Between the Strokes of Night

CHAPTER THIRTY

Sunrise: a recurring miracle, something that no one would ever see in S-space. Peron rolled out of bed and tiptoed to the window. A small sliver of Jezel’s disk already showed above the horizon, its white brilliance muted by a morning haze. As morning advanced and the haze burned off, Jezel would turn to a golden glory in the sky, brighter than Sol or Cassay.

Wolfgang Gibbs, who seemed to have transferred his disdain for sleep from S-space to N-space, was already outside. He was surrounded by the dozen newcomers who had arrived on Kallen’s World four days ago. Peron, moving quietly so that he did not awaken Elissa, dressed and went to join the group. Wolfgang had his back to the house and did not notice Peron’s approach. “Ready to go at dawn,” he said, “and with a good breakfast already inside you. I hope you all remembered what I told you yesterday afternoon, because we won’t be stopping to rest or eat before midday. Any questions?”

A girl with an open, innocent face — to Peron she looked about twelve — raised a hand. “I thought we would be walking because of a shortage of aircars. But last night I learned there are scores of them available. Why are we doing this on foot?”

She was a recent Planetfest winner, which meant she must be at least sixteen. And she must also be in first-rate physical condition. Peron wondered why she was asking. A troublemaker, maybe — the way he and Elissa and their Planetfest group had been troublemakers?

The group was staring at Peron, which made Wolfgang turn his way. He said, “Good morning,” but his raised eyebrows, invisible to the group of trainees, added, “Here we go again! Same old dumb questions.”

Wolfgang addressed the girl. “Tilda — it is Tilda, isn’t it? — you must have been briefed about Kallen’s World while you were on the way here. Right?” “Of course.”

“So I’m sure that you were told you were coming to a pleasant, benign world, well-suited to humans and with few dangers.”

“That’s exactly what we were told.” Tilda, encouraged by a nudge from the short, dark-haired youth next to her — there’s the troublemaker, Peron thought — went on, “It’s true, isn’t it?”

“It is, Jonas.” Wolfgang had identified the real source of the question. “This is a wonderful planet. In many ways it’s better for humans than Pentecost, or even the original homeworld, Earth. You all volunteered to live and work here, and you’ll enjoy it. Soon you’ll be free to wander around and see the place for yourselves. But there’s a huge difference between few dangers and no dangers. Today I’m going to take you and point out things that can be dangerous. I want you to see ‘em and smell ‘em and hear ‘em — and learn not to touch them. You do those things on the ground. You can’t do them sitting in an aircar. Any other questions?”

The youth nudged Tilda again, but she did not speak. Finally he said, “Dangerous things. You mean like the karnoos?”

Peron thought that a reasonable question. The karnoos were big, armored, and possessed a double array of scythelike teeth. They were also fairly intelligent, smarter than the night-lappers of Pentecost that made anyone except determined Planetfest competitors avoid the Villasylvia woods after dark.

Wolfgang smiled. “You’ve been looking at the pictures, haven’t you? But no, I don’t mean the karnoos. They are herbivores, and all they want is to be left in peace. They could certainly hurt you — take a look at the size of them, and all those teeth — but they are dangerous only if they can’t run away. Get in trouble with a karnoo, and you can bet it will be your own fault.”

“But we will see some, won’t we?” asked a tall, rangy girl at the back of the group.

“If we’re lucky. The karnoos are very picky about what they eat. We’ve had agbots planting our own crops in this area, which don’t seem to appeal to karnoo tastes. As our settlement spreads, they stay farther away. You’ll see karnoos when we get out beyond ten kilometers — which we never will do, unless people stop asking me questions and we start moving.”

“How smart are they?” It was the dark-haired youth next to Tilda again. “Smart enough, Jonas. Smart enough to build dams and avoid humans. The beginnings of language, too, we think — but we’ve never been able to study it, because once a karnoo is captured and realizes it can’t escape it just lies down. Either you have to let it go, or after a while it dies. Which is what you’re all going to feel like doing — of starvation — unless we leave this minute. We have a set amount of ground to cover before we stop and eat. Let’s go.” Wolfgang waved a hand, to show that he would listen to no more questions, and ushered the group away along one of the paths that led through planted fields toward the undeveloped areas beyond.

“Anyway, it’s not the animals,” Peron heard Wolfgang saying as they went. “It’s the plants you have to watch out for. There’s a fruit that I’m going to show you. The karnoos love it, and we call it a globerry. Like a big yellow plum, smells wonderful and tastes even better. Eat one, and you’re likely to eat another. Which would be a terrible mistake. They contain a hemolytic poison. Unless you throw up at once, you’ll sweat, vomit blood, pee blood, and collapse. Then there’s the papercut bush.…”

Peron noticed that the group was hanging slightly closer to Wolfgang as they went out of sight. He smiled, and went back into the house. It had been grown mainly from Elissa’s specifications, and was big for Peron’s tastes. But he could not complain about the kitchen. Elissa had programmed in everything that he liked to eat.

He scanned incoming messages as he ate breakfast. Not surprisingly, there was nothing new from any of the S-space facilities. During the nine hours since he had last looked, only a quarter of a minute had passed in S-space. Also, and more to the point, little or nothing had happened here. Perhaps that was predictable, but no one had foreseen it when they discussed a second facility. And everyone had agreed that if it was not to be in S-space, then a planetary setting would be more attractive than anywhere else to the fresh new talent that they needed. What was less obvious was the amount of time and effort it took to form what was, in effect, a new planetary colony. As the number of people grew, the original settlement had expanded to two, then three, widely separated groups. Soon there would be more, with easy and continuous communication among them.

All the newcomers needed a lot of teaching. That didn’t seem to worry Wolfgang. He must miss Charlene, but otherwise he seemed totally happy with their new existence. Peron didn’t know much about Wolfgang’s background, but the man was a natural father who just happened to have no children of his own. In the old days he had apparently lavished care and affection on the animals in his charge. Now he was responsible for every new group of arrivals on Kallen’s World, complaining to Peron about their questions while obviously delighting in their youth and enthusiasm. He would never leave for S-space, or anywhere else. And Peron himself? That was a harder question. Food was certainly better here than in S-space, and it always would be. He helped himself to another muffin, sniffing that fresh-baked aroma before he bit into the crisp surface. Sex was better, too. He and Elissa had known that long ago, before the end of their brief visit to old Earth.

But there was another important variable: knowledge. Stay here, and you would never find out what was changing selected stars of the local arm to red dwarfs. You would never learn if humanity survived the threat. You would be dead, long before humans could meet the aliens or understand the nature of the Pipistrelles and Gossameres. You would be plagued by one of the oldest questions: what comes next, after I am gone?

Peron heard a noise from the narrow hallway. Elissa was up — at last. Recently she seemed to have been sleeping later and later. He poured another cup in anticipation of her arrival, then studied again the most recent plan of the settlement. Wolfgang had been an optimist when he said the new group might see some karnoos at ten kilometers. A new clearing by the agbots had already spread beyond that.

Elissa entered, rubbing her eyes. She came across to Peron, gave him a silent hug, then grabbed the drink that he had poured for her.

“Not even a thank-you?” He held her robe so that she could not step away, and put his other arm around her waist. “A wonderful bright morning on Kallen’s World, and you with a face so grim.”

“Not grim.” She smiled down at him. “Serious. Big difference. What are you doing?”

“Reviewing our progress — or lack of it.”

“I was afraid that’s what you might say.”

“I’m wondering if we should be here at all. We were so sure that a second research facility in normal space was the answer, but we’ve discovered nothing. In five years, we’ve not reported one useful thing to Gulf City.” “Five years. That’s, let’s see, a bit less than a day in S-space. They’re not looking for results from us yet — they hardly know we’ve left.”

“But we know. Almost all our efforts go into the colony, making sure that new arrivals are safe or directing the work of the people already here. I was thinking, five years of that is enough for us. Wolfgang loves it here, and he has everything under control. We could return to S-space for a while, and come back here if and when they need us. What do you think, Elissa?”

She was standing by his side. Instead of answering, she grabbed his arm that was still around her waist. She pulled open her robe. She was wearing nothing underneath it, and she placed his hand on her bare belly.

“Feel.”

At first he felt nothing but smooth skin, but then there was the tiniest quiver under his palm. He gasped and said, “How long?”

“Five months.”

“Why didn’t you say before?”

“I wanted to be sure. This morning I felt her kicking.”

“Her?”

“I checked that, along with a ton of other things because we’re on a new planet. It’s a girl, and she’s developing absolutely normally.”

“She’ll be the first — the first human baby born on Kallen’s World! We have to send a message at once, even if Kallen himself never gets it.”

“You’re not upset?”

“Upset? I’m delighted. Shouldn’t I be?”

“I wasn’t sure. We’re stuck here now. There can be no return to S-space for years and years. Not until she’s grown.”

“I know that. It doesn’t matter.” Peron stood up. “Come on outside.” “Like this? I’m not dressed.”

“You’re dressed enough. I just want you to see something, then you can come back in.”

“See what?”

“Kallen’s World. Where she’ll be born. Where she’ll grow up. Where we all live. Home.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Jezel was high in the sky. The season was close to midsummer, and the humidity promised rain and a thunderstorm before evening. Wolfgang, pointing out plants, animals, and natural features, kept a close eye on the group. They had all placed well in their different Planetfests, so they were used to pushing themselves to the edge of endurance and beyond without letting it show in either their expressions or their attitudes. However, the last thing that he wanted was a collapsed new recruit on his hands.

“Gather around and take a look at this,” he said. “Don’t touch it, or come any closer than I am.”

They were beyond the developed agricultural region, and he had finally spotted an area of rocky hillside clear of bushes. He had been watching for one like it for the past hour, and now he walked to its center. He watched the youngsters as they edged forward. Tired as they must be, everyone moved easily, without stumbling or favoring one foot over the other. A tough bunch. Within seconds they formed a silent ring with Wolfgang at the center. In front of him a purple-brown cylinder about a meter tall and thirty centimeters across jutted up from the ground in the middle of the clearing.

He crouched down next to it. “If we had come by early this morning, this stalk wouldn’t have been there. If you look closely you will see that it’s growing, a few centimeters a minute. What you can’t see is the rest of it. Underground, where you’re standing and where I am standing, there is a big sphere almost five meters across.”

The group stared down at the ground, as though trying to see beneath their own feet. One of them asked, “Is it a plant or an animal?”

“Strictly speaking, it’s neither one. It’s called a grape-plant, but it’s more like a cross between a plant and a fungus. And almost all the time it’s perfectly harmless. It just sits underground, sucking in nutrients and growing steadily, and on one day of the year — today, for this one — it puts up a thick stem. Still harmless. You are perfectly safe.”

Wolfgang was watching very closely as he spoke, noting the delicate change of hue as the stem grew taller.

“Now, you’ve had time for a good look. So we’re all going to move. Back up, away from here, and I’ll tell you when to stop.”

The ring expanded. Wolfgang walked around it, moving a couple of the taller people a little farther from the center.

“That’s good. All of you remain exactly where you are. I want you to take careful note of how far away the stem is from you. How far would you say?” Some voices muttered, “Six meters,” a few, “Six and a half meters.” “Close enough. Now.”

Wolfgang deliberately said nothing more. The group stood quiet for four minutes. He had timed it with care, so that they were beginning to fidget and glance at each other when it happened.

A roar, too high-pitched to be thunder, shattered the silence. At the same time the air filled with a thousand whistling shrieks. Everyone except Wolfgang reflexively ducked and flinched.

“Look at it now,” he said. The purple stem had split open into a dozen sections which lay flat on the ground around it. “Seed dispersal mechanism. No, it’s no good looking around for them. The nearest ones will be kilometers away. The seeds or spores — call them what you like — are aerodynamically shaped, and they blow out of there at better than three kilometers a second. They mass thirty to forty grams. If one hit you when it was on the way down it might draw blood. Hit you close up, like now, and it would pass right through you and keep going. They always emerge at an angle of at least thirty degrees to the horizontal, so unless you’re more than three meters tall you’re safe at the distance we were at. But you can imagine what happens if somebody is careless and stands right next to one when it pops. Grape-plant doesn’t refer to grapes, or grapefruit. It refers to grapeshot, which was fired at people with the idea of riddling them as full of holes as a colander.”

