Singularity

by Bill DeSmedt

  The clock on the wall read quarter to three in the morning. It wasn’t quite that late: The time had been set two hours ahead at midnight to compensate for Rusalka’s eastward movement. Still, it was into the wee hours, whatever the time zone.

  Knox glanced over to where Marianna was curled up in one of the lounge’s overstuffed leather armchairs, the glass of Chardonnay beside her untouched. After a full day of sun and sea air, she was about as tuned into the conversation as were the anemones and angelfish dancing in the tropical aquarium behind her. And Galina had been gone since before dinner—something about checking in on an experiment in progress back home in Akademgorodok.

  Knox drained his Dewar’s. “How ’bout it, Sasha—call it a night?”

  If Sasha heard, he gave no sign. He, too, was quietly contemplating Marianna’s drowsing form, swirling the drink in his glass. When he did speak, it was to say, “Your friend, Dzhon, is most lovely. So full of energy and life. Quite charming, truly.”

  “She’s far too good for me, that’s for sure,” Knox said, and then—because it was expected, and because it was true—added “Galya’s looking terrific, too.”

  Sasha drained his fifth?—seventh?—Stolichnaya of the evening. It you say.

  “Do I detect a note of—how do I put this?—ennui?”

  Sasha sat there, head down, staring into his now-empty glass. “Time can bring to an end even the closest relationships, Dzhon,” he said in a barely audible voice. He cleared his throat before adding, “You especially would know that, being divorced yourself.”

  “So you’re saying you and Galya . . .”

  “Our association is still one of friendship and professional collaboration,” Sasha enunciated carefully. Whatever the exact count, he’d had a lot to drink. “But no more than that. Not for years.”

  “Gee, I’m really sorry to hear—” Then it hit Knox. “Wait a minute. How’d you know I’m divorced?”

  “Oh, as to that, GEI’s corporate intelligence is quite thorough. They checked you out as soon as I received your first email. I know all about you, Dzhon: your divorce, your work at Archon, how you abandoned your Soviet researches for a career in systems analysis . . .”

  Sasha heaved a sigh. “All about you. Even about the consequences for you of that night, the night we sampled the shaman’s gift.”

  “Sasha, that’s all blood under the bridge.”

  “Please, Dzhon, painful as it is, I must say this: I am most sincerely sorry for what happened, for the harm I caused you. Had I only known . . .”

  “It’s okay. Really. It’s not like I died or anything.” Though for a while there, he’d wished he could.

  “Not okay, Dzhon.” Sasha was shaking his head. “How could I have been so stupid? But I thought then you had simply experienced what I did—the beauty, the wonder of it. For me, it truly was as the old Evenk had promised: a journey out among the stars.” He sounded as if he’d be ready to sign on for the magical-mushroom mystery tour again, given half a chance.

  “Maybe it was for me too, at first. Except, where you saw cosmology, I saw quantum reality.”

  Knox had been hooked on quantum mechanics ever since encountering his first pop-science rehash back in high school. It was as if the Uncertainty Principle had resonated with some deep-seated yearning that the world not be totally deterministic, totally predictable—that there still be some room left for mystery in the universe, if only in the realm of the very small. He’d lacked the heavy-duty math skills to advance much beyond the level of an educated layman, but he got far enough to revel in the theory’s quasi-mystical implications.

  Until that last night in Moscow, when those implications walked up and bit him in the ass.

  “It was beautiful, in the beginning. But after a while it all turned . . . bad.” Knox shuddered, remembering. This was not a good idea. Not if he wanted to sleep tonight.

  If only you hadn’t left me all by myself. If only there’d been someone, anyone there to talk to me, talk me through it, talk me down. He’d spent an eternity alone in the darkness, powerless to wrench his gaze away from Chaos and Old Night, away from the wriggling horror the world had dissolved into. Only as dawn broke had he finally found his way back to—or, by an effort of will, reconstructed?—a recognizable cosmos again.

  “But I did not leave you, Dzhon.” Sasha’s whispered response was Knox’s first hint that he’d said at least part of that aloud.

