Remembering his role, Daisuke cleared his throat. “Support?”
“Yes. Consider this a dry run. A first step. Once the mission is over and we’ve returned to base, I will have the resources to expand my presence on Junction.” Farhad caught Anne’s twitch and said, “I don’t mean I’ll open a hotel. I’m talking about a research and conservation station. A real one, not some military boondoggle that never actually gets built. And it will have you as its director.”
Anne stared at him. Daisuke held his breath.
Farhad put his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “You’re an explorer, Anne. Please, help me explore too.”
Anne shook her head as if waking herself up from a pleasant dream.
She thunked her index finger down on the table.
“I want a firm contract,” she said. “And in that contract I want to be guaranteed independence. A lot of independence. You don’t know what’s interesting. I decide what’s worth pursuing.”
“Literally pursuing, I’m sure.” Crow’s feet deepened as Farhad smiled. “And I can’t wait to see you chasing creatures across the landscape. You will have your independence, Anne. It’s already in the draft contract. The only caveat is that you have to stay in or close to the mobile lab. Food and fuel constraints demand a strict schedule.”
“And the NDA, of course,” said Aimi.
Farhad did not so much as flicker an eyelash. “Of course.”
Had the two of them rehearsed that reveal? If so, they hadn’t included Daisuke in the loop. He leaned forward. “What are the terms of the NDA?”
“No announcement of new discoveries until we arrive back at Imsame. I have final say over the contents of the first press conference. After that, you can say whatever you want.” Farhad turned up his hands, as if releasing birds.
“That sounds generous,” Anne said.
Daisuke frowned. Was it too generous? But what a fool he would look if he set this meeting up, dragged Anne to it, then backed out now. He shook his head.
“All right,” said Anne. “Who’s my team going to be? You’ll need a lot of specialists. Biochemists, biomechanics people, medical researchers if you want to do anything with drugs. I’ve been working with some people who I can recommend….”
She trailed off. Farhad had put his palms up and was shaking his head sadly. “Not on this trip, I’m afraid. I’m sorry, Anne, but you know the political situation. If the Farside Administration lets us field our big research team, they’ll have to greenlight every other big research team, including those teams from, gasp, China. A big research station would give everyone an advantage, which means no advantage for one power relative to any other. Therefore every individual power will drag its feet, hoping to stumble across a strategic advantage that will allow it shove aside the competition and take the whole pie.” He sighed at the foolishness of shortsighted politicians. “But the current deadlock can’t last forever, can it? Some time soon the way will be open for civilian research stations. Like yours.”
He cleared his throat.
“Then, of course you’ll have your pick of the world’s talent. For this expedition, however, we’ll need to travel light. Aside from myself and Aimi, we’ll have a crew of six, not counting the Nun. You and Daisuke are the last puzzle piece.”
Emotions warred on Anne’s face. She knew she couldn’t do much real science without other scientists, but the last year had seen a chill set in between Anne and her colleagues. Envy, Daisuke said. Anne didn’t know if he was right or not, but she had started inventing reasons to not appear at conferences.
That was why Farhad’s offer was so important. This way Anne wouldn’t have to bum around the army base. She could be out on the frontier. She could have Junction all to herself. She’d never have to leave.
“I’m not looking for a repeat of my last trip to Junction,” Anne said, as if she’d heard Daisuke’s thoughts. “I’m not in the mood for another life-or-death struggle with the aliens while someone tries to kill me, again with the aliens.”
“Of course not,” Farhad said. “I’m not even chartering a flight. My mission will be conducted in a nice, safe ground vehicle. A mobile lab and dormitory, supplied with everything we need and sealed against the elements.”
“A caravan, in other words,” said Anne, but Daisuke could tell she liked the idea.
“I believe the chassis was a Class A motor home, attached to what in the States is called a camping trailer,” said Farad. “But I do like the word caravan. It has a Silk Road ring to it.”
“The Wormhole Road?” suggested Aimi, scribbling on her tablet. “The Alien Way?”
“And it’s fully stocked,” Farhad said. “Microscope, dissecting table, liquid nitrogen, freezers, a mass spectrometer. Everything.”
“What the hell would I do with a mass spectrometer?” Anne said. “Naw, ditch the mass spec, and add another freezer. Something that can go down to minus 190. And do you have a 4C fridge? And was that a dissecting microscope?”
Farhad grinned. “It certainly can be, Anne. Anything else you would like to add to your order?”
Daisuke couldn’t help himself. “I’m so happy,” he said. “This will be like a pre-honeymoon.”
He didn’t even worry when Anne looked shifty. Maybe she wasn’t convinced that agreeing to marry him had been a good idea? Then Daisuke would convince her! Once they were back in the wilderness, he could do anything.
***
Farhad smiled and waved as the couple walked away. He projected calm, but his real expression grew under his mask of polite interest, what his wife called his ‘manticore’s smile’.
“All right,” said Aimi. “All right. You did it.”
Farhad looked up at the sky – no good if Houlihan turned and saw him grinning at her – and breathed out a great gust of air, as if to scatter the clouds. “Yes.”