Wolfgang stared with satisfaction at the circle of shocked faces. Their natural sass would be back in a few minutes, but for the moment he had them completely. “Right. This seems like a good place and time to stop and eat. After what you just saw, let me give you some good news. All running water on Kallen’s World is fit to drink. I recommend that you use a container rather than drinking direct from any sizeable stream, because there’s a couple of lobster look-alikes that wouldn’t mind a taste of your nose. Do it like this.”

He illustrated, scooping water into his canteen from a little rivulet that ran down the hill, then sat down on the hillside with his back against a rock. The tall girl who usually hung at the back of the group came to sit cross-legged next to him. He knew her name — Demmy Zeiss — and that she had scored fourth in the last Planetfest. That was about all.

She smiled at him. “You must have shown a hundred groups like us how to look after ourselves on Kallen’s World. Don’t you ever get tired of it?” “No. I never do.” Wolfgang opened his lunch pack and began to eat. He didn’t intend to say more. If Demmy was trying to suck up to him for some reason, it wouldn’t work. To give preferential treatment to any one of the new arrivals would diminish him in the eyes of the others, and they would then discount the advice he had to offer.

There were also personal reasons that went beyond his job as advisor. The girl seated next to him disturbed Wolfgang. It was not just that she was friendly, she was also tall and dark-haired and had a willowy build that reminded him of Charlene Bloom. He deliberately looked the other way.

Demmy was not discouraged. After a period of quiet eating, she stared around them and said, “This place seems so peaceful after Pentecost. Not dangerous at all.”

Wolfgang glanced back at her from the corner of his eye. At some time — probably during Planetfest trials — Demmy’s nose had been broken, and had not set quite straight. It gave her face and her smile an odd and attractive asymmetry. “Not dangerous, unless you do something stupid,” he said gruffly. “The only time I’ve had somebody get into trouble, he went wandering off by himself.” “He died?”

“No. He fell down a sink hole and broke his leg. His monitor told us where he was, otherwise he’d have been in worse trouble. If the hole had been deeper he’d have been a goner — the monitor signals don’t travel far through rock.” Wolfgang had deliberately raised his voice, including everyone in the conversation. “That’s another thing to remember; even if you take all your clothes off to go skinny-dipping, you still wear your monitor.”

He stood up. “Right. You’ve finished eating. We came out to see the world, not sit in one place all day. Let’s go.”

Demmy was on her feet in one easy movement. “Do you still think we’ll see some karnoos?”

“If we’re lucky. We’re getting close to their territory. But if they hear us they’ll bolt. They run twice as fast as any of you, so from now on we walk quietly, and no talking.”

It was a little bit of misinformation. It was true about the speed of the karnoos, but they didn’t hear well and they saw even worse. But Wolfgang’s words should end Demmy’s persistent efforts to talk to him.

He walked over the brow of the hill and started down the other side. There was a trick to running these training outings. You had to lead the way, but you also needed eyes in the back of your head to know what everyone in the party was doing. Tilda and Jonas, for example, were behind the rest of the group, talking to each other and paying no attention to anyone else or where they were going. Wolfgang said nothing until they reached the flat valley bottom, with its soggy ground and growth of fronded reeds taller than a human. Without a word, he gestured to the others to go on past him and waited for Tilda and Jonas. They came to within a meter of where he stood and then stopped, startled. “You want a private chat?” Wolfgang pointed back toward the settlement they had started from. “That’s the place for it. If you want to learn about Kallen’s World, you’d better keep up with the rest and watch what’s going on. Otherwise you’ll stay home next time.”

He was still talking when he heard the noise from behind him. It was a rumble, together with a breathy swish of reeds moving against each other. He shouted, “Run uphill!” and started in that direction, head turned to make sure the others were following.

They didn’t wait — they were, after all, Planetfest winners — but the soggy ground slowed progress. Three people, one of them Demmy, were still in the flat valley bottom when the reeds parted. Five karnoos hurtled blindly toward them like armored tanks.

Demmy and the other woman threw themselves out of the way, but the man, a heavily-built youngster named Timko, slipped. Even so, he almost made it by flattening himself to the ground. One of the karnoos ran right over him, and merely seemed to brush his left leg as it went by. Wolfgang heard a snap and a gasp of pain, and saw the white of exposed bone. Then the karnoo had passed on. Wolfgang stood and listened. He heard only the sound of the retreating karnoos and Timko’s groans.

He hurried forward and bent at Timko’s side, at the same time thumbing the emergency button on his call unit. “Camp, we need a lift out, soon as you can make it. We have an injury.”

“Critical?” A voice answered at once.

“No.” Wolfgang was studying Timko’s leg. “But nasty. Compound fracture of the lower leg, tibia and fibula.”

“On our way. We have your coordinates.”

Wolfgang was already sliding the medical unit from his belt when Timko said, “What’s that for?” His face was pale and the sweat ran down his forehead, but his voice was under control.

“Painkillers. Don’t move. We’ll have you out of here in five minutes.” “No painkillers.” Timko gave a tiny shake of his head. “They’ll have to put me out to set the bones. No point in giving them a mixed-drug situation.” Wolfgang leaned back on his heels. Not for the first time, he marveled at the toughness of the Planetfest winners who arrived on Kallen’s World. They took pain, and hardship, and hunger and thirst, and shook them off as though they were nothing. He glanced around. The others, without a word from him, had formed a protective circle facing outward. They were utterly silent, and totally alert for any strange sound or movement.

“What happened?” Timko said softly. “You told us that the karnoos would run away from us, not right at us.”

He wasn’t rubbing it in, but Wolfgang felt it that way. He had given useless advice and walked everybody into danger.

“It was a karnoo stampede. I’ve seen it happen before, but only when they were running to get away from humans.” Wolfgang paused, then added — the group might as well learn the full extent of his incompetence — “I didn’t expect to encounter them for at least another couple of kilometers. And then they should have been fleeing.”

“So we don’t know what happened.” Timko lay back and closed his eyes. “In some ways, I guess that’s good. Maybe we’ll be useful. There’s still things about this planet that need to be learned.”

Wolfgang heard the whine of high-speed engines and looked up. Seconds later, an aircar was hovering overhead. Wolfgang waved, but the medical unit was already being lowered.

He turned back to the youth on the ground, silent and tight-lipped. “You’ve got it exactly right, Timko,” he said. “There’s still things about this planet that need to be learned.”

“Now you tell me.” Wolfgang was striding up and down, angrier than Elissa had ever seen him. “When it’s too late, and one of the group I’m responsible for has been damn near killed.”

“I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t know.” Elissa was trying to soothe him, because she would have been at least as mad if it had happened to her. “In fact, no one knew.”

“How can that be?” Wolfgang swung round to face her. “Are you telling me that settlements on this planet aren’t planned, they just happen at random?” “Of course not. We start with surveys — you’ve taken part in those. Then we proceed to site selection. After we’ve picked the next place for a settlement, we make a second survey to be sure we didn’t miss anything. And then, when that’s all done, we give the go-ahead for ground clearing and construction.” “Who gives the go-ahead?”

“Sometimes I do. Sometimes Peron does” — Peron himself had just entered the room — “and sometimes it’s a member of the development team. But Wolfgang, you haven’t let me get to my point. The clearbots and the conbots and the agbots are always busy. So once we give a go-ahead for development of a new area, the work is placed in the queue. After that, no human is involved. As soon as machines are available, work begins on clearing the area.”

“Well, that’s got to end.” Wolfgang finally stopped pacing and flung himself angrily into a chair. “I’m never again taking a group of new arrivals smack into a place where our own robots have started clearing the ground, and driven every karnoo in the whole area into a panic. I said I’d only seen karnoos stampede when they were running to get away from humans, and damn it, I was right. The karnoos were fleeing from us, or at least from our machines.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“It was my responsibility. Those kids were in my charge. I want to know, what changes do you plan to make?”

He glared at Elissa, and then, even harder, at Peron. The other man was sitting opposite Wolfgang, and his face bore a strange and distant expression. “What changes?” Wolfgang repeated. “Peron, are you listening?”

Peron turned to him. “I was at first, but then what you and Elissa said gave me an idea.”

“For changing procedures?”

“Yes. But not the procedures we need for protecting your training groups. I was listening to you, talking about the karnoo stampede. And I suddenly thought, suppose we are the karnoos?”

Elissa said, “Peron, I’m not following. And I understand the way you think better than anybody.”

“My fault.” Peron pulled his chair forward. “Listen to me for a few minutes, then if you agree I think we have a ton of work to do. Wolfgang, do we have all the records received at Gulf City relating to the Kermel Objects?” “Every last bit of data, right up to the time we left. They’re in the bank down here, with a back-up copy in orbit.”

“Good. I think we’re going to need all of them. Here’s my understanding of how you and your party got into trouble today. Tell me if at any point you see things differently.…”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Charlene was late, as she always seemed to be late for any meeting called by Judith Niles.

“Sorry, sorry.” She slipped into her chair, out of breath. Sy, together with staff members Emil Garville, Alfredo Roewen, and Libby Trask, was already there, as was Judith Niles herself.

Charlene saw Judith’s mouth opening and did her best to forestall the criticism. “I know, punctuality, punctuality, and I’m wasting everyone’s time. But I was in the middle of an experiment when I heard about a signal, and I never for a moment suspected the call might be that signal. I mean, a message so soon — they left only a few weeks ago.”

“From our point of view, but not from theirs.” Judith Niles pointed to the wall of her office, where dual chronometers displayed N-space and S-space passage of time. “It’s been two hundred and forty years in N-space since they left Gulf City. While they were travelling they were in S-space, the same as we are, but for the past fifteen of their years they’ve been in N-space, struggling to set up the colony on Kallen’s World. Even the signal we’re about to see took seventeen of their years to get here. From their point of view, it’s all old history. But this is so important, I decided I had to call this meeting at once. Ready?”

“I’m ready.” Charlene slipped her shoes off. S-space, N-space,

no-matter-what-the-hell-space, she had never found a place to live where her feet felt right in shoes.

The display came alive. A group of a dozen people stared out at Charlene. Peron and Elissa were in the middle, smiling a greeting. Elissa was visibly pregnant and had a three-year-old holding her tightly by the hand. Four strangers stood on each side of them, somber and serious. And then, next to the end — Wolfgang! Charlene felt her heart turn over. It seemed he had been gone only a few weeks — for her, it had been only a few weeks — but he looked older and different. His bare arms were more muscular, he wore a heavy suntan, and there were fine wrinkles about his eyes and on his forehead. As though he had become aware of Charlene’s gaze, he also smiled. Any pleasure that Charlene might have felt was taken away by the sight of the woman standing next to Wolfgang. She was a tall, slender brunette, and although she was not touching him, there was something in the way she stood that proclaimed a more-than-casual interest.

Peron spoke. “I don’t quite know how to say this. We’ve been away for a long time so far as we are concerned, and although we’ve worked as hard as we know how it doesn’t seem we’ve done very much. Most of the first few years went into breaking ground and starting the settlements, which took longer than we expected. On the other hand, we realize that as far as you are concerned we left just a little while ago.”

Judith Niles muttered, “Get on with it! What’s wrong with Peron?” “Give him time.” Sy was nodding to himself. “He’s feeling uneasy. I know Peron, and I know Elissa. If there’s any way they can do a thing for themselves, they will. He’s working himself up to say something that comes hard to him. He’s going to make a request.”

Peron was continuing. “We’ve been picking sites for our new settlements, with good logic for each, and we’re steadily expanding. If you’ve been reading our progress reports — I’m sure you have — then you already know about the karnoos. They have special diet requirements, and they prefer a certain kind of terrain. Until recently we’ve had little interaction with them — or thought we did. But it turned out, without our knowing it, the selection criteria that we use to pick out settlement sites choose exactly the places where the karnoos like to live. Our clearings destroy their main food sources. If the karnoos were smart enough — and maybe they are — they’d decide that we were out to get them, by deliberately destroying their habitats.”

Sy muttered, “Preferred habitats: G-2 V dwarf stars. Preferred habitat for others? Maybe, around red dwarfs?”

“The karnoos are peaceful,” Peron went on, “but we learned the hard way that they can be dangerous when they feel threatened. If they were smarter, they might not just run away from the places where we are clearing the ground. They might try to find out the source of their trouble, the place where all the new land clearing and settlement first began. And then they’d either attack us and try to wipe us out, or they’d come and try to talk to us.