  “Huh?”

  “It was you who left, perhaps two hours before sunrise. I should have stopped you, but . . .”

  Knox hadn’t thought much about the events of that long, unendingly dark night in nearly two decades. Had, in fact, invested a good deal of psychic energy in not thinking about it at all. But now that Sasha mentioned it, he could vaguely recall waking up back in his own dorm room.

  If you could call it waking when the nightmares didn’t stop.

  “I went looking for you, of course,” Sasha was still talking, “as soon as I was able. But by then you were gone. I foolishly assumed you had taken a taxi to Sheremetevo and flown home. You never said anything in your letters.”

  Sasha looked truly miserable now. “I only learned the truth this past week. Your stay at the Embassy clinic, how you dropped out of graduate school. Dzhon, my friend, I ask your forgiveness.”

  “For what it’s worth, you’ve got it. But really, Sasha, there’s nothing to forgive.”

  As he spoke the words, Knox couldn’t help wondering if Sasha would find it in his heart to be as forgiving, when the time came.

  17 | Buy-In

  “YOU DON’T LOOK so hot, Jon,” Marianna said as Knox shambled V into her stateroom for their three P.M.

  Actually, he felt okay, considering he hadn’t gotten to sleep till sunrise. The late-night with Sasha had left him with too much to think about, and no way to turn the thoughts off. Things he’d avoided thinking about for years, and now he remembered why. He’d felt like shit when he’d dragged himself out of his cabin shortly before twelve, but an afternoon of basking in the restorative rays of the sun had pumped him back up to maybe eighty-five percent.

  “I wouldn’t mind the insomnia so much, if only I could sleep through it.” He smothered a yawn. “Course, the way they keep changing the time around doesn’t help.” Rusalka was running full bore almost due east; the two hours they’d already moved the clocks ahead translated into one twelfth of a day in lost sack-time.

  “Are you sure you’re up to this?”

  Knox nodded cautiously, trying to synch the movement with the residual throbbing in his head. “I’ll manage. Let’s do it.”

  He could tell she was getting antsy, not to mention heartily sick of faking a becoming ineptitude at skeet shooting, archery, and all the other paramilitary recreations Rusalka had on tap. It must have been a relief for her to come back to the stateroom and review the nearly forty hours of data they’d captured, courtesy of Grishin’s own chartroom surveillance arrangements.

  “So, altogether that makes three shifts in a day and a half,” Marianna summarized the findings. “Three visits, more like, each lasting about half an hour: one at six-thirty yesterday morning, then again at six-thirty in the evening, finally, the one at eight-thirty this morning. With me so far?” The clipped efficiency of her wrapup was rendered slightly incongruous by the fact that she delivered it wearing nothing more than a body-hugging yellow sunsuit.

  Knox nodded again. Not to be outdone, he was attired in swimming trunks and a windbreaker. As far as he was concerned, all client conferences could be like this: nubile, scantily-clad young females, and not a three-piece suit in sight.

  “At least now we know where Galya had dinner last night,” he said.

  “Uh-huh. I was kind of surprised to see that, but it was her pulling the evening shift, all right.”

  Knox waited, but Marianna didn’t elaborate on why she found Galina’s involvement so surprising all of a sudden.

  “What about our early riser—the guy in the c
heckered shirt?” he asked, referring to the man they’d watched descending into the shaft on both mornings. “Could he be one of your missing ‘magnet guys’ ?”

  “Hmm. Take away the beard and it could be Komarov. Well put a name to the face some other time. Right now there’s something else we need to focus on.”

  Knox straightened up and did his best to look alert. “Which is?”

  “The duty schedule. I mean, twelve hours between the first two visits, then fourteen hours till the third? What’s going on? When’s the next one going to be?”

  Through the fog of sleep deprivation, Knox glimpsed the outlines of an answer. “Urn, let’s try flipping the perspective here. What if whatever they’re working on isn’t onboard this ship?”

  “Boat,” Marianna corrected, then: “How does that explain anything?”

