring what she called the Hot New Skanky Look, which she showed off for him in their cramped hotel room that evening. She flounced around in an off-the-shoulder pink blouse, artfully showing underwear and straps. Skanky certainly caught the flavor, but still he was distracted.

  In their cramped hotel room, jet-lagged, she used some of her first-date skills, overcoming his distance. That way he got some sleep a few hours later. Good hours, they were.

  The morning session was interesting, the afternoon a little slow. Irene did sit in on some papers. He couldn’t tell if she was interested in the science itself, or just because it was part of his life. She lasted a few hours and went shopping again, saying, “It’s my way of understanding their culture.”

  The conference put on a late afternoon tour of the vast, thick-walled castles that loomed at every sharp peak. At the banquet inside one of the cold, echoing fortresses they were treated to local specialties, a spicy polenta and fresh-caught trout. Irene surveyed the crowd, half of them still wearing shorts and T-shirts, and remarked, “Y’know, this is a quirky profession. A whole room of terribly smart people, and it never occurred to them to try to get by on their looks.”

  He laughed; she had a point. She was a butterfly among the astro-drones, turning heads, smiles blossoming in her wake. He felt enhanced to have her on his arm. Or maybe it was the wine, a Vin Local red that went straight to his head, with some help from the two kilometer altitude.

  They milled around the high, arched reception room after the dessert. The crowd of over two hundred was too energized to go off to bed, so they had more wine. Ralph caught sight of Andy Lakehurst then. Irene noted his look and said, “Uh oh.”

  “Hey, he’s an old friend.”

  “Oh? You’re glaring at him.”

  “Okay, let’s say there’s some leftover baggage.”

  She gave him a veiled look, yawned, and said. “I’ll wander off to the room, let you boys play.”

  Ralph nodded, barely listening. He eavesdropped carefully on the crowd gathered around lanky, broad-shouldered Andy. The man’s booming voice carried well, over the heads of just about everybody in the room. Andy was going on about good ol’ G369.23-0.82. Ralph edged closer.

  “I figure maybe another, longer look at it, at G—”

  “The Bullet,” Ralph broke in.

  “What?” Andy had a high forehead and it wrinkled as he stopped in mid-sentence.

  “It looks like a bullet. Why not call it that, instead of that long code?”

  “Well,” Andy began brightly, “people might mistake—”

  “There’s even the smoke trailing behind it, the wake.” Ralph said, grinning. “Use that, if you want it to get into Scientific American.”

  “Y’know, Ralph, you haven’t changed.”

  “Poorer, is all.”

  “Hey, none of us went into this to get rich.”

  “Tenure would be nice.”

  “Damn right, buddy.” Andy clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m going up for it this winter, y’know.”

  He hadn’t, but covered with, “Well deserved. I’m sure you’ll get it,” and couldn’t resist adding, “Harvard’s a tough sell, though. Carl Sagan didn’t make it there.”

  “Really?” Andy frowned, then covered with, “So, uh, you think we should call it the Rifle?”

  “The Bullet,” Ralph said again. “It’s sure going fast, and we don’t really know it’s a neutron star.”

  “Hey, it’s a long way off, hard to diagnose.”

  “Maybe it’s distant, I kinda wonder—”

 
“And it fits the other parameters.”

  “Except you couldn’t find a pulse, so maybe it’s not a pulsar.”

  “Gotta be,” Andy said casually, and someone interrupted with a point Ralph couldn’t hear and Andy’s gaze shifted to include the crowd again. That gave Ralph a chance to think while Andy worked the room.

  There were nearly a thousand pulsars now known, rotating neutron stars that flashed their lighthouse beams across the galaxy. Some spun a thousand times in a second, others were old and slow, all sweeping their beams out as they rotated. All such collapsed stars told their long tale of grinding decay; the slower were older. Some were ejected after their birth in bright, flashy supernovas, squashed by catastrophic compression in nuclear fire, all in a few minutes.