“You’ve got people at your end smarter than anyone here, so you’re probably way ahead of me and know what we’ve been trying to do here for the past few years. Stars all over the local spiral arm have been changing stellar type for millions of years, we know that from the records we’ve picked up from the Kermel Objects. When we were at Gulf City no one could ever spot any kind of pattern that would let us predict which particular stars were likely to change next. We’ve done no better here. But we decided we have been proposing the wrong question. Rather than asking which star is likely to be the next to change, we should ask which star was the first to change. Just the way the karnoos ought to seek our first settlement on Kallen’s World.

“Well” — Peron glanced first at Elissa, and then at Wolfgang for encouragement — “we tried. We took every scrap of data that had come in from the Kermel Objects, and we analyzed it every way we know how. We hoped we’d be able to send you stellar coordinates for the first changed star and ask you to go there and take a look. Obviously, it would mean a long trip in S-space, maybe even need the use of T-state or cold sleep. But it turned out to mean neither one, because we failed. Either the data just aren’t there, or we don’t know the right way to process it. So now you can see why we are calling. We’ll keep on trying here, but we’re passing the buck. Maybe the Kermel Object data that’s needed won’t come in for another ten thousand years, or maybe it arrived since we left. Either way, we know we won’t live long enough, ourselves, to see the end of this.” “But no regrets,” Elissa added. “We were here for the beginning, and that should be enough for anyone.”

The three-year-old was tugging urgently at her hand, and she made a wry face. “We have to go now, or at least I do. Some things won’t wait. I’ll talk to you again — from your point of view, it will probably be before you’ve eaten your next meal.”

She turned and hurried away toward one of the buildings.

“That just about says it all. We work our butts off for a whole year, while you’re eating dinner.” Peron’s grin took any bite away from the remark. “Sy, if you’re listening, you always said you were interested in long-range projects. This one should be enough even for you. We don’t know where the stellar changes started, but the average distance of stellarformed stars from Gulf City is eighteen hundred light-years. Goodbye, and good luck.”

The others in the image nodded, and the display faded.

The years had made little difference, and Judith Niles had lost none of her impatience. As Peron and the others vanished slowly from the display, she turned to her companions.

“That was clear enough. Conclusions?”

Sy said, “First conclusion is one I’ve suspected for a while. People aren’t as smart in S-space.”

As the others bristled, he went on, “Oh, it’s not a big difference, and it won’t affect the average person. I doubt if you could measure a change in memory or logical ability. What goes is a tiny creative edge.”

Judith Niles was frowning. “You have no evidence at all for that statement.” “Only the evidence that the first new idea for what to do about the stellarforming didn’t come from here. It came from a group working in N-space. I’ll admit that Peron and Elissa are far from being your average person, but I’ll not agree they’re brighter than we are.” Sy shrugged. “Anyway, I didn’t want to start an argument. I’ll give you another conclusion, and this one we can back up from our own analysis of distant galaxies. Red dwarf stars occur naturally, and they are fairly common. So the idea of looking for a ‘first red dwarf’ in our local galactic arm is hopeless.”

Libby Trask, who had found her way to Gulf City not long before Sy and his friends, said, “Isn’t that exactly what their message was proposing?” “Not quite. They are telling us we have to identify the first star that changed — changed in a rather short period of time, say a few thousand years — from some other spectral type into a red dwarf. If we can find that one, we’ll know where the stellarforming started. Then it’s a good working assumption that whatever did it was and is still near that star.”

“And we are supposed to discover that star — how?” Judith Niles had called the meeting, but Charlene sensed that she was no longer running it. Somehow Sy had taken over.

“I don’t know, but if Peron and Elissa say they’ve combed the existing data base received from Kermel Objects, I believe them. That’s the bad news. The good news is that new data are received here all the time, and we never know until it arrives and we’ve analyzed the geometry of stellar positions whether it portrays this galaxy as it was last week, or ten million years ago.” He turned to Emil Garville. “You have the most experience time-ordering the Kermel Object image data. What do you think?”

Garville was a huge man, slow-moving and slow-talking. He was one of the Gulf City residents who didn’t bother to wear a wig, and at some time — almost certainly in a Planetfest accident — something had fractured his skull with a frightful blow just above the forehead. He rubbed at the scar-tissued fissure while he took his time answering Sy’s question.

“I’ve tried the obvious tricks,” he said at last. “I have all the images we’ve ever received, and the stellar geometry allows me to assign an age to each one. The times themselves seem random. I’ve used the images and their ages to plot out the number of red dwarfs in the whole affected area of the spiral arm as a function of time, and it’s monotonically increasing. The numbers go up, and once a star has changed to a red dwarf it never changes back.

“I’ve analyzed the plots, number of red dwarfs against time, but they don’t follow any smooth function. The most you can say is that the rate of increase with time is somewhere between linear and quadratic, which is bad news for the future. I’ve done my best to extrapolate backwards, and I can make rough estimates of the time when the fraction of red dwarf stars to total stellar population in our local spiral arm is the same as in other arms of our galaxy. What we don’t have are pairs of Kermel Object images corresponding to those times, which might show the first stellarforming change taking place and allow us to pinpoint the star involved. We have a couple of images showing the situation from long ago — thirty million years and more — and the star counts from those give me confidence that at one time this galactic arm had the same stellar type distribution as everywhere else. But that’s all. I’ve never seen a way to use the results.”

Sy was nodding. “You’re not alone in that. I believe you’ve squeezed out of the data all there is to be squeezed. We could all take another look, but I doubt we’ll add to what you have.”

“So you have nothing to add?” Judith Niles made an attempt to recapture control of the meeting. “In that case — “

“I didn’t say I had nothing to add.” As Sy continued, Charlene could feel the tension returning. “I believe I know exactly what we must do. It’s simple, it calls for huge patience, and it’s going to be enormously frustrating for people like me — because it’s totally passive.”

He became silent, until finally Judith Niles betrayed her own lack of patience and said, “Well, then?”

“We do what you established Gulf City to allow us to do. We remain in S-space, or even in T-state, and we wait. While we wait, our instruments eavesdrop on the whole sky, listening all the while for more signals from the Kermel Objects. Eventually we will acquire the pair of images that we need, a pair which Emil assures us are not in the current data bank. We’ll find two consecutive images in which exactly one star has changed to become a red dwarf in the interval between the two. And that star will be the one we want.”

Judith Niles said, “Eventually! How long might that be? By the time that the images you’re asking for come in, we might be millions of years into the future. The whole spiral arm might be red dwarfs.”

“True.” Sy sounded casual as he stared around the little group. “The Director is quite right. ‘Eventually’ could also mean ‘too late.’ That’s always a possibility. But I still propose to do what I’ve suggested. And if somebody comes up with an idea that’s definitely better, while I’m watching and waiting, then I’ll be delighted to switch.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Charlene had done none of the work herself, which was perhaps why the results so fascinated her.

She pressed the button again, and in front of her, in all its sprawling orange-red splendor, lay the local galactic arm. It hung for a few moments, glowing and static; then the change began. Here and there, at scattered points within the display, specks of orange-red were replaced by points of cyan, magenta, blue-white, and luminous green. At the same time, the whole spiral arm shifted, creeping to a slightly different configuration.

It was a slow process, because the stars were so numerous; but in the time it took to blink, somewhere in the image a spark of orange-red was turned off and a mote of some other hue took its place.

Blink. Another star was transformed.

Blink: another star.

Again and again and again. Now the display was no longer predominantly orange-red. Other star colors were becoming more numerous, even starting to dominate. The lost stars formed no pattern, but somehow the eye discovered a shrinking circle. As the display proceeded farther, that circle became an explicit overlay, a colored ring whose center might shift but whose size always diminished.

The end came swiftly. The circle narrowed and narrowed, until finally it formed a halo around a single spark of orange. Nothing happened for a few seconds, and then, suddenly and surprisingly, that spark changed from orange to green. The slow crawl of the spiral arm to a different geometry continued, and there were still orange-red stars to be seen; but there were no more color changes. “There it is.” A voice spoke from the darkness behind Charlene. “The Ur-star. Less than three light-years away. Tell me what we will find there.” Charlene touched a button, reversing the time flow in the display. Now it would move forward, from the distant past to the present and then at last to a future where the orange-red glow of red dwarf stars would dominate the spiral arm. She swung around in her seat. “If I knew what we’d find, we wouldn’t need to go. That’s a question for someone smarter than me.”

“As usual, you underestimate yourself.” Emil Garville, a head and a half taller than Charlene and twice her width, squeezed into the chair at her side. “I don’t think so.” She smiled at him. He was unfailingly polite and considerate, and she was always glad to see him. “You know, Emil, I’m not one of your supercompetent Planetfest winners. I’m just an underqualified lab technician who happened to get swept up in this at the very beginning, eighty-one thousand years ago.” Charlene nodded at the display in front of her. “For instance, I could never have done what you did, building that display from bits and pieces of Kermel Object data.”

“You give me too much credit.” Emil rubbed at the fissure on his skull, in what Charlene had decided was an unconscious attempt to hide it. His refusal to wear a wig that covered the scar was a deliberate statement — look all you want to, it said, it doesn’t bother me — but somewhere inside him that wasn’t true. He had a hang-up that made him display what he would most like to conceal. Charlene wanted to tell him that he didn’t need to feel embarrassed, that in an odd way his craggy, fractured skull made him more attractive. Unfortunately, her hang-ups wouldn’t ever permit any such statement.

“The work to track down Urstar,” he went on, “it wasn’t all my doing. Back on Gulf City a lot of it was done by teams working in N-space. I felt like I was in the old fairy stories. Again and again I’d be stumped and go to bed with a tough unsolved problem sitting on my desk. I didn’t leave out any cookies or glass of milk, but as often as not I’d wake up next morning and find a written solution waiting for me.”

Charlene could understand that. So far as she was concerned, once the Urstar location had been determined this whole giant ship, the Argo, had appeared magically, overnight, ready to fly far off across the spiral arm. She said, “Did you ever meet your N-space colleagues?”

“Not once. I believe the N-space team on Gulf City regarded my notes as a direct challenge. They had eight S-hours before I’d be up and about, and that gave them a couple of their years. There wasn’t much they couldn’t crack in that time.” “But you laid out the overall design for what had to be done. Urstar wouldn’t have been found without you. You deserve the main credit.”

This time Emil rubbed at his nose, whose off-center shape suggested that it too had seen its share of woes. “I’m not sure I like to hear you put it that way.” “Why on earth not?”

“Charlene, suppose I’m wrong. We’ve come all this way, and we are getting close to our destination. But suppose our analysis selected the wrong star as Urstar? Would you like to be known as the person who took the Argo and a full crew of thirty-eight specialists in everything from physics to animal behavior more than two thousand light-years, and all for nothing?”

“I don’t believe it will be for nothing. And we’ve spent most of the journey either in cold sleep, or in T-state. It hasn’t felt like a long time for anyone on board.”

“I know. But not everyone in the universe is aboard this ship. Watch.” Emil took a coin from his pocket and flipped it into the air. It rose maybe a meter and a half, then dropped back into his hand.

He closed his big fist on the coin and stared at Charlene. “How long did that coin toss take? Maybe one second, start to finish? But we’re in T-state. That flip lasted twenty-three N-days, more than three weeks on Earth or Pentecost or Kallen’s World. And people are all back there, waiting for results from us. Even if we find what we hope for at Urstar, it will have been one hell of a long wait for answers for them. At its fastest this ship travelled at more than sixteen percent of light speed, faster than anything ever flown before by humans; but when we arrive at our destination we’ll have been on the way for more than fifteen thousand N-years. Do you wonder I’m nervous? Aren’t you nervous, too?” “I am. But not for the same reason as you are.” Charlene turned in her chair, so that she could place her lips just a few inches from Emil’s ear.

He flinched away. “What are you doing?”

“Not what you seem to think I’m doing.” Charlene reached out and pulled Emil’s bald head close to her face. She felt almost guilty, deliberately changing the subject from his concerns to hers; yet it was the right thing to do, to stop his own brooding on a possibly wrong destination. She whispered, “I don’t want anyone else to hear this. And I mean anyone.”

Emil froze. He said in a deep growl, and just as softly, “Charlene, I’ll tell you a secret: blow in my ear and I’ll follow you anywhere. But what’s this about?”

“I want you to do something for me, without making it at all obvious. I’d like you to observe Judith Niles as closely as you can, without ever letting her suspect that you’re doing it.”

“The Director?” Emil turned his head, so that his brown eyes gazed into Charlene’s from just a few inches away. “Charlene, that makes me uneasy. What are you getting at?”

