“Run the full diagnostics,” I said to Ajit.
“I already started them.”
“Kane,” I said, shaking him gently, then harder. He moved a little, groaned. So his upload wasn’t dead.
I sat on the edge of the bunk, fighting fear, and took his hand. “Kane, love, can you hear me?”
He squeezed my fingers. The expression on his face didn’t change. After a silence in which time itself seemed to stop, Ajit said, “The diagnostics are complete. About a third of brain function is gone.”
I got into the bunk beside Kane and put my arms around him.
Ajit and I did what we could. Our uploads patched and copied, using material from both of us. Yes, the copying would lead to corruption, but we were beyond that.
Because an upload runs on such a complex combination of computer and nano-constructed polymer networks, we cannot simply be replaced by a backup program cube. The unique software/hardware retes are also why a corrupted analogue is not exactly the same as a stroke- or tumor-impaired human brain.
The analogue brain does not have to pump blood or control breathing. It does not have to move muscles or secrete hormones. Although closely tied to the “purer” programs that maintain our illusion of moving and living as three-dimensional beings in a three-dimensional ship, the analogue brain is tied to the computer in much more complex ways than any fleshy human using a terminal. The resources of the computer were at our disposal, but they could only accomplish limited aims.
When Ajit and I had finished putting together as much of Kane, or a pseudo-Kane, as we could, he walked into the wardroom and sat down. He looked, moved, smiled the same. That part is easy to repair, as easy as had been replacing Ajit’s head or the exotics on the observation deck. But the man staring blankly at the terminal was not really Kane.
“What was I working on?” he said.
I got out, “Shadow matter.”
“Shadow matter? What’s that?”
Ajit said softly, “I have all your work, Kane. Our work. I think I can finish it, now that you’ve started us in the right direction.”
He nodded, looking confused. “Thank you, Ajit.” Then, with a flash of his old magnificent combativeness, “But you better get it right!”
“With your help,” Ajit said gaily, and in that moment I came close to truly loving him.
They worked out a new division of labor. Kane was able to take the sensor readings and run them through the pre-set algorithms. Actually, Ajit probably could have trained me to do that. But Kane seemed content, frowning earnestly at his displays.
Ajit took over the actual science. I said to him, when we had a moment alone, “Can you do it?”
“I think so,” he said, without either anger or arrogance. “I have the foundation that Kane laid. And we worked out some of the preliminaries together.”
“We have only one more jump left.”
“I know, Tirzah.”
“With the risk of radiation killing us all—”
“Not yet. Give me a little more time.”
I rested a moment against his shoulder. “All right. A little more time.”
He put his arm around me, not in passion but in comradeship. None of us, we both knew, had all that much time left.
Kane was only temporarily defeated by the contamination of the probe data. Within half a day, he had aborted his shadow-matter theory, archived his work on it, and gone back to his original theories about the mysteriously massive young stars near the hole. He used the probe’s new data, which were all logical amplifications of the prelim readings. “I’ve got some ideas,” he told me. “We’ll see.”
He wasn’t as cheerful as usual, let alone as manically exuberant as during the shadow-matter “discovery,” but he was working steadily. A mountain, Kane. It would take a lot to actually erode him, certainly more than a failed theory. That rocky insensitivity had its strengths.
Ajit, on the other hand, was not really working. I couldn’t follow the displays on his terminal, but I could read the body language. He was restless, inattentive. But what worried me was something else, his attitude toward Kane.
All Ajit’s anger was gone.
I watched carefully, while seemingly bent over ship’s log or embroidery. Anger is the least subtle of the body’s signals. Even when a person is successfully concealing most of it, the signs are there if you know where to look: the tight neck muscles, the turned-away posture, the tinge in the voice. Ajit displayed none of this. Instead, when he faced Kane, as he did during the lunch I insisted we all eat together at the wardroom table, I saw something else. A sly superiority, a secret triumph.
I could be wrong, I thought. I have been wrong before. By now I disliked Ajit so much that I didn’t trust my own intuitions.
“Ajit,” I said as we finished the simple meal I’d put together, “will you please—”
Ship’s alarms went off with a deafening clang. Breach, breach, breach.
I whirled toward ship’s display, which automatically illuminated. The breach was in the starboard hold, and it was full penetration by a mass of about a hundred grams. Within a minute, the nanos had put on a temporary patch. The alarm stopped and the computer began hectoring me.
“Breach sealed with temporary nano patch. Seal must be reinforced within two hours with permanent hull patch, type 6-A. For location of breach and patch supply, consult ship’s log. If unavailability of—” I shut it off.
“Could be worse,” Kane said.
“Well, of course it could be worse,” I snapped, and immediately regretted it. I was not allowed to snap. That I had done so was an indication of how much the whole situation on the Kepler was affecting me. That wasn’t allowed, either; it was unprofessional.
Kane wasn’t offended. “Could have hit the engines or the living pod instead of just a hold. Actually, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before. There’s a lot of drifting debris in this area.”
Ajit said, “Are you going into the hold, Tirzah?”
Of course I was going into the hold. But this time I didn’t snap; I smiled at him and said, “Yes, I’m going to suit up now.”
“I’m coming, too,” Kane said.
I blinked. I’d been about to ask if Ajit wanted to go with me. It would be a good way to observe him away from Kane, maybe ask some discreet questions. I said to Kane, “Don’t you have to work?”
“The work isn’t going anywhere. And I want to retrieve the particle. It didn’t exit the ship, and at a hundred grams, there’s going to be some of it left after the breach.”
Ajit had stiffened at being preempted, yet again, by Kane. Ajit would have wanted to retrieve the particle, too; there is nothing more interesting to space scientists than dead rocks. Essentially, I’d often thought, Sag A* was no more than a very hot, very large dead rock. I knew better than to say this aloud.
I could have ordered Ajit to accompany me, and ordered Kane to stay behind. But that, I sensed, would only make things worse. Ajit, in his present mood of deadly sensitivity, would not take well to orders from anyone, even me. I wasn’t going to give him the chance to retreat more into whatever nasty state of mind he currently inhabited.
“Well, then, let’s go,” I said ungraciously to Kane, who only grinned at me and went to get our suits.
The holds, three of them for redundancy safety, are full of supplies of all types. Every few days I combine a thorough ship inspection with lugging enough food forward to sustain us. We aren’t uploads; we need bodily nurturing as well as the kind I was supposed to be providing.