With his next in-breath, he gathered his energy, pulling it back into the safety of his body. As if aiming a cannon, he lowered his face and turned it toward his mentee. “Now tell me how I did it.”
Farhad rubbed his hands together impatiently as she glanced down at her tablet. His fingers drummed on the vacuum-spinner’s box and his knee bounced as if under a grandchild.
“One,” she said. “What was the best outcome?”
Farhad checked his coffee cup. Empty. He really shouldn’t order another, or he’d be unable to nap, and his ten p.m. with Fort Bragg would be suboptimal.
“Convincing Dr. Houlihan to come aboard,” Aimi continued.“Check.”
Farhad shook his head. “That wasn’t the best outcome. What I wanted was to win her heart, but I failed. Why?”
Aimi frowned down at her tablet.
“The answer isn’t in your notes,” said Farhad, so Aimi looked up instead of down, cocking her head in a gesture that would look great on the cover of a women-in-business magazine.
Farhad had chosen Aimi to be his mentee partly because she was better than ninety-five percent of the other candidates, and partly because her looks put other people on the wrong foot. Women were envious of her, men of Farhad, and everyone assumed the two of them were sleeping together. They weren’t, which made Farhad feel powerful.
“You didn’t value-align,” she said. “You only seemed to.”
“Yes. Go on. Why?”
“Your black swans,” Aimi said. “You told her hardly anything about the real mission.”
“No more than her poor fiancé told her about this meeting. Why weren’t we more forthright?”
“Well, because she would have said no.”
“At the very least. She’d probably inform the authorities and have us arrested.” Farhad’s knee bounced. What he could use now was a walk. It was good to feel so much energy.
“Well, how do you value-align if you can’t tell the other person what your real mission is?” she asked.
“How do you build trust if you can’t trust someone?”
“What you do is you change the terrain,” said Farhad. “Here, on Earth, real synergy with Ms. Houlihan is impossible. On Junction, however, out of range of communications networks, things will be different.” He stood. “Come on, let’s take a walk. I’ll need to work out some of this energy before my nap.”
Chapter Three
Holes
Under the ground of the highlands of Indonesia, a portal waited to open. Around that hole in the universe, pitiful human machinery clanked and gurgled.
Professor Dohyun Moon listened impatiently, his fists clenched, his teeth grinding, his eyes on a little red light. When would it ever turn green?
The light indicated the status of a hatch. The hatch blocked a portal that had sat here in the New Guinea highlands for as long as there had been any New Guinea highlands. A well of cosmic mystery, the greatest discovery since the stars themselves, and what had people done when they discovered it? Fought a territorial skirmish over it, then built this concrete nest on top of it.
The Indonesians had fortified the portal on their territory, dug the ground out from under it, lined the well they’d made with metal, and filled the well with water. Right now, that water was being pumped out according to principles understood since Archimedes. Never mind the question of how the portal knew when the water was gone. Never mind how it decided what should pass through it in the first place. The authorities were a bunch of narrow-minded primates who cared more about restricting the movements of other primates than about the destruction of everything Moon thought he understood about the cosmos and his place in it.
The speaker on the wall crackled. “Professor Moon? I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that.”
He’d been muttering. It would be a waste of time to explain why, and Moon had so little time left. He shouldn’t have to waste his life on this hatch with its little red light. He shouldn’t have had to tie himself in knots all through those interminable layovers between flights in primitive human aircraft. Moon should not have had to stand there, uselessly, in that hospital in Seoul, while his father took an unbearable eternity to die.
“Professor Moon?”
“It’s not important,” Moon said. “I was talking to myself.” He tried to control his breathing. He gave up. “How much longer do I have to wait?”
“Any moment now, Professor.”
In fact it was another two minutes before Moon felt the shift in his balance. His inner organs sank as the corridor seemed to tilt.
Moon stumbled, catching himself on the door, which had gained an apparent forward cant. A gravity gradient. The interaction between the Earth’s vector of gravitational acceleration and that of a distant exoplanet.
And what the hell did that imply? That gravitons existed after all? That space-time didn’t know it ought to warp until something came out of the portal and told it to? That this information could tunnel instantly under the horizon of the universe and turn the stomach of an impatient monkey on Earth? A monkey that would lose its mind before it died, as well.
It shouldn’t be possible for a life to come so suddenly to a stop. Where did the energy go?
Moon made fists against the door, visor white with ragged breath.
“Professor Moon, please wait until the light turns green,” said the voice from the wall.
He kept his mouth shut. Closed his eyes. Sight and speech were both pointless, and never mind the gravitons. Just calculate the vectors. Moon breathed. One vector points toward the center of the Earth, and the other points to the portal. Or rather, through the portal. To Junction.
Moon took a step back and his nausea abated. The pull of Junction faded. Another step back and he could hardly feel it at all. How did that work? How could it? Gravity should vary with the square of distance, forming an elegant asymptotic curve. Not this stupid little funnel. According to what Moon understood about how gravity worked, everyone on Earth ought to feel it when the portal opened and gravity from Junction leaked through.
Clearly, then, what Moon understood about gravity was wrong.