“I’m not sure.” They were still whispering, although the chance that anyone could overhear the conversation was negligible. “I’ve known JN for an awfully long time, in both objective and subjective time. Ever since we came from cold sleep three weeks ago, I’ve sensed something different. At first, I thought maybe the change was in me. But I don’t think so.”

“You could ask Sy for a second opinion. He’s known the Director longer than I have.” Emil saw Charlene’s face. “No, on second thoughts I guess you couldn’t. He doesn’t take much interest in people. The Director would have to turn into a cloud of pink smoke before Sy noticed. But what sort of differences are you talking about?”

Charlene was silent for a while, rocking backward and forward from the hips. “A long, long time ago,” she said at last, “before we came to Gulf City, before we even moved the Institute into space, JN developed some odd habits. She’d rub at her left eye, or she’d sit and stare at nothing for a few seconds during meetings, exactly as if she’d blanked out. I noticed it then, but I didn’t do anything about it. I don’t think I dared — she was too much my boss, everybody’s boss.”

Emil nodded. “Then, and now.”

“Maybe. But I’ve regretted my lack of nerve ever since, because it turned out that JN had a fast-growing malignant brain tumor. We saved her — just — by pushing her into S-space. She was the first human ever to go there, and we left her there until a treatment and cure had been developed.”

“Charlene, you shouldn’t feel guilty about something that happened a million years ago.”

“Eighty-one thousand. I’m not worrying about old guilt, Emil. I’m worrying about now. I’m seeing — or imagining — modes of behavior that bring back disturbing memories.”

“It can’t be a tumor. The medical screening that takes place when anyone goes to and from cold sleep to either T-state or S-space would have caught it.” “I know. I’ve told myself the same thing. But human beings are complicated, there are a million things that can go wrong with us. And I think one of them is affecting the Director. Her behavior has become weird sometimes. If you will keep a close eye on her whenever you can, and make your own evaluation, I would really appreciate it.”

“Of course I will.” Emil stood up. “I’ll go and find her now. I have a good reason for a meeting. We’re close to the time when we’ll all move to S-space for the final approach to Urstar, and the Director will want special data capture procedures.” He reached down and squeezed Charlene’s hand. “You should have shared this with me sooner. It is not a burden for anyone to struggle with alone.”

Charlene was right. Emil would never have noticed it without her prompting, but when you knew what to look for…

The whole group, everyone on the Argo except a couple who were sleeping or busy with other matters, was together at dinner in the ship’s dining room. The conversation was animated and excited along the ten-meter table, the air filled with speculation about what the next few days would bring. The move to S-space had been smooth. Velocity-shedding had been performed with all the crew briefly in cold sleep, and tomorrow the final transition to N-space would take place. The target system would then lie only four light-days away; light-days in N-space, where hours and days and months flashed by at dizzying speed. Already the high-magnification sensors reported the existence of half a dozen planets in orbit around the glowing red dwarf primary. Three were gas giants, while the inner three were small, metal-rich worlds. Not one of them lay within the life-zone of worlds habitable by Earth-dwelling forms, but who knew the needs of an alien species?

The group ate and drank — lightly, knowing that in just a few hours all food and drink would taste infinitely better than it ever could in S-space. The talk was lively, full of guesses about what they might find at Urstar. Emil joined in, but every few seconds his eyes flickered across for another look at Judith Niles.

He had made sure that he sat straight across from her. At first glance, the Director was normal enough. She seemed weary, with black smudges under her eyes, but that might be no more than worries about what the next few days might reveal. Would the Urstar show that it was indeed the first, the original of all the changes in spectral type; or would it — a worry for Emil as much as for Judith Niles — provide no evidence at all, of stellarforming activities or anything else? Emil’s second look provided more information. One of Judith Niles’s eyes was noticeably more prominent than the other, the bulge in the left obvious from a profile view. The facial tics moved around, sometimes in an eye, sometimes affecting the line of her mouth or of one ear.

And Judith Niles herself knew that something was happening to her. At each tic or facial twitch she glanced around to make sure that no one noticed, but there were other problems over which she had less control. Every few minutes her face went rigid, and for as much as thirty seconds she froze into catatonia. When she came out of it her face quivered, and her head wobbled as though it was too heavy for her neck.

Charlene was sitting next to the Director, across the table from Emil. He caught her eye, very briefly. His nod would have been imperceptible to anyone who was not waiting for it. Charlene’s raised eyebrow would be comprehensible to Emil alone. It meant, you see it too. What do we do now?

The timing could not be worse. Judith Niles was their leader, it was assumed that she would control all activities when they reached Urstar. If not she, then who?

Emil looked all along the table. Libby Trask had the necessary cool, but not the experience. Alfredo Roewen had the ego, but not the dispassionate attitude. Who else? Well, if you wanted dispassionate attitude there was always Sy, noticeable at the moment by his absence from the group. On the basis of seniority of service, Sy outranked everyone except Charlene, who in turn was outranked only by Judith Niles herself. They might have to make the best of a bad lot. If Judith Niles continued to deteriorate — and Charlene insisted that she was getting rapidly worse — then it might have to be Sy. Assuming, that is, they could somehow force him to take on the job.

And here came the man himself, slouching his way into the room. Rather than sitting at a place where the robot servers would instantly provide him with food and drink, he placed himself at the very far end, away from everyone. He held his deformed left forearm close to his body — another mystery, why had he never agreed to the minor surgery required to fix it? — and peered with bright gray eyes at the miniature display clutched in his right hand.

He remained like that for several minutes, oblivious to all the others in the room. Finally he seemed to make up his mind. He sat straighter, looked along the length of the table, and said in a clear, penetrating voice, “We’ve stopped, you know. Does anyone have an explanation for that?”

His words produced the effect he had surely been hoping for: dead silence. Everyone looked to Judith Niles. The Director was blinking rapidly, one hand on her throat. Finally, and with apparent effort, she said, “Stopped? What has stopped?”

“We have. The ship has.”

Everyone turned to the monitors, discreetly inlaid as panels along the dining room walls. The Argo’s engines were not scheduled to turn on again until the transition to N-space had been made, when high deceleration for stellar rendezvous could be tolerated. The displays showed exactly that: inactive engines, and a ship speeding toward its target star at a good fraction of the speed of light.

A questioning mutter began, cut off by Sy’s curt, “Don’t go by engine activity. Look at what the external sensors are reporting. We have no Doppler shift with respect to the target star, and the microwave background radiation is close to isotropic. If this ship is moving at all, it can’t be at more than a few tens of meters a second. At this rate it will take millions of years to reach Urstar.” The mutter of voices in the dining room took on a different tone. Everyone in science and engineering had a favorite suite of instruments, and they were polling them without moving from their seats.

Emil looked at Judith Niles, and saw Charlene’s glance turn in the same direction. This was the point where the Director would take over, end the individual efforts, and set a coordinated course to discover exactly what was happening. Instead, JN sat with slack mouth and unfocused eyes. It was one of the younger scientists, Rolf Sansome, whose voice rose above the general hubbub. “Worse than a million years. According to our best instruments, we have absolutely no velocity relative to Urstar’s center of mass.”

Libby Trask, a linguistics expert but no physicist, said, “I don’t understand. How could we go from a sixth of light-speed to zero, with nobody on board noticing?”

“We couldn’t.” That was Dan Korwin, chief engineer on the Argo and a man as blunt and confrontational as Sy was indirect and devious. “Keep your eyes on your instruments, Rolf Sansome, and you too, Sy Day. I’m going to try something.”

Korwin was busy with his own hand-held. A shudder went through the ship, while glasses and plates left on the dining room table by the service robots danced and rattled on the polished surface.

Korwin looked up. “Well?”

Rolf Sansome shook his head. “Still zero velocity with respect to Urstar.” “The engines insist we’re accelerating.”

“The inertial sensors tell me we’re not moving.”

Sy added, “And the visuals say we have negligible velocity with respect to the three-degree cosmic background. You goosed the drive?”

“I sure as hell did.” Dan Korwin glared at his hand-held, as though holding it personally responsible. “I gave the engines as much of a boost as we can take in S-space. We should all have felt it. And with that much drive, all the plates and glasses ought to have slid down to the end of the table and finished in Sy’s lap.”

Everyone again looked to Judith Niles. She shook her head, as though the whole of the past five minutes had been too much for her. It was left to Charlene, reluctantly and after a nod from Emil, to ask the obvious: “Something brought us from a sixth of light-speed to a flat stop. We can’t move toward Urstar, even when we apply the Argo’s own propulsion system. Where do we go from here?” “We go nowhere.” Sy alone, of all the people in the room, was smiling. “We’re stuck, fixed in one place like an insect in amber until whatever decided to stop us decides to get in touch with us, or lets us move again. It looks bad, but there’s one huge piece of good news: we know now that we didn’t come to the wrong place. The star ahead of us, even if we can’t get there, is the real thing. That’s Urstar.”

How could Sy possibly be so cheerful? But then Charlene, surveying her companions, noticed that Emil appeared, if not cheerful, then relieved. He smiled across the table at her. His complacent look said, Well, things do look grim. But at least I can relax now. I may have brought us all to our doom — but at least I didn’t bring us to the wrong place!

Charlene gritted her teeth. Emil! And not just Emil, every man she had ever met. They were all as bad as each other. Which one of the old-timers, back on long-ago and faraway Earth, had said it? — “A man will rather die than look like a fool.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“What the devil is Korwin trying now?” Charlene spoke through clenched teeth. She hung on to the arms of her chair as the Argo shook from end to end in spasms that couldn’t be predicted or resisted.

“More of the same.” Sy sat next to her in the control room, his eyes fixed on the banks of displays. “My guess is that he’s pogoing us over a range of at least five gees. But I doubt if he’s accomplishing a thing.”

The crew was again in N-space, where they could tolerate considerable acceleration. Most had gone to their own quarters or the control room, where they could strap in securely while Dan Korwin, aft in the engine room, drove the ship at full power toward the distant spark of Urstar. One gee, two gees, and on up to an off-the-charts acceleration that left everyone feeling flattened. The ship should have been racing toward its destination. Previous attempts to fly closer had been useless, while an attempt to turn the ship and fly away from Urstar had been just as ineffective; the Argo could rotate on its axis, like some great beast impaled on a spit, but all other movement was denied. The acceleration abruptly ended and Korwin’s frustrated voice came over the ship’s central address. “All right. Screw it. I guess that’s all for today.” Sy ran his eyes over the monitors. “Same as before. Hefty acceleration, but according to the sensors we’ve moved not a single millimeter. Hm. I wonder.” Gus Eldridge, one of the communications specialists who had been skeptical of Dan Korwin’s efforts from the start, heard Sy’s comment. He grunted and said, “Of course we haven’t moved. This is — what? — the eighth day of trying? And while he’s accelerating the ship like that, nobody else can do a damned thing. How long do we give him before we tell him to stop fooling himself?”

Charlene could see Eldridge’s point. The Argo might be unable to move, but most of the scientist crew had plenty to keep them busy. According to the observers at X-ray and gamma ray wavelengths, the space around Urstar crackled with high-frequency energy. If the intensity estimates were anywhere close to correct, the ship would have been forced to halt of its own accord before ever reaching the outermost gas giant; otherwise, the field intensities around the hull would have melted the Argo. Sy had argued, with typical perverse logic, that the ship had been halted to prevent its destruction.

That still left the big question: What to do, when they could neither approach Urstar nor escape from it? Charlene, breathing easy now that the violent and intermittent acceleration was over, gazed at the display of the static external scene. She muttered, “Day after day, day after day, we stuck, nor breath nor motion. As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.”

She had been talking to herself, but Emil Garville as usual had his eye on her. He moved closer and said sharply, “What was that?”

She smiled at him and shrugged. “Nothing. I’m showing my age, that’s all. Old words — the man who wrote them was dead hundreds of years before the first person flew in space.”

“Flew in Earth-space?”

“Yes, flew in Earth-space. I keep telling you that I’m old, but you don’t seem to want to believe me.”

“You’re only old objectively, not subjectively. Say it again.” Emil listened closely as she recited the words, then nodded. “I don’t know what had happened to them and their ship, but it certainly applies to us. We’re stuck. Unless something changes, we’ll have to go into T-state before we run out of supplies.” “Something has been changing. But not the sort of thing we’re hoping for.” “JN?”

