Asimov's SF, January 2012 (13 page)

Aside from his dog, she wasn't sure about that.

Cayla had found the first event—the first burst—the previous fall, a year after she had started working with Maune.

Working for Maune was both exhilarating and exhausting. He spoke quietly, was never angry or sarcastic, never threw things—unlike some of her friends’ advisors—but he asked questions as endless as the sea, and when she floundered he sent her away to look for answers.

She took to considering all the angles and possibilities before seeing him. She worked harder preparing for a meeting with Maune than for her classes. A good word from Maune could make her career. Although Cayla felt, deep down, that Maune's
admiration
was beyond her reach, she hoped for at least his respect. That desire drove her to work seventy, eighty hours a week.

And she learned. She feared she was putting in too little time in her second year courses, and she missed half her study group sessions, causing her to dread the upcoming quals. But she knew the astronomical databases like the back of her hand and had a dozen analysis tools in her handheld, their algorithms disassembled and personally tweaked by her.

When she finally sat for the quals in the spring, she stared at the questions, terror rising inside her. She was able to write down something for barely half the questions, and only then because of things she had come across in her reading for Maune, or mathematical tricks he casually mentioned to her.

When the results were posted, she couldn't bear to look. Instead she sat rooted at her desk, until one of her office mates, Bai-lin, stopped in. “Why are you even still here?” Bai-lin asked, and the words sounded like an accusation. “Well, we're all going to a bar. You probably don't want to come with us. . . ."

"Sure,” said Cayla, standing up with a heavy heart.

At the bar her fellow students moaned about their scores, but not a word was said to Cayla until Bai-lin piped up: “Hey, Cayla, you can show me how an American girl talks up guys. Like those two there."

Before Cayla could protest, Bai-lin grabbed her hand and dragged her over. “Say something,” Bai-lin urged, elbowing her, but Cayla just stared miserably into her beer. Bai-lin sighed and said loudly: “I guess you can't believe the stereotypes. I'm the fun one, and she's miss super-smart study-all-the-time no-time-for-dates."

"Don't tease,” Cayla muttered, wincing.

"This one, she got the highest score on the astrophysics qual,” Bai-lin said, “by a factor of two,” and Cayla felt as if her legs had been kicked out from under her. It was all she could do to keep standing. “Now everyone else has to work hard just to be second best. How rude is that?"

Cayla lifted her head, her mouth open, but Bai-lin had already slipped away through the crowd with one of the young men.

"I'm Rish,” the one left behind said.

"It's not true,” she said.

He smiled. “Well, my parents insist it is. Like fish, but with an ‘r.’”

"No, I mean about the astrophysics qual."

"Why, what was your score?"

She felt flushed. “I didn't look. But I couldn't—"

"So, a statistical fluke, then?” When Cayla didn't answer, he added, “Which is of professional interest to me."

"You study statistics?"

Rish laughed. “No, history. And I've always been fascinated by accidents. You know, there's the Great Man theory of history, all Hitlers and Lincolns and Gandhis, and then there's the Inexorable Wave theory of the masses. But I think it's neither. It's the guard who falls asleep, the cook who uses spoiled meat, the cab driver who gets lost. What if the art teacher said, I'll give little Adolf an A? If Mary Todd said, Abe, I have a headache tonight, let's skip the play?"

"Sounds like the flip side of the anthropic principle."

"Huh?"

Cayla lifted her own half-full glass. “Well. The anthropic principle states that the universe is the way it is because if it were different, we wouldn't be here to write papers on it. There are some physical constants that, if they were different, stars wouldn't form, or there wouldn't be enough carbon and oxygen. A roll of the dice. Most people think it's a circular argument."

"
Anthropic
. I like that word. I'll try to work it into my dissertation.” Rish took a swallow of his beer. “But to be honest, I'm actually working on the influence of technology on warfare and trade in Asia. And you, miss no-time-for-dates studies-all-the-time?"

"Well, not
all
the time,” Cayla said.

Cayla did work long hours that summer. When she had energy left she went out with Rish, or home with him. But every morning, even when grainy-eyed from too little sleep, she got up, wrapped herself in her worn terrycloth bathrobe, flicked on the terminal, and began to work.

