Marianne followed Judy out the door. “Cell phones?”
“No.” Judy stopped smiling. “Look, I know it’s draconian, but Stubbins knows what he’s doing. He must trust you or you wouldn’t be here, and he told me I can be as open with you about project details as you can stand. I know you’re a geneticist, not a physicist or an engineer. We’re much farther along on the ship than Space X, the European Union, or China. India is hopeless. The Russians are our only competition and we can’t afford leaks of how we’re solving the problems associated with the Deneb plans. We have to be first.”
“Why?” Marianne said.
Judy stared at her. “You really are a trusting soul, aren’t you? Do you know what the Russian ship is called?”
“Stremlenie—the Endeavor.”
“That’s the public name. The top-secret project name is Mest’.”
“I don’t speak Russian.”
“It means ‘revenge.’”
Something tightened in Marianne’s chest. “If it’s top secret, how does Stubbins know that?”
“He knows. The Venture is private enterprise, but of course Stubbins works with Washington. Not openly, because every congressional district has way too many people who hate the Denebs, and lawmakers have this pesky need to get reelected. But Central Asia suffered more than anybody from the spore cloud. You’re a geneticist—you must know that. They lost more people to the plague, and the mouse die-off affected their crop ecology the most. And the current regime is so old-school tyrannical that they might as well be czars.”
“Yes.” Marianne was thinking furiously. Revenge—against World. Against Noah, against Smith, against Marianne’s half-Deneb grandchild. Against a star-faring section of humanity, who reported themselves as peaceful but who were capable of creating the technology that the Russians now wanted to use as a warship.
“Can the star drive be weaponized? Can it?”
Judy shrugged. “Nobody knows. It’s hard to convey to a non-physicist how alien these plans, and the physics behind them, really are. No, don’t look at me like that, I know the Denebs are human, not alien. But the thinking behind their tech is so strange to us that there is speculation it isn’t even theirs but came to them from somewhere else.”
Marianne’s mouth opened, then closed again without anything coming out.
“Just speculation,” Judy said. “And here’s more of the same, although this one is founded on some actual data. Did you ever wonder why the Denebs needed human scientists aboard the Embassy? Why not just get a few human lab-rat volunteers and work out the immunity issues by themselves? I’ve gone through every published article by every one of you who was aboard—Harrison Rice, Ahmed Rafat, Jessica Yu—and I got some biologist friends to do it with me. Every single breakthrough seems to have been made by Terrans, not Denebs. Don’t you see what that means? It means the same thing as bringing you human scientists aboard in the first place. When it comes to genetics, we know more than they do. So what other science have they gotten from somebody else, and are just piggybacking on?”
Marianne found her voice. “You sound like one of the conspiracy theorists out there. Damn it, Judy, I worked with these people. I was there!”
“I know you were. And I could be dead wrong. But I’m not the only scientist saying that. And whatever I suspect, or believe, or entertain as mad fantasy, doesn’t change a very real fact—no one knows what will happen the day we finish the ship and press the button to start her. Actually, we’re all grateful it is a button and not some peculiar thing we wouldn’t even recognize. The drive appears to harness the repulsion force of dark matter, and nobody on Earth understands that very well.”
Judy took a long final drag on her cigarette, dropped it on the ground, and turned her heel on it. Then, noting Marianne’s expression, she carefully picked it up, wrapped it in a tissue, and put it in her pocket. “I was on the Dark Energy Survey, incidentally, in the Strong Lensing work group, that ended up confirming the existence of dark energy. The survey got delayed because of funding problems after the collapse and also because of the totally inane… never mind. You aren’t interested in the politics. I’m not even interested anymore in the stupidity of the politicians involved. The point is that dark energy exists, or at least the mathematics say it does, and it seems to power the Deneb star drive, although nobody knows how.
“We’re doing things we don’t understand to Terran materials, processes that make baking nobium-3-tin into superconductors look like kindergarten play. A lot of that is going on in underground bunkers. The engineers are in control and we physicists struggle to keep up, which is a dead reversal of the normal order. It’s not just the blind leading the sighted, it’s like the blind pushing them over cliffs. And David Chin, project chief, is cliff-diving just as much as the rest of us, although don’t tell him I said so.”
Marianne said, “How do you know—”
“That we’re building it right? Of course we can’t really be sure, not to every tiny intended tolerance—the error bar on this project is the size of Rhode Island. All of which means that nobody understands the implications of what may or may not happen when we turn it on.”
“That wasn’t what I was going to ask. What if”—this was a stupid question but she had to ask it—“the star drive blows up Earth?”
“Aren’t you the one who keeps insisting the Denebs are our friends?”
“Yes, but if we somehow build it wrong… if we don’t understand the plans correctly…”
“It won’t blow up Earth,” Judy said. “We think.”
The physicist was grinning. Was she just playing with her? Marianne wasn’t sure she believed Judy. But then Judy said something that tipped the balance.
“We know enough to know what we don’t know—unlike the anti-alien yahoos out there—but we’re not completely ignorant. The physics fits with quantum theories and brane theory both, once you make certain radical adjustments in your thinking, and even with general relativity. Which, God knows, quantum mechanics didn’t. But the basic underlying idea for all of it seems to be that everything in the universe is interconnected in ways we hadn’t expected. Quarks and galaxies and time and spores and coffee spoons and consciousness. All of it.”
“That sounds religious.”
“It isn’t. I mean, yes, it is, but not in the way most people mean. But you know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
Judy’s eyes, small and dark in her broad face, pierced Marianne. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I didn’t used to think so, but I do now.” Since Colin’s revelations to her. A lot more was interconnected than she’d ever believed.
“I thought so. But that’s enough philosophy for now. You want a tour of this candy factory? Willy Wonka himself asked me to show you around.”
“Yes,” Marianne said again. “I want to see everything.”
The spaceship camp was the coolest place ever. Jason said so, and now Colin agreed.
It had so much stuff! Trucks and bulldozers and steam shovels like in Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Colin’s second favorite book. His favorite was still Brandon and the Elephant in the Basement, but probably there wasn’t an elephant here. Still, like Grandma said, you couldn’t have everything.