Poul Anderson - Tau Zero

“She is a young woman,” Pereira said. “If our circumstances have made her, how shall I put it, overwrought, she might react irrationally to any reminder of age and death.”

Fedoroff swung about. “She’s not ignorant! She’s perfectly aware the treatment has to be periodic through a whole adulthood — or menopause will hit her fifty years before it needs to. She says that’s what she wants!”

“Why?”

“She wants to be dead before the chemical and ecological systems break down. You predicted five decades for that, didn’t you?”

“Yes. A slow, nasty way to go out. If we haven’t found a planet by then—”

“She remains Christian. Prejudices about suicide.” Fedoroff winced. “I don’t like the prospect either. Who does? She won’t believe it isn’t inevitable.”

“I suspect,” Pereira said, “the idea of dying childless is to her the true horror. She used to make a game of deciding on names for the large family she wants.”

“Do you mean — Wait. Let me think. Damn him, Nilsson was right the other day, about the unlikelihood of our ever finding a home. I have to agree, life in that case seems pretty futile.”

“To her especially. Facing that emptiness, she retreats — unconsciously, no doubt — toward a permissible form of suicide.”

“What can we do , Luis?” Fedoroff asked in anguish.

“If the captain was persuaded to make the treatments mandatory — He could justify that. Supposing we do reach a planet in spite of everything, the community will need each woman’s childbearing span at a maximum.”

The engineer flared up. “Another regulation? Reymont dragging her off the doctor? No!”

“You should not hate Reymont,” Pereira reproached. “You two are alike. Neither is a quitter.”

“Someday I’ll kill him.”

“Now you display your romantic streak,” Pereira said, attempting to ease the atmosphere. “He is pragmatism personified.”

“What would he do about Margarita, then?” Fedoroff gibed.

“Oh … I don’t know. Something unsentimental. For instance, he might co-opt a research and development team to improve the biosystems and organocycles — make the ship indefinitely habitable — so she could be allowed two children, at least—”

His words trailed off. The men stared gape-mouthed at each other. It blazed between them:

Why not ?

Maria Toomajian ran into the gym and found Johann Freiwald working out on the trapezes. “Deputy!” she cried. Dismay shivered in her. “At the game room, a fight!”

He bounced to the deck and pelted down the corridor. The noise reached him first, an excited babble. A dozen off-duty persons crowded in a circle. Freiwald shoved through. At the middle, second pilot Pedro Barrios and bull cook Michael O’donnell panted and threw bare-knuckled blows. Slight harm had been done, but the sight was ugly.

“Stop that!” Freiwald bellowed.

They did, glaring. Folk had seen ere now the tricks that Reymont had drilled into his recruits. “What is this farce?” Freiwald demanded. He turned his contempt on the watchers. “Why didn’t any of you take action? Are you too stupid to understand what this kind of behavior can lead to?”

“Nobody accuses me of cheating at cards,” O’donnell said.

“You did,” Barrios retorted.

They lunged afresh. Freiwald’s hands shot out. He got a grip on the collar of either tunic and twisted, pressing into the Adam’s apples behind. The men flailed and kicked. He delivered a couple of fumikomi. They wheezed their pain and yielded.

“You could have used boxing gloves or kendo sticks in the ring,” Freiwald said. “Now you’re going before the first officer.”

“Er, pardon me.” A slim, dapper newcomer eased past the embarrassed witnesses and tapped Freiwald’s shoulder: cartographer Phra Takh. “I don’t believe that’s necessary.”

“Mind your own business,” Freiwald growled.

“It is my business,” Takh said. “Our unity is essential to our very lives. It won’t be helped by official penalties. I am a friend of both these men. I believe I can mediate their disagreement.”

“We must have respect for the law, or we’re done,” Freiwald replied. “I’m taking them in.”

Takh reached a decision. “May I talk privately with you first? For a minute?” His tone held urgency.

“Well … all right,” Freiwald agreed. “You two stay here.”

He entered the game room with Takh and shut the door. “I can’t let them get away with resisting me,” he said. “Ever since Captain Telander gave us deputies official status, we’ve acted for the ship.” Being clad in shorts, he lowered a sock to show the contusions on an ankle.

“You could ignore that,” Takh suggested. “Pretend you didn’t notice. They aren’t bad fellows. They’re simply driven wild by monotony, purposelessness, the tension of wondering if we will get through what’s ahead of us or crash into a star.”

“If we let anybody escape the consequences of starting violence—”

“Suppose I took them aside. Suppose I got them to compose their differences and apologize to you. Wouldn’t that serve the cause better than an arrest and a summary punishment?”

“It might,” Freiwald said skeptically. “But why should I believe you can do it?”

“I am a deputy too,” Takh told him.

“What?” Freiwald goggled.

“Ask Reymont, when you can get him alone. I am not supposed to reveal that he recruited me, except to a regular deputy in an emergency situation. Which I judge this is.”

“ Aber … why — ?”

“He meets a good deal of resentment, resistance, and evasion himself,” Takh said. “His overt part-time agents, like you, have less trouble of that sort. You seldom have to do any dirty work. Still, a degree of opposition to you exists, and certainly no one will confide anything if he thinks Reymont might object. I am not a … a fink. We face no real crime problem. I am supposed to be a leaven, to the best of what abilities I have. As in this case today.”

“I thought you didn’t like Reymont,” Freiwald said weakly.

“I cannot say I do,” Takh answered. “Even so, he took me aside and convinced me I could perform a service for the ship. I assume you won’t let out the secret.”

“Oh no. Certainly not. Not even to Jane. What a surprise!”

“Will you let me handle Pedro and Michael?”

“Yes, do.” Freiwald spoke absently. “How many more of your kind are there?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Takh said, “but I suspect that he hopes eventually to include everybody.” He went out.

The nebular masses which walled in the galaxy’s core loomed thunderhead black and betowered. Already Leonora Christine traversed their outer edge. No suns were visible forward; elsewhere, each hour, they shone fewer and fainter.

In this concentration of star stuff, she moved according to an eerie sort of aerodynamics. Her inverse tau was now so enormous that space density did not much trouble her. Rather, she swallowed matter still more greedily than before and was no longer confined to hydrogen atoms. Her readjusted selectors turned everything they met, gas or dust or meteoroids, into fuel and reaction mass. Her kinetic energy and time differential mounted at a dizzying rate. She flew as if through a wind blowing between the sun clusters.

Nonetheless, Reymont haled Nilsson to the interview room.

Ingrid Lindgren took her place behind its desk, in uniform. She had lost weight, and her eyes were shadowed. The cabin thrummed abnormally loud, and frequent shocks went through bulkheads and deck. The ship felt irregularities in the clouds as gusts, currents, vortices of an ongoing creation of worlds.