Jonny processed this in his own way. “So I need to be angry at you, or scared, before I can make this work?”
“That’s a starting hypothesis, but it seems narrow. I’m guessing that right now you just need an agitated emotional state.”
“What about my DNA?”
“What about it?”
“I’d like you to run tests on me to find out whether this is going to kill me.”
Derek shrugged. “Fine. Roll up your sleeve.”
“What now?”
“You want DNA testing, so I’m taking blood.”
Grumbling to himself, Jonny rolled up a sleeve.
The needle that Derek reached for looked as though it would have been appropriate for a large animal like a whale.
“Don’t you have anything smaller?” asked Jonny.
“Scared?”
Jonny promptly shut his mouth, not wanting to let Derek win.
Derek took eight test tubes of blood in all.
“You need eight samples to test my DNA?” inquired Jonny.
“No, I need eight samples so that, if I think of something else to look for, I don’t need to call you back to the lab each time. This will go a lot more smoothly if you don’t question my every action.” Derek placed seven of the test tubes in a lab fridge and set one of them in a DNA sequencer.
“What are you looking for?”
Derek sighed. “What did I just tell you about not questioning every little thing?” Despite his annoyance, he answered anyway. “At birth all of us are sequenced. If there have been any significant changes in your DNA, they will show up. Are you done with that line of questioning?”
“Yes.”
“Great. Now I think we should start looking into what triggers this response in you. Anger is one stimulus, fear another.”
“So I should just try getting angry?”
“Well, maybe. We’re going to have to design protocols that include directed anger, undirected anger, and a host of other emotions. Chances are that this isn’t going to be fun for you.” Derek reflected a little more before smiling maliciously. “I, on the other hand, should be able to entertain myself enormously.”
Indirect Information
Calm sat next to Cay’s bed. The boy looked young lying there, his skin pale under the lights of the room and against the sheets of his bed. A tube led into his nose and another down his throat. The entire room, with its lack of decoration, conspired to make the medical care seem crude and the environment claustrophobic.
This was Calm’s second time visiting Cay. Two days after the accident the boy still hadn’t awoken. The equipment monitoring his slumber indicated that he was in a coma.
None of the machines registered brainwaves, and the prognosis was grim. Meanwhile the medical team had been working around the clock to determine the cause of Cay’s lapse into unconsciousness. So far they had met with failure, which made estimates of when he’d wake up little better than wild guesses.
Calm dragged a passing researcher into the room to question him while he visited. Who knew? Maybe Cay would hear the conversation. “What do you mean that it’s as though the solar system is invisible?” he asked. Calm watched the man struggle to find a simple way of describing the situation.
“Well, we’re still in the gravity field of a solar system.”
“How can you tell?”
“The gravity from the sun was all that ever held the Oort Cloud together.”
“So?”
“The physics out here are still acting as though there is a central gravity well. It has a minimal effect, but it is still measurable.”
“What does that mean in simpler terms?” Calm inquired.
“Well, it’s just a theory, but you’ve been told how all of the stars have changed, right?”
“Yes, of course.”
“It’s possible that somehow Cay affected the artifact and that our entire solar system has been teleported to a new location in the universe.”
Calm rolled his eyes. These so-called explanations weren’t helping at all. “And how would that turn the sun invisible?”
“It wouldn’t. It would just mean that the light from the sun would need time to reach us again.”
“Beg pardon?”
“We’re almost a light year out from the center of the solar system. If something happens in there, the sight of it would take almost a year to reach us.”
“So you’re saying what exactly?”
“That we might see the sun out here in a year, or much sooner if we headed inward.”
Calm took an interest in the ceiling while he worked out this idea. “So you’re inferring from the presence of minimal gravity that we’re still in our sun’s gravity well?”
“Yes.” The scientist looked relieved that Calm understood him.
“Could it be any star?”
“Well, yes, I suppose so.” The academician’s voice was dismissive. “But if it isn’t our sun, then you’d expect the light to have already made its way out here.”
Calm stood up and paced in circles before posing his next question. “Is there a way to test this hypothesis of yours?”
