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tenure and become an associate professor by now, but the waiting periods and
protocols were time-honored, hardening like arteries as the University of
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California aged. Not getting the routine merit increase did not bode well for
the coming, crucial vault to tenure.
She used her command of language by remaining silent. Certainly among some
other faculty this would seem a ripe comeuppance, principally for those for
whom the university was mostly like a chat show with more guests. As she
walked out of Onell's office, still without a word, she was surprised to find
that not getting a step up the ladder did not even measure on her emotional
scale. A year before it would have been rattling. Now it was like reading
about a flood in China;
bad news, no doubt, but for somebody else.
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"This is great," Max said. He had braved the freeway traffic to get down here
as soon as he heard. After Onell, she had been okay for a few hours, but then
found she needed cheering up.
She wished she could watch his face, but they sat in the utter blackness of
the observatory, watching the swirl of color from the
Cosm. "A cosmic light show," he murmured slowly.
"Not a show. The real thing."
"Yes," he whispered, "the real thing."
As if he still did not quite believe it, she thought. And yet she knew what he
felt. They had been throwing every diagnostic at a metallic bowling ball,
behaving like good scientists, reasoning all around it, but until now there
was no direct, firm confirmation that made you feel the presence of a whole
other space-time. The grand dance of radiant dust and stars, wheeling in
gravitational gavottes, finally did it for her. And him, she could sense.
"I still don't understand why we can see it," she said.
"Me either. The neck is stretching, getting thinner."
"Will we lose it?"
"Well, it's held this long, through the rough first stages of its expansion."
"In other words ..."
"Right. I haven't a clue."
They sat and watched and an odd, warm sensation of intimacy crept into her.
Max knew when to say nothing, to be humble before the huge facts of the world;
maybe that was essential to being a true scientist. Pleasant, very.
"It's accelerating," he said, voice distant in the dark. "Running faster all
the time."
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COSM
"I wish we could measure time on the other side, get some--"
"Can't you feel it?" he said suddenly. "I almost think I can see the globular
clusters swooping through space."
She knew what he meant, some gut-level perception she had when the masses of
luminous raw gas gave way to spinning crowds of pearly stars, only to be swept
away moments later by tides of dark dust that blotted out the furious
luminosities of Creation. Speed. The spectacle on the other side moved almost
with... "Haste."
"Yeah, impatience." He sighed. "To be born."
"It was born over four months ago."
In the utter blackness, their eyes never leaving the swirl and rhapsody before
them, she could read his mood from tone alone. "I mean life. Struggling to be
born."
She blinked. "Already?" Stellar evolution was one thing, but--"There's an old
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saying in popular astronomy courses," Max said remotely. "Why was the Earth
4.5 billion years old? Because it took that long to find that out."
"With everything else changing, the mass and so on, is your first fit to the
time shift still good?"
He turned to his laptop and updated the curve with the new measurements
Zak had made of the background radiation temperature, the cooling haze of the
emission that had killed Brad. He printed out the new curve and added his
hand-drawn labels and axes. On this scale the early weeks were squashed into
the bottom axis. All that remained was the remorseless steep curve, taking the
Cosm time frame into an accelerating future. Brad and the recombination era
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