Charlene nodded wearily. “I’ve talked to Sy about what we should do. He thinks we have to declare the Director incompetent to remain in control, and have someone else take over.”

“Take over and do what?” Emil waved a hand around the control room. “I agree that JN is deteriorating fast, and she spends most of the time in her cabin sitting and doing nothing. But if she were her old self, what could she do? Urstar is only a few light-days away, but in terms of our getting there it might as well be on the other side of the galaxy. We’re stuck.”

Sy, as usual, had been listening without comment while he sat busy with his own experiments. Now he said, “We may be stuck, but we’re not going to be on our own much longer. Unless something changes, we’re going to have visitors.” He posted the tiny image on his hand-held unit to the main display. For some reason of his own he had been observing the region around Urstar at the wavelength of the cosmic background radiation. Logic and experience insisted that close to a star there would be nothing to be seen at such wavelengths. The batlike Pipistrelles and the wispy lattice webs of the Gossameres, residents of deep space, were only found light-years away from fierce stellar radiation. Except, apparently, here. On the display, three fuzzy bat shapes were visible, together with a hint of a gauzy rectangle of silvery lines.

“Doppler insists there’s nothing out there,” Sy said. “I’ve tried active radar, and I’m getting zero returns at all wavelengths. But I’ve also been monitoring the increase in apparent size of their outlines. That shows they’re moving at a constant rate. If they keep it up, they’ll reach the Argo this evening.” Charlene tried, unsuccessfully, to see any increase in the size of the shapes on the display. She said, “We can’t run, and we can’t hide. What do we do?” “We inform the Director of the situation.” Emil shook his head at Charlene and Sy’s perplexed expressions. “I know how you feel. But we’re just three people, among a crew of thirty-eight. Until we discuss this with the others, and they all agree — which I’m not sure they will — JN is still the leader of this expedition. We tell her what we know, we give her our best advice, and we listen to what she says. And unless it’s off-the-wall stark staring lunacy, we do what she says. It’s a rule that’s even older than the poetry that Charlene was quoting a few minutes ago: On a ship, you can have only one captain.” * * *

It was an unnerving experience to stare out of the Argo’s observation ports and see nothing there but the ruddy glow of Urstar. And then, moments later, glance across at the displays showing the same region of space at microwave wavelengths, and watch the black bat-shapes creeping steadily closer. Charlene had spoken to no one else about Sy’s discovery, but somehow the word had spread. During the early evening the crew members had wandered one by one into the main control room, to take up their assigned seats. There was very little conversation. Everyone was waiting.

Judith Niles was the last to arrive. Her face was haggard, and her eyes were wide and lacked focus. Her right pupil was twice the size of her left. To Charlene, however, the most disturbing change was also on the face of it the least significant. From their very first days in S-space, JN had always made a point to cover her bald scalp with a wig. Today, either through oversight or conscious decision, she had omitted to do so. Her scalp, smooth and white and with the faint lines of long-ago surgery tracing across the cranium, was more shocking to Charlene than the possibility of the coming alien contact. Coming, and coming soon. The intangible wisps of the Pipistrelles loomed large in the displays. No one on the Argo could do anything to slow their approach. On the other hand, the Pipistrelles were so insubstantial, so little different from the void itself, any danger from them seemed like a product of overexcited human imagination.

And yet, in the final minutes as those three dark shapes converged on the space-locked Argo, no one in the dim-lit control room could find anything to say. The three Pipistrelles swept on, closer and closer. At microwave wavelengths their winged shapes blocked out half the sky. On their final approach the wings curled around, as though to encompass the helpless ship. “Any second now.” Sy’s calm voice sounded clearly through the hushed chamber. “Closing — closing — contact.”

There was no sound — no movement — no evidence of impact; but the air within the room glowed with pale-blue luminescence. The walls of the chamber blurred, briefly, as though vibrating at a speed too high for the eye to follow. The Pipistrelles vanished from the displays. At the same moment all lights inside the Argo went out.

And then, just as suddenly, the Pipistrelles reappeared on the displays. They were receding from the Argo as silently and as mysteriously as they had approached. Nestled among the three bat shapes shone the bright silver web of the Gossamere.

“That’s it? That’s all we get?” Some crew member muttered the words to herself in the darkness, but she was voicing everyone’s thoughts. They had been tensed for confrontation, for high drama, maybe even for destruction. Now their possible contact retreated, while the ship was once again locked in a featureless void of open space, a few light-days from Urstar but more than two thousand light-years from home.

In the faint glow cast by the displays, Charlene peered around the chamber. She was examining faces. A few seemed openly relieved, most looked worried or disappointed. Sy was inscrutable — naturally. Emil, massive and imperturbable, caught her eye and winked. Maybe he was trying to reassure her. It didn’t work. Charlene turned her attention again to Judith Niles. The Director still sat hunched in her chair, but something had changed. The wide-eyed blankness was gone, replaced by an alertness that Charlene had not seen for months. Her eyes seemed to throw off a light of their own.

As Charlene watched, that bright gaze moved steadily from person to person, focusing intently on each for a few moments and then moving on. When the gimlet stare reached her, Charlene shivered. She felt as though the Director had seen into the secret depths of her mind.

JN was going to speak — Charlene was sure of it; but whatever the Director might have said was lost, because all the lights suddenly came on and as they did so the room filled with an outburst of excited comments.

“Inertial sensors say we’re moving!”

“We’re getting positive Doppler — but it shows a red shift, a big one. That means we’re heading away from Urstar — “

“We’ve had a power drain, a big one. Half our reserves have gone.” “There’s motion relative to the cosmic background radiation.”

“Data bank security has been violated. Extent of penetration unknown. It’s still being violated.”

“Hey, we have engine control!”

Every crew member was busy with a hand-held, checking the ship functions for which they were personally responsible. The noise level suggested that everyone had discovered something significant.

The old Judith Niles, the dynamo at the center of the Sleep Research Institute, would have snapped out a command at once to silence and organize everyone. The Judith Niles of the past few weeks would have looked on apathetically and done nothing.

This Judith Niles did neither one. She sat, quietly waiting, until the excited chatter died away to a murmur.

“Very good,” she said at last, and there a crispness and finality in her tone that made the voices fall silent.

She went on, “Let me begin with information that will probably disturb you. We are not Judith Niles. We are merely making temporary use of her body.” Charlene was shocked — but at the same time felt that she had known what was coming before it was spoken. The inhibition against speech that she always felt in the presence of the Director was gone, and she blurted out, “You killed her!” “No. We saved her. Was it not evident to you that her condition was deteriorating fast, and she could not long survive?”

It had been evident, at least to Charlene, but it was Sy who asked, “So what happened to Judith Niles?”

“She still exists, although not in material form. She left the ship with the Pipistrelles, and is undergoing necessary indoctrination.”

Sy spoke again. “Pipistrelles. You know our words. Who are you, and how are you able to speak to us in our own language?”

“Let us answer your second question first.” One hand of Judith Niles reached forward to the table in front of her, ready to check off points on her fingers. Charlene, who had seen that gesture for seventy millennia, quivered with tension.

“First” — the forefinger tapped on the table — “it should be clear to you that normally we do not exist in material form. We are currently embodied, but that is merely for ease of communication. Second” — a tap of the second finger — “one of you already observed that we have access to the data banks of this ship. We have absorbed those data sources in their entirety. We know how you came to this star, and why. We know your complete history, as individuals and as a species. Therefore, we know not only this language, the one that we are now employing, but all languages in use by your kind. Third” — a finger tap — “and most important: we do not seek to harm you. Your forward progress toward what you know as Urstar was arrested, because had you continued all life on board this ship would have been extinguished.”

“So you claim you’re the good guys,” Dan Korwin said. The shock around the room was being replaced by a swelling anger, and he more than anyone had resented the loss of the Argo’s freedom of motion. “But you haven’t answered Sy’s other question: Who are you? And while you’re thinking about that, I’ve got another one for you: If you mean us no harm, why are you systematically removing the type of stars that our kind need in order to survive? Are you going to tell us you have nothing to do with it, that somebody else is wrecking the galaxy?” “Of course not.” The replacement for Judith Niles enjoyed all the calm controlling ability of the original. “However, you have completely misunderstood the situation. When a species first goes into space — “

Korwin burst out, “You don’t know us. We’ve been a spacefaring species for more than seventy millennia!”

“We do not know you, although indeed your records indicate seventy thousand of your years of experience in space.” The intelligence embodied in Judith Niles regarded Korwin calmly. “However, I repeat, when a species first goes into space, perhaps during their initial million years of off-planet wandering, that species tends to believe it knows all. All about S-space, all about the T-state. All of the advantages, and all the possible dangers. Such, however, is not the case.”

Bright eyes stared steadily around the control room. Seeing them now, Charlene could not believe that she had ever seen them as human.

The JN embodiment continued, “You are already aware of some consequences of S-space living. Sterility is an obvious side effect, which could scarcely be missed. And, in fact, it is a side effect which can, by suitable treatments, be partially remedied. A slight loss of creativity is a more serious problem, although again palliative measures exist. What cannot ever be remedied — or rather, since we lack the hubris to believe that we know all, let us say it can possibly never be remedied — is the long-term deterioration of organic life confined to S-space existence. You ask, who are we? Let us rather say what we were. Once we, like you, were carbon-based organic life forms. In S-space, there is an inevitable decline in the physical condition of such forms. Normally, such a decline occurs only after, at a minimum, half a million years for individuals in a species of your type. That it happened so quickly to Judith Niles puzzled us, but we have concluded that was a consequence of her earlier medical problems. Her entry to S-space appears anomalous. Can any of you confirm that? It predates anything in your ship’s data bases.”

“I can,” Charlene said. She swallowed, overwhelmed by a memory more than eighty-one thousand years old. “I was there when it happened. We had very little idea what we were doing, but we had no choice. If we hadn’t taken JN to S-space she would have died within months — N-space months.”

“Of the medical problems unique to your species, we know only what is in your data bank. However, our knowledge is based on experience with more than two hundred other space-going intelligences. The pattern in every one is the same: discovery of S-space; exploitation of S-space, as a means of subjective life extension and interstellar space travel; and then, after a shorter or longer period, the realization that S-space existence, sufficiently continued, brings with it physical decline and finally death. As a means of seeking immortality, S-space is a blind alley.”

“Immortality!” It was not clear how many people said the word, but it lingered as a murmur around the chamber.

“Let us say, potential immortality. No one knows the maximum attainable life-span of an intelligence, but this we do know: maximal life extension is impossible for an embodied form that uses S-space, T-state, or any of their variations. Ultimately, time consumes flesh. Maximal life extension requires conversion to immaterial form.”

“Pure spirit,” Emil Garville said softly.

“Use that word if you wish. Stabilized fields is a name we would prefer. In any case, your own species faces a choice: material existence, which offers immortality only in the form of offspring; or a move to immaterial form, where we believe that the duration of existence of individual consciousness may be unlimited.

“Now.” The body of Judith Niles sat up straighter in its chair. “We have given you as much information as we think it wise for you to have. Experience shows that each species must learn for itself, and make its own mistakes.” Sy held up a hand. “The question. The unanswered question. If you do not wish humans harm, why are you destroying us by removing from the galaxy the type of stars that our kind needs?”

“You will not like this answer, but it is the truth. You were until recently insignificant. The existence of your kind did not impinge on us until your attempted approach to Urstar.”

“So if we had not come here, you would have changed Sol and the other stars that we need into red dwarfs?”

“No. There was never a danger of that. Before stellarforming begins there is always a survey. No star is changed whose planets form a home for intelligent — even potentially intelligent — life.” Judith Niles’ face, perceptibly non-human, still managed an apologetic smile. “You sit, at your present level of development, somewhere between the two. It is our intention to leave you alone, to become… . whatever you will become.”

“But why do you change stellar types at all?” Gus Eldridge said. “You keep telling us how little we know and understand. Well, maybe that’s true. But what makes you think that you know everything? You may be ruining the galaxy.” “If that is the case, we will have committed a sin for which we can never atone. We certainly do not know everything. But we are well-intentioned. We are changing stellar types for good reason — a reason that you are already in a position to understand and appreciate. What are the longest-lived forms of stars?”

The others looked to Eva Packland. She was the Argo’s astronomical expert. That meant she was also one of the best that humanity, on Gulf City or anywhere else, had to offer. Judith Niles had made her selection of expedition specialists with great care.

