Tau Zero

Chapter 18

The reaches of space-time cannot be numbered by man’s familiar integers; They cannot even be honestly counted by orders of magnitude. To feel this fact, recapitulate:

Leonra Christine spent most of a year getting within 1 per cent of light velocity. The time aboard was about the same, because the value of tau only began to drop sharply when she was quite near c. During that initial period, she covered half a light-year of space, approximately five trillion kilometers.

Thereafter the decrease became constantly more swift. Aided by the higher acceleration now possible, she required somewhat under two more years, in her own measure, to get about ten light-years from Earth. That was where she met her grief.

The decision being made to seek the Virgo cluster of galaxies, she must gain such a tau that she could bridge the distance in a tolerable shipboard time. At maximum acceleration — a maximum which increased as she traveled — she swung half around the Milky Way and into its heart in a little more than one year. According to the cosmos, it took better than a hundred millennia.

In the Sagittarian clouds, she won a tau which brought her out of her native galaxy in days. Then her people discovered that the vacuum between the family of star groups they were in and the Virgo assemblage at which theirplans were aimed, was not hard enough. They must go beyond the entire clan.

In intergalactic space, Leonora Christine remained able to pile on speed. It took her weeks to fare a couple of million light-years to a chosen neighbor galaxy. Spanning this in hours, she filled herself so full of kinetic energy that she crossed a similar distance in days … and presently she used a week or so to depart from her original cluster and reach another one … through which she passed quite rapidly… She coasted across the almost total emptiness of interclan space; meanwhile her engineers fixed the damaged unit. Although without acceleration, she needed only a pair of her own months to lay two or three hundred million light-years behind her.

The accessible mass of the whole galactic clan that was her goal proved inadequate to brake that velocity.

Therefore she did not try. Instead, she used what she swallowed to drive forward all the faster. She traversed the domain of this second clan — with no attempt at manual control, simply spearing through a number of its member galaxies — in two days.

On the far side, again into hollow space, she fell free. The stretch to the next attainable clan was on the order of another hundred million light-years. She made the passage in about a week.

When she arrived there, of course, she spent the star stuff she found to force herself still closer to the ultimate speed.

“No — don’t — look out!”

Margarita Jimenes missed the handhold that would have checked her flight. Scrabbling for it, she struck the bulkhead, caromed, and floundered in air.

“Ad i chawrti!” Boris Fedoroff snorted.

He gauged vectors and launched himself to intercept her. It was not a conscious calculation; that would have been impossibly cumbersome. Like a hunter who aimed for a moving target, he used the skills and multiple senses of his body — angular diameters and shifts, muscle pressures and tensions, kinesthesia, the unseen but exactly known configuration of every joint, the several time derivatives of each of these factors and many more — his organism, a machine created with incomprehensible complexity and precision and, as it soared, beauty.

He had a ways to fly. They were on Number Two deck, well aft near the engine rooms. It was devoted to storage; but a major part of the materials it had held were now fashioned into objects. Where the cargo had been was a cavernous, echoing space, coldly lit, seldom visited. Fedoroff had brought his woman there for some private instruction in free-fall techniques. She was doing miserably in the classes that Lindgren had decreed for groundlubbers.

She spun before him, head lost among loose ringlets, arms and legs and breasts flopping. Sweat oiled her bare skin and broke off in globules that glittered around her like midges. “Relax, I tell you,” Fedoroff called. “The first damn thing you must learn is, ‘Relax.’”

He passed within reach and grabbed her at the waist. Linked, the two of them formed a new system that spun on a crazy axis as it drifted toward the opposite bulkhead. Vestibular processes registered their outrage in giddiness and nausea. He knew how to suppress that reaction; and he had given her an antispacesickness pill before the lesson started.

Nevertheless she vomited.

He could do nothing except hold her through their trajectory. The first upheaval caught him by surprise and struck him in the face. Thereafter he clasped her back against belly. His free hand swatted at stinking yellow liquid and gobbets. Inhaled under these conditions, the stuff could choke a person.

When they hit metal, he snatched the nearest support, an empty rack. Hooking an elbow joint in it, he could use both arms to keep her and soothe her. Eventually the dry phase passed too.

“Are you better?” he asked.

She shivered and mumbled, “I want to be clean.”

“Yes, yes, we’ll find a bath. Waithere. Hang on, don’tlet go. I’ll come in a few minutes.” Fedoroff shoved free again.

