Angelmass

CHAPTER 15

"Jereko?" Gyasi's voice came from the open doorway.

Kosta looked up, being very careful not to move his head too quickly lest it fall off. "Mm?" he muttered, wondering vaguely if he looked as rotten as he felt.

If Gyasi's expression was anything to go by, he did. "I take it," Gyasi said, "that you haven't had much experience with zero-gee space travel."

There was room there for some kind of witty reply, but Kosta was too ill to bother. "I'd say that's a fair statement," he said instead.

"Uh-huh," Gyasi nodded. "Well, if it helps any, they'll probably be rotating the ship on the way back to the catapult. Unfortunately, they can't do that on the way in—it would foul up too many of the experiments." Gyasi looked at his watch, a frown creasing his forehead. "You know, that stuff you took should have taken effect long ago."

"Oh, it is," Kosta told him. "Starting to, anyway. I'm not feeling quite as queasy as I was."

"Ah. Good." Gyasi peered at him. "You must have a pretty exotic metabolism for it to have taken this long."

If you only knew how exotic, Kosta thought. But he was feeling better, and improving by the minute.

"How long till we get to Angelmass?" he asked.

"Maybe twenty minutes," Gyasi said. "That's to the inner radiation region. We've been inside the outer field since we 'pulted."

"I know." It wasn't something Kosta could have missed; the gamma-ray clicks from the ship's electronics were pretty distinctive. Also just a little bit scary. "That base—Angelmass Central—it sits out here permanently?"

"Sure does," Gyasi nodded. "Has to, you see—hunterships come and go across the clock, and the net and catapult have to be running at all times."

"Is it manned?"

"Usually, though the people are mostly there to help in case of huntership emergencies. The station is automated enough that you could set it up to run pretty much by itself if you had to. You can also turn the major systems on and off from Seraph."

Kosta nodded, thinking about people sitting in the outer radiation field of a blazing quantum black hole for weeks or months on end. The shielding technology alone that that implied was incredible.

No wonder the Komitadji's lasers and plasma jets hadn't put a dent in those Lorelei defense ships.

"The gamma-ray clicking must drive them nuts," he murmured.

Gyasi grinned. "You get used to it. Just like you do riding around in zero-gee. You look like you're feeling better."

"I am," Kosta confirmed, nodding. This time his head didn't even threaten to come off. "That stuff works fast when it finally gets around to it."

"Only the best for us folks at the Institute," Gyasi said. "You feel up to heading forward and checking out some of the gear?"

"Sure." Carefully, Kosta gave himself a push away from the restraint straps and drifted across the room. Gyasi caught his arm as he approached, deftly helping him through the door. "I never got a chance to ask if you had any experiments aboard," he said as they headed down the corridor.

Gyasi shook his head. "I don't personally, though the head of my team does. Most of what I'm working on can be done easier in the lab." He grinned, his face a little dreamy looking. "I just like to come out here and look at Angelmass."

"So to speak," Kosta murmured.

"Well, not directly at it of course," Gyasi agreed. "But even through fifteen filters it's still an impressive sight. Here we are."

They had arrived outside a door marked starboard analysis room. It slid open at a tap on the touch plate, and Gyasi led the way inside.

The view in here was impressive, too. The room was long and relatively narrow, its entire length taken up on both sides by displays and tangles of equipment. Perhaps thirty people floated around and through it all, making adjustments or taking notes or just watching. A murmur of quiet conversation competed with the hum of cooling fans and cryogenic pumps, all of it punctuated every few seconds by a gamma-ray click. "Did they leave anything at all behind in their labs?" he asked.

Beside him, Gyasi chuckled. "This is nothing. On some trips the place gets really crowded."

"Right," Kosta said dryly. A monstrous apparatus at the far end caught his eye: a huge spherical tank wrapped with cables and metal coils. "What's that thing?" he asked, indicating it.

"Ah, that," Gyasi said. "Dr. Ciardi's angel decay detector. One of the three permanent experiments aboard; and heaven only knows how they're going to get it out of the ship if and when they're done with—"

"Wait a second," Kosta interrupted him. "Decay detector?"

"Right," Gyasi nodded. "Dr. Ciardi's one of those who isn't ready to believe in the Acchaa theory—he still wants angels to be nothing more than highly metastable subatomic particles. If his theory is right, an angel should spontaneously decay into a particular group of other subatomic particles. That thing is busy looking for that specific particle-track signature."

"Wouldn't it be simpler to just take one into his lab and sit on it?"

"Oh, he's doing that, too," Gyasi said. "But that could take a while—his theory predicts a half-life in the fifty-thousand-year range. I've heard he tried to get hold of a whole bunch of angels to help speed things up, but Director Podolak turned him down."

