“Huh.” And now Patricia felt dumb, so Laurence had succeeded in crushing her ego after all. She should have seen that Kawashima was just creating one of his intentionally flimsy traps, where the real trap is that you fool yourself into believing the snare to be robust. But she also felt better—and then the part where Laurence sort of hinted that he thought she was the coolest person he’d ever met sank in as well, even if it was just a rhetorical supposition.
“And you know these people way better than I do,” Laurence said, “but it strikes me that this thing about Aggrandizement is a way of controlling you. They don’t want you to use your power, except for however they tell you to.”
At last, the rain stopped and Patricia had dried out except for her shoes. They headed for two separate bus stops, although their route coincided for four blocks. They hugged goodbye. When Patricia got home she gazed at her Caddy while brushing her teeth, like a blank mirror, and it filled her in on everything she’d missed. Before she sank into her bed, she tossed the Caddy back in her shoulder bag.
21
SOMETIMES LAURENCE ZONED out and imagined walking on another Earth-like planet. The weird gravity. The different mix of oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen in the air. Types of life that might defy our definitions of “plant” or “animal.” More than one moon, maybe more than one sun. His heart could burst, just with the newness of it: digging bare feet into soil that no human toes had ploughed, under a brazen sky that proclaimed all the things we had thought our limits were merely our prejudices. And then he snapped back, to the reality that his team was stuck: no closer to opening up the final frontier than a year earlier.
He would come out of his reverie to find another e-mail from Milton, who wanted progress reports that included actual progress. These e-mails contained phrases like “Humanity strides along a widening precipice.” Some days, Laurence struggled to motivate himself to go in to work, and once there, he couldn’t bring himself to leave.
When he talked to Serafina about his work, he kept the details vague—as far as Serafina knew, his team was working on a theoretical antigravity thing, that could yield some practical application years from now, if ever. But he longed to show off the finished product to Serafina, and spread his arms wide as the Pathway to Infinity burst open behind him. That would be the crowning moment of his life.
Which is why, when Priya said she wanted to be the first weightless person on Earth, Laurence scarcely hesitated.
*
PRIYA HAD THESE amazing hands that she gestured with when she talked, and it was like she was making shapes in your brain. Her fingers were long and rippled with indentations, and she wore chunky rings, with big fake sapphires. Plus pastel acrylic nails.
Sougata had been staring at Priya for weeks across the hAckOllEctIvE, watching her solder, wearing safety goggles that only made her look more elfin. She constructed some kind of wireless-enabled burrowing robot that could hide small objects where you’d never find them without the right PGP key.
Laurence was like, “You should sneak her up here and show her the antigrav, and the not-quite-antimatter. She’ll be yours forever, man.”
Anya and Tanaa fought against letting Priya inside their headquarters, on the grounds that she would tell everyone else in the hAckOllEctIvE, and there would be drama. The hackerspace had some cool people, but there were also people who still thought it was awesome to build your own two-second time machine.
“We’re doing serious research here,” said Tanaa. “Nothing is a toy. Well, except for Six-Fingered Steve.” She gestured at the tiny tap-dancing robot, who heard his name and made jazz hands with too many digits. Disturbing, as always.
“This is a top-secret research facility, disguised as a clubhouse,” concurred Anya, who was wearing jodhpurs and riding boots, plus a puffy T-shirt with Debbie Harry on it, with a belt around Debbie’s neck. Anya had just dyed her hair candy pink.
Laurence and Sougata both looked around the loft, with the exposed ceiling beams and posters for The Gossip and James Bond movies, plus beanbags and a corduroy sofa. The disco ball doubled as a security system. The “clubhouse” disguise was very cunning indeed.
Soon enough, Priya was flexing one long, sparkly finger at Six-Fingered Steve and watching him dance. “His reaction time is impressive,” she said with only a slight Punjabi accent. “I would have given him some kind of central gyro, for balance.”
After a couple hours hanging out and tinkering, Priya was like part of the group and she swore on all that was unholy not to tell anybody else about their hideaway. Laurence explained to her about the antigravity thing: “The goal is to negate gravity, to change the spin of all the electrons in your body so that your mass is effectively shunted somewhere else.”
“Like another dimension,” Priya said. “Because of the theory that gravity is a stronger force in other universes.”
“Yes,” said Tanaa. “So you would still be here, but your mass would be elsewhere.”
“All of this is just a means to an end, though,” added Sougata. “We think if we can solve the gravity problem, we can create stable worm—” Anya kicked him and he coughed and said, “pie. Worm pie.”