“Well, it’s not my theory, but it’s the best that any of us have come up with.”
Straight answers here were in short supply. “Answer my question.”
“We’ll be sending a probe to the inner solar system to determine what’s there now.”
“And what about us?”
“In what sense?”
Calm realized that a scientist who had chosen to live in the most remote settlement ever established by mankind might not understand the need to reconnect with the rest of humanity. “What do we do? How long can we survive?”
“Oh. Well, we haven’t yet finished mapping the surrounding area, but the portion of the Oort Cloud that we were in appears to have made the same trip as us. That means we have what amounts to an unlimited supply of raw materials. The FAME stations were designed to be self-sufficient for extended periods of time due to the impracticality of regular supply chains.”
“So we’re not in any immediate danger of starvation or atmospheric breach then?”
“No, we’re safe, more or less indefinitely.”
“Indefinitely?” Calm asked, not believing that the man could really believe that.
“Yes.”
“How many women are at this station?”
Comprehension failed to glimmer in the man’s eyes. “Twelve.”
“And men?”
“Forty-seven.”
Understanding still eluded the cosmologist. “I’m going to go talk to someone with a higher pay grade,” said Calm.
The Pet Shop
Deklan sat with Susan in her office. A sign on the door said “Out for lunch.”
“I think you’re being hasty and overly dramatic,” she declared.
“Oh? How?”
“You’re suggesting that because of one venomous dog and rumors in an ER, we should flee the planet.”
Deklan thought about this. It was an incomplete summation, but accurate as far as it went. “You are aware of the stakes here, right? If I’m correct and we flee, we survive. If I’m wrong and we flee, we get a holiday.”
“What is this ‘we’ business? I met you today while you were bleeding in my office. I have half a mind to bill you for services rendered.”
Deklan had learned over the years that being rude sometimes got through to people in ways that being polite didn’t. “Fine. Stay and die.”
Susan bristled. “That was uncalled for. I’m just saying that perhaps a little research is in order.”
Deklan rolled his eyes. “What research do you need to do? Dissect a few more stray dogs to see whether they’re hosts to deadly viruses?”
Deklan swore that he heard a miniature sonic boom as Susan’s head snapped around. “Do you think a Keystone could do that?” she asked.
“Who knows what a Keystone can do? Calm is famous for being the next best thing to indestructible. Did you see the footage of him kite-surfing in the hurricane?”
“Yes. What does that have to do with animals?”
“My cat ripped a door off its hinges and nearly killed a Great Dane.” Deklan struggled to believe this, despite having lived through the experience only that morning. “Animals outnumber us, and not just by a little. If a tiny percentage of them become Keystones, and a tiny percentage of those become dangerous Keystones, then humans will stop being the apex predators of the planet.”
“I still think that we should apply a more scientific method. What if animal Keystones are very rare and your cat is as powerful as they’re going to be? You were in an emergency room. There, as one would expect, you heard the worst-case stories.”
Deklan could hear the rationalization in Susan’s voice. The lies that people tell themselves, he thought, in order to avoid having to act. “So you think that, out of all of the animals in the world that have become Keystones, I’m living with one of them, got attacked by another, and then heard stories about all of the rest in a third location that I visited? Doesn’t that stretch the meaning of the word ‘coincidence’ just a little?”
Susan flapped her hands in dismissal of his counter-argument. “The dogs were probably just attracted to the smell of blood.”
“And that doesn’t worry you?” he rejoined.
“Okay, fine. This needs to be looked into a little more. Let me dissect some rats.” Susan turned away from Deklan. “I’m sure I have traps around here somewhere.”
“Or we could go to a pet store.”
“You are distinctly annoying,” she replied.
Leaving the sign on the office door, Susan and Deklan walked to the nearest pet store, a mere three blocks away. To Deklan’s mind, Susan paid far too little attention to their immediate surroundings. His eyes darting everywhere, Deklan perceived pigeons as an aerial menace. The noise of trash rustling on the sidewalk prompted him to make sure that it wasn’t caused by a rat or a dog. He felt the threat of danger looming everywhere.
