Singularity

by Bill DeSmedt

  “Most assuredly. Except, of course, for very littlest ones formed in the Big Bang itself.”

  “Very littlest whats? Black holes? I thought they had to be big as suns. Oh, hey, wait a minute . . .” Knox struggled to recall the details of other midnight conversations two decades ago.

  Sasha spoke not a word. Instead, he laid a finger alongside his nose, smiling impishly.

  Now, why the hell? Knox knew that look, though he hadn’t seen it in going on twenty years: it meant Sasha’d already said too much. They had somehow managed to stumble into his friend’s conversational discomfort zone. In cosmology, no less. What did really little black holes have to do with anything?

  Sasha was looking at his wristtop again. “And now, Dzhon, I really must go.”

  And Marianna still hadn’t confirmed she was safely under cover.

  Because she wasn’t. She scanned the confines of the secret lab a third time, looking with mounting apprehension for someplace, anyplace. Her gaze ran over the equipment banks, the walls, the floor—

  The floor! Was it a trick of the light, or was that group of four ceramic tiles slightly raised above the plane of the flooring? She dropped to her knees and ran her gloved hands over the surface. Yes, she could just barely feel a bump . . .

  The thing was a camouflaged hatch cover.

  There must be a control that raised and lowered it somewhere, but nothing obvious and no time to look for it. She tried to get her fingertips under the rim to gain purchase, but the plate was too close to being flush with the floor. Up, damn you, up!

  “This whole business does remind me of something else, though—” Knox launched his final bid to keep the discussion going. “Hugh Everett’s ‘Many Worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics.”

  “Ah, Dzhon, I knew you would find a way to bring quantum physics in. But I fail to see the relevance.”

  “Try it this way: how many black holes you figure there are in our own universe?”

  “Mmm.” Sasha knit his brows in thought. “Perhaps one black hole for every ten thousand stars, a hundred billion stars per galaxy, and a hundred billion galaxies. So, order of magnitude—say, one billion billions.”

  “A billion billion black holes, each of them spawning a whole new cosmos,” Knox said. “And Everett’s got the universe splitting in two every time anybody performs a quantum measurement. I didn’t like that and I don’t like this. Any way you slice it, it all adds up to a whole shitload of universes. And for what? No, give me that old-time re-expression of the vacuum any day.”

  He felt a tiny frisson of anxiety then. This was going to cost him again; in steering the conversation away from what Sasha evidently felt was shaky ground, he’d moved it onto some even shakier ground of his own. He sensed another bout of sleeplessness ahead, another night of staring into the void.

  “Re-expression of the vacuum? Hah!” Sasha hadn’t noticed Knox’s momentary indisposition. “Metaphysical claptrap! Surely you cannot believe this?”

  A voice came from behind: “There you are, Sasha. What has kept you? Must I see to this myself?”

  Knox turned and, enunciating carefully for the sake of the microphone, said, “Ah, good evening, Arkady Grigoriyevich.”

  Go to ground, Marianna! Time’s just run out!

  The man himself was on his way down! Marianna could hear the hollow clunk of Grishin’s shoes on the rungs of the metal ladder. From the way he was wheezing, he didn’t make this trip all that often. What could he be up to?

  And what would he do if he found her? Best she could tell, Yuri was back from his tea-run. Even if she could get by Grishin, his personal hitman would be waiting for her at the top of the shaft.

  Her wristtop’s telltale was reading pulse and respiration way up. Her fingers scrabbled frantically against the edge of the floor plate, to no avail. She could hear Grishin’s labored breathing getting closer.

  In desperation, she pulled a utility knife from her tool belt and inserted its micron-thin blade into the crack. Gingerly, taking care not to snap it off, she levered the blade . . . and felt the hatchplate rise maybe an eighth of an inch. That would have to be enough. She set a small slot screwdriver against the raised edge, and pounded it with the heel of her hand, sinking it deep into the plate’s plasticized substrate. She gripped the handle and heaved. Please!

  Click! The upward pressure must have tripped a switch, because a hidden mechanism whirred softly and swung the plate up on its hinges, revealing an access tube with rungs leading down another level.

