Ajit grew more focused, too. Even more intent on winning, even as he began to lose a few games. More slyly gleeful when he did win. He flicked his winning piece onto the board with a turn of the wrist in which I read both contempt and fear.
I tried everything I could to intervene, every trick from a century of experience. Nothing worked. Sex only made it worse. Ajit regarded sex as an earned prize, Kane as a temporary refreshment so he could return to the games.
One night Ajit brought out the statue of Shiva and put it defiantly on the wardroom table. It took up two-thirds of the space, a wide metal circle enclosing the four-armed dancer.
“What’s that?” Kane said, looking up from the game board. “Oh, God, it’s a god.”
I said quickly, “It’s an intellectual concept. The flow of cosmic energy in the universe.”
Kane laughed, not maliciously, but I saw Ajit’s eyes light up. Ajit said, “I want it here.”
Kane shrugged. “Fine by me. Your turn, Ajit.”
Wrong, wrong. Ajit had hoped to disturb Kane, to push him into some open objection to the statue. Ajit wanted a small confrontation, some outlet to emphasize his gloating. Some outlet for his growing unease as Kane’s game improved. And some outlet for his underlying rage, always just under the surface, at Kane, the better scientist. The statue was supposed to be an assertion, even a slap in the face: I am here and I take up a lot of your space. Notice that!
Instead, Kane had shrugged and dismissed it.
I said, “Tell me again, Ajit, about Nataraja. What’s the significance of the flames on the great circle?”
Ajit said quietly, “They represent the fire that destroys the world.”
Kane said, “Your turn, Ajit.”
Such a small incident. But deep in my mind, where I was aware of it but not yet overtly affected, fear stirred.
I was losing control here.
Then the first minicap of data arrived.
Mind uploads are still minds. They are not computer programs in the sense that other programs are. Although freed of biological constraints such as enzymes that create sleep, hunger, and lust, uploads are not free of habit. In fact, it is habit that creates enough structure to keep all of us from frenzied feedback loops. On the probe, my job was to keep habit strong. It was the best safeguard for those brilliant minds.
“Time to sleep, gentlemen,” I said lightly. We had been gathered in the wardroom for sixteen hours straight, Kane and Ajit at their terminals, me sitting quietly, watching them. I have powers of concentration equal in degree, though not in kind, to their own. They do not suspect this. It has been hours since I put down my embroidery, but neither noticed.
“Tirzah, not sleep now!” Kane snapped.
“Now.”
He looked up at me like a sulky child. But Kane is not a child; I don’t make that mistake. He knows an upload has to shut down for the cleansing program to run, a necessity to catch operating errors before they grow large enough to impair function. With all the radiation bathing the probe, the program is more necessary than ever. It takes a few hours to run through. I control the run cues.
Ajit looked at me expectantly. It was his night. This, too, was part of habit, as well as being an actual aid to their work. More than one scientist in my care has had that critical flash of intuition on some scientific problem while in my arms. Upload sex, like its fleshy analogue, both stimulates and relaxes.
“All right, all right,” Kane muttered. “Good night.”
I shut him down and turned to Ajit.
We went to his bunk. Ajit was tense, stretched taut with data and with sixteen hours with Kane. But I was pleased to see how completely he responded to me. Afterward, I asked him to explain the prelim data to me.
“And keep it simple, please. Remember who you’re talking to!”
“To an intelligent and sweet lady,” he said, and I gave him the obligatory smile. But he saw that I really did want to know about the data.
“The massive young stars are there when they should not be… Kane has explained all this to you, I know.”
I nodded.
“They are indeed young, not mashed-together old stars. We have verified that. We are trying now to gather and run data to examine the other two best theories: a fluctuating ring of matter spawning stars, or other black holes.”
“How are you examining the theories?”
He hesitated, and I knew he was trying to find explanations I could understand. “We are running various programs, equations, and sims. We are also trying to determine where to jump the probe next—you know about that.”
Of course I did. No one moves this ship without my consent. It has two more jumps left in its power pack, and I must approve them both.
“We need to choose a spot from which we can fire beams of various radiation to assess the results. The heavier beams won’t last long here, you know—the gravity of the superhole distorts them.” He frowned.
“What is it, Ajit? What about gravity?”
“Kane was right,” he said, “the mass detectors aren’t damaged. They’re showing mass nearby, not large but detectable, that isn’t manifesting anything but gravity. No radiation of any kind.”
“A black hole,” I suggested.
“Too small. Small black holes radiate away, Hawking showed that long ago. The internal temperature is too high. There are no black holes smaller than three solar masses. The mass detectors are showing something much smaller than that.”
“What?”
“We don’t know.”
“Were all the weird mass-detector readings in the prelim data you sent back to the Kepler?”
“Of course,” he said, a slight edge in his voice.
I pulled him closer. “I can always rely on you,” I said, and I felt his body relax.
I shut us down, as we lay in each other’s arms.
It was Ajit who, the next day, noticed the second anomaly. And I who noticed the third.
“These gas orbits aren’t right,” Ajit said to Kane. “And they’re getting less right all the time.”
Kane moved to Ajit’s terminal. “Tell me.”
“The infalling gases from the circumnuclear disk… see… they curve here, by the western arm of Sag A West…”
“It’s wind from the IRS16 cluster,” Kane said instantly. “I got updated readings for those yesterday.”
“No, I already corrected for that,” Ajit said.
“Then maybe magnetization from IRS7, or—”
They were off again. I followed enough to grasp the general problem. Gases streamed at enormous speeds from clouds beyond the circumnuclear disk which surrounded the entire core like a huge doughnut. These streaming gases were funneled by various forces into fairly narrow, conelike paths. The gases would eventually end up circling the black hole, spiraling inward and compressing to temperatures of billions of degrees before they were absorbed by the maw of the hole. The processes were understood.
But the paths weren’t as predicted. Gases were streaming down wrong, approaching the hole wrong for predictions made from all the forces acting on them.
Ajit finally said to Kane, “I want to move the probe earlier than we planned.”
“Wait a moment,” I said instantly. Ship’s movements were my decision. “It’s not yet the scheduled time.”