“This is Nataraja,” Ajit said. “Shiva dancing.”
“Ajit—”
“No, I am not a god worshipper,” he smiled. “You know me better than that, Tirzah. Hinduism has many gods—thousands—but they are, except to the ignorant, no more than embodiments of different aspects of reality. Shiva is the dance of creation and destruction, the constant flow of energy in the cosmos. Birth and death and rebirth. It seemed fitting to bring him to the galactic core, where so much goes on of all three.”
This explanation sounded weak to me—a holo of Shiva would have accomplished the same thing, without using up nearly all of Ajit’s weight allotment. Before I could say this, Ajit said, “This statue has been in my family for four hundred years. I must bring it home, along with the answers to my scientific questions.”
I don’t understand Ajit’s scientific concerns very well—or Kane’s—but I know down to my bones how much they matter to him. It is my job to know. Ajit carries within his beautiful body a terrible coursing ambition, a river fed by the longings of a poor family who have sacrificed what little they had gained on New Bombay for this favored son. Ajit is the receptacle into which they have poured so much hope, so much sacrifice, so much selfishness. The strain on that vessel is what makes Ajit’s lovemaking so gentle. He cannot afford to crack.
“You’ll bring the Shiva statue back to New Bombay,” I said softly, “and your answers, too.”
In his hands, with the bright lighting, the bronze statue cast a dancing shadow on his naked body.
I found Kane at his terminal, so deep in thought that he didn’t know I was there until I squeezed his shoulder. Then he jumped, cursed, and dragged his eyes from his displays.
“How does it progress, Kane?”
“It doesn’t. How could it? I need more data!”
“It will come. Be patient,” I said.
He rubbed his left ear, a constant habit when he’s irritated, which is much of the time. When he’s happily excited, Kane runs his left hand through his coarse red hair until it stands up like flames. Now he smiled ruefully. “I’m not much known for patience.”
“No, you’re not.”
“But you’re right, Tirzah. The data will come. It’s just hard waiting for the first minicap. I wish to hell we could have more than three. Goddamn cheap bureaucrats! At an acceleration of—”
“Don’t give me the figures again,” I said. I wound my fingers in his hair and pulled playfully. “Kane, I came to ask you a favor.”
“All right,” he said instantly. Kane never counts costs ahead of time. Ajit would have turned gently cautious. “What is it?”
“I want you to learn to play go with Ajit.”
He scowled. “Why?”
With Kane, you must have your logic ready. He would do any favor I asked, but unless he can see why, compliance would be grudging at best. “First, because go will help you pass the time until the first minicap arrives, in doing something other than chewing the same data over and over again until you’ve masticated it into tastlessness. Second, because the game is complex enough that I think you’ll enjoy it. Third, because I’m not too bad at it myself but Ajit is better, and I think you will be, too, so I can learn from both of you.”
And fourth, I didn’t say aloud, because Ajit is a master, he will beat you most of the time, and he needs the boost in confidence.
Ajit is not the scientist that Kane is. Practically no one in the settled worlds is the scientist that Kane is. All three of us know this, but none of us have ever mentioned it, not even once. There are geniuses who are easy for the inferior to work with, who are generous enough to slow down their mental strides to the smaller steps of the merely gifted. Kane is not one of them.
“Go,” Kane says thoughtfully. “I have friends who play that.”
This was a misstatement. Kane does not have friends, in the usual sense. He has colleagues, he has science, and he has me.
He smiled at me, a rare touch of sweet gratitude on his handsome face. “Thanks, Tirzah. I’ll play with Ajit. You’re right, it will pass the time until the probe sends back the prelim data. And if I’m occupied, maybe I’ll be less of a monster to you.”
“You’re fine to me,” I say, giving his hair another tug, grinning with the casual flippancy he prefers. “Or if you’re not, I don’t care.”
Kane laughs. In moments like this, I am especially careful that my own feelings don’t show. To either of them.
We automatically woke after the hyperjump. For reasons I don’t understand, a hyperjump isn’t instantaneous, perhaps because it’s not really a “jump” but a Calabi-Yau dimension tunnel. Several days’ ship-time had passed, and the probe now drifted less than five light-years from the galactic core. The probe, power off, checked out perfectly; the shielding had held even better than expected. And so had we. My eyes widened as I studied the wardroom displays.
On the Kepler, dust clouds had softened and obscured the view. Here, nothing did. We drifted just outside a star that had begun its deadly spiral inward toward Sag A*. Visuals showed the full deadly glory around the hole: the hot blue cluster of IRS16. The giant red star IRS7 with its long tail distended by stellar winds. The stars already past the point of no return, pulled by the gravity of Sag A* inexorably toward its event horizon. The radio, gamma-ray, and infrared displays revealed even more, brilliant with the radiation pouring from every single gorgeous, lethal object in the bright sky.
And there, too, shone one of the mysteries Kane and Ajit had come to study: the massive young stars that were not being yanked toward Sag A*, and which in this place should have been neither massive nor relatively stable. Such stars should not exist this close to the hole. One star, Kane had told me, was as close to the hole as twice Pluto’s orbit from Sol. How had it gotten there?
“It’s beautiful, in a hellish way,” I said to Ajit and Kane. “I want to go up to the observatory and see it direct.”
“The observatory!” Kane said scornfully. “I need to get to work!” He sat down at his terminal.
None of this is true, of course. There is no observatory on the probe, and I can’t climb the ladder “up” to it. Nor is there a wardroom with terminals, chairs, table, displays, a computer. We are the computer, or rather we are inside it. But the programs running along with us make it all seem as real as the fleshy versions of ourselves on the Kepler. This, it was determined by previous disastrous experience in space exploration, is necessary to keep us sane and stable. Human uploads need this illusion, this shadow reality, and we accept it easily. Why not? It’s the default setting for our minds.
So Kane “sat” “at” his “terminal” to look at the preliminary data from the sensors. So did Ajit, and I “went” “upstairs” to the observatory, where I gazed outward for a long time.
I—the other “I,” the one on the Kepler—grew up on a station in the Oort Cloud, Sol System. Space is my natural home. I don’t really understand how mud-dwellers live on planets, or why they would want to, at the bottom of a murky and dirty shroud of uncontrollable air. I have learned to simulate understanding planetary love, because it is my job. Both Kane and Ajit come from rocks, Ajit from New Bombay, and Kane from Terra herself. They are space scientists, but not real spacers.
No mud-dweller ever really sees the stars. And no human being had ever seen what I saw now, the frantic heart of the human universe.
Eventually I went back downstairs, rechecked ship’s data, and then sat at the wardroom table and took up my embroidery. The ancient, irrelevant cloth-ornamenting is very soothing, almost as much so as gardening, although of course that’s not why I do it. All first-class Nurturers practice some humble handicraft. It allows you to closely observe people while appearing absorbed and harmless.