  Yes! Thank God!

  As Marianna lowered herself into the tube, her eyes swept the room one more time: everything as it had been; no trace of her visit. Then, pausing only long enough to place a small hemisphere of lucite on the deck, she pulled the hatch-cover closed.

  “Jon?” she whispered into her throat mike. “I’m clear.”

  Marianna crouched there in the darkness, watching the feed from the periscope on her miniature display. Watching Grishin step off the last rung of the ladder and stride across the lab. He barely glanced at the workstations, but headed directly to the sealed “microwave oven.” She switched from fisheye to hemispheric and then to close-up mode, minimum distortion, max magnification. She needed to be sure she caught this.

  Grishin punched seven digits into the keypad, too fast for Marianna to catch them all. Never mind, it was recorded. He reached for the insulated oven-mitts hanging alongside the unit and pulled them on. Then he opened the safe and withdrew its contents: that strange cylindrical object she’d glimpsed before.

  Grishin’s gloved hands rotated the thing back and forth around its long axis, to give him a better view of the engravings on its surface. Not good enough, evidently. Even with the object held right up to his eyes, Grishin seemed to be having trouble deciphering whatever message it bore. Finally he took his right glove off, walked over to a nearby electronic whiteboard and began making notes on its surface with a marker, puzzling out letter after letter.

  He pocketed the object then, and stood for a moment examining his transcription. Marianna couldn’t focus on what he had written from this angle, but, judging by the expression on his face, the result pleased him.

  A quick swipe with an eraser, and he strutted to the metal ladder to begin his slow ascent.

  Waiting, so as to give Grishin time to clear the access shaft, Marianna played her flash around her hiding place. One deck below her there was another hatch, identical to the one just above her head. What the hell, recon is recon. She climbed down. This hatch, too, yielded to her proddings, opening onto the top landing of a spiral stair in the midst of a cavernous dark.

  She didn’t have time for this. Couldn’t even be sure if Jon was still on station—just incidental noises coming in over her still-live earphones now. Maybe just a quickie. She swept the coherent beam of her flash once through the chamber. The tight spot of light elongated and warped as it encountered a series of curved surfaces in the darkness. Marianna widened the beam and simultaneously pumped up the illumination to compensate.

  The broad band of light fell on a strangely-shaped giant, part orca, part Yellow Submarine. A bathyscaphe, floating in a moonpool. But what a bathyscaphe! This was no dinky Trieste. It was a monster, the size of a small submarine. What could it be doing down here? How could they ever get it out to launch it?

  Too many mysteries. Marianna’s head was spinning. She needed to work this through with her pet “trained analyst.” She smiled, remembering. But he was pretty good in that department, and—well, Jon had done pretty good all around tonight. For some reason, that last thought gave her an odd, tingly feeling.

  Marianna climbed back up and out of hiding. A glance to be sure she was alone again, then she walked over to the whiteboard. Grishin had wiped the writing clean, but his hand had been heavy; the soft plastic of the electrolytic surface still held a faint imprint. Marianna squinted, tried different angles, couldn’t make it out.

  She thought for a moment, then pulled the fl
ash from her belt again, switched the setting to UV, and played it over the surface. Trace residues of marker-inks fluoresced in the ultraviolet beam, transforming the empty whiteboard into a palimpsest of scrawls. One, the most recent, judging by the way it overwrote the others, stood out.

  ПОИMKA 3/VIII 2247—a Russian word, poimka, unfamiliar both to her and to her handheld, followed by a date and time, Cyrillic style: 10:47 P.M. August 3rd.

  Less than forty-eight hours from now.

  19 | Party Animals

  THE FIRST INKLING Knox had that Marianna was back safe and sound was when she stuck her head in the door connecting their cabins.

  “Come in here, Jon, we need to talk. There was some weird shit down there.”

  He stepped in and stopped. She was pacing up and down, unable to keep still.

  “Are your microelectronic wards still in place?” Her agitation was making him nervous.

