Tamika drained the liqueur in one long, slow swallow. It tasted of blueberry and sparkled of rubies. She felt it rushing to her head and was deeply grateful for the sensation.
Thalia watched her with an intent expression that Tamika had come to interpret as amusement. "Would you like another?" Thalia asked, lifting the crystal decanter to refill her own glass.
Tamika shook her head and smiled faintly. "I still need to be able to think."
The astrophysicist nodded as she walked across her office. Her midnight-blue jumpsuit whispered as she moved. Tamika wondered if the woman's choice of color was an expression of her emotions. Thalia stopped, staring at the viewscreen wall. Three days had altered the scene completely. The star that had been Betelgeuse was now a galactic light-stage. The massive shell of hot gases and newly created elements that had been blasted off in the explosion still glowed fiercely as it expanded into space. From the station and its just-launched fleet of replacement monitor sats, the shell was now on the outside, a dozen astronomical units out, a curtain of blazing light that obscured the rest of the universe. To one side, an ill-defined blob of brightness marked what was left of the companion, Honey, after it had been destroyed in a secondary supernova and blown clear of the primary. Lost Love, in its more distant orbit, had not yet been touched. It was truly alone now, the only star remaining of the original three.
Without n-thread communications, Tamika knew, even the closest interstellar neighbors would not see this explosion for years to come. But in fact, of course, the Habitat of Humanity would know soon what had happened here, if reports hadn't gone out already; the neighbors would have plenty of warning before the spectacle appeared in their skies.
Toying with her empty glass, she came and stood beside Thalia. Her eyes were drawn from the beautifully glowing curtain to the vortex of darkness at its center: the black hole, surrounded by a glowing mass of more slowly expanding stellar debris. It was a highly processed image, she knew; the naked eye would see nothing but blinding light in that direction. Down in that vortex, somewhere, was the entry point to the galactic gateway that had been born three days ago. The black hole was not itself the entry point, but its intense gravitational field was one of the forces that shaped the entrance and held it open.
Neither the opening nor the rest of the gateway was visible. No one had expected them to be, without special instrumentation. The trouble was, even the best instrumentation this station had to offer could not discern their shape. The mapping of the gateway had been a failure.
"Have you thought any more about staying to help us?" Thalia asked, without turning.
Tamika exhaled, closing her eyes. She willed herself to see the gateway with her inner vision, willed Dax to somehow make it clear to her. And yet, even if that were possible, would she really want it? She had believed, ever since hearing of it, that the Auricle Alliance should not be permitted monopolistic use of the gateway. If they succeeded in mapping it clearly enough to use, would the Alliance permit that knowledge, or the gateway itself, to be shared?
News of this event was certain to be political wildfire among the worlds of the Habitat. She wasn't sure she wanted to be involved in the upheaval that would follow. The political explosion could be as great as the supernova.
"You know what my stand is on the gateway," she said finally.
Thalia was staring at her, an amused glint in her huge dark eyes. "I'm not asking you to give that up."
"No? Then what? You want to get into the gateway, don't you?"
"Well—" Thalia's gesture was awkward, but it conveyed a surprising passion. "We don't want this whole effort to be wasted. And I for one don't want Willard's death to be in vain."
Willard's death. Tamika's thoughts drifted abruptly: it was still hard to believe that Rus'lem was gone. Somehow she kept expecting a communiqué: They've been found, Room Zeta has been found! And yet she knew that it was impossible; she'd felt Willard's spirit, and Max's, passing out of this world; out of this life. But had they passed into death, whatever that was—or into something else altogether? Her mind and her heart churned with uncertainty.
"Maybe death is the wrong word," Thalia continued. "Since we all felt it—are you listening to me?"
Tamika started. "Sorry. Yes."
"We all felt it."
"But we don't know," Tamika said. "We don't know what happened to them." And why am I the one denying it? Am I so afraid of hoping—and being wrong?
"We don't know," Thalia agreed. "There's no hard scientific evidence for it. But if you had to make a bet, wouldn't you say that Willard's consciousness survived in some form through the formation of the gateway?"
We felt him passing, Tamika thought. But surviving? How can we know? Still, it hadn't felt as though he were dying. And there was that other thing, that other consciousness.
((There are many things we can never know, until we see them, or try them.))
(Shut up, Dax. You tell me: Was that a star's consciousness we felt along with Willard's? A real consciousness?)
((Wouldn't we all like to know?))
"I'm not trying to convince you that he's alive now," Thalia was saying. "I hardly dare hope that myself. But we had contact at the end—and you were closer to him than anyone else who survived him." Her voice caught a little on that last statement. "So at the very least, if we could recover anything he might have communicated to you—"
Tamika sighed. "You want me to relive that!"
"We could use hypnotic regression—"
She snorted, and knew that the impulse had come from Dax. "There's someone inside me who can do a lot more than hypnotic regression."
Thalia nodded in understanding. Of course; Dax was in her, as well. "Certainly."
"But you said you wouldn't ask me to compromise."
Thalia nodded again, but with a grimace. "I can't promise on behalf of the Alliance—obviously. And you wouldn't believe me if I did. But there are foreign-world observers here, who certainly suspect that we did more than just watch the star explode. The Querayn, in particular, have been buzzing. I could ensure that they shared in any knowledge we gained here. And once that was out, it would be hard to enforce a monopoly, even if the Auricle Councils were inclined to try."
Tamika gazed at her. "At what cost to your career?"
