Noumenon Infinity

He gazed at her blankly.

“All of my Muslim colleagues are fasting during daylight hours. This is a favorite for keeping up strength. Go on, it’s sweet.”

“What’s floating in it?”

“Pine nuts.”

“I’ll pass.”

“Oh, no you don’t.” She pushed it closer to him. “You don’t get to preach at me about boldly going and all that if you won’t even try a harmless little drink.”

The cafeteria sat on the ground floor of the seven-story building, right at the base of the main escalators. Its long communal tables were easily visible from the balconies lining the inside of all floors, and during the day sunbeams streamed through the angled skylights to nurture the half-dozen inground trees dotting the public space.

The cafeteria was largely empty. The early hour meant the sundown feasts were long over, though many people would be getting up soon to prepare a hearty meal before sunrise.

Still, three women occupied a nearby table, two in hijab and one with her hair in a bun, all dressed in lab coats. They eyed Kaufman with suppressed smirks as he lifted the glass of jellab to his lips, a preemptive expression of distaste furrowing his brow.

He took a dainty sip, smacking his lips loudly. “It is sweet,” he agreed, taking a gulp. “What is that? Grapes and—?”

“Rose water.”

He took another long gulp. “Could do without the nuts, though.”

“Couldn’t we all,” Vanhi said under her breath, slicing into the doughy, steamed deliciousness before her. “All right, so you were auspiciously comparing SD drives to warheads …”

“Only in that we don’t test them where we make them. Because it’s too dangerous. How many certifications did the drives need in space before anyone agreed to put them in ships?”

“A lot. Still looking for your point here.”

“Your research could be accelerated by orders of magnitude if you were allowed to take it off-planet. But the only player in the big-budget space game is the consortium. It’s the P.U.M.s or nothing.” He pushed his jellab to the side, leaning over his salad conspiratorially. “What if I could get you a mission?”

“There are twelve missions,” she said pointedly between bites. “That’s it. They take up the entire world’s budget for deep-space travel. Where are they going to scrape up another, what, forty-five trillion for a thirteenth trip? Besides, let’s say you’re right, and that moving SD research into space for the sake of safety means we advance our understanding of the subdimensions by decades. We don’t need to leave the solar system to do it. And that’s the point of the P.U.M.s.”

“Your research could render the Planet United Missions obsolete,” he insisted. “Imagine this—which convoy is it—nine, I think?—that’s on its way to study Sagittarius A-Star. Imagine they arrive there to find a future convoy, built a hundred years from now, has gotten there first, thanks to your work. Imagine how much more knowledge we could amass about our universe because we can simply travel faster. Study sooner. We’re talking the difference between a wagon train and a bullet train. If you have enough resources, I bet within your lifetime we’ll find—and be able to use—SDs that sweep us along at n-to-the-second or n-to-the-tenth or n-to-the-nth-power faster than our current travel SD.”

The thought should have excited her, invigorated her. But for some reason it made her stomach turn. She wanted to advance, to help mankind, to push the limits of known science, but the idea of sending all those people into space only to make them obsolete …

She dropped her fork, wiping her hands against her thighs. “Is this your pitch to the consortium? Give her a convoy and watch how fast she proves your resources wasted on these other missions?”

“Of course not.”

“Good. For a second there it really sounded like you thought the consortium would thank you for the slap in the face and ask for another.”

Kaufman stabbed ruthlessly at his iceberg lettuce. “Definitely not. Especially since I wouldn’t be asking them to add on a thirteenth mission.”

“Oh?”

“I’d be asking them to cancel one of the current missions.”

Vanhi took a cleansing breath and closed her eyes. When she opened them and did not wake up at her desk, she drank half her jellab in one go, barely blinking an eye as the pine nuts went down whole. When she had finally composed herself, she said, “I can’t believe you flew halfway around the world—unannounced—to bother me with this nonsense. They aren’t going to cancel a current mission—not for anything. Do you understand what that would mean? How many dollars would be wasted? The outrage in the scientific community alone is enough to keep all the cogs turning, nevermind the flapping lips of all those politicians who keep crunching the numbers, talking about how much food one mission could buy or how many jet planes.”

Dr. Kaufman was clearly unimpressed by her protest. “Are you done?”

Glaring, she took another bite of her bun.

“I have it on good authority that one of the missions—yes, beloved as it is—isn’t stacking up.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a possibility the original research that earned it a convoy not only wasn’t so original, it wasn’t so sound.”

She understood where he was going with this, but she wanted to hear him say it.

“The results were tampered with, Kapoor. The research was padded.”

“I thought all of the proposals were independently vetted.”

“You thought—you and every other sucker who’s never considered bribing anyone. Hush money exchanged hands.”

Academic dishonesty was not an arena any scientist worth their salt wanted to tread into, from any angle. “Now I for sure don’t want to touch this idea of yours with a ten-foot pole.”

“You don’t even want to know which convoy it is?”

“Nope.”

He pushed his now-empty plate—a feat, considering how much gabbing he’d done—aside and put his hands on the table, making chopping motions every other word. “I have no plans to make the bribes public. No one outside of the consortium members I plan on approaching—along with you and me and the devil who did it—will need to know why that mission got dropped and yours became the new poster child. The one thing these P.U.M.s are riding on is public approval. As soon as we start revealing even a hint of corruption, people’s opinions go down, the usefulness of space travel comes into question, and those number-crunching politicians gain a little extra traction.

“And what would you prefer, really? A mission based on lies, on the barest of research going out into the stars to waste life upon life for next to no scientific gain? Or, would you rather humans do their thing. That we try to one-up ourselves. That we make it our goal to ensure these deep-space missions grow. That we make the travel faster, cheaper, safer. A space race against ourselves is something to root for. You know it is.”

Two words rattled through Vanhi’s mind. Two words she absolutely hated whenever they cropped up. Two words that meant she was sliding down someone else’s rabbit hole with no visible daylight on the other side.

He’s right.

“Okay,” she said after a long pause. “I don’t want to see a mission go to waste. Not if it doesn’t have to. I’m in.”

He raised his jellab. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

SEPTEMBER 12, 2116

“You appear nervous. I think it would be more effective if you appeared not nervous,” C said.

The third-floor public bathroom in the consortium office was freaking freezing, and the sink refused to give hot water. In addition, the battle between paper towels and hand dryers still raged on, and seeing how this particular model of Strongblow (no, really) had an “Out-of-Order, sorry :( ” sign taped to it, Vanhi was firmly on Team Paper.

She settled for flicking her hands over the sink basin instead of wiping them on her business jacket. On the counter, C peeked out of her open purse like one of those pocket dogs rich girls carried. The light near its camera flashed green.

“I hadn’t considered that,” she said sarcastically. “Don’t look nervous, got it. Anything else?”

“Your shoe is untied.”