At the beginning of the fall quarter she presented her initial results to Maune. Her data mostly agreed with the simulations, although she admitted to being troubled by the sensitivity to parameters.

"It's chaotic, of course,” Maune said quietly. “The key is finding a robust statistical characterization."

"The temperature. . . ."

"Are you sure you can define temperature? Is the system in thermal equilibrium?"

Cayla stood there with her mouth open.

"You look as if you've been invited to your own funeral,” Maune said. “Do cheer up. You simply have to be prepared for the inevitable sniping from referees. The answer, as ever, is to keep working."

It was hard to focus at first, but she did just that, and the next day she found the first burst.

Chastened, Cayla had begun by hunting in other bands. She started with the V or violet filter band, then worked her way through the B (blue), R (red), and IR (infrared) band.

But the data in each of these bands were sparse, just a few pixels here and there, so sparse as to be nearly useless. “But
nearly
useless means they aren't quite useless,” she whispered to herself.

It struck her that she could overlay the data, patch together a little of V and B and R and IR. Individually, the bands didn't have enough data to make statistical sense, but combined . . . It was a trick Maune himself had used.

So she overlaid the bands and stepped through the data in time.

And she saw it. Late January 2019, a bright spot, a single pixel, less than a microarcsecond across, but there was a signal in every band. In any given band it looked like a random fluctuation, but they all had the
same
fluctuation.

Intrigued, she looked closer. The event hadn't lasted long; she had UV data with a twelve hour sampling rate and it was gone after two cycles.

But it was odd. It was compact, intense, but less energetic than a supernova or even a nova. And there were no stars nearby.

A week later she was about to write it off as a fluke, when she found another event, this one from 2025 . . . but in a different part of the LMC. The same compact nature in space and time; and both had broad, non-thermal spectra.

Cayla didn't dare tell Maune. Two “events” could be statistical accidents. After all, she was mining hundreds of petabytes of data, and was bound to find some weird coincidences. “I need another burst,” she told Rish.

Meanwhile, she continued to gather data on shock fronts in the interstellar medium, creating time-lapse images in false color, showing the oscillating flow of energy and pressure like the flapping of a butterfly wing. But the meaning of her events, her bursts, still eluded her.

"A signal from little green men?” Rish asked. “Or, hey! Maybe it's a starship, crashing, an accident.” Cayla shook her head. “Why not?"

Cayla put her head in her arms. “Because I actually considered that. But if it were moving at relativistic speeds I'd be able to see it smeared across a few pixels."

"Still haven't showed it to Maune?"

"He seems distracted these days, staring off into space. He asks me to repeat myself. Maybe he's disappointed in me."

"I doubt that. He's an eccentric astronomer, remember?"

Cayla mined data, week after week, working from mid-morning into late night. Rish packed up lunches for her, and was clearly bottling up his own frustration, and Cayla felt whipped by guilt and ambition from all sides.

Then, in early May, shortly after the campus carillon rang midnight, Cayla, sitting in her office, found an event from 2018. It looked just like the other two. She danced in the parking lot beneath a quilt of clouds, woke Rish to tell him the news, and found The Lump.

The wait for scan results was torture. For his part Rish adopted black humor. “It could be a cost-cutting measure,” he quipped. “By waiting longer to tell me, I'll die faster and save them a bundle. Oh, don't look so glum,” he said when Cayla winced. “It's so awful it's almost comical. Or something."

"Don't make fun,” she mumbled.

"You should go in. With you rattling around here and offering me tea every fifteen minutes, it makes me nervous."

"Are
you
able to focus? On your work?"

He sighed. “On my diss? Not a chance. But to be honest, you're reminding me of my
nani
taking care of me when I was sick as a kid, and I don't want to superimpose you on my
nani
. Not sexy at all. Please. Go in."

At work, Cayla's automated search algorithms had dredged up two new candidate bursts, one within the Milky Way, another on the edge of the Large Magellenic Cloud. The luminosities were roughly one-trillionth of a canonical gamma-ray burst, so she thought of them as picobursts.