"Academic censorship?"

"Simple arithmetic. The High Senate and most of the top EmDef people have angels now, along with all the planetary governors and senators and a lot of judges. But there are still lower-level politicians, leaders of industry—you know the list. Maybe in ten years or so Director Podolak will be able to take fifty or a hundred angels out of the pool for that kind of study. But not now."

Kosta nodded, feeling more hopeful than he had in days. If the plan was going to require another ten years to complete, then perhaps there was still time to save these people.

Provided he, Kosta, did his job.

And finding out more about this Ciardi's theory might be a good place to start. If he could help sow doubt as to what the angels really were—

"Mr. Gyasi?" a woman's voice called from the other end of the room. "Can you give me a hand?"

"Sure," Gyasi called back. He kicked off the wall, bouncing his hands against walls and ceiling to skillfully maneuver himself through the maze of other occupants. Kosta followed more slowly, wondering just how often Gyasi had taken this trip.

He arrived at the far end of the room to find Gyasi and a middle-aged woman poring over a maze of circuit cables. "Ah—Jereko," Gyasi said, glancing up. "Dr. Qhahenlo, this is my new officemate, Jereko Kosta. This is Dr. Rae Yanda Qhahenlo, my supervisor."

"Honored, Mr. Kosta," Qhahenlo said briefly, not bothering with the usual greeting routine. "You know anything about mid-range samplers?"

"A little," Kosta said cautiously, hovering over their shoulders. He knew a great deal about midrange samplers, actually. But Pax samplers, not their Empyreal counterparts. Even if the designs turned out to be parallel, translating the terminology might be tricky. "What's the trouble?"

"Output signal is way too noisy," Qhahenlo grunted. "I thought it was the 'sponder, but replacing it didn't seem to help."

"Um." Kosta looked over the apparatus. "What's in all that tubing?"

"Siitalon," Qhahenlo said. "Cryogenic heat-pump fluid—keeps the detectors cool."

"Fluorine-based?"

Qhahenlo frowned at him. "I think so. Why?"

"Well, it looks like you've got one of the line connections right over the 'sponder feed," he pointed out. "If you've got a small leak there, you may be getting some fluorine adsorption onto the line.

Maybe enough to cause your noise."

Gyasi blinked. "You're kidding. I've never heard of anything like that."

"Actually, I have," Qhahenlo said, already searching through her tool kit. "I'd completely forgotten it, though. Let's see..."

For a minute she worked in silence, tightening down the suspect connection with a zero-gee wrench and then molding extra sealant around it. "Okay, give it a try."

Gyasi busied himself with the control board. "Well, it looks a little better," he said doubtfully, studying the display. "Wait a minute; there it goes." He looked up. "Nice call, Jereko."

"Thanks," Kosta said, letting out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. Somehow, it had been vitally important to him to be right on this. "Lucky guess."

"One of my own favorite investigative tools," Qhahenlo said dryly. "Thank you, Mr. Kosta." She eyed him thoughtfully. "You must be new to the Institute."

Kosta nodded. "Just got here a couple of days ago. Still finding my way around."

"Any of the other research teams press-gang you yet?"

"Uh..." Kosta glanced at Gyasi, found no cues there. "No. Should they have?"

She cocked an eyebrow. "If this is a sample of your skills, they certainly will. Good diagnosticians are in high demand."

Kosta glanced at Gyasi again. Was Qhahenlo trying to hire him? And if so, did he have any say in the matter? "I do have some projects of my own I'm working on," he said carefully.

She smiled. "Don't worry—I'm not talking about kidnapping you away from your other work," she assured him. "But I would like you to work with my team. Even just on a consulting basis, if that's all the time you can spare."

"Though as a matter of fact," Gyasi put in, "you'll probably wind up working with Dr. Qhahenlo sooner or later anyway. That ion shell project of yours could be useful when the V/E experiment is finished."

"What ion shell project is this?" Qhahenlo asked, looking interested.

"I'm trying to see whether it's possible to strip off an angel's collected ion shell," Kosta said, feeling awkward. It was a little unsettling to have someone of Qhahenlo's obvious status and experience listening so closely to what he had to say. "My original thought was to see whether the shell had anything to do with the angel effect, but Yaezon tells me it's probably a dead-end approach."

"Never underestimate dead-end approaches," Qhahenlo advised. "At worst, they often generate useful spin-offs; at best, they sometimes turn out to be not so dead-end as everyone expected."

"I'll remember that," Kosta said. "May I ask what this V/E experiment is?"

"Certainly—it's not a secret," Qhahenlo said. "The Variable Exposure experiment is a long-term test of angel stability."

