Poul Anderson - Tau Zero

“Forget it,” Chidambaran advised. “He had a point. We are not on a planet. Whatever we lose is lost for good. Best not to take chances; and surely we have time for bureaucratic procedures.” The entrance to commons appeared. “Here we are.”

They headed toward the hypnotherapeutic room. “I trust your experience will be pleasant, Matyas,” Chidambaran said.

“Me too.” Lenkei winced. “I’ve had a few terrible nightmares in there.” Brightening: “And a wild lot of fun!”

Stars grew scattered. Leonora Christine was not crossing from one spiral arm of the galaxy to another — not yet; she was just in a lane of comparative emptiness. For lack of much intake mass, her acceleration diminished. That condition was very temporary, so shrunken was her tau: a few hundred cosmic years. But for some time inboard, the viewscreens to starboard opened mainly on black night.

A number of the crew found it preferable to the eldritch shapes and colors blazing to port.

Another Covenant Day arrived. The ceremonies and the subsequent party were less forlorn than might have been expected. Shock and grief had gotten eroded by ordinariness. At present, the dominant mood was of defiance.

Not everybody attended. Elof Nilsson, for one, stayed in the cabin he and Jane Sadler shared. He spent a lengthy while making sketches and estimates for his exterior telescope. When his brain wearied, he dialed the library index for fiction. The novel he selected, at random out of thousands, proved absorbing. He hadn’t finished it when she returned.

He raised eyes that were bloodshot with fatigue. Except for the scanner screen, the room was unlighted. She stood, big, gaudy, not altogether steady, in shadow.

“Good Lord!” he exclaimed. “It’s five in the morning!”

“Have you finally noticed?” She grinned. The whisky haze around her reached his nostrils, together with a muski-ness. He took a pinch of snuff, a luxury that occupied a large part of his baggage allowance.

“ I’m not due at work in three hours,” he said.

“Nor I. I told my boss I wanted a week’s leave. He agreed. He’d better. Who else has he got?”

“What attitude is that? Suppose others on whom the ship depends behaved thus.”

“Tetso Iwamoto … Iwamoto Tetsuo, really; Japanese put last name first, like Chinese … like Hungarians, did you know? — ’cept when they’re being polite to us ignorant Westerners—” Sadler captured her thought. “He’s a nice man to work for. He can manage a spell ’thout me. So why not?”

“Nevertheless—”

She lifted a finger. “I will not be scolded, Elof. You hear? I’ve borne with that o-ver-com-pensated inferiority complex of yours more’n I should’ve. And a lot else. Thinking maybe the rest of you’d grow up to match that IQ of yours. Enough’s enough. Gather ye roses while ye may.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Sort of.” Wistfully: “You should’ve come along.”

“What for? Why not confess how weary I am of the same faces, the same actions, the same inane conversations? I’m far from unique in that.”

Her voice dropped. “Are you tired of me?”

“Why—” Nilsson’s Kewpie-doll form clambered erect. “What’s the matter, my dear?”

“You haven’t exactly bowled me over with attention, these past months.”

“No? No, perhaps not.” He drummed a dresser top. “I’ve been preoccupied.”

She drew a breath. “I’ll say it straight. I was with Johann tonight.”

“Frewald? The machinist?” Nilsson stood speechless for a humming minute. She waited. Soberness had come upon her. He said at length, with difficulty, watching the tattoo of his fingers: “Well, you have the legal and doubtless the moral right. I am no handsome young animal. I am … was … more proud and happy than I knew how to express when you agreed to be my partner. I let you teach me a number of things I did not understand before. Probably I was not the most adept pupil anyone ever had.”

“Oh, Elof!”

“You are leaving me, aren’t you?”

“We’re in love, he and I.” Her vision blurred. “I thought it’d be easier than this to tell you. I didn’t figure you cared a lot.”

“You wouldn’t consider a discreet — No, discretion isn’t feasible. Besides, you couldn’t bring yourself to it. And I have my own pride.” Nilsson sat down again and reached for his snuffbox. “You had better go. You can remove your things later.”

“That quick?”

“Get out!” he shrieked.

She fled, weeping but on eager feet.

Leonora Christine re-entered populated country. Passing within fifty light-years of a giant new-born sun, she transited the gas envelope that surrounded it. Being ionized, the atoms were seizable with maximum efficiency. Her tau plummeted close to asymptotic zero: and with it, her time rate.

Reymont paused at the entrance to commons. The deck lay empty and quiet. After an initial surge of interest, athletics and other hobbies had become increasingly less popular. Aside from meals, the tendency was for scientists and crew-folk to form minute cliques or retreat altogether into reading, watching taped shows, sleeping as much as possible. He could force them to get a prescribed amount of exercise. But he had not found a way to restore what the months were grinding out of the spirit. He was the more helpless in that respect because his inflexible enforcement of basic rules had made him enemies.

A propos rules — He strode down the corridor to the dream room and opened its door. A light above each of the three boxes within said it was occupied. He fished a master key from his pocket and unlocked the lids, which passed air but not light, one by one. Two he closed again. At the third, he swore. The stretched-out body, the face under the somnohelmet, belonged to Emma Glassgold.

For a space he stood looking down at the small woman. Peace dwelt in her smile. Doubtless she, like most aboard, owed her continued sanity to this apparatus. Despite every effort at decoration, at actual interior construction of desired facilities, the ship was too sterile an environment. Total sensory deprivation quickly causes the human mind to lose its hold on reality. Deprived of the data-flow with which it is meant to deal, the brain spews forth hallucinations, goes irrational, and finally collapses into lunacy. The effects of prolonged sensory impoverishment are slower, subtler, but in many ways more destructive. Direct electronic stimulation of the appropriate encephalic centers becomes necessary. That is speaking in neurological terms. In terms of immediate emotion, the extraordinarily intense and lengthy dreams generated by the stimulus — whether pleasurable or not — become a substitute for real experience.

Nevertheless…

Glassgold’s skin was loose and unhealthy in hue. The EEG screen behind the helmet said she was in a soothed condition. That meant she could be roused fast without danger. Reymont snapped down the override switch on the timer. The oscilloscopic trace of the inductive pulses that had been going through her head flattened and darkened.

She stirred. “ Shalom , Moshe,” he heard her whisper. There was nobody along of that name. He slid the helmet off. She squeezed her eyes tighter shut, knuckled them, and tried to turn around on the padding.

“Wake up.” Reymont gave her a shake.

She blinked at him. The breath snapped into her. She sat straight. He could almost see the dream fade away behind those eyes. “Come on,” he said, offering his hand to assist. “Out of that damned coffin.”

“Ach, no, no,” she slurred. “I was with Moshe.”

“I’m sorry, but—”

She crumpled into sobbing. Reymont slapped the box, a crack across the ship’s murmur. “All right,” he said. “I’ll make that a direct order. Out! And report to Dr. Latvala.”