Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [84]
“As always, Markis, it was nice to spend time with you.”
“Okay.” She went to a split screen, Emily and Markis again, from a conversation seven weeks earlier, shortly after Hunter had departed St. Johns. “Watch.”
Neither spoke. Emily squeezed Kane’s shoulder and slipped into the right-hand seat.
“We’re right on schedule,” he said.
She leaned toward him, as close as the restraints would permit. “Maybe this’ll be our time.”
“I hope so, Emily. I really do.”
“Listen to his voice,” Kim said. “Watch the body language.”
The two sat several minutes, talking about incidentals. But the manner of it, the tendency of each to reach out and touch the other broadcast their mutual passion. Kim froze the picture at a moment when they gazed soulfully at each other.
“I don’t know,” said Solly. “What are you trying to prove?”
“Inconsistency.”
She replayed the conversations in her mind and stared out at the skyline.
“Let me change the subject,” said Solly. “The Institute called a while ago. Harvey’s asked for some time off. They need a replacement pilot.”
“For—?”
“Taratuba.”
The black hole near the Miranda nebula. The genesis candidate. The Thomas Hammersmith was scheduled to leave in eleven days.
There was a suspicion, but little hard evidence, that Taratuba had created a false vacuum, had collapsed into a new big bang. A baby universe. The event, if it had in fact occurred, would have erupted into a different space-time continuum, forever separated from this universe. But theory held that if it were in fact happening, Kung Che radiation would be detectable around the hole. It might be a chance to touch the fires of creation. To make some progress on precreative conditions.
“You’d be gone quite a while,” she said.
“Several months.” He looked at her. “What do you think? Does it make a problem for you?”
“No. Of course not.”
“I mean, this thing has lain fallow for thirty years.”
“Of course.”
“You think there’s anything to it?” he asked.
“To what?”
As if he’d been reading her thoughts: “Alternate worlds. A place where you and I are sitting in this same room, having this same conversation, except maybe we’ve figured out what’s going on.”
She shrugged. “Not my field, Solly. But I’d like to compare notes with the other Brandywine.”
He looked at her for a long moment. “I wonder,” he said suddenly, “if there’s a place out there where we’re lovers?”
He blurted it out, as if he had to say it before some prohibition intervened. He looked uncomfortable in the wake of the remark, and she knew he would have called it back if he could.
She took his hand, not knowing quite what to say. There’d always been an unspoken understanding between them, a distance created by the knowledge that they would not risk a long friendship to a sexual encounter. But there were occasional hints, suggestions from Solly that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the status quo. Still, he was all the family she had, and she did not want to lose him. “I’d hope so,” she said cautiously, smiling, but using a neutral tone.
While Solly called the desk and booked tickets on the Snowhawk in the morning, Kim parked herself in front of the display and began running the Hunter logs again.
Emily and Kane.
I love you, the early encounters said, the passion reciprocal. There was no way to miss it.
And: “As always, Markis, it was nice to spend time with you.”
The nonverbal cues were almost professionally correct, no suggestion of sexual tension, no touching, no wistful smiles. Nothing. Even the voices were friendly but detached. Pass the coffee.
“It’s all wrong,” she said aloud.
“If you figure it out,” said Solly, stretching, getting up from the sofa on which he’d been spread out, “let me know. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Kim put up her split screen again, Kane and Emily from early in the mission on one side, Kane and Emily saying goodbye on the other. She ran both sequences forward at normal speed, then backed them up and ran them again at one quarter. And then she saw it.
My God.
She reversed it and watched it again. There was no question.
She knocked