At least he had the grace to admit as much. Wormholes, the idiots in the media called the portals. If this thing in New Guinea really was two black holes joined by a throat, their gravity would rip Moon apart. He would fall forever into an inescapable gullet of stretched time. Outside observers would see Moon slow, but never stop; approach, but never reach the event horizon. Each breath taking longer to come than the last. The space between each heartbeat stretching.
And what would Moon, himself, experience? One might as well ask what Moon’s father experienced as his disease converted his consciousness into noise. As useless a question as ‘Don’t you recognize me?’ or ‘Did you get yourself tested?’ or ‘Why did it have to be so soon?’
There was no cure for the disease Moon and his father shared. There were only the inescapable laws of heredity. You could scream your question into the sky, or a hole in the ground, but you’d never get an answer.
The speaker bleeped like a heart monitor. Moon started, opened his eyes to the fog on the inside of his visor. His biocontainment suit seemed to constrict around him, pinching him at elbows and knees. He itched to rip the pointless thing off.
“Professor Moon, you are cleared to enter the wormhole,” said the speaker.
Yes. Yes. The light was green.
“Finally.” Moon put out his hands and touched the door, which gave a heavy clank as interior bolts drew back.
He pushed, grunted, then realized the problem and pulled, feeling like an idiot.
“There is a ladder inside,” the voice said. “Climb down the ladder to the wormhole.”
“I know!” said Moon. Climb down the ladder, meet Farhad, get out of range of the American army’s surveillance, and then, finally, begin his experiments. Crack portal physics.
The metal rungs slipped in Moon’s gloved grasp, but he gripped harder and slowly leaned out over the edge of the door. The ladder descended a meter or so, then seemed to stretch, bulge, rip apart, and recombine itself. Moon might have thought he was looking at a reflection in a warped mirror, except for the fact that his own image was missing. At the far end of the shaft, light shone through an open doorway on another world.
Moon forced his hands to stop trembling. He had no time to waste on awe or dread. He just had to go. Leave the Earth like he had left that hospital room. What would have been the point of saying goodbye? His father had been entirely unresponsive to the voices around him. The outside world fell into the man’s eyes, and nothing came out.
“Professor Moon? Please proceed through the wormhole.”
Moon twitched. “Yes. Of course.”
Furious with himself for wasting time, Moon swung himself through the door and onto the ladder. It wobbled slightly under his new, nearly doubled weight. Where did that energy come from? Where did it go?
Nothing about portals made sense. Things just went through one face and came out the other, no matter where. A portal could take him a million light-years away. A portal could take him to the past, or to the interior of a black hole.
His blood pounded in his ears and his weight continued to increase. He should be torn apart and crushed under a falling sky. He would be, if this were a real wormhole, if everything Moon understood about the universe were true.
How, then, was his understanding wrong?
Moon descended, imagining someone climbing down through a portal into a black hole. And then, impossibly – miraculously! – leaving.
***
The rows of cages extended for maybe thirty meters. That was smaller than the defensive perimeter around the Farside Base, smaller than the length of the plane that had flown them into the New Guinea highlands. To Anne, though, if you added up the flight from Sapporo to Jakarta, Jakarta to Jayapura, Jayapura to Nearside Base, and the wormhole drop down
who knew how many light-years to the planet Junction, the walk between the animal cages was still the longest.
The cages had been stacked three or four high, and lined up to form a sort of gauntlet along the path that led from the Farside Base to what once had been the village of Imsame. Made of green saplings cut apart and tied back together with wire or wickerwork, the cages gave any jet- and wormhole-lagged newcomer an excellent view of the animals inside.
Here was a land-aster from the Lighthouse biome, like a giant plastic-shelled starfish. There, a scaly bug-like reaper from the Sweet Blood biome stood under the dried skin of a dire shmoo from the glasslands. Anne had watched one of these things kill somebody, but looking at this spiny silicone sack, she felt only exhausted sorrow. She registered a turtle and a shivering tree-kangaroo before she had to close her eyes. But still the animals cried out. They stank. They suffered, palpably.
“What’s this?” asked Daisuke, and Anne put out her hand to push him forward.
“Don’t stop,” she said. “Don’t look. Don’t engage or someone will try to sell you one of these poor things.” Then what would she do, caught between the moral imperative to relieve suffering and the market incentive she would create if she gave this bastard any money? She weighed an extra twenty-five kilos on Junction and she wanted to lie down.
“Hello!” said an Indonesian-accented voice. “You like that eagle?”
“Hmm,” Daisuke said, which wasn’t a no at all.
Anne opened her eyes so she could glare at Daisuke’s back. “What, is this your first animal market? I said don’t engage.”
“You might be interested in this bird,” Daisuke said, and you could practically hear the cash-register noises from the merchant.
“No, Daisuke. I’m trying not to look at it,” Anne ground out. “If I do, I’ll feel how bad it feels, and I’ll want to fucking buy it.”
“Bad?” The merchant’s breath puffed on her face and Anne’s eyes popped open. “They don’t feel bad,” he declared. “My animals are all safe.”
Anne cursed. Behind her, Farhad chuckled.
Interchange Page 4
