All three holds can be pressurized if necessary, but usually they aren’t. Air generation and refreshment doesn’t cost much power, but it costs some. Kane and I went into the starboard hold in heated s-suits and helmets.
“I’m going to look around,” Kane said. He’d brought a handheld, and I saw him calculating the probable trajectory of the particle from the ship’s data and the angle of the breach, as far as he could deduce it. Then he disappeared behind a pallet of crates marked SOYSYNTH.
The breach was larger than I’d expected; that hundred-gram particle had hit at a bad angle. But the nanos had done their usual fine job, and the permanent patch went on without trouble. I began the careful inspection of the rest of the hull, using my handheld instruments.
Kane cursed volubly.
“Kane? What is it?”
“Nothing. Bumped into boxes.”
“Well, don’t. The last thing I want is you messing up my hold.” For a physically fit man, Kane is clumsy in motion. I would bet my ship that he can’t dance, and bet my life that he never tries.
“I can’t see anything. Can’t you brighten the light?”
I did, and he bumped around some more. Whenever he brushed something, he cursed. I did an inspection even more carefully than usual, but found nothing alarming. We met each other back by the hold door.
“It’s not here,” Kane said. “The particle. It’s not here.”
“You mean you didn’t find it.”
“No, I mean it’s not here. Don’t you think I could find a still hot particle in a hold otherwise filled only with large immobile crates?”
I keyed in the door code. “So it evaporated on impact. Ice and ions and dust.”
“To penetrate a Schaad hull? No.” He reconsidered. “Well, maybe. What did you find?”
“Not much. Pitting and scarring on the outside, nothing unexpected. But no structural stress to worry about.”
“The debris here is undoubtedly orbiting the core, but we’re so far out it’s not moving all that fast. Still, we should had some warning. But I’m more worried about the probe—when is the third minicap due?”
Kane knew as well as I did when the third minicap was due. His asking was the first sign he was as tense as the rest of us.
“Three more days,” I said. “Be patient.”
“I’m not patient.”
“As if that’s new data.”
“I’m also afraid the probe will be hit by rapidly orbiting debris, and that will be that. Did you know that the stars close in to Sag A* orbit at several thousand clicks per second?”
I knew. He’d told me often enough. The probe was always a speculative proposition, and before now, Kane had been jubilant that we’d gotten any data at all from it.
I’d never heard Kane admit to being “afraid” of anything. Even allowing for the casualness of the phrase.
I wanted to distract him, and, if Kane was really in a resigned and reflective mood, it also seemed a good time to do my job. “Kane, about Ajit—”
“I don’t want to talk about that sniveling slacker,” Kane said, with neither interest not rancor. “I picked badly for an assistant, that’s all.”
It hadn’t actually been his “pick”; his input had been one of many. I didn’t say this. Kane looked around the hold one more time. “I guess you’re right. The particle sublimed. Ah, well.”
I put the glove of my hand on the arm of his suit—not exactly an intimate caress, but the best I could do in this circumstance. “Kane, how is the young-star mystery going?”
“Not very well. But that’s science.” The hold door stood open and he lumbered out.
I gave one last look around the hold before turning off the light, but there was nothing more to see.
The mended statue of Shiva was back on the wardroom table, smack in the center, when Kane and I returned from the hold. I don’t think Kane, heading straight for his terminal, even noticed. I smiled at Ajit, although I wasn’t sure why he had brought the statue back. He’d told me he never wanted to see it again.
“Tirzah, would you perhaps like to play go?”
I couldn’t conceal my surprise. “Go?”
“Yes. Will you play with me?” Accompanied by his most winning smile.
“All right.”
He brought out the board and, bizarrely, set it up balanced on his knees. When he saw my face, he said, “We’ll play here. I don’t want to disturb the Cosmic Dancer.”
“All right.” I wasn’t sure what to think. I drew my chair close to his, facing him, and bent over the board.
We both knew that Ajit was a better player than I. That’s why both of us played: he to win, me to lose. I would learn more from the losing position. Very competitive people—and I thought now that I had never known one as competitive as Ajit—relax only when not threatened.
So I made myself nonthreatening in every way I knew, and Ajit and I talked and laughed, and Kane worked doggedly on his theories that weren’t going anywhere. The statue of the dancing god leered at me from the table, and I knew with every passing moment how completely I was failing this already failing mission.
Kane was gentler since the radiation corruption. Who can say how these things happen? Personality, too, is encoded in the human brain, whether flesh or analogue. He was still Kane, but we saw only his gentler, sweeter side. Previously that part of him had been dominated by his combative intellect, which had been a force of nature all its own, like a high wind. Now the intellect had failed, the wind calmed. The landscape beneath lay serene.
“Here, Ajit,” Kane said. “These are the equations you wanted run.” He sent them to Ajit’s terminal, stood, and stretched. The stretch put him slightly off balance, something damaged in the upload that Ajit and I hadn’t been able to fix, or find. A brain is such a complex thing. Kane tottered, and Ajit rose swiftly to catch him.
“Careful, Kane. Here, sit down.”
Ajit eased Kane into a chair at the wardroom table. I put down my work. Kane said, “Tirzah, I feel funny.”
“Funny how?” Alarm ran through me.
“I don’t know. Can we play go?”
I had taught him the ancient strategy game, and he enjoyed it. He wasn’t very good, not nearly as good as I was, but he liked it and didn’t seem to mind losing. I got out the board. Ajit, who was a master at go, went back to Kane’s shadow-matter theory. He was making good progress, I knew, although he said frankly that all the basic ideas were Kane’s.
Halfway through our second game of go, the entire wardroom disappeared.
A moment of blind panic seized me. I was adrift in the void, nothing to see or feel or hold onto, a vertigo so terrible it blocked any rational thought. It was the equivalent of a long anguished scream, originating in the most primitive part of my now blind brain: lost, lost, lost, and alone…
The automatic maintenance program kicked in and the wardroom reappeared. Kane gripped the table edge and stared at me, white-faced. I went to him, wrapped my arms around him reassuringly, and gazed at Ajit. Kane clung to me. A part of my mind noted that some aspects of the wardroom were wrong: the galley door was too low to walk through upright, and one chair had disappeared, along with the go board. Maintenance code too damaged to restore.
Ajit said softly, “We have to decide, Tirzah. We could take a final radiation hit at any time.”
“I know.”
I took my arms away from Kane. “Are you all right?”
He smiled. “Yes. Just for a minute I was…” He seemed to lose his thought.
Ajit brought his terminal chair to the table, to replace the vanished one. He sat leaning forward, looking from me to Kane and back. “This is a decision all three of us have to make. We have one minicap left to send back to the Kepler, and one more jump for ourselves. At any time we could lose… everything. You all know that. What do you think we should do? Kane? Tirzah?”