The Best of Nancy Kress

  “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…

  The automatic maintenance program kicked in and the wardroom re-appeared. 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 mini-cap left to send back to the Kepler, and one more jump for our-selves. 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, para-noid, 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 mini-cap 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 Sgr 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 mini-cap. 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 mini-cap with whatever you’ve got, and 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 mini-cap 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 mini-cap.” 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 three point one, but I can’t remember after that.”

  I said, through the tightness in my throat, “Three point one four one. 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 Sgr A*.

  13. SHIP

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

  The third mini-cap 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 Sgr 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 back-up 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 back-up 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 back-up 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 mini-cap 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 mini-cap 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, any-way.”

  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 Sgr 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 we’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 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.”

  No dissension. I saw that both of them dreaded some long, drawn-out discussion of group dynamics, never a topic that goes down well with astrophysicists. Kane said abruptly, “I still want to move the ship.”

  I had prepared myself for this. “No, Kane. We’re not jumping closer in.”

  He caught at my loophole. “Then can we jump to another location at the same distance from the core? Maybe measurements from another base point would help.”

  “We’re not jumping anywhere until I’m sure the third mini-cap isn’t coming.”

  “How long will that be?” I could see the formidable intelligence under the childish tantrums already racing ahead, planning measurements, weighing options.

  “We’ll give it another three days.”

  “All right.” Suddenly he smiled, his first in days. “Thanks, Tirzah.”

  I turned to Ajit. “Ajit, what can we do for your work? What do you need?”

  “I ask for nothing,” he said, with such a strange, intense, unread-able expression that for a moment I felt irrational fear. Then he stood and went into his bunk. I heard the door lock.

  I had failed again.

  No alarm went off in the middle of the night. There was nothing overt to wake me. But I woke anyway, and I heard someone moving quietly around the wardroom. The muscles of my right arm tensed to open my bunk, and I forced them to still.

  Something wasn’t right. Intuition, that mysterious shadow of rational thought, told me to lie motionless. To not open my bunk, to not even reach out and access the ship’s data on my bunk screen. To not move at all.

  Why?

  I didn’t know.

  The smell of coffee wafted from the wardroom. So one of the men couldn’t sleep, made some coffee, turned on his terminal. So what?

  Don’t move, said that pre-reasoning part of my mind, from the shadows.

  The coffee smell grew stronger. A chair scraped. Ordinary, mundane sounds.

  Don’t move.

  I didn’t have to move. This afternoon I had omitted to mention to Kane and Ajit those times that certification boards had mis-judged, or been bribed, or just been too dazzled by well-earned reputations to look below the work to the worker. Those times in which the cramped conditions of space, coupled with swollen egos and frenzied work, had led to disaster for a mission Nurturer. But we had learned. My bunk had equipment th
e scientists did not know about.

  Carefully I slid my gaze to a spot directly above me on the bunk ceiling. Only my eyes moved. I pattern-blinked: two quick, three beats closed, two quick, a long steady stare. The screen brightened.

  This was duplicate ship data. Not a back-up; it was entirely separate, made simultaneously from the same sensors as the main log but routed into separate, free-standing storage that could not be reached from the main computer. Scientists are all sophisticated users. There is no way to keep data from any who wish to alter it except by discreet, unknown, untraceable storage. I pattern-blinked, not moving so much as a finger or a toe in the bed, to activate various screens of ship data.

  It was easy to find.

  Yesterday, at 1850 hours, the mini-cap bay had opened and received a mini-cap. Signal had failed to transmit to the main computer. Today at 300 hours, which was fifteen minutes ago, the mini-cap bay had been opened manually and the payload removed. Again signal had failed to the main computer.

  The infrared signature in the wardroom, seated at his terminal, was Ajit.

  It was possible the signal failures were coincidental, and Ajit was even now transferring data from the third mini-cap into the computer, enjoying a cup of hot coffee while he did so, gloating in getting a perfectly legitimate jump on Kane. But I didn’t think so.

  What did I think?

  I didn’t have to think; I just knew. I could see it unfolding, clear as a holovid. All of it. Ajit had stolen the second mini-cap, too. That had been the morning after Kane and I had slept so soundly, the morning after Ajit had given us wine to celebrate Kane’s shadow-matter theory. What had been in that wine? We’d slept soundly, and Ajit told us that the mini-cap had come before we were awake. Ajit said he’d already put it into the computer. It carried the Kane upload’s apology that the prelim data, the data from which Kane had constructed his shadow-matter thesis, was wrong, contaminated by a radiation strike.