Thalia shrugged, hiding a faintly sour expression.
For a moment, neither of them spoke. Then Tamika said gently, "May I ask you something?"
Thalia's eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. The gaze of her dark eyes was challenging, but not without warmth. Tamika was beginning to understand why Willard had been attracted to this woman. In the last three days, she had come to trust Thalia in a way she wouldn't have dreamed possible four days ago. Nevertheless, Thalia had invested years of work in pursuing this project for the Auricle Alliance. Why would she suddenly drop that commitment? "Why are you willing to accommodate my views?" Tamika asked finally. "You have a lot invested in secrecy here. You could do it without me."
Sighing, Thalia turned back to the viewscreen. "To give meaning to Willard's death."
"Yes, but—"
"No, it's more than that. For one thing: obviously, right now we have little to show for what we've done. Oh, we could send exploratory ships in—and we will—and eventually one will survive the trip and return. Eventually, when enough people have died, we'll learn to use this monster." She gestured at the image. "If it can be used. But I don't think Willard would have wanted a lot of people to die in his footsteps—and I know he didn't want it to be used just by the Alliance, and . . ." She paused, struggling.
Tamika waited.
"Well, maybe I understood a little of how he felt, at the end," Thalia concluded, her voice dropping to a hoarse whisper. She glanced at Tamika with sharp eyes and turned away.
Tamika felt a twinge of sympathy. However strange it felt to her, there was a bond between the two of them now. She knew it would not quickly disappear. "I think he would want us to use the gateway," she agreed. "If the 'us' included the entire Habitat. All of the worlds."
Thalia shrugged her big shoulders. "Yes."
"But—" and Tamika's words became halting. "I don't know what I could do. It doesn't seem to me that any of the impressions I got—of their passing, I mean—would help much." (Dax?) And as she looked inward, she received no sense from Dax that there was anything hidden that she had forgotten, no subliminal cues from Rus'lem about how the gateway had turned out. She doubted that he had even known it himself in those moments of unworldly contact.
Thalia turned back to her. "I understand. And that's why I want to take a gamble. And I want you to think about joining me." She strode across the room to fill her liqueur glass again. Raising her eyebrows in query, she lifted the decanter in Tamika's direction. After a second's hesitation, Tamika joined her for a refill. She allowed a sip of the bracing liquid to glide down her throat. She looked at Thalia warily.
"Now, this is based on your perceptions, as well as my own," Thalia said. "There's no way I could convince a science panel of this without your support—and I still might not be able to convince them."
Tamika sensed what was coming, and she wasn't sure she liked it.
"Let us suppose that Willard's awareness survived in some form. Since the K-space field joined us to his consciousness at the end, it seems reasonable to wonder if another K-space field might renew that contact."
Tamika nodded silently.
Thalia took a breath. "And entry to the gateway would of course be through a K-space field."
Tamika closed her eyes. "Of course." She was beginning to feel a buzzing between her eyes. She wanted to think that it was the liqueur, but she knew it wasn't. Don't give me hope that will fail. Please.
"Tamika?"
She kept her eyes closed; they were beginning to leak tears. She didn't want to answer.
"Tamika—" Thalia repeated, and there was a pain in her voice that forced Tamika to finally blink the tears away. "You know, his loss—I won't say death—was a blow to me, too. You're not alone in mourning him."
Tamika gazed at her, barely seeing the woman standing in front of her, seeing only an image of a black hole and its glaring cloak that hid not only its own secrets but also the secrets of the invisible gateway—and wondering if Willard might somehow have survived. Did she dare to hope? In what form could he have survived? In what form could a star be alive? And what difference could it make to her? Willard was lost to her, to her universe.
((You don't know until you know.))
"I'm sorry," she whispered at last, thinking of Thalia's grief.
Thalia seemed not to hear her. She continued, "It's also possible, I suppose, that the whole station survived; that they're drifting somewhere in an n-space field, somehow beyond the range of all of our monitors."
Tamika shook her head violently. She didn't want to find Willard dead in some torn-up station; if someone else wanted to go looking for him there, that was fine. But she knew that the station hadn't survived the cataclysm; she'd felt that with a certainty she couldn't explain.
Thalia nodded. "I don't think so, either. But there is the gateway. And there is his friend, Ali'Maksam. And the sun. If we were right about the sun."
Within Tamika's mind, a recollection crystallized of the stellar consciousness she had sensed—and somewhere in there, Max's as well. She had never really come to terms with Max. Was it possible she still could do so? Or was this all madness?
"One of the Querayn observers came to me yesterday," Thalia said, "telling me that they'd sensed the soul of the sun when it died. I didn't tell them what we'd done, though I was sorely tempted. But there was a look in this one's eyes; I think perhaps he knew." She squinted through her glass, squinted at Tamika. "It won't be as soon as I'd like. There will be a lot to do first. And it could all be wrong. A completely false hope. Maybe he can't let us know how to do it. We could die in an instant. But I intend to try. And I'd like you to go with me."
"Go?" Tamika whispered, her eyes blurring.
"Through, Tamika," Thalia said. "Through . . ."
And the world suddenly seemed a very windy place; there was a rushing in Tamika's ears, and she heard Dax's voice talking to her, confusingly; and it all seemed to be spinning, out of control. She felt as though she were already passing through the gateway, and she imagined that she heard Rus'lem's voice calling out to her, caressing her mind. And almost as though against her will, she felt herself nodding.