“Well.” Eva hesitated. She was lightning-bright, but shy unless the subject was her own field. Then there was no stopping her. “Well, according to our theories of astrophysics, the stars with the longest active lifetimes are the dwarf stars, ones barely above the minimal mass threshold to sustain a hydrogen-helium fusion reaction. On the other hand, we have nothing in our theories that says stellarforming is possible, even in theory.”

“Stellarforming calls for the use of a branch of physics which you have yet to discover; however, your notions on the processes of stellar fusion and associated lifetimes will not be changed by that new knowledge. A blue-white supergiant star must inevitably squander its energy resources, running through fusion fuel supplies in just a few million years. A star like your own native Sol is somewhat better, able to shine for more than ten billion years, before expanding to red giant status and then sinking to cold dimness; but a small red dwarf will shine for better than a hundred billion years; and that — to beings with an adequately long perspective of the future — is a minimal requirement. We are not destroying your region of the galaxy; we are engaged in preserving it, for the needs of long-lived beings like ourselves, and perhaps someday for your needs. That will depend on the choices that you make as a species. “And now, there has been more than our intended interaction between your kind, unless and until you proceed to the next level of development. We wish you good fortune, and we leave you.”

“One more question!” Sy held up his hand again. “The Kermel Objects — “ “No more questions. However, we volunteer the information that we do not control the Kermel Objects. They are in many ways as mysterious to us as they are to you. We propose to do you one other small favor, the nature of which you will shortly discover. But now, goodbye. You can expect no more contact with our kind until some of you learn how to achieve a non-material state.”

Judith Niles turned her head slowly from side to side, her eyes again lingering for a fraction of a second on each person. She stared at Charlene last of all, and it seemed to Charlene that the gaze was longer and harder than at anyone else. Then JN was gone. A woman sat there still, but Charlene knew that what faced her at the end of the table was nothing more than an empty husk. Already, in just a few seconds, the eyes had dimmed and the face frozen into a dead mask. Charlene reached out and gripped Emil’s hand. He said, very softly, “I know. She’s gone, Charlene. But I’m a believer. Somewhere, in some form, she still lives.”

His quiet comment was drowned out by an excited cry from Gus Eldridge. “Take a look at that red shift. We’re moving again — and we’re not just moving, we’re flying.”

Sy was checking their motion relative to the microwave background radiation. “Better than ninety-nine percent of light-speed,” he said cheerfully. “And my guess is that we’re heading right for Gulf City.”

“Ninety-nine percent of light-speed?” Dan Korwin was anything but cheerful. “Then we’re all dead. There’s no way that the Argo’s engines can slow us down enough for a Gulf City rendezvous.”

Sy shook his head. “My bet is we don’t need to worry about that. If they could speed us up without our knowing it, they can slow us down the same way. I wonder just how fast we’re moving. There has to be significant time dilation. Eva, can you get a handle on that, see what sort of a time compression factor we can look forward to? We’re not just going home — we’re going home in style.” Sy, rarely for him, was showing a little excitement. Everyone else, with the possible exception of Korwin, was delighted to be racing home at such high speed. But Charlene alone, it seemed, had heard and understood the main message from the aliens: S-space was not an end point for existence; nor was T-state. Either you returned to N-space, and lived at the same rapid rate as all of humanity through its multimillion years of development; or you abandoned bodily existence completely, to become an abstract entity with no material attributes. In that form you sought to enjoy the hundred-billion or more years that such a transformation might make possible.

For others, it might be easy. Charlene knew that for her the choice would be difficult. Did she want an existence from which all the usual pleasures of life were excluded? She thought not. But could she then face death itself, that dark part of the future that she had always avoided thinking about?

She knew only one thing for sure: both alternatives terrified her.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The form that had occupied the body of Judith Niles had left unspecified the “small favor” being done on behalf of the crew of the Argo. Even when the nature of the favor, as an accelerated return to Gulf City, was recognized, its magnitude had yet to be measured.

The result, reported by Eva Packland and Gus Eldridge, staggered everyone — even the phlegmatic Sy.

“Ninety-nine point nine nine seven percent of light-speed,” he said. “Let’s see now.” He entered a couple of numbers into his own hand-held. “That gives us a time dilation factor of almost a hundred and thirty. Shipboard travel time back to Gulf City will be less than seventeen years. Which means just three days in S-space. We’ll be there before we know it.”

“And then what?” Dan Korwin seemed in a state of permanent rage. The loss of Judith Niles had left a leadership gap, which Korwin obviously felt best qualified to fill. That others, such as Libby Trask, Emil Garville, Charlene Bloom, and Alfredo Roewen, seemed much more ready to assign that role to a reluctant Sy, did nothing to make Korwin less angry. He went on, “You keep insisting, based on no evidence whatsoever, that the aliens will stop the Argo for us when we get to Gulf City. I hope so. Because I’ll tell you now, I don’t know how to stop this ship.”

“That, I can easily believe.” Sy did not let himself be drawn. “I still say that the aliens will do it.”

“How?”

“I have no idea. The same way they’re protecting us on the way. Do you realize what should be happening to us at this speed? Individual atoms of interstellar hydrogen ought to blast through the Argo like bullets, riddling our bodies and equipment. But everything and everyone is just fine.”

“You have a damned sight more faith in alien goodwill than I do.” Korwin glared at Sy, spun around on his heel, and walked out.

“He’s right, you know,” Emil said. “We are taking an awful lot on faith.” “Not true.” Sy considered for a moment, then went on, “I have made not one decision or taken a single action that depends in any way on an assumption as to the benign nature of alien intentions. Judith Niles was removed, and her body used, independent of anything I might have thought or wished. I did nothing to increase the speed of this ship to its present value. Nor could I have done so, even if I wished to. I merely point out that if the aliens had wanted to destroy us, they could have done it very easily. Simply allowing the Argo to continue on its course toward the intense fields around Urstar would have accomplished that. Why would they save us then, in order to destroy us now?”

Emil had shoulders as wide as a door, and now he shrugged them. “You would be the first to tell us not to make assumptions about alien motives.” “I would. I do. I don’t know how aliens think. All I am asking is a certain consistency to their behavior. Admit that, and you will conclude that if they did not stand by and permit us to destroy ourselves then, they will not permit it now. In any case, we will know soon enough if I am right. In three S-days, we will either be stationary at Gulf City and ready to dock the Argo there; or we will be racing past at so close to the speed of light that Gulf City will come and go before we know it.”

Sy left, heading in the same direction as Dan Korwin. Charlene doubted that his objective was continued polite conversation. Sy didn’t allow his feelings to show, but there was no doubt about Korwin’s intense dislike for him. She glanced at Emil. He rubbed his cratered skull and said, “Just three more days, dear. We waited long enough to get to Urstar. I guess we can stand to wait a little longer to see what happens when we get home.”

Maybe he could. Charlene couldn’t. What was apparently true for everyone else on the Argo was not true for her. She could not get over the loss of Judith Niles. She had never really liked the Director, in the usual meaning of that word, but her respect for JN had been enormous. To see her gone, so suddenly and finally, the dominant force on the Argo — and before that on Gulf City, and long before that on and around Earth — was too much. JN had been changed in a moment, from the living, breathing legend who embodied human endurance and determination, to a dried husk of dead tissue. The body was in cold storage, pending a full autopsy by medical and state-change specialists back on Gulf City. That was almost worse than if she had disappeared entirely.

It was all too much for Charlene. No matter what JN might have become in a new incarnation, her vanishing from this one was a break with eighty millennia of work together. No one else on board shared that long history, but to Charlene the separation came as a gigantic shock.

Emil was eager for her company, and he wanted to discuss with her everything that had happened since their progress toward Urstar had been abruptly terminated. But for Charlene, even Emil’s easy company and conversation were too much to take. She fled forward to where the state-change tanks were housed, and placed herself in cold sleep pending the ship’s arrival at Gulf City. As the cold blue mist swirled about her, she was filled with a sense of old loss and new foreboding.

Progress. There had been progress. The return from cold sleep, once a procedure that left the subject shaky and uncertain, had become quick and easy. Charlene opened her eyes in what felt like the middle of a continued thought, and saw Emil staring down at her.

“Did I? — “ she began.

“You did. We’re at Gulf City, and it’s not at all the way we expected. Can you walk?”

“Of course I can.”

“Then let’s go.” He lifted her effortlessly from the tank and led the way out of the tank room and out of the ship.

The Argo was sitting in one of Gulf City’s monster docking stations. Charlene and Emil were in N-space, not S-space. She knew that at once, not because they were moving in a field that was a substantial fraction of a gee, but because the robots around them trundled along slowly enough to be visible at all times. “Where are the others?” she asked, meaning the others of the Argo’s crew. Emil misunderstood the question. “I wish I could tell you,” he said. “All we know at the moment is that the whole place seems to be deserted. Abandoned.” Charlene stared at the busy robots. “But there are scores of these, all over the place.”

“I meant empty of people. We’re scattering through Gulf City, looking for humans, but so far no one has reported finding any. We’re also checking the data banks, to learn what happened here. Come on.”

Over the centuries and millennia, Gulf City had grown from a docking port and temporary facility to an extended space city. Charlene, carried to any preferred destination by service robots when in S-space, had never had a feeling for Gulf City’s swelling dimensions. Now, walking along corridors and through chambers in N-space, she became aware of the city’s size and complexity. Without the guidance robots, she and Emil would have been helpless. The idea of a systematic search of the whole of Gulf City for possible human presence was unthinkable. “Won’t be necessary,” Emil said in answer to her question. His tone was grim. “We have reason to believe that we will find no other humans anywhere on Gulf City.”

“Everyone left?”

“They did; but they also left messages.”

“What did they say?”

“Better if you see for yourself, rather than my trying to summarize. We’re there.”

The robot guide was leading them into a place that seemed oddly familiar. It was the old control center for Gulf City, but a control center that had been modified by the addition of arrays of unfamiliar equipment. Most of the crew of the Argo slumped in chairs around the periphery of the chamber, with expressions ranging from suspicion to despair.

Four people stood in front of a narrow two-meter-high cylinder with rounded contours, a machine unlike anything that Charlene had ever seen before. The four were members of the Argo’s crew: Sy Day, Gus Eldridge, Eva Packland, and a taciturn technician named Delsy Gretz who was the Argo’s specialist in hardware interfaces. Gretz was holding a small gray handset, and pressing a sequence of points on its surface.

“There’s the complete set,” he said. “A hundred and seventy-eight of them.” A long list of names, each with stellar coordinates, stood out against the gray surface of the machine. Charlene recognized maybe a dozen of them: Pentecost, Kallen’s World, Wendell, Derville, Marsden, Lysander. The rest were unfamiliar, scattered more widely through the spiral arm than the stars and settled planets that she knew.

“Colonies of widely varying ages,” Delsy Gretz went on. “All apparently thriving, all working at the same time rate — N-space, no one is using S-space. And all of them apparently in communication with each other. Gulf City receives messages from every world in the galactic web, but it seems to generate none of its own.”

“I don’t get it,” Gus Eldridge said. “Gulf City is the central hub for development of this spiral arm. Decisions on new colonies, and pacing for use of resources, all come from here.”

“Not any more.” Sy had been peering at the list of worlds. He moved backward and flopped onto a chair. It was a mark of his unusual emotional condition that the man he sat down next to was Dan Korwin. “Don’t you get it?”

No one spoke, until Charlene — better a fool who would ask questions than one who would hide ignorance — said, “I don’t get anything, Sy, except that Gulf City is nothing like we expected.”

He nodded. “Right. But not just Gulf City, Charlene — the whole of the spiral arm. When we left on the Argo to travel to Urstar, we all realized we were going off on a long journey. We spent most of the trip out in T-state or cold sleep, so not much subjective time passed for us, but we knew that back here on Gulf City more than seven S-years would flash by while we were on the way there. It would take another S-year for us to return, so far as people here were concerned — our time dilation on the way back because of relativistic effects did not apply to them at all.

“We knew all this; knew, no matter what happened, that so far as anyone on Gulf City was concerned we might be gone for ten S-years, allowing a reasonable span for us to explore Urstar and try to discover what had happened there. “Our logic seemed impeccable when we left, but there was one huge flaw in it. We assumed that the way to measure time was as intervals in S-space, which is where we and the majority of people on Gulf City were and would be living. “We were wrong. Most of the new colonies are down on planetary surfaces. We have known since S-space was first discovered that even a modest surface gravity makes existence in S-space impossible, because no one would be able to walk or even stand up. They would be flat on the ground before they knew they were off balance.