"Not like Dr. Ciardi's, though," Gyasi put in. "This one's based on a variant on the Acchaa theory that Dr. Qhahenlo's come up with. Instead of the angel being a single quantum of good, you assume it's a bundle of many quanta, with the angel particle being a kind of threshold for creation rather than the absolute minimum size that a strict quantum would imply. When you do that, the angel effect can be explained as a slow decay of these constituent quanta into fields of good that directly affect people nearby. Saves you a whole bunch of the headaches the theorists are having trying to come up with a workable mechanism for the angel/personality interaction—"

He broke off suddenly, looking at Qhahenlo with a somewhat sheepish expression. "Sorry, Dr.

Qhahenlo. I interrupted, didn't I?"

"Don't worry about it," Qhahenlo told him with an amused smile. "The general rule is that enthusiasm is worth two to three extra lab techs. Anyway, that's basically where we're starting from, Mr. Kosta. Since all angel theories allow both positive and negative solutions, it seems reasonable to assume that there can be fields of evil—or anti-good, if you prefer—that might be able to affect the rate of decay of the quanta bundles in a given angel."

"Which is where the Variable Exposure experiment comes in," Gyasi said.

"Right," Qhahenlo nodded. "What we've done is to take four newly captured angels and put them in radically different environments. The first is locked in a deep underground vault, some fifty meters from any human being; that one's our control. The second is in a special cell with a convicted serial murderer. The third is being worn by Director Podolak herself, replacing one she'd been wearing for the previous five years. And the fourth has been sewn into a special harness being worn by a onemonth- old child."

Something icy ran up Kosta's back. "A one-month-old child?" he repeated carefully. "A baby?"

"That's the layman's term for them, yes," Gyasi said dryly. "He's the son of two Institute employees—they've got an apartment on the grounds."

"We plan to run the test for about a year," Qhahenlo said. "If angels do in fact absorb evil, then there should be detectable differences between the four. Though what those differences will be we're still not sure of."

"I see," Kosta said mechanically. A baby. They'd put an angel on a baby. An unknown but very real force... and they'd turned it loose on an innocent and helpless child.

"We'd of course appreciate any suggestions you might have along the way," Qhahenlo continued.

"And Mr. Gyasi's right; finding a way to strip off the angels' ion shells could be very useful when it comes time to compare them."

With an effort, Kosta forced his mind away from the image of that baby. "Yes," he managed. "I'll see what I can do."

"Good." Qhahenlo looked at her watch. "We should be getting close to our target zone. Give me a hand, Mr. Gyasi, and let's get this thing going."

"Attention, all passengers," the cool voice came over the speakers. "De-rotation will begin in three minutes. Repeating: de-rotation will begin in three minutes."

Hunched head to head with Qhahenlo over a display, Gyasi looked up at Kosta. "You going to be okay?"

Kosta nodded. "I think I've got the hang of it now," he said.

Qhahenlo looked up, too, as if noticing Kosta for the first time. "Incidentally, Mr. Kosta, you really don't have to wait around here if you've got something else you want to do. Watching other people sift their data isn't the most thrilling way to spend an afternoon."

"Actually, I've already been around the ship a couple of times," Kosta told her. "Nobody else has anything more interesting to watch."

Qhahenlo blinked. "When did you do all that?"

"About forty minutes ago."

Qhahenlo's lips puckered. "Occasionally, you'll find I get too engrossed ill my work to be a proper host. My apologies."

"That's all right," Kosta assured her.

Qhahenlo looked back at Gyasi. "Anyway. Let's see; we were about here..."

Their heads went back together, already lost in the data again. Kosta watched them, a wisp of worried contempt tugging at him. They were the archetypical crystal-tower scientists, all right, both of them. So completely wrapped up in their research that they didn't notice the rest of the universe.

So single-mindedly confident in what they were doing that not even the slightest doubt ever crossed either of their minds.

So infatuated by the angels that they'd lost all sense of perspective.

They'd put an angel on a baby. How long would it be before they were putting angels on all the babies?

"Yaezon?" he asked suddenly. "What kind of numbers are we talking about to get the Empyrean properly fitted out with angels?"

Gyasi looked up again. "Well, we need angels for all politicians from regional level on up. Then there are the judges, corporate executives, EmDef officers, trade officials—"

"Yes, but what I want is the total number of angels we're talking about."

Gyasi frowned. "No idea. Doctor?"

"Not offhand," Qhahenlo said. Without looking up she waved at another terminal. "But all that should be listed under the Empyreal Angel Experiment heading."

The approaching-zero-gee alarm was beginning to sound as Kosta found the proper sublist; and the ship's rotation was nearly at a stop by the time he located the current status information.

