It was a statue of some sort of god with four arms, enclosed in a circle of flames, made of what looked like very old bronze.
“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 statue has been in my family for four hundred years. I must bring it home, along with the answers to our experiments.”
“You will bring Shiva back to New Bombay,” I said softly, “and your answers, too.”
“Yes, I have begun to think so.” He smiled at me, a smile with all the need of his quicksilver personality in it, but also all the courtesy and hope. “Now I will sleep.”
The next morning, after a deep sleep one part sheer exhaustion and one part sex, I woke to find Ajit already out of bed and seated in front of his terminal. He rose the moment I entered the wardroom and turned to me with a grave face. “Tirzah. The minicap arrived. I already put the data into the system.”
“What’s wrong? Where’s Kane?”
“Still asleep, I imagine.”
I went to Kane’s bunk. He lay on his back, still in the clothes he’d worn for three days, smelling sour and snoring softly. I thought of waking him, then decided to wait a bit. Kane could certainly use the sleep, and I could use the time with Ajit. I went back to the wardroom, tightening the belt on my robe.
“What’s wrong?” I repeated.
“I put the data from the minicap into the system. It’s all corrections to the last minicap’s data. Kane says the first set was wrong.”
“Kane?” I said stupidly.
“The Kane-analogue,” Ajit explained patiently. “He says radiation hit the probe’s sensors for the first batch, before any of them realized it. They fired off the preliminary data right after the jump, you know, because they had no idea how long the probe could last. Now they’ve had time to discover where the radiation hit, to restore the sensor programs, and to retake the measurements. The Kane analogue says these new ones are accurate, the others weren’t.”
I tried to take it all in. “So Kane’s shadow-matter theory—none of that is true?”
“I don’t know,” Ajit said. “How can anybody know until we see if the data supports it? The minicap only just arrived.”
“Then I might not have moved the probe,” I said, meaning “the other I.” My analogue. I didn’t know what I was saying. The shock was too great. All that theorizing, all Kane’s sharp triumph, all that tension…
I looked more closely at Ajit. He looked very pale, and as fatigued as a genemod man of his youth can look. I said, “You didn’t sleep much.”
“No. Yesterday was… difficult.”
“Yes,” I agreed, noting the characteristically polite understatement. “Yes.”
“Should I wake Kane?” Ajit said, almost diffidently.
“I’ll do it.”
Kane was hard to wake. I had to shake him several times before he struggled up to consciousness.
“Tirzah?”
“Who else? Kane, you must get up. Something’s happened.”
“Wh-what?” He yawned hugely and slumped against the bulkhead. His whole body reeked.
I braced myself. “The second minicap arrived. Your analogue sent a recording. He says the prelim data was compromised, due to radiation-caused sensor malfunction.”
That woke him. He stared at me as if I were an executioner. “The data’s compromised? All of it?”
“I don’t know.”
Kane pushed out of his bunk and ran into the wardroom. Ajit said, “I put the minicap data into the system already, but I—” Kane wasn’t listening. He tore into the data, and after a few minutes he actually bellowed.
“No!”
I flattened myself against the bulkhead, not from fear but from surprise. I had never heard a grown man make a noise like that.
But there were no other noises. Kane worked silently, ferociously. Ajit sat at his own terminal and worked, too, not yesterday’s tentative copying but the real thing. I put hot coffee beside them both. Kane gulped his steaming, Ajit ignored his.
After half an hour, Kane turned to me. Defeat pulled like gravity at everything on his face, eyes and lips and jaw muscles. Only his filthy hair sprang upward. He said simply, with the naked straightforwardness of despair, “The new data invalidates the idea of shadow matter.”
I heard myself say, “Kane, go take a shower.”
To my surprise, he went, shambling from the room. Ajit worked a few minutes longer, then climbed the ladder to the observation deck. Over his shoulder he said, “Tirzah, I want to be alone, please. Don’t come.”
I didn’t. I sat at the tiny wardroom table, looked at my own undrunk coffee, and thought of nothing.
The data from the probe’s new position looked good, Kane said. That was his word: “good.” Then he returned to his terminal.
“Ajit?” I was coming to rely on him more and more for translation. He was just as busy as Kane, but kinder. This made sense. If, to Kane, Ajit was a secondary but still necessary party to the intellectual action, that’s what I was to both of them. Ajit had settled into this position, secure that he was valued. I could feel myself doing the same. The cessation of struggle turned us both kinder.
Kane, never insecure, worked away.
Ajit said, “The new readings confirm a large gravitational mass affecting the paths of both the infalling gas and the probe. The young stars so close to Sag A* are a much knottier problem. We’ve got to modify the whole theory of star formation to account for the curvatures of spacetime caused by the hole and by the shadow mass. It’s very complex. Kane’s got the computer working on that, and I’m going to take readings on Sag A West, in its different parts, and on stars on the other side of the mass and look at those.”
“What about the mass detectors? What do they say?”
“They say we’re being pulled toward a mass of about a half million suns.”
A half million suns. And we couldn’t see it: not with our eyes, nor radio sensors, nor X-ray detectors, nor anything.
“I have a question. Does it have an event horizon? Is it swallowing light, like a black hole does? Isn’t it the gravity of a black hole that swallows light?”
“Yes. But radiation, including light, goes right through this shadow matter, Tirzah. Don’t you understand? It doesn’t interact with normal radiation at all.”
“But it has gravity. Why doesn’t its gravity trap the light?”
“I don’t know.” He hesitated. “Kane thinks maybe it doesn’t interact with radiation as particles, which respond to gravity. Only as waves.”
“How can it do that?”
Ajit took my shoulders and shook them playfully. “I told you—we don’t know. This is brand-new, dear heart. We know as much about what it will and will not do as primitive hominids knew about fire.”
“Well, don’t make a god of it,” I said, and it was a test. Ajit passed. He didn’t stiffen as if I’d made some inappropriate reference to the drawing of Shiva he’d shown me last night. Instead, he laughed and went back to work.
“Tirzah! Tirzah!”
The automatic wake-up brought me out of shutdown. Ajit must have been brought back online a few moments before me, because he was already calling my name. Alarm bells clanged.
“It’s Kane! He’s been hit!”
I raced into Kane’s bunk. He lay still amid the bedclothes. It wasn’t the maintenance program that had taken the hit, because every part of his body was intact; so were the bedclothes. But Kane lay stiff and unresponsive.