He must close the ventilators before the splashed foulness got drawn into the ship’s general air system. Afterward he could see about catching it with a vacuum cleaner. He would do that himself. If he detailed another man to this mess, the fellow might do more than resent it. He might start a rumor about—

Fedoroff’s teeth slammed together. He finished his precautions and dove back to Jimenes.

Though still white-faced, she appeared in command of her movements. “I’m dreadfully sorry, Boris.” Her speech came hoarse out of a larynx burned by stomach acid. “I should never have agreed … to come this far … from a suction toilet.”

He poised in front of her and asked grimly, “How long have you been puking?”

She shrank away. He caught her before she drifted loose. His clasp was savage on her wrist. “When was your last period?” he demanded.

“You saw—”

“I saw what could easily have been a fake. Especially considering how busy I’ve been in my work. Give me the truth!”

He shook her. Unanchored, her body was twisted at the shoulder. She screamed. He let go as if she had turned incandescent. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he gasped. She bobbed from him. He got her just in time, hauled her back and held her tightly against his besmeared breast.

“Th-th-three months,” she stammered through her weeping.

He let her cry while he stroked the matted hair. When she was done, he helped her to a bathroom. They sponged each other fairly clean. The organic liquid they used had a pungency overriding the stench on them, but its volatilization was so rapid and thorough that Jimenes shuddered with chill, Fedoroff chucked the sponges into the chute of a laundry-bound conveyor and turned on a hot-air blower. He and she basked for minutes.

“Do you know,” he said after much silence, “if we have solved the problem of hydroponics in zero gravity, we should be able to design something that will give us a real bath. Or even a shower.”

She didn’t smile, only huddled near the grille. Her hair billowed backward.

Fedoroff stiffened. “All right,” he said, “how did it happen? Isn’t the doctor supposed to keep track of every woman’s contraceptive schedule?”

She nodded, not looking at him. Her reply was scarcely to be heard. “Yes. One shot a year, though, for twenty-five of us … and he had, he has many things on his mind other than routine …”

“You didn’t both forget?”

‘‘No. I went to his office on my usual date. It’s embarrassing when he has to remind a girl. He wasn’t in. Out taking care of someone in trouble, maybe. His chart for us lay on his desk. I looked at it. Jane had been in for the same reason, I saw, this same day, probably an hour or two earlier. Suddenly I snatched his pen and wrote ‘OK’ after my own name, in the space for this time. I scribbled it the way he does. It happened before I really knew what I was doing. I ran.”

“Why didn’t you confess afterward? He’s seen battier impulses than that since this ship went astray.”

“He should have remembered,” Jimenes said louder. “H he decided that he must have forgotten I was in — why should I do his work for him?”

Fedoroff cursed and grabbed after her. He stopped his hand short of the bruised wrist. “In the name of sanity!” he protested. “Latvala’s worked to death, trying to keep us functional. And you ask why you should help him?”

Her defiance grew more open. She faced him and said: “You promised we could have children.”

“Why — well, yes, true, we want as many as we can, once we have a planet—”

“And if we do not find a planet? What then? Can’t you improve the biosystems as you’ve been bragging?”

“We’ve put that aside in favor of the instrumentation project. It may take years.”

“A few babies won’t make that much difference meanwhile … to the ship, the damned ship … but the difference to us—”

He moved toward her. Her eyes widened. She crawled from him, handhold to handhold. “No!” she yelled. “I know what you’re after! You’ll never take my baby! He’s yours too! If you … you cut my baby out of me — I’ll kill you! I’ll kill everyone aboard!”

“Quiet!” he bellowed. He backed off a little. She clung whereshewas, sobbing and baring teeth. “I won’t do a thing myself,” he said. “We’ll see the constable.” He went to the exit. “Stay here. Pull yourself together. Think how you want to argue. I’ll fetch clothes for us.”

On his errand, the sole words he uttered were through the intercom, requesting a private talk with Reymont. Nor did he speak to Jimenes, or she to him, on their way to their cabin.

When they were inside, she seized his arms. “Boris, your own child, you can’t — and Easter coming—”

He tethered her. “Calm down,” he warned. “Here.” He gave her a squeeze bottle with, some tequila in it. “This may help. Don’t drink much. You’ll need your wits about you.”

The door chimed. Fedoroff admitted Reymont and closed it again. “Would you like a dram, Charles?” the engineer asked.

The features he confronted might have been a vizor on a war helmet. “We’d Setter discuss your problem first,” said the constable.

“Margarita is pregnant,” Fedoroff told him.

Reymont floated quiet, lightly gripping a bar. “Please—” Jimenes began.

Reymont waved her to silence. “How did that happen?” he inquired, softly as the ship’s breath from the ventilators.