  She walked into the bathroom to doublecheck. “The base-unit’s reading all phase inverters in the green. Little Mr. WaterPik’s playing night sounds for the benefit of our listeners. It’s rigged for a separate audio feed, too. Want to hear what ‘we’ sound like?” If Knox didn’t know better, he’d have said she sounded high on something.

  “Stereo snoring? No, thanks.” He spoke too late: Marianna had already hit a concealed switch on the WaterPik recharger.

  The air was filled with audio of indifferent fidelity but fabulously prurient content. Was that supposed to be him and Marianna? Whoever CROM had hired to make the recording, they sure sounded like they’d enjoyed their work. And they sure didn’t sound like lawyers-in-love.

  Marianna blushed and switched the sound back off. “Whew! Distracting. Countermeasures really outdid themselves this time.”

  Knox’s clever comeback died unspoken, slain by the look on her face. Her lovely face. The brown eyes wide, the glossy lips barely parted. He became aware that he was holding his breath, conscious that the two of them were standing there, inches apart, not speaking, as the seconds ticked by. He reached out. Something flared in her eyes.

  “Listen, Marianna—” he began, just as Marianna pounced.

  This was the kiss he’d been fantasizing about. And a whole lot more. Marianna was all over him, pressing herself to him as though life depended on it. Her outfit might scramble light rays, but, judging by the enthusiasm with which she was rubbing against him, it seemed to pass other sensations just fine. Not that that mattered; she was halfway out of it already.

  “God, I hope you’re straight, Jon,” she gasped. Rather than wait for confirmation, she slipped a hand inside his pants. “Oh! Guess that’s a big ‘Yes’ ! Got protection?”

  “Night table, my room,” he managed. They maneuvered each other through the connecting door, down onto his bed.

  Like the take-charge lady she was, Marianna preferred to ride on top. Knox took advantage of the, for him, unaccustomed underdog position to fondle her petite, beautiful breasts. Not for long, though: Marianna would brook no distractions as she worked to scratch her sudden itch. Gripping his hands with unexpected strength, she wrested them from her nipples as she reared back, sliding to and fro, urging—no, ordering—him on and on.

  She pumped him dry, but had yet to find release herself. Discarding the spent condom, she erected him again with fingers, mouth, and force majeur, then resheathed him and reimpaled herself. For Knox, the experience had gone beyond sex by now. It was more like being assaulted by a multi-featured vacuum cleaner—one with the optional clawing and biting attachments.

  After what seemed an eternity, she became utterly still, quivering, aglow with the endless incandescence of her orgasm.

  Marianna sat up and looked around in the dark. Quietly, careful so as not to wake Jon, she lifted back the coverlet and lowered her feet to the floor.

  The time-display on the wall read 2:52 A.M. Its dim blue digits cast just enough light to make out where her jumpsuit lay discarded at the foot of the bed. She bent to retrieve the garment, then rose and tiptoed to the connecting door, breathing shallowly as she could, the reek of her own musk in her nostrils. Slipped through into her stateroom and, without looking back, eased the door shut and locked it behind her.

  Into the bathroom. Shower on full force. Only then, when she was sure she couldn’t be heard from the other room, did she allow herself to burst into tears.

  The morning sun shone through the curtains. Knox rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and rolled over. He reached out an arm in drowsy anticipation of finding Marianna’s slumbering form beside him, but encountered rumpled, unoccupied bedclothes instead. He stretched and looked around him. Marianna was gone, the door to her stateroom shut tight. Hunh!

  He got up, slow and stiff. He felt remarkably good, considering how much he hurt; last night’s flood of endorphins had flushed out of his bloodstream by now, so there was nothing to dull the ache where she’d scratched his shoulders and chest. He shambled to the connecting door and knocked. Knocked again. He looked at the time: 8:23 A.M. She might be at breakfast already.

  She was. When Knox got to the outdoor dining area twenty minutes later, Marianna, clad in sweats, was sitting at a table sipping orange juice. A magazine sat propped open in front of her, its pages fluttering in the wisps of breeze that managed to circumvent the wind-baffles. She returned his “good morning” without looking up.

  Uh-oh. Cold, gray light of dawn syndrome.