“So people living on planets inhabit N-space, because they have no choice. From their point of view, the ship that left for Urstar would not be gone for just ten years or so. The Argo was gone for more than twenty thousand of their years. Long enough for many new planets to be colonized, long enough to establish an interstellar communications web, long enough to discover new branches of science totally unknown to the living fossils — us — aboard the Argo.”

Sy swept his arm around the control chamber, indicating the arrays of instruments and equipment. “How much of this do you recognize? If you are anything like me, damned little.”

Libby Trask objected, “Even if you are right about the equipment — and I must admit I don’t recognize most of it, even in my own field — it would make no sense to abandon Gulf City as the central organizing group.”

“Wrong. It would make no sense to keep Gulf City in the decision loop at all, so long as people here insisted on remaining in S-space. Interstellar communication times are long enough as it is. Can you imagine the frustration of waiting for some answer, knowing that for every day in S-space on Gulf City, two thousand days — more than five years — were flashing by on your planet? The center of action moved to the planets, coordinating their own development. This place became a backwater.”

Emil said, “A backwater, maybe. But that doesn’t account for Gulf City being totally deserted.”

“Correct. I suspect there is a different reason for that, and it’s something we’ll be able to confirm when we send messages to the planetary web and say we’re home from Urstar. When we left Gulf City, we had on board the most advanced knowledge that humans could offer. But by the standards of planetary civilizations we were travelling for a long, long time. Humans moved out of caves and into space in less time than it took us to go to and return from Urstar. I think that human scientific knowledge has moved on, far past anything with which we can claim familiarity. Someone — almost certainly, a group working on a planet and therefore working in N-space — discovered for themselves the unpleasant truths that we were warned about after our ship was halted and JN’s body was taken over. S-space, over long periods of time, is fatal to us. What was it we were told? Ultimately, time consumes flesh.”

Dan Korwin, sitting next to Sy, turned in his seat. “So everyone returned to live in normal space and time, leaving Gulf City to fade away? I don’t believe it.”

“Nor do I, and I didn’t say that. I think something much more complicated took place. I agree with the list that Delsy Gretz showed us, those are a hundred and seventy-eight different planetary colonies, all operating and communicating with each other in N-space. But there are other lists. Here’s one that I found when I was poking around.”

A group of about twenty names and coordinates appeared as glowing symbols, standing a few centimeters in front of the tall unit that still displayed Delsy Gretz’s list.

“Not nearly so many of these,” Sy said. “But there’s an important difference. Not one of them is associated with a planetary or a stellar system — not even a brown dwarf or a free-flying rogue planet. My guess is that every one is like Gulf City, as far removed as they can get from all other matter.” “Doing what?” Eva Packland was making her own rapid check, confirming that the coordinates did not correspond to any known celestial objects.

“Your guess is as good as mine. Free space facilities, far away from gravitational perturbations. Low density of interstellar matter, and with only the galactic fields as disturbance.”

“Perfect for delicate physical measurements,” said Rolf Sansome. “Minimal interference.”

“Or for long-range astronomy and astrophysics,” Eva Packland added. Sy nodded. “Both of those are logical. My own belief is a little different. Humans set up Gulf City to study parts of the universe that they didn’t understand, but this was also a fine place to explore the different states in which people can exist. S-space was used here, but this is also where the first T-state experiments were performed. I believe that those” — he pointed to the list — “represent the next generation of free-space experiment stations. Different groups had different ideas as to what should be done next. They took everything learned here on Gulf City as a starting point, and set up facilities dedicated to their own explorations.”

“Exploring what?” Charlene, not for the first time, was losing track of the direction of Sy’s thinking.

“All the open questions of space and time. When we left for Urstar, people here were groping their way toward understanding how humans could live in T-state. A time-rate difference of two million to one sounded like a lot to us — it is a lot, four Earth-years flashing by for every minute spent in T-state. But why think of that as an end point for progress? We can survive, unconscious and in cold sleep, and we have no idea how much time would elapse before physical deterioration. There could also be any number of other states between T-state and cold sleep, in which humans can remain conscious and with reduced rates of perception.”

Emil shook his head. “The beings who met us at Urstar said not. You yourself just quoted what they did say: Time consumes flesh.”

“True. But I’ll also quote something else they said: they don’t know everything, and the universe contains many unsolved mysteries. The aliens at Urstar know more than humans — at least, they know more than humans did at the time we left Gulf City. Suppose there are other states, and other forms of life extension, possible for our species but not for theirs? Also, exploration of human physical potentials is just one form of research. Some of the free-space colonies may be devoted to social experiments, or pure physics research, or fields of science totally new to us.”

Charlene had never seen Sy so talkative. She asked, “So some humans have returned to the planets, and are living in normal space. And others have established free-space colonies, to explore we don’t know what. Where does that leave us? We travelled all the way to Urstar and all the way back — but there’s no one here to know or care what we found out.”

“We’ll send messages to all the colonies, free-space or planetary, telling what we’ve learned. Whether they care or not — well, that’s another matter.” Sy looked all around the chamber. “I want to make one point clear to everyone. We went to Urstar as a united group, with one main purpose, and Judith Niles was our undisputed leader. When she left us, we had no leader. Many of you cast me in that role, and maybe for a while I served in it. But it’s not something I like doing, and it’s not something I’m well-suited to carry out. So far as I am concerned, we are thirty-seven individuals, each of us free to pursue his or her own goals. I’m not going to set anyone else’s agenda. At the moment I’m not even sure of my own. What I am sure is that I need some time to myself, to consider my options. I recommend that each of you do the same. I’ll be here at the same time tomorrow. If anyone is interested, I’ll tell you my intentions and listen to yours.”

A couple of people started to speak, either to make comments or to ask questions. Sy waved them away and hurried out of the chamber. Behind him he left a stunned and troubled group.

Or not a group at all. Charlene, gazing around her, saw confusion on every face. The voyage to Urstar had become history. The great expedition, designed by Judith Niles to include matched and complementary skills, was no more. All that was left was a motley assortment of individuals.

What would happen to them now — to her now? That, to Charlene, remained the unanswerable question.

Twenty-four hours did nothing to lessen Charlene’s misgivings. Unable to sleep or relax, she roamed the deserted corridors. Gulf City had become Ghost City, populated only by the arrays of silent and motionless robots, awaiting commands that never came. The space docks were the same, filled with ships ready and waiting to take nonexistent passengers and crews to the farthest reaches of the galaxy.

Charlene saw devices, familiar and unfamiliar, in a thousand deserted chambers. None of them interested her. She realized that her pleasures — all her pleasures — came from living things, people and animals. She had joined the Institute not because she cared about sleep research, but because it had offered her a chance to work with the nervous marmots and the great, gentle Kodiak bears.

It was a mixed blessing when the time came to return to the central chamber and meet with the others. She knew she had little to say to them, but she craved human company.

They drifted in, in ones and twos. Emil came in with Eva Packland, but he moved at once to sit next to Charlene.

“Where have you been? I looked everywhere — even back on board the Argo.” “Wandering about. Thinking.” If you could call it that.

But Sy’s arrival cut off further conversation. He looked as tired as Charlene felt, and he at once slumped down in a chair at the side of the room. Even if he didn’t want to be a leader, many of the others still treated him that way. They all stared at him expectantly. He glared back at them.

“What are you all looking at me for? Don’t any of you have anything better to do?”

“Yes.” It was Dan Korwin, as belligerent as Sy. He was the center of a group of five people, two men and three women. “I knew what I wanted to do ages ago, before we arrived at Gulf City. Hell, I knew it even when we were stuck close to Urstar. We” — his nod took in his companions — “have never been satisfied with the line of talk we were given by the aliens there. We’re going to load one of the research vessels with special equipment, and we’re going back. I want to know how anything could stop a ship that’s going at a fair fraction of light-speed dead in its tracks. What happened to inertia as an invariant property of matter?”

If Korwin was hoping to start an argument with Sy, it didn’t work. They stared at each other for a few seconds, then Sy nodded. “I’d be as interested in hearing the answer to that as you are. Good luck. Anyone else?”

“Yes.” Eva Packland spoke diffidently. “One of the free-space colonies is building special instruments to observe the universe at the greatest distances and earliest times. There’s a message in the files, posted recently, saying they could use a few well-qualified researchers. Libby and Gretchen and I already sent a message back to them, saying we’ll soon be on our way. They need to know what we were told about the logic the beings we encountered presented in favor of stellarforming. The colony we’re going to is five hundred and sixty light-years from here, but they’re doing all their work in S-space. In terms of S-time we’ll be with them pretty quickly, so they’ll still be able to use our help when we get there.”

There was a silence, then Gus Eldridge said, “Well, that makes me feel a good deal better. I thought we were going a long way, Chang and Rolf and me, but you make us look like stay-at-homes. We plan to head for Tellus Prime, where the focus is on the Pipistrelles and the Gossameres. We figure that the records the Argo made when we were marooned near Urstar might come in useful. We don’t understand what we saw, but maybe the people on Tellus will have ideas.” He glanced across at Eva. “Tellus is only ninety-seven light-years, hardly like travelling at all after what we’ve been through getting to Urstar and back.” A feeling was growing around the chamber, not exactly of excitement but of resolve to seek new challenges. People piped up, in twos and threes, choosing from a growing number of projects all around the spiral arm. Some were intrigued by the information offered by the Judith Niles’ embodiment, that no world where intelligence might develop would see its primary star changed. Checking such a statement would be a long and difficult job, calling for a cooperative effort among hundreds of groups in widely scattered locations. The biologists in the party wanted to see what life forms might thrive on planets circling red dwarf stars. If that was the future of the galaxy, better know what it looked like. Others wanted to be near a star when the change to a red dwarf first began. Techniques to predict when and where that would happen needed to be developed. Finally, almost everyone had spoken. Gretchen Waltz, standing close to Charlene, turned to her smiling and said, “What about you, Charlene? You haven’t said a word.”

“I know.” Charlene felt her face turning red. “This probably sounds stupid, but I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

“Well, no hurry.” Gretchen switched to Emil. “How about you?”

He shrugged his great shoulders and shook his head, with its bald and cratered dome. “I’m the same as Charlene. Give me a few more days, and I’ll know where I want to go and what I want to do.”

Charlene felt a surge of gratitude. He did know his own plans, she felt sure he did — but he was saying he didn’t, so she wouldn’t feel like the odd exception. Emil went farther, turning deliberately away from Gretchen toward Sy and saying, “You’ve asked everybody else, but you’ve been very coy about your own intentions. What will you be doing?”

“I wish I knew. I can assure you of one thing, I won’t be working as part of a group.”

Everyone laughed, and Charlene was astonished. Sy had actually made a joke about his own solitary preferences.

“I can tell you my goal,” Sy went on. “The beings performing the stellarforming may seem omnipotent and omniscient so far as we are concerned, but they made it clear that there’s one thing they don’t understand. The Kermel Objects are as much a mystery to them as they are to us. I want to take a closer look at them and see what I can learn.”

“But they’re outside the galaxy,” Eva Packland objected. “Tens of thousands of light-years, and some of them a lot farther than that.”

“So?” Sy shrugged. “Did I say I was in a hurry? I’m willing to travel in T-state, or in cold sleep, or whatever it takes. We don’t even know the best time rate at which to study them — it could require some new state we haven’t discovered yet.”

“But the time it will take — “ Eva paused.

“ — is nothing to worry about, considering how much time we’ve got. Even if we question the motives of the disembodied aliens we met at Urstar, we know from our own work on stellar evolution that a small red dwarf star can sustain fusion processes for a hundred billion years or more. If understanding takes that long, I’m willing to wait.”

“But that’s so far ahead, general expansion will have made the universe unrecognizable — probably incomprehensible. Acceleration may make everywhere inaccessible beyond the local galactic cluster.”

“So the universe may become beyond our comprehension. Do you understand the universe as it is now, Eva? I certainly don’t.”

“You may not be able to survive in what the universe becomes.”

“True. That would be bad, because you know what I really want? I’ll tell you: I want to live forever. But I’m willing to risk death in order to do it. Now, that’s enough talk about me. We all have things to do. Let’s go and do them.” Sy promptly left the control chamber. Other people, following his lead, began to drift out in small groups of three or four. Finally, only Charlene and Emil were left. He leaned back in his chair and said, “What now?”