She tried to explain, and couldn’t. Fedoroff put it in a few words.

“I see.” Reymont nodded. “About seven months to go, hm? Why do you consult me? You should have gone directly to the first officer. She’ll be the one in any event who disposes of the case. I have no power except to arrest you for a grave breach of regulation.”

“You — We are friends, I thought, Charles,” Fedoroff said.

“My duty is to the whole ship,” Reymont answered in the same monotone as before. “I can’t go along with anyone’s selfish action that threatens the lives of the rest.”

“One tiny baby?” Jimenes cried.

“And how many more desired by others?”

“Must we wait forever?”

“It would seem proper to wait till you know what our future is likely to be. A child bom here could have a short life and a grisly death.”

Jimenes locked fingers over her abdomen. “You won’t murder him! You won’t!”

“Be still,” spat from Reymont. She choked but obeyed. He turned his gaze on Fedoroff. “What are your views, Boris?”

Slowly, the Russian retreated until he was beside his woman. He drew her to him and said: “Abortion is murder. This should not have happened, maybe, but I cannot believe my shipmates are murderers. I will die before I permit it.”

“We’d be in bad shape without you.”

“Exactly.”

“Well—” Reymont averted his eyes. “You haven’t yet told me what you imagine I can do,” he said.

‘‘I know what you can,” Fedoroff answered. “Ingrid will want to save this life. She may not be able without your advice and backing.”

“Hm. Hm. So.” Reymont drummed the bulkhead. “It isn’t the worst thing for us, this,” he said at length, thoughtfully. “There might even be some gains to make. If we can pass it off as an accident, an oversight, whatever, instead of a deliberate infraction… It was, at that, in a way. Margarita acted insanely; still, how sane are any of us by now? … Hm. Suppose we announce a consequent relaxation of the rules. A very limited number of births will be authorized. We’ll compute how many the ecosystem can stand and let the women who want draw lots. I doubt that many will … under present circumstances. The rivalry shouldn’t be great. Having infants to coo over and help take care of, that might well relieve certain tensions.”

Briefly, his voice rose. “Also, by God, they’re apledge of confidence. And a fresh reason to survive. Yes!”

Jimenes tried to reach him and embrace him. He warded her off. Above her weeping and laughter, he ordered the engineer: “Get her calmed. I’ll discuss this with the first officer. In due course, we’ll all confer together. Meanwhile, no word or sign to anybody.”

“You … take the affair … coolly,” Fedoroff said.

“How else?” Reymont’s answer was edged. “Been too bloody much emotion around.” For another instant, the vizor lifted. This time a death’s head looked out. “Too bloody clawing much!” he shouted. He flung the door wide andi whipped into the corridor.

Boudreau peered through the viewscope. The galaxy toward which Leonora Christine rushed showed as a blue-white haze on a darkling visual field. When he had finished, a scowl bent his brow. He walked to the main console. His footfalls thudded in the restored weight of an intrafamilial passage.

“It is not right,” he said. “I have seen plenty of them; I know.”

“Do you mean the color?” Foxe-Jameson asked. The navigator had bidden the astrophysicist come to the bridge. “Frequency seem too low for our speed? That’s mainly due to simple space expansion, Auguste. The Hubble constant. We’re overhauling galactic groups whose velocity gets higher and higher with respect to our starting point, the farther we travel. Good thing too. Otherwise the Doppler effect might present us with more gamma radiation than our material shielding can handle. And, to be sure,.as you very well know, we’re counting heavily on the same space expansion to help us into a situation where we can stop. Eventually the velocity changes in themselves ought to overbalance their reduction of Bussard efficiency.”

“That part is plain.” Boudreau leaned on the desk, shoulders hunched, brooding over the notes he had made. “I tell you, however, I have watched each single galaxy we passed through, or in observation distance of, these months. I have grown familiar with their types. And gradually those types are changing.” He jerked his head at the viewscope. “That up ahead, for instance, it is of the irregular sort, like the Magellanic Clouds at home—”

“I daresay, in these parts, the Magellanic Clouds count as home,” Foxe-Jameson murmured.

Boudreau chose to ignore the aside. “It should have a high proportion of Population n stars,” he went on.

“From here we should be able to see many individual blue giants. Instead, we see none.

“All the spectra I take, to the extent I can interpret them, they are becoming different from what is normal for the types. No kind of galaxy looks right any more.”

He raised his eyes. “Malcolm, what is happening?”

Foxe-Jameson appeared surprised. “Why’d you pick me to query?” he countered.

