Earth

• EXOSPHERE

“… the most likely explanation. Come now, Captain Tikhana. Surely you aren’t taken in by that silly cover story they’re spreading? That America was conducting secret weapons tests aboard Erehwon?” . Teresa shrugged, wondering again why she had let Pedro Manella set up this luncheon meeting in the first place. “Why not?” she responded. “The space secretary denies it. The President denies it. But you press people keep printing it.”

“Exactly!” Manella spread his hands expansively.

“The government’s charade is working perfectly. It’s a venerable tactic. Keep loudly denying something you didn’t do, so nobody will look for what you really did!”

Teresa stared as he twirled a forkful of linguini and made a blithe insouciance of taking it under the portal of his moustache. Fighting a nascent headache, she pressed the pressure points above her eyes. The plastic table top rocked under her elbows, setting plates and glasses quivering.

“Exactly-what-are-you-talking-about?” she said irritably, speaking the words individually. “If you don’t start making sense soon, I’m going to switch languages. Maybe you can make yourself understood in Simglish.”

The reporter gave her a look of distaste. Known to be fluent in nine tongues, he clearly had no love for the experimental bastard son of English and Esperanto.

“All right, Ms. Tikhana. Let me spell it out for you. I think your husband’s team on the space station’s Farpoint platform was experimenting with captive black holes.”

She blinked, then broke out laughing. “I knew it. You are crazy.”

“Am I?” Manella wiped his moustache and leaned toward her. “Consider. Although cavitronics research is allowed in a few places, in only one location have investigators been licensed to go all the way — to create full-scale singularities. And then only in orbit around the moon.”

“So?”

“So imagine some government decided to do an end run around the international team. What if they wanted to experiment on singularities of their own, in secret, to get a technological head start before the moratorium ends?”

“But the risks of getting caught—”

“Are substantial, yes. But those repercussions would be lessened by keeping all experiments at high altitude until everyone is sure microholes are safe and the tribunals start issuing licenses. Look what happened to that poor imbecile Alex Lustig, when he got caught jumping the gun right on the Earth’s surface.”

Teresa shook her head. “You’re implying the United States was engaged in secret, illegal research in space,” she said coolly.

Manella’s smile was patronizing, infuriating. Teresa steeled herself to ignore everything but content.

“I’m suggesting,” he replied. “That your husband might have been involved in such a program, and never bothered telling you about it.”

“I’ve heard enough.” Teresa crumpled her napkin and threw it on the table. She stood, but then stopped as she saw the reporter pull out several glossy photographs and lay them between the place settings. Teresa’s fingertips traced the outline of Jason’s face.

“Where was this taken?”

“At a conference on gravity physics last year, in Snowbird. See? You can read his name tag. Of course he wasn’t in uniform at the time…”

“Do you carry a secret camera in your bow tie?”

“In my moustache,” he said, with such a straight face that Teresa almost believed him. “This was back when I was hunting for clues to Alex Lustig’s whereabouts, before I broke the story on his own particular—”

Teresa flipped the last picture aside. “Nobody trusts photographs anymore, as proof of anything at all.”

“True enough,” Manella conceded. “They could be faked. But it was a public conference. Call the organizers. He used his own name.”

Teresa paused. “So? Among other things, Jason was studying anomalies in the Earth’s gravitational field. They’re important to orbital mechanics and navigation.” Because of that aspect, Teresa had done more than a little reading on the subject herself.

Manella commented with his shoulders. “The Earth’s field is twenty orders of magnitude less intense than the sort of gravity they talk about at conferences on the theory of black holes.”

Teresa slumped into her seat again. “You’re crazy,” she repeated. But this time her voice didn’t carry as much conviction.

“Come now, Captain. You’re an adult. Do not sink to abuse. Or at least keep the abuse relevant. Call me overzealous. Or pushy. Or even pudgy. But don’t say I’m crazy when you know I might be right.”

Teresa wanted to look anywhere but into the man’s dark, piercing eyes. “Why can’t you just leave it alone! Even if everything you suspect were true, they paid for it with their lives. The only ones they harmed were themselves.”

“And the taxpayers, Ms. Tikhana. I’m surprised you forget them. And perhaps your space program. What will happen to it during the lengthy investigations?”

Teresa winced, but said nothing.

“Besides, even if they only harmed themselves, does that excuse their bosses for violating basic principles of international law? True, most physicists agree cavitrons can’t make anything truly dangerous. But until that’s verified by a science tribunal, the technology is still quarantined. You know the reasons for the New Technologies Treaty as well as I do.”

Teresa felt like spitting. “The treaty’s a millstone, dragging us back—” But Manella disagreed, interrupting.

“It’s our salvation! You, of all people, should know what harm was done before its enactment. Care to try stepping outside right now without protection? Our grandparents could do so safely, even on a day like today.”

She glanced through the coated panes of the restaurant. It was bright out, not a cloud in the sky. Many strollers were enjoying an afternoon on the Mall. But everyone, without exception, wore sun hats and protective glasses.

Teresa knew the UV danger was often overstated. Even a few days’ sunbathing on a beach wouldn’t appreciably shorten the average person’s lifespan. The ozone layer wasn’t that badly depleted yet. Still, she got Manella’s point. Human shortsightedness had shredded that protective veil, just as it accelerated the spreading deserts and rising seas.

“You Americans astonish me,” he went on. “You dragged the rest of us, kicking and screaming, into environmental awareness. You and the Scandinavians chivvied and coerced until the treaties were signed… possibly in time to save something of this planet.

“But then, once the laws and tribunals were in place, you became the loudest complainers! Hollering like frustrated children about restraints on your right to do whatever you please!”

Teresa didn’t say anything, but answered silently. We never expected all the damned bureaucracy.

Her personal grudge was the tribunals’ slowness in releasing new rocket designs — studying, then restudying whether this propellant or that one would produce noxious or greenhouse gases. Closing the barn door too late on one problem and closing opportunity’s door at the same time.

“The world is too small,” Manella went on. “Our frail, frugal prosperity teeters on a precipice. Why do you think I devote myself to hunting down little would-be Fausts like Alex Lustig?”

She looked up. “For the headlines?”

Manella lifted his wine glass. “Touchi. But my point remains, Captain Tikhana. Something went on aboard that station. Let’s put aside illegality and talk about secrecy. Secrecy meant it wasn’t subject to scrutiny and criticism. That’s how calamities like Chernobyl and Lamberton and Tsushima happen. It’s also why — to be horribly blunt — your husband is right now hurtling at relativistic velocities toward Sagittarius.”

Teresa felt the blood drain out of her face. She had a sudden memory… not of Jason, but of the slippery way Colonel Gle