“I don’t know. You pretended you didn’t know where you were going, just so I wouldn’t feel bad. I appreciate that, but you shouldn’t have done it.” “I didn’t do it. I spent most of last night and this morning trying to find you. Where were you?”

“Nowhere. Everywhere. Wandering around Gulf City.”

“Well, that’s a shame. I wanted to talk to you. You’ve been restless ever since we started back from Urstar. I wanted to ask why.”

“Isn’t it obvious? I’m out of place among the rest of you. I was never a super-brain or a super-achiever. Just a normal person, with average abilities.” “I don’t see you that way, and I never have. The reason I wanted to find you was to make a proposition.”

He was rubbing his head, shielding the scarred and battered area. Charlene stared at him, afraid she was misunderstanding.

“A proposition? What sort of proposition?”

“I could say, the usual kind, but that’s not true. Look, Charlene, I’m tired of life out in open space. I want to get back to a planet. I know I’m a pretty battered object, and not much of a catch.” He hesitated. “Not a catch at all, you might say, for any rational person. But I wondered if you might be willing to go with me.”

Charlene stared at him and said nothing.

“I mean, as my partner,” Emil went on at last. “Live together. Maybe even start a — “

“Emil, I’m old. I’m at least fifty thousand years older than you are.” “Not really. I’ve thought about that, and I’ve done the calculations. If you allow for all the time you’ve spent in S-space, and in cold sleep, you are still a young woman. In subjective time, you have lived only two years more than I have. We are both easily young enough to start a family.”

“On a planet?”

“It would have to be.”

“That would mean N-space, with time running at normal rates. Even with the best life-extension treatment, we would die in a few centuries.”

“I know. That’s why I was almost afraid to ask. But I’m asking. Will you do it, Charlene? Pick a place, and go there together, and see what happens.” He saw her hesitation, and added, awkwardly, “If you didn’t like it, or couldn’t stand me, you could always leave.” He looked at her, the hand covering his forehead held so low above his eyes that he seemed to be peering out from under its shield. “What do you say?”

“I say — “ Charlene felt as though she could not breathe, and she had to pause for a moment. “Emil, I don’t know — I can’t — I’ll have to think about it.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The sun was a fraction redder than Sol, although nothing like the red dwarf stars making their steady takeover of the galaxy. The planet was also a little too far away to be an ideal home for life. Except for a brief period close to summer solstice, frigid air from the poles took the night-time temperatures below the freezing point of water.

And yet — Charlene smiled to herself — to pretend that this was in any sense a “frontier existence,” in the old meaning of the word, was ridiculous. The fusion energy plant in the corner of the kitchen room, an unobtrusive object the size of an old wastepaper basket, would warm the house at any preferred level. It would continue to do that for centuries, without need for adjustment or maintenance.

As for cooking and cleaning and laundry, Charlene could do those herself — if she chose. She rarely did, except for such personal assignments as the decoration of a child’s birthday cake. Normally she instructed the robots and left them to get on with it.

And it wasn’t just the cleaning of the house. Charlene went over to a corner of the nursery, following her nose. No doubt about it, that smell was coming from seven-month-old Sylvia. Sometimes Charlene would do the change herself, but it was getting dark and she wondered what Emil and Damon were doing out there in the cold.

She told one of the robots to change Sylvia, but not to bathe her. Charlene liked to do that herself. Then she slipped into a thermal shield and headed out into the not-quite-dark.

Colchis was already below the horizon, so the faint light refracted by the atmosphere of Leemu was barely enough to see anything. She called. “Emil? Damon?”

“Over here.” They were sitting on a bench down at the end of the garden. Charlene went to them and found they were both staring upward, to where the first stars were appearing.

Damon’s head, with its dense thatch of black curls, was tilted far back (“That’s what I looked like — once,” Emil would say, every day). “Where is it?” Damon was saying.

“You can’t see it until later at night, when Leemu has turned farther on its axis. And then you still can’t see it, without a big telescope, because it’s so far away.”

“But you’ve been there?”

Emil shook his head. “No, I never have. But your mother has. In fact, she was born on Earth.”

“Can I go there, Dad?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Charlene said, “But not tonight. Tonight you have to go inside, and take a bath right now.”

“Mum, that’s not fair. Dad was explaining things to me. About the stars, and where people live, and what they do.”

“That’s very good. But all that will still be there tomorrow. Go on.” Charlene spoke firmly. “In right now, the water will be just right.”

“What about you?”

“We’ll be in in just a second. Don’t worry, from the look of you there’ll be plenty of dirt left for me to worry about when I’m inside.”

“It’s not fair.” But seven-year-old Damon picked up the little crab-apply fruit he had pulled earlier and stomped off into the house.

Charlene sat down in his place, and Emil said, “He wants to go. To the stars. I suppose that it’s inevitable.”

“I know. The more he learns about where we came from, the more he wants to see it all for himself. Sylvia will be the same. But it won’t be for a long time.” Charlene repeated, with great emphasis, “A long time.”

“We like to think so. But time is flying by. Do you wish you hadn’t come, and you had stayed in S-space?”

“Never! This is real human life, the way we were meant to live.”

“I agree, but the children may not.”

“Emil, that’s an awful thought.”

“But a true one. You can almost bet on it. Our children will be like kids everywhere in space and time, whatever their parents did is by definition stupid and old-fashioned. And maybe they are right.” Emil stared up at the sky, where a thousand stars shone clearly now through the frosty air. Charlene was snug in her thermal wrapper, but Emil should have been chilled. He didn’t admit it, of course. As usual he seemed impervious to heat or cold or any physical discomfort.

“We are all over the sky,” he went on. “It makes you wonder what we are looking for. My guess is that we are all — including the free-space disembodied aliens — seeking the same thing. We want immortality. Either we look for it in person, or through our children, or through works that will live on through time.

“You know, when I was no more than eleven or twelve years old, I was convinced that it was human destiny to spread wider and wider in space, until one day there would be humans, or the changed descendants of humans, everywhere. But what I never imagined, even in my wildest dreams, was S-space and T-state and cold sleep, and all the other possible ways of changing the rate at which we live. The human diaspora is real, but it is more than I could conceive. It is taking place through time, as well as through space. We, or our children, are going to be present in the farthest depths of space and time. And we won’t just be there. We’ll dance and sing there, even if the singing is done with radio frequency electromagnetic signals, and the dance is a swirl of free electrons.” While he had been speaking, Charlene had sat silent at his side. He turned to her.

“Well, I guess your notable lack of response is sufficient comment on my ramblings. Or were you miles away, with thoughts of your own?”

“No. I was listening.”

That was almost true. Charlene had been aware of every word that Emil said. But as soon as he had spoken of children and immortality, her thoughts had set off on their own flight. Long before them, Wolfgang Gibbs had chosen a Mayfly life on one of the planets and rejected any attempt at personal immortality. What was the name of the place? Kallen’s World.

Wolfgang was dead now, his life had finished uncounted centuries in the past. Nothing of his mortal remains would survive. They had crumbled to atoms, just as the body of Judith Niles, which Charlene had insisted that they bring with them to Leemu, was crumbling now to quiet dust in the chilly ground of their new world. But Wolfgang’s descendants surely lived on, as presumably JN herself lived on in noncorporeal form. Some day, in a far-off time and place, maybe Charlene’s descendants and Wolfgang’s would meet. They would, of course, know nothing of the long-ago affair of their great-to-the-Nth grandparents. And that was just as it should be. Each generation should make its own loves, establish its own bonds, and know love and life and exultation as if they were newborn that very hour.

She thought of Wolfgang, but it was not with any sense of regret. Fondness, yes, and more than that, an odd curiosity. Of course, she would never exchange Emil, Damon, and Sylvia for anyone or anything in the known — or unknown — universe. But the curiosity took the form of an unanswerable question: would their children’s children’s children, someday and somewhere, meet?

It was not a subject she would ever discuss with Emil. He had little or no jealousy in him, but there were some things that you simply did not mention to your lover, husband, and life-companion, no matter what the circumstances. Charlene reached forward and placed her hand on Emil’s head. As she suspected, it was cold, much too cold to be comfortable.

“Come on, love,” she said. She felt an infinite affection and gratitude for the man next to her. S-state permitted no such intense feelings, nor would it ever. “Come on,” she repeated. “We need to get inside before you freeze. And if you want to see your son do his best to flood the whole house with bath water, we’ll have to hurry.”

And then, inexplicably — stupidly — she added, “They’ll meet as strangers, of course. And that’s just as it should be.”

Emil asked, not surprisingly, “Strangers? Who are you talking about?” “The children. If they leave here for the stars, they won’t know anybody.” “Of course they won’t — for the first week or two. But they’re young. They’ll make their own friends soon enough. We did it, didn’t we? And if we did it, then anyone can.”

Emil linked his arm in hers and led the way back into the house. Even from a distance, Charlene could hear the sounds of a child’s laughter and splashing water.

EPILOG

I evaluate my chances of personal survival beyond the next few minutes as zero. Also, I will never achieve my original goal of following time all the way to its end. In a universe of infinite expansion, that is of necessity impossible. However, I am not disappointed. What I am doing is far more interesting. This group of Kermel Objects, baffling to me as to their basic nature and goals, has over the past four thousand T-state years (eight billion years, in old time measure), significantly altered its behavior patterns. The Kermel Objects used to be loners, sitting far removed from each other in interstellar — more accurately, inter-galactic — space. Now some of them are clustering, forming a tight little group within which I have carefully sited myself at the exact center of mass. More Kermel Objects join us, and as they do the local matter-energy density steadily rises. As it does so, local spacetime curvature increases.

It is not difficult to project an end point, or to conjecture what is happening here. The Kermel Objects are breeding; however, unlike all other forms of life (and intelligence?) they propagate in a unique way. Massless themselves, they somehow increase the local matter density until spacetime curvature exceeds a critical mass. At that point, the cluster of Kermel Objects will pinch off from the rest of the universe. They will create, in fact, a new (and empty?) universe in which they can multiply and prosper.

And now for the big question: what would happen to a human who remained at the center of the cluster, as the curvature rose and rose to its critical value? Would the human survive and be “carried through,” to emerge in that new time and space created by the Kermel Objects?

I am going to find out, and very soon. As the Kermel group clusters tighter, the rate of curvature increase grows exponentially. I am not sure how to relate time within the cluster to external time, but that makes little difference since only local time — time as I perceive it — has meaning for me.

On that scale, we are close indeed.

Four minutes. Four minutes remain, until the critical mass-energy density is passed and this region pinches off from the rest of spacetime. And then? If I knew the answer to that question, eight billion years of waiting could have been avoided.

The Kermel Objects are all around me, and they are crowding in. They are also changing in appearance. There is a pulsation at their centers, like a slow, strengthening heartbeat. They are finally silent, with their low frequency transmissions subsided to nothing, but that does not mean there is no communication among them. They are throwing out connecting filaments, long tendrils that join them and gradually grow thicker. I can see stars and galaxies beyond, but darkened and distorted.

Three minutes. The fainter galaxies are gone. The brightest and closest ones are fading, blocked out. I feel no discomfort, no twisting or tearing pressure on my body. The forces not far from my body must be enormous, as the Kermel Objects prepare to tear the fabric of spacetime itself, but I sit comfortably at the eye of the hurricane.

Two minutes. The tendrils are everywhere, a black mesh around me which admits little external light. All the Kermel Objects have merged, to become one. I am cocooned at its center, swaddled, a chrysalis cut off from the cosmos and ready to be reborn.

One minute. I evaluate my condition. Physically, I am not sure that I exist at all in the universe of my birth. Mentally, I remain calm. When you have pursued an objective for so long, it would be foolish to complain when you are so close to achieving it.

I cannot help wondering what the tightening cluster of Kermel Objects looks like from outside, in free space. This event — this vanishing, this breeding, this birth — may have happened long before we or our kind were there to observe it. I wonder, was our universe, the universe inhabited by humans, itself created from a confluence of Kermel Objects? Has this happened in the past, not once but many times?

We are close to the end now — mere seconds on my subjective clock.

All outside light has gone. The cocoon is closed. What happens next will be simple, and very sudden.

The curvature of the region that I occupy will exceed critical value. A new, self-contained region of spacetime will be formed. Its matter content, converted to raw energy, will be that contained within the volume bounded by the contracting Kermel Objects.

And I? It seems to me that I represent that matter content, in its totality. I, Sly Day, will cease to exist in my present form. I will become a universe. Let there be light?

Framed