“I had only a vague impression at first,” Boudreau said. ‘‘I am not a real astronomer. Besides, I could not get accurate navigational sights. To obtain a value of tau, for instance, requires such a cat’s cradle of assumptions that — Bien, when I finally felt sure the nature of space was altering, I approached Charles Reymont. You know how he puts down panic-mongers, and he is correct in that. He told me to call in one of your team, quietly, and report the answer back to him.”

Foxe-Jameson chortled. “Why, you two pathetic beggars! Haven’t you anything else to stew about? Actually, I thought it’d be common knowledge. So common that none of us pros happened to mention it, starved though everyone is for fresh conversation. Makes a chap wonder what else he’s overlooking, eh?”

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

“Consider,” Foxe-Jameson said. He settled one thigh and buttock on the desk. “Stars evolve. They build heavier elements than hydrogen in thermonuclear reactions. If one is so big that it explodes, a supernova, at the end of its life, it scatters some of those atoms back into the interstellar medium. A more important process, though, if less spectacular, is the shedding of mass by smaller stars, the majority, in their red-giant stage on the way to extinction. New generations of stars and planets condense out of this enriched medium and add to it in their turn. Over the ages you get a rising proportion of metal-rich suns. That affects the over-all spectrum. But of course no star gives back more than a percentage of the material which formed it. Most matter stays locked in dense bodies, cooling toward absolute zero. So the interstellar medium becomes depleted. Space within the galaxies grows more clear. The rate of star formation declines.”

He gestured bow-ward. “Finally you reach a point where little or no further condensation is possible. The energetic, short-lived blue giants bum themselves out and have no successors. The galaxy’s luminous members are entirely dwarfs — at last nothing except cool, red, miserly Type Ms. Those are good for almost a hundred gigayears.

“I’d judge this galaxy we’re aimed for isn’t that far along yet. But it’s getting there. It’s getting there.”

Boudreau pondered. “Then we won’t gain as much speed per galaxy as we did before,” he said. “Not if the interstellar gas and dust are being used up.”

“True,” Foxe-Jameson said. “Don’t fret. I’m sure ample will remain for our purposes. Every bit doesn’t get collected in stars. Besides, we have the intergalactic medium, the intercluster, the interfamilial — thin, that, but usable at our present tau — and eventaully we should be getting work out of the interclan gas itself.”

He clapped the navigator’s back in friendly wise. “We’ve come about three hundred megaparsecs now, remember,” he said. ‘‘Which means about a thousand million years of time. You’ve got to expect some changes.”

Boudreau was less accustomed to astronomical concepts. ‘‘You mean,” he whispered, “the whole universe is growing enough older for us to notice?” It was the first time since his early youth that he had crossed himself.

The door to the interview room was shut. Chi-Yuen hesitated before pressing the chime button. When Lindgren let her in, she said timidly, “They told me you were here alone.”

“Writing.” The first officer stood somewhat slumped; nonetheless she topped the planetologist by a head. “A private place.”

“I hate to disturb you.”

“What I’m for, Ai-Ling. Sit down.” Lindgren went back behind her desk, which was covered with scrawled-on papers. The cabin hummed and trembled to irregular acceleration. More than a day of weight remained. Leonora Christine was bound through a clan of unprecedented size and opulence.

For a while, hope had lived that this might be the one where the ship could reach a halt within some member galaxy. Closer observation showed otherwise. Inverse tau had gotten too immense.

A faction had argued at general assembly that there ought to be limited deceleration anyhow, in order that requirements for stopping inside the next clan be less rigorous. One could not prove the contention wrong; not that much cosmography was known. One could only use statistics, as Nilsson and Chidambaran did, to prove that the likelihood of finding a resting place seemed greater if acceleration continued. The theorem was too involved for most persons to follow. The ship’s officers elected to take it on faith and maintain full forward thrust. Reymont had had to quell some individuals whose objections approached mutiny.

Chi-Yuen perched herself on the edge of a visitors’ chair. She was small and neat in high-collared red tunic, broad white slacks, hair brushed back with unwonted severity and held by an ivory comb. Lindgren contrasted in more than size. Her shirt was open at the neck, rolled up at the sleeves, smudged here and there; her hair was tousled, her eyes haunted.

“What are you writing, if I may ask?” Chi-Yuen ventured.

‘‘A sermon,” Lindgren said. ‘‘Not easy. I’m no writer.”

“You, a sermon?”

The left corner of Lindgren’s mouth twitched slightly upward. “Actually the captain’s address at our Midsummer Day festivities. He can still conduct divine service, after a fashion. But for this he requested me to, ah, inspirit the troops in his name.”

