“Shadow matter,” I said, tasting the words on my tongue. It sounded too bizarre to take seriously, but Kane was insistent.
“The theory’s been around for centuries, but deGroot pretty much discredited it in 2086,” Kane said. “He—”
“If it’s been discredited, then why—” I began.
“I said ‘pretty much,’” Kane said. “There were always some mathematical anomalies with deGroot’s work. And we can see now where he was wrong. He—”
Kane and Ajit started to explain why deGroot was wrong, but I interrupted. “No, don’t digress so much! Let me just tell you what I think I understood from what you said.”
I was silent a moment, gathering words. Both men waited impatiently, Kane running his hand through his hair, Ajit smiling widely. I said, “You said there’s a theory that just after the Big Bang, gravity somehow decoupled from the other forces in the universe, just as matter decoupled from radiation. At the same time, you scientists have known for two centuries that there doesn’t seem to be enough matter in the universe to make all your equations work. So scientists posited a lot of ‘dark matter’ and a lot of black holes, but none of the figures added up right anyway.
“And right now, neither do the orbits of the infalling gas, or the probe’s drift, or the fact that massive young stars were forming that close to the black hole without being ripped apart by tidal forces. The forces acting on the huge clouds that have to condense to form stars that big.”
I took a breath, quick enough so that neither had time to break in and distract me with technicalities.
“But now you think that if gravity did decouple right after the Big Bang—”
“About 10-43 seconds after,” Ajit said helpfully. I ignored him.
“—then two types of matter were created, normal matter and ‘shadow matter.’ It’s sort of like matter and antimatter, only normal matter and shadow matter can’t interact except by gravity. No interaction through any other force, not radiation or strong or weak forces. Only gravity. That’s the only effect shadow matter has on our universe. Gravity.
“And a big chunk of this stuff is there on the other side of Sag A West. It’s exerting enough gravity to affect the path of the infalling gas. And to affect the probe’s drift. And even to affect the young stars because the shadow matter-thing’s exerting a counterpull on the massive star clouds, and that’s keeping them from being ripped apart by the hole as soon as they otherwise would be. So they have time to collapse into young stars.”
“Well, that’s sort of it, but you’ve left out some things that alter and validate the whole,” Kane said impatiently, scowling.
“Yes, Tirzah, dear heart, you don’t see the—you can’t just say that ‘counter-pull’—let me try once more.”
They were off again, but this time I didn’t listen. So maybe I hadn’t seen the theory whole, but only glimpsed its shadow. It was enough.
They had a viable theory. I had a viable expedition, with a goal, and cooperatively productive scientists, and a probability of success.
It was enough.
Kane and Ajit prepared the second minicap for the big ship, and I prepared to move the probe. Our mood was jubilant. There was much laughing and joking, interrupted by intense bursts of incomprehensible jabbering between Ajit and Kane.
But before I finished my programming, Ajit’s head disappeared.
Kane worked all day on his shadow-matter theory. He worked ferociously, hunched over his terminal like a hungry dog with a particularly meaty bone, barely glancing up and saying little. Ajit worked, too, but the quality of his working was different. The terminals both connect to the same computer, of course; whatever Kane had, Ajit had, too. Ajit could follow whatever Kane did.
But that’s what Ajit was doing: following. I could tell it from the timing of his accesses, from the whole set of his body. He was a decent scientist, but he was not Kane. Given the data and enough time, Ajit might have been able to go where Kane raced ahead now. Maybe. Or, he might have been able to make valuable additions to Kane’s thinking. But Kane gave him no time; Kane was always there first, and he asked no help. He had shut Ajit out completely. For Kane, nothing existed right now but his work.
Toward evening he looked up abruptly and said to me, “They’ll move the probe. The uploads—they’ll move it.”
I said, “How do you know? It’s not time yet, according to the schedule.”
“No. But they’ll move it. If I figured out the shadow matter here, I will there, too. I’ll decide that more data is needed from the other side of Sag A West, where the main shadow mass is.”
I looked at him. He looked demented, like some sort of Roman warrior who has just wrestled with a lion. All that was missing was the blood. Wild, filthy hair—when had he last showered? Clothes spotted with the food I’d made him gulp down at noon. Age lines beginning, under strain and fatigue and despite the rejuve, to drag down the muscles of his face. And his eyes shining like Sag A West itself.
God, I loved him.
I said, with careful emphasis, “You’re right. The Tirzah upload will move the ship for better measurements.”
“Then we’ll get more data in a few days,” Ajit said. “But the radiation on the other side of Sag A West is still intense. We must hope nothing gets damaged in the probe programs, or in the uploads themselves, before we get the new data.”
“We better hope nothing gets damaged long before that in my upload,” Kane said, “or they won’t even know what data to collect.” He turned back to his screen.
The brutal words hung in the air.
I saw Ajit turn his face away from me. Then he rose and walked into the galley.
If I followed him too soon, he would see it as pity. His shame would mount even more.
“Kane,” I said in a low, furious voice, “you are despicable.”
He turned to me in genuine surprise. “What?”
“You know what.” But he didn’t. Kane wasn’t even conscious of what he’d said. To him, it was a simple, evident truth. Without the Kane upload, no one on the probe would know how to do first-class science.
“I want to see you upstairs on the observation deck,” I said to him. “Not now, but in ten minutes. And you announce that you want me to see something up there.” The time lag, plus Kane’s suggesting the trip, would keep Ajit from knowing I was protecting him.
But now I had put up Kane’s back. He was tired, he was stressed, he was inevitably coming down from the unsustainable high of his discovery. Neither body nor mind can keep at that near-hysterical pitch for too long. I had misjudged, out of my own anger at him.
He snapped, “I’ll see you on the observation deck when I want to see you there, and not otherwise. Don’t push me around, Tirzah. Not even as captain.” He turned back to his display.
Ajit emerged from the galley with three glasses on a tray. “A celebratory drink. A major discovery deserves that. At a minimum.”
Relief was so intense I nearly showed it on my face. It was all right. I had misread Ajit, underestimated him. He ranked the magnitude of Kane’s discovery higher than his own lack of participation in it, after all. Ajit was, first, a scientist.
He handed a glass to me, one to Kane, one for himself, Kane took a hasty, perfunctory gulp and returned to his display. But I cradled mine, smiling at Ajit, trying with warmth to convey the admiration I felt for his rising above the personal.
“Where did you get the wine? It wasn’t on the ship manifest!”