  “Take another look at the timing: six-thirty A.M. and P.M. yesterday, then today it jumps to eight-thirty A.M.” He paused for effect. “Now, what happened at midnight last night?”

  “Oh, right. They reset the clocks.”

  “And the spycam’s on ship’s time,” he said. “The two-hour discrepancy between yesterday’s interval and today’s is just an artifact of Rusalka’s own passage through the time zones. If you shift your point of view, and think of the secret lab monitoring something at a fixed point on the globe, then whatever it is repeats every twelve hours . . . at, um, half past eleven GMT, morning and evening.”

  “So, the lab should empty out as of nine tonight?”

  “Uh-huh, and stay empty till, uh, ten-thirty tomorrow morning.” She smiled at him. “Thanks, Jon. Sounds like I go in tonight at midnight.”

  That brought Knox full awake. “Huh?”

  “Well, sure.” She kicked off her sandals and draped one languorous leg over the arm of her chair. “Seeing as how you just proved there won’t be anybody in the lab then. What’d you think this was, some theoretical exercise? I’ve got to come up with an action plan here.” Uh-oh! Served him right for showing off. “Hold on. I didn’t prove anything.”

  “What do you mean? You yourself said—”

  “I know what I said.” Knox swallowed: he’d created a monster. “It’s just—do you know the old engineering joke, the one that goes: If you need a straight-line fit, plot only two data-points?”

  Humor was a consultant’s secret weapon, a guided missile that sailed in under the radar, bearing insight as its payload. Would it work here? Help the “client” appreciate just how risky it was to go off half-cocked like this?

  Marianna laughed. Then frowned. “You’re saying we still don’t have enough hard data to move on this.”

  “Not enough to trust our lives to. And, from what you’ve been telling me about the dark side of Grishin Enterprises, that’s exactly what we’d be doing.”

  “But we’ve tracked three occurrences already.” Marianna had both feet back on the floor now; she was leaning forward, re-engaged.

  “My point exactly: we’ve got three dots on a page, and you’re trying to connect them up into the Mona Lisa. You’d know better if—” He stopped himself before he could complete the thought: if this weren’t your first field assignment.

  “What about your pattern-matching’ thingee. That’s just connect-the-dots too, isn’t it?”

  “No. It’s subconscious. Whatever its other failings, the subconscious mind has a firm grasp on reality.”

  “And I don’t, you’re saying?”

  “I’m just saying we don’t know how real this supposed duty schedule is. Until we understand what’s really going on down in that lab, we won’t know if the timing of the visits isn’t just random chance, like a roll of the dice. But you’re thinking like a gambler, convinced the last roll influences the probabilities on the next.”

  “So, we wait for what—total certainty? That’s not an option, and you know it.”

  Oh, Lord! Another client hell-bent for disaster, and intent on taking him with her.

  “All right, here’s an option for you . . .” Knox took a deep breath. “I’ll go.”

  “Come again?” She had to fight to keep from laughing.

  “Face facts: I’m a better observer than you. It’s what I do for a living. And I read Russian, fluently. Stands to reason I could pick up the same amount of information in maybe half the time. That alone cuts the risk by fifty percent.”

  The remarks rankled, but Marianna was damned if she’d show it. Just like a, a . . . consultant! . . . to try getting you so mad you started saying stupid stuff and wound up doubting your own competence.

  Sweet reason, then. “Even if what you say were so, Jon, it wouldn’t work. One of us has got to be in the wheelhouse distracting the bridge crew. And, as you just finished pointing out, your Russian’s a lot better than mine.”

  “Find a way to improve the odds, then, if you’re so set on doing it yourself.”

  “Why are you making this so goddamn difficult? Can’t you be a team player for once?”

  “Believe me,” he said. “You don’t want that. Unless the only thing CROM hired me for was my entree with Sasha.”

  He paused, as if waiting for her to say it wasn’t so. Don’t hold your breath, Jon.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “if there’s any value added I can contribute here, it’s because I’m not a team player.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I’m trying to give you an objective assessment of our chances. I couldn’t do that if I was part of your chain of command; I’d be worrying about who I was pissing off, how I was screwing up my year-end review, my chances for promotion—all the things worker bees have to get past before they say word one.