Still, she hesitated to go to Maune.
What do you think these bursts are?
she imagined him asking, and she had no idea. It's publishable, she kept telling herself, publishable data, but she wanted the data to make sense.
Yet, sometimes the universe doesn't make sense,
Maune's cool, clipped voice came back to her.
It's a sequence of cold and improbable accidents
. She blinked. She didn't remember him ever saying anything like that. In her experience he was more likely to say,
We must try to understand the universe
.

Frustrated, Cayla went home, home to find Rish pacing their tiny apartment. “The bastards, the bloody bastards,” he said, breathing hard, “the stupid
pricks!"

Cayla stopped in the doorway. “What? What is it?"

"They lost the data from the scan. I have to go in for another."

She dropped her backpack and swiftly went to put her arms around him, but Rish was stiff with rage. “When?” she asked.

"Oh, they were ever so nice, said I should be at Sharp in an hour.” He pulled away from her. “I don't think I should drive, I'm so angry—"

"Of course I'll drive you."

Down at the corner rent-a-ride a duo was, thankfully, available. Cayla waved her credit wand at the lock and they jammed themselves into cramped seats. As they wound through thick La Jolla traffic, Rish cursed the doctors. “Two weeks they make me wait, and then the
bloody
bastards erase it."

"You have a right to be angry at them,” Cayla said as she sped along, weaving past the other cars.
If we're late it'll be my fault
. “I know if it were me, I'd be about ready to bawl my eyes out—"

"Watch it watch it WATCH IT!” Rish shouted, grabbing the dashboard. In front of them the brake lights of an old-style hybrid flared red as it fishtailed, tires shrieking, bumper looming large. Cayla stomped on her own brake pedal, quickly looked left then right but
oh no oh god
thick traffic on either side but she saw a hole she thought she hoped and yanked the wheel to the right, barely missed clipping the hybrid even as it slammed into a small truck stopped dead in the middle of the road. The sound of crunching plastic and crumpling metal made a horrible, stomach-knifing sound and it took all of Cayla's strength to keep her eyes open and looking forward even as in her peripheral vision she saw shattered glass and mushrooming airbags and bits of car flying up in the air.

And then they were past the accident, the only sound the polite hum of the duo's electric motor.

Rish turned around in his seat to look back. “Jesus!"

"Do you want me to pull over?” Cayla asked, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. “Should we call—?"

"No, other people are stopping.” Rish slumped in his seat, facing forward again. “Sorry I yelled,” he murmured, “it was just . . ."

"It's okay."

Even sitting in the waiting room, Rish commented, “I still feel shaken. Shaken, not stirred."

Cayla rubbed her forehead. “We were lucky."

"Well, a different roll of the dice and they might have been scraping Rish and Cayla chutney out of that car. Is this an anthropic situation?"

Before Cayla could respond, a nurse called. “Mr. Chandan?"

Rish stood. “Wish me luck."

"Luck is an illusion,” Cayla said automatically, but she was thinking,
a different roll of the dice
, and her thoughts rang her body like a bell.

And as she sat in the cool, ticking quiet of the waiting room, she began to make estimates in her head.

She did not have Maune's experience and vast internal library. But as she worked out the numbers, skipping over factors of pi and two, she got a taste of what it must be like to be him.

She looked up and saw Rish standing in front of her. “Sorry it took so long."

"Long?” She glanced at a wall clock. She'd been there for over ninety minutes. “It's okay. I was just thinking. About my data.” She stood, grabbed her purse, and followed Rish out the double doors.

At the elevator he asked, “And any interesting thoughts about your data?"

"Yes,” she said, “but I'm probably wrong."

Cayla did not find where she was wrong.

Instead, she found more data, more events, that fit into her scheme.

"I must be crazy,"

"Everyone is crazy,” Rish said. “Anything in particular you are crazy about?"

"My data. My explanation for my data."

"Which is what? Little green men?"

She sat down heavily at the table, dropping her knapsack on the floor. “Little green men I wouldn't feel so bad about.” She spread her hands. “You heard me talk about dark energy?"