“It was in my personal allotment,” Ajit said, smiling.
Personal allotments are not listed nor examined. A bottle of wine, the statue of Shiva… Ajit had brought some interesting choices for a galactic core. I sipped the red liquid. It tasted different from the Terran or Martian wines I had grown up with: rougher, more full-bodied, not as sweet.
“Wonderful, Ajit.”
“I thought you would like it. It is made in my native New Bombay, from genemod grapes brought from Terra.”
He didn’t go back to his terminal. For the next half hour, he entertained me with stories of New Bombay. He was a good storyteller, sharp and funny. Kane worked steadily, ignoring us. The ten-minute deadline I had set for him to call me up to the observation deck came and went.
After half an hour, Kane stood and staggered. Once before, when he’d broken Ajit’s statue, stiffness after long sitting had made Kane unsteady. That time he’d caught himself after simply bumping the wardroom table. This time he crashed heavily to the floor.
“Kane!”
“Nothing, nothing… don’t make a fuss, Tirzah! You just won’t leave me alone!”
This was so unfair that I wanted to slap him. I didn’t. Kane rose by himself, shook his head like some great beast, and said, “I’m just exhausted. I’m going to bed.”
I didn’t try to stop him from going to his bunk. I had planned on sleeping with Ajit, anyway. It seemed that some slight false note had crept into his storytelling in the last five minutes, some forced exaggeration.
But he smiled at me, and I decided I’d been wrong. I was very tired, too. All at once I wished I could sleep alone this night.
But I couldn’t. Ajit, no matter how well he’d recovered from Kane’s unconscious brutality, nonetheless had to feel bruised at some level. It was my job to find out where, and how much, and to set it to rights. It was my job to keep the expedition as productive as possible, to counteract Kane’s dismissing and belittling behavior toward Ajit. It was my job.
I smiled back at him.
When Ajit’s head disappeared, no one panicked. We’d expected this, of course; in fact, we’d expected it sooner. The probe drifted in a sea of the most intense radiation in the galaxy, much of it at lethal wavelengths: gamma rays from Sagittarius East, X-rays, powerful winds of ionized particles, things I couldn’t name. That the probe’s shielding had held this long was a minor miracle. It couldn’t hold forever. Some particle or particles had penetrated it and reached the computer, contaminating a piece of the upload-maintenance program.
It was a minor glitch. The backup kicked in a moment later and Ajit’s head reappeared. But we all knew this was only the beginning. It would happen again, and again, and eventually programming would be hit that couldn’t be restored by automatic backup, because the backup would go, too, in a large enough hit—or because uploads are not like other computer programs. We are more than that, and less. An upload has backups to maintain the shadows we see of each other and the ship, the shadows that keep our captured minds sane. But an upload cannot house backups of itself. Even one copy smudges too much, and the copy contaminates the original. It has been tried, with painful results.
Moreover, we uploads run only partly on the main computer. An upload is neither a biological entity nor a long stream of code, but something more than both. Some of the substratum, the hardware, is wired like actual neurons, although constructed of sturdier stuff: thousands of miles of nano-constructed organic polymers. This is why analogues think at the rate of the human brain, not the much faster rate of computers. It’s also why we feel as our originals do.
After Ajit’s maintenance glitch our mood, which had been exuberant, sobered. But it didn’t sour. We worked steadily, with focus and hope, deciding where exactly to position the probe and then entering the coordinates for the jump.
“See you soon,” we said to each other. I kissed both Kane and Ajit lightly on the lips. Then we all shut down and the probe jumped.
Days later, we emerged on the other side of Sag A West, all three of us still intact. If it were in my nature, I would have said a prayer of thanksgiving. Instead I said to Ajit, “Still have a head, I see.”
“And a good thing he does,” Kane said absently, already plunging for the chair in front of his terminal. “We’ll need it. And—Ajit, the mass detectors… great shitting gods!”
It seems we were to have thanksgiving after all, if only perversely. I said, “What is it? What’s there?” The displays showed nothing at all.
“Nothing at all,” Ajit said. “And everything.”
“Speak English!”
Ajit—I doubt Kane had even heard me, in his absorption—said, “The mass detectors are showing a huge mass less than a quarter light-year away. The radiation detectors—all of them—are showing nothing at all. We’re—”
“We’re accelerating fast.” I studied ship’s data; the rate of acceleration made me blink. “We’re going to hit whatever it is. Not soon, but the tidal forces—”
The probe was small, but the tidal forces of something this big would still rip it apart when it got close enough.
Something this big. But there was, to all other sensors, nothing there.
Nothing but shadows.
A strange sensation ran over me. Not fear, but something more complicated, much more eerie.
My voice sounded strange in my ears. “What if we hit it? I know you said radiation of all types will go right through shadow matter just as if it isn’t there”—because it isn’t, not in our universe—“but what about the probe? What if we hit it before we take the final event-horizon measurements on Sag A*?”
“We won’t hit it,” Ajit said. “We’ll move before then, Tirzah, back to the hole. Kane—”
They forget me again. I went up to the observation deck. Looking out through the clear hull, I stared at the myriad of stars on the side of the night sky away from Sag A West. Then I turned to look toward that vast three-armed cloud of turning plasma, radiating as it cools. Nothing blocked my view of Sag A West. Yet between us lay a huge, massive body of shadow matter, unseen, pulling on everything else my dazed senses could actually see.
To my left, all the exotic plants in the observatory disappeared.
Ajit and Kane worked feverishly, until once more I made them shut down for “sleep.” The radiation here was nearly as great as it had been in our first location. We were right inside Sagittarius A East, the huge expanding shell of an unimaginable explosion sometime during the last hundred thousand years. Most of Sag A East wasn’t visible at the wavelengths I could see, but the gamma-ray detectors were going crazy.
“We can’t stop for five hours!” Kane cried. “Don’t you realize how much damage the radiation could do in that time? We need to get all the data we can, work on it, and send off the second minicap!”
“We’re going to send off the second minicap right now,” I said. “And we’ll only shut down for three hours. But, Kane, we are going to do that. I mean it. Uploads run even more damage from not running maintenance than we do from external radiation. You know that.”
He did. He scowled at me, and cursed, and fussed with the mini-cap, but then he fired the minicap off and shut down.
Ajit said, “Just one more minute, Tirzah. I want to show you something.”
“Ajit—”
“No, it’s not mathematical. I promise. It’s something I brought onto the Kepler. The object was not included in the probe program, but I can show you a holo.”
Somewhere in the recesses of the computer, Ajit’s upload created a program and a two-dimensional holo appeared on an empty display screen. I blinked at it, surprised.