As they approached the pet store, Deklan could see that something was wrong. The door was open, not because a shopper had left it ajar but because it couldn’t close anymore, the frame’s being badly bent. “Still think I’m crazy?” he asked.
“You’re jumping to conclusions.” Susan still sounded blasé. “This is probably damage from the riots. You know, when everything went dark for eight minutes.”
Deklan kept mum about how he had spent that time. “Fine. Just stay back and let me look first.”
Susan rolled her eyes. “No, we’re going to go inside, buy some rats, and you’re going to see that this is all one big overreaction on your part.”
“Humor me, okay? It’s not going to cost you anything.”
Near the damaged store’s front windows, Deklan peered from behind the concrete encasements so that only a small part of his face would be visible to someone or something inside. A scene from a science-fiction movie met his eyes. Cages were ripped apart. Bags of feed were spilled open, groups of animals eating from them like impromptu troughs. A dog was sleeping on a wall as though gravity didn’t exist. A tabby cat sat atop a goldfish tank with two tentacles extending from its jaws into the water as it plucked fish from their marine haunts. One small area of the store had an inexplicable white hemisphere that looked like nothing Deklan had ever seen.
“Take a look,” said Deklan as he pulled back from what he had glimpsed. “Then tell me that I’m crazy and overreacting.”
Susan mimicked his action and, faster than he had, pulled her head back. Looking at him with a wild light in her eyes, her breath coming in rapid bursts, she leaned against the wall and repeated, “I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die.”
Deklan shook her, gently at first but then with greater urgency. “Susan!” he shouted. Focus!”
“That’s just one shop!” she replied. “How many animals are there in the city?”
Deklan ignored the question. “We should go. Do you have family?”
She shook her head, still in a daze. “No.”
“I do.” Deklan looked around. “We need to go, and I need to call them.”
Sitting in the waiting room at Susan’s veterinary practice, Deklan detached the earpiece from his Uplink and put it on before calling his parents. “Hey, Mom!”
“Deklan. How nice! Did you kill someone?” Deklan flicked an icon on his Uplink. It never failed: he always forgot to lower the volume when he called home. How his mother managed to be so loud he’d never figured out.
“No.”
“You don’t sound very sure.”
“Anyway I have some great news.”
His mother recited her wish list for his life, her voice more hopeful with each item. “You and Cindy got back together? You’re engaged? I’m going to have grandchildren before I die?”
“Um, no, no, and maybe.”
“Well, your news can’t be that great then. Wait, did you meet someone else?”
“No, but
. . . .
”
“Not that great then.”
“I won tickets for a vacation on the Terra Rings.”
When she spoke again, his mother’s voice had slowed down and sounded cautious. “Okay, and how does that affect your father and me?”
“Well, it’s a vacation for four, and I want you and Dad to come with me.”
“Oh, I don’t know, honey. That’s a lot right now. What with the upset of that light thing and your car going missing. I don’t know whether your father and I are up for that. We never wanted to see the Rings anyways.”
“Come on, Mom. You’re always complaining that you never see enough of me since I moved to New York. It’s a week-long, all-expense-paid vacation to Ring Two.”
“Isn’t that the cheap one?”
Confronted with the possibility of an all-expense-paid exotic vacation, his mother still found something to criticize. It was familiar, reassuring, and annoying all at once. “What? No. What kind of question is that? Why would any of the Rings be ‘cheap?’”
“I’ve been on an airplane before, and your father gets acid reflux something terrible. I don’t think that would mix well with weightlessness.”
“I’ll help you sneak a giant redwood seed into one of the parklands up there.”
“Why would I want to do that?” asked his mother, her voice going an octave higher, the way it did when she was confused.
“Because you love to garden, and that would make you the first person to plant a giant redwood in space.”
There was a hush as his mother mustered her arguments. “Tempting, but still not a good enough reason to go.”
“I’m not taking no for an answer.”
“I’ll talk to your father, but I don’t think he’ll want to go. Why don’t you come visit us instead?”