“He is not a well man, is he?” Chi-Yuen inquired low.

The humor flickered out in Lindgren. “No. I assume I can trust you not to blab that around. Even if everybody does suspect it.” She rested elbow on desk, forehead on hand. “His responsibility is destroying him.”

‘‘How can he blame himself? What choice has he except to let the robots move us onward?”

“He cares.” Lindgren sighed. “Also, mis latest dispute. In his condition, that was more than he could take. He’s not nervously prostrated, understand. Not quite. But he’s no longer able to buck people.”

‘‘Are we wise to hold a ceremony?” Chi-Yuen wondered.

“I don’t know,” Lindgren said in a worn-out voice. “I simply don’t. Now when — we aren’t announcing it, but we can’t prevent computation and talk — when we’re somewhere around the five-or six-billion-year mark…” Her head lifted, her hand fell. “To celebrate something as purely Earth as Midsummer Day, now when we have to start thinking of Earth as gone—”

She seized both arms of her chair. For a moment the blue eyes were wild and blind. Then the straining body eased, muscle by muscle; she leaned into the seat until its swivel joint tilted with a creak; she said flatly: “The constable persuaded me to go ahead with our rituals. Defiance. Reunification, after the past quarrel. Rededication, especially to that unborn baby. New Earth: We’ll snatch it from God’s grip yet. If God means anything, even emotionally, any more. Maybe I should lay off religion altogether. Carl didn’t give me any details. Only the general idea. I’m supposed to be its best spokesman. Me. That tells you a good deal about our condition, doesn’t it?”

She blinked, returning to herself. “Apologies,” she said. “I oughtn’t to have dropped my problems on you.”

“They are everyone’s problems. First Officer,” Chi-Yuen replied.

“Please. My name is Ingrid. Thanks, though. If I haven’t told you before, let me say now, in your quiet way you’re one of the key people aboard. A garden of calm — Well.” Lindgren bridged her fingers. “What can I do for you?”

Chi-Yuen’s glance fluttered to the desk. “It’s about Charles.”

The ends of Lindgren’s nails whitened.

“He needs help,” Chi-Yuen said.

“He has his deputies,” Lindgren answered tonelessly.

“Who keeps them going except him? Who keeps us all going? You too, Ingrid. You depend on him.”

“Certainly.” Lindgren intertwined her fingers and strained them. “You must realize — perhaps he never mentioned it to you in words, any more than to me or I to him; but it’s obvious — there’s no quarrel left between him and me. We eroded that away, working together. I wish him everything good.”

“Can you give him some of it, then?”

Lindgren’s gaze sharpened. “What do you mean?”

“He is tired. More tired than you imagine, Ingrid. And more alone.”

“His nature.”

“Maybe. Still, that was never any of the inhuman things he’s had to be: afire, a whip, a weapon, an engine. I’ve come to know him a little. I’ve watched him lately, how he sleeps, what few times he can. His defenses are used up. I hear him talk sometimes, in his dreams, when they aren’t simply nightmares.”

Lindgren closed her hands on emptiness. “What can we do for him?”

“Give him back a part of his strength. You can.” Chi-Yuen raised her eyes. “You see, he loves you.”

Lindgren got up, paced the narrow stretch behind her desk, struck fist into palm. “I’ve assumed obligations,” she said. The words wrenched her gullet.

“I know—”

“Not to smash a man, especially one we need. And not to … be promiscuous again. I have to be an officer, in everything I do. So does Cari.” Raw-voiced: “He’d refuse!”

Chi-Yuen rose likewise. “Can you spare this night?” she asked.

“What? What? No. Impossible, I tell you. Oh, I’ve the time, but impossible all the same. You’d better go.”

“Come with me.” Chi-Yuen took Lindgren by the hand. “What scandal can there be if you visit the two of us in our cabin?”

The big woman stumbled after her. They went up the thrumming stairs to crew level. Chi-Yuen opened her door, led Lindgren through, closed it again. They stood alone amidst the ornaments and souvenirs of a country that died gigayears before, and regarded each other. Lindgren breathed in deep, quick draughts. Red pursued white across her face, down throat and bosom.

“He should be back soon,” Chi-Yuen said. “He doesn’t know. It is my gift to him. One night, at least: to tell him and show him how you never stopped feeling.”

She had separated the beds. Now she lowered the dividing partition. She did not quite forestall her tears.

Lindgren held her close for a moment, kissed her, and finished sealing her off. Then Lindgren waited.