  “So, no, don’t think of me as being on your team, Marianna—think of me as the umpire.”

  Marianna held her head in her hands. It wasn’t enough that she was working the biggest case of her career—hell, the biggest case in CROM’s history—all by herself. No, she had to have the hired help questioning her authority at every turn. Umpire, indeed.

  Still, she needed him to make this work. Not looking up, she said, “Okay, final offer: we hold off till eight-thirty tonight and see if that duty cycle of yours still checks out.” Not much of a concession there; she had to wait for dark anyway.

  “If it does, we go at midnight,” she finished. “Hey, at least this way you get another data-point for your collection.”

  “And if it doesn’t—check out, that is?”

  “Then we need a new theory, and congratulations: you’ve bought yourself a whole ’nother day’s delay.

  “But if it does,” she went on, “if Galina’s evening visit comes off right on schedule, I want you behind me a hundred percent on the follow-up, agreed? . . . What?”

  “Has it even occurred to you to prepare for something going wrong?”

  “Ease down, Jon. I’ve done my homework.” Most of it anyway. As for the rest, well, no time like the present. “I just hadn’t gotten to the contingency part, is all. But now that you bring it up, how’s this? You play lookout again, but this time we rig you for sound: wearable microphone and an ear insert for reception.”

  She crossed to her dresser and rummaged through her utility kit.

  “Then,” she said, “I go in with the earphones on. You’ve got a mate to my call-box on the mike unit. You chat up the bridge crew like before, only now you’ve got a panic button just in case. Hit it, and I’ll tune in and hear what’s going down in time to run for cover.”

  He eyed her sharply. “You’re making this up as you go along, aren’t you?”

  She thought about bluffing, but what was the use? He was reading her like a book.

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “Have I got your buy-in anyway?”

  He looked dubiously at the microelectronics resting in the palm of her hand. After a long moment he reached out and took them from her.

  “You’re the client. Just make sure you record everything. And, Marianna?”

  “Urn?”

  “Nothing, ju
st . . . try to think patterns.”

  Buy-in was on Pete Aristos’s mind, too. Had been for the whole drive in to D.C. And all the way up to the top floor of the Forrestal Complex, the Energy Department’s headquarters.

  He stepped off the elevator and scanned the nearly-empty hall in search of his target. Then he was striding purposefully toward the small, gray sparrow of a man standing by the entrance to the executive conference room.

  “Ray,” he blurted out, even before he got to within handshake distance, “tell me you’ve got Gallagher onboard with this thing.”

  Raymond Hartog, Director of the DOE Critical Resources Oversight Mandate, gave a dry chuckle. “Hello to you, too, Pete,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry, hi,” Pete said. “Well, what about it?

  Ray tilted his grizzled head back a bit, the better to look his subordinate in the eye. Then he put on his dour Dutchman’s frown, and said, “It’s still a toss-up, Pete. I can’t make any promises.”

  Shit! What can you do? Pete knew better than to voice the thought aloud, of course. But some echo of it must have crossed his face, because when he reached for the door handle, Ray laid a hand on his arm.

  “Pete?” A warning note crept into the reedy voice. “When we get in there, you’re to follow my lead, understood? You talk if the Secretary asks you a direct question, or if I hand off to you. Other than that, you’re scenery. Got it?”

  “Jesus, Ray, there are lives at stake here! And likely a whole lot more!”

  “Your Ms. Bonaventure knew the risk she was taking. And she’d better not be wrong about the whole lot more, either. We’re going to look bad enough if we’re right!” Ray’s next words came out in a strained near-whisper. “Now, we’re going to play this my way, or not at all. I say again: have you got that?”

  “Got it.” Pete had seen it before: there was something about breathing the rarified air of the higher bureaucratic altitudes that eventually killed off the little gray cells. Ray had held out as long as most, maybe longer. But if he could really seriously fret about appearances in the face of a threat to national security . . .