  Well, if there’s no opening, make one. He glanced at the magazine’s cover. “Predprinimatef?” Entrepreneur, the mouthpiece of Russia’s right-wing business community. “Your Russian really up to that?”

  She made no response, just kept on flipping pages, too fast to be reading them.

  “Marianna, what’s going on? No, put the magazine down and look at me!”

  “Jon, it happened. Let’s leave it at that, okay?” Still no eye contact.

  “But . . .” Knox was seldom if ever at a loss for words. Except around Marianna. “Listen, the next time we have a fight, you’ve got to tell me, so I can at least attend.”

  She was standing by this time, still looking past him. She looked beautiful in her sweats, her face still flushed from her morning workout. She looked beautiful in anything, and nothing. She said quietly, “We’re not going to talk about it right now.”

  She met his eyes then, flashed him one of her endearing back-off-or-I’ll-break-your-arm looks, and walked over to the aft rail.

  Marianna stood looking out at, but not seeing, Rusalka’s churning wake. She wasn’t being fair. It wasn’t Jon’s fault she’d gone off the deep end last night. That damn Countermeasures recording had pushed her over the edge. And when the rush hit, Jon was just the nearest body equipped with a phallus. All her training and experience taught her to use whatever tools were to hand. Well, she’d gone and done so . . .

  If only she hadn’t been so damned horny to begin with! Had to’ve been that close call with Grishin in the lab. There were studies about that in the literature, weren’t there? “Post-Imperilment Euphoria,” they called it—PIE for short. Shared danger triggers the reproductive urge, and it’s “Wham, bam, thank you Sam!”

  If the acronym fits, wear it. She certainly felt as if she had “pie” all over her face this morning.

  Shit, shit, shit!

  The worst part was, she’d been starting to like the guy. Liked the way he’d kept his cool and run that conversational riff on Sasha last night, saved both their butts most likely. Not to mention the chutzpah it had taken to send Yuri out for tea!

  And he’d wanted to go on the raid itself in her place. Him trying to protect her. Silly, but sweet.

  Three weeks back in D.C. and all this would be a fading memory. Her problem, their problem, was to get through the next three days. No way could she deal with this now. She had to stay focused on the job at hand, keep things on a professional level.

  And on that level, she needed him. For somebody who’d started out the quintessential fifth wheel, he’d made himself s
urprisingly useful. Especially that little pattern trick he did. She needed his input. Bad choice of words. She needed his perspective on the data she’d gathered last night.

  Once she’d sorted it all out, she could see there was no help for it: She’d just have to set her feelings aside—or keep them in check, not sure which—for the duration.

  She turned and walked back to the table where Jon was sullenly perusing the pages of Predprinimatel’.

  Knox had to keep reminding himself it’d only taken Marianna fifty minutes to reconnoiter the secret lab. You’d never know it from how much of the morning her interminable post-mortem had already chewed through. Of course, it would have gone faster if she hadn’t insisted on freeze-framing the damned video every time another damned line of Cyrillic scrolled across another damned workstation screen, or on having Knox squint and translate the barely legible text. But try telling her that.

  His eyes were watering in earnest by the time they got to the end, but he sat up and took notice nonetheless. Marianna had saved the best for last.

  “And here’s the final sequence: Grishin puzzling out that message on the cylinder,” she said as she switched to the footage she’d shot from hiding. The presentation concluded with a still of the cryptic inscription itself glowing purple against the whiteboard in the UV light of Marianna’s pocket flash: ПОИMKA 3/VIII 2247.

  Show over, Marianna retreated back to the armchair in the far corner of the stateroom. Knox got the feeling that, if this meeting could have been held from the opposing baselines of Rusalka’s indoor tennis court, she’d have opted for that.

  She sat erect in her corner chair, dressed in black jeans and a Hamilton College sweatshirt. Prim. Proper. Knees locked tight together. Not the slightest whiff of languor.

  She was talking to him, at least, but she’d raised shields again. Back to day one: cool, neutral, businesslike. A normal client relationship, really. It was the last few days that had been atypical. To say nothing of last night.