It was worse than he'd expected. The original estimate had been that it would take forty years to achieve the target level of one angel per hundred Empyreals. Now, barely eighteen years later, updated projections were guessing that goal to be only seven more years away. More hunterships, better shielding and detection equipment, the breakthrough invention of the hyperspace net—there were pages and pages of graphs tracing how each new scientific and technological advance had brought the goal closer. Already over eighteen thousand angels had been collected, with that number growing at an ever increasing rate.

Kosta paused, staring at one of the graphs, a quiet alarm bell going off in the back of his mind. He'd studied great quantities of black hole theory during the astrophysics segment of his tridoctorum degree. But if that graph was correctly drawn...

Strapping himself into the chair, hardly noticing his weightlessness, he got to work.

He was still at it when the announcement came that the ship had landed.

"So. What did you think?"

Kosta looked up from his display, feeling a flicker of annoyance at the interruption. "Of what, Angelmass?"

"Of Dr. Qhahenlo," Gyasi said. "And our project."

"Oh." Kosta shrugged, turning his attention to the display again. "I don't know. Okay, I guess."

Peripherally, he saw Gyasi put down his stylus and scoot his chair over. "Okay, I give up," he said.

"What in the world is so interesting?"

Kosta hesitated. He was sure now. But whether he ought to tell any of the Empyreals about this...

No. Of course he ought to. He was here to save them, after all. "This," he told Gyasi, swiveling the display around. "It's a graph of number of angels captured per huntership per unit time, shown in oneyear slices. You can see that it's gone up in the past couple of years."

Gyasi glanced at it. "No big surprise," he said. "There have been some major advances in technology and sensor equipment—"

"I've factored those out," Kosta cut him off.

Gyasi stopped. "Oh." He looked at the graph again, more carefully this time. "Well, maybe it's due to the fact that Angelmass is getting smaller. You know—as a quantum black hole gets smaller, it gets hotter and radiates its mass away faster." He reached for the keyboard. "Let's see; a hotter effective temperature would shift the mean particle spectrum upwards, creating more angels—"

"I've factored that out, too," Kosta told him.

Gyasi frowned. "You sure?"

Kosta nodded. "It's a simpler calculation even than the technological advancements. Check it yourself if you want."

"I'll take your word for it." For a long minute Gyasi gazed at the display, lips moving soundlessly.

"Interesting and a half," he admitted at last. "What do you think is causing it?"

Kosta shook his head. "I don't know. But it's for sure that something strange is going on out there.

Something in the Hawking process that current theory doesn't cover."

"Angels don't come from Hawking radiation," Gyasi said absently, eyes still on the graph. "At least not directly."

Kosta frowned. "What do you mean? I thought all particle radiation from a quantum black hole was Hawking process."

"Not angels, apparently," Gyasi shrugged. "Classical Hawking process is a tidal-force creation of particle-antiparticle pairs at the event horizon, one of which escapes while the other falls into the black hole. Right? So if angels are Hawking process, we should see anti-angels too. Only we don't."

"Never?"

Gyasi shrugged again. "No one's ever found one."

Kosta rubbed his chin. "But if it's not Hawking process, then what's the mechanism?"

"The theorists over in the west wing have been trying to answer that one for twenty years," Gyasi said dryly. "So far nothing they've come up with has been solid enough to hold soup." He shook his head. "I wonder why no one's ever noticed this before."

Because you've all got terminal tunnel vision where angels are concerned. "Probably because no one's thought to look," Kosta said instead. "That's why you bring in people like me who don't know what the unspoken assumptions are."

"I guess," Gyasi conceded. "You ought to get this written up and onto the nets as soon as possible."

Kosta felt his stomach tighten. For a moment there he'd almost forgotten who and what he was.

Now, all of that came rushing back like a splash of cold water.

He was a spy in enemy territory. And spies were not supposed to draw attention to themselves by publishing inflammatory academic papers. "Actually, I thought I'd do a little more work on it first," he said cautiously. "Make sure I'm not seeing things that aren't there."

"Bosh," Gyasi snorted. "What are you afraid of, looking silly? No one cares about that." He held up a hand. "Okay, okay, I know you're new here. Tell you what: if it'll make you feel any better, you can have three days to run all the numbers back and forth through the sand sifter. But after that, either you write it up or I will. Deal?"

Kosta hesitated. But he really didn't have a choice. And if it made the Empyreals even slightly more cautious about these angels of theirs, it would be worth the risk. "Deal."

"Good." Gyasi waved a hand imperiously at Kosta. "Well, don't just sit there—get to work. The entire Empyreal scientific community is waiting for this."

"Yeah," Kosta muttered. "I'm sure they can hardly wait."

"That's the spirit," Gyasi said. "Hey, relax—even if you're totally wrong, no one's going to hang you."

Kosta shivered. If he only knew.