Poul Anderson - Tau Zero

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.

“Please,” Jane Sadler had implored. “Come help him.”

“You can’t?” Reymont asked.

She shook her head. “I’ve tried. And I think I make matters worse. In his present condition. I being a woman.” She flushed. “You savvy?”

“Well, I’m no psychologist,” Reymont said. “However, I’ll see what I can do.”

He left the bower where she had caught him at rest. The dwarfed trees, tumbling vines, moss and blossoms made it a place of healing for him. But he noticed that comparatively few others went into these rooms any longer. Did such things remind them of too much?

Certainly no plans were being made for celebration of the autumnal equinox which impended on the ship’s calendar — or any other holidays, for that matter. The Midsummer festival had been dishearteningly hushed.

In the gymnasium, a zero-gee handball game bounced from corner to corner. They were spacemen who played, though, and doggedly rather than gleefully. Most of the passengers came here for little except their compulsory exercises. They weren’t showing great interest in meals, either: not that Carducci was doing an inspired job nowadays. One or two passersby gave Reymont a listless hail.

Farther down the corridor, a door stood open on a hobby shop. A lathe hummed, a cutting torch glowed blue, in the hands of Kato M’Botu and Yeshu ben-Zvi. Apparently they were making something for the recently resumed Fedoroff-Pereira ecological project, and had been crowded out of the regular facilities on the lower decks.

That was good as far as it went, but it didn’t go any real distance. You had to be sure precisely what you were doing before you overhauled the systems on which life rested. As yet, and doubtless for years to come, matters were at the research stage. The undertaking could only engage the full attention of a few specialists, until actual construction began.

Nilsson’s instrumental improvements had been an excellent work maker. Now that was drawing to a close, unless the astronomers could think up new inventions. Most of the labor was finished; cargo had been shifted, Number Two deck converted to an electronic observatory, its haywire tangle trimmed. The experts might tinker and refine, as well as lose themselves in their prodigious studies of the outer universe. For the bulk of the team, no task was left.

Nothing was left save to abide.

At each crisis, the folk had rallied. Yet each upsurge of hope peaked lower than the last, each withdrawal to misery went deeper. You would offhand have expected more reaction to the changed ruling on children, for instance. Exactly two women had applied for motherhood, and their last shots wouldn’t wear off for months. The rest were interested, no doubt, in a fashion — The ship quivered. Weight grabbed at Reymont. He barely avoided falling to the deck. A metal noise toned through the hull, like a basso profundo gong. It was soon over. Free flight resumed. Leonora Christine had gone through another galaxy.

Those passages were becoming more frequent by the day. Would she never meet the right configuration to stop? Ought she to start deceleration, if only to be doing something different?

Could Nilsson, Chidambaran, and Foxe-Jameson have miscalculated? Were they beginning to realize it? Was that why they’d worked late hours in the observatory, these past few weeks, and been so worried-looking and taciturn when they came out for food or sleep?

Well, no doubt Lindgren would get the information from Nilsson when it was confirmed, whatever it was.

Reymont floated along the stairwell to the crew deck. After a pause at his own cabin, he found the door he wanted, and chimed. Getting no response, he tried it. Locked. Sadler’s adjoining door wasn’t. He entered her side. The partition was down between her and her man. Reymont swung it out of the way.

Johann Freiwald floated at the end of his bedline. The husky shape was curled into an imitation of a fetus. But the eyes held awareness.

Reymont grasped a handhold, encountered that stare, and said noncommittally, “I wondered why you haven’t been around. Then I heard you aren’t feeling well. Anything I can do for you?”

Freiwald grunted.

“You can do considerable for me,” Reymont went on. “I need you pretty badly. You’ve been the best deputy — policeman, counselor, work-party boss, idea man — I’ve had through this whole thing. You can’t be spared.”

Freiwald spoke with an effort. “I shall have to be spared.”

“Why? What’s the matter?” “I can’t go on any more. It’s that simple. I can’t.”

“Why not?” Reymont persisted. “What jobs we have aren’t hard, physically. Anyhow, you’re tough. Weightlessness never bothered you. You’re a machine-era boy, a practical chap, a lusty, earthy soul. Not one of those self-appointed delicates who have to be coddled every minute because their tender spirits can’t bear a long voyage.” He sneered. “Or are you one?”

Freiwald stirred. His unshaven cheeks darkened a trifle. “I am a man,” he said. “Not a robot. Eventually I start thinking.”

“My friend, do you imagine we would have survived this far if the officers, at any rate, did not spend every waking hour thinking?”

“I don’t mean your damned measurements, computations, course adjustments, equipment modifications. That’s from nothing but the instinct to stay alive. A lobster trying to climb out of a kettle has as much dignity. I ask myself, why? What are we really doing? What does it mean?”

“ Et tu. Brute ,” Reymont muttered.

Freiwald twisted about until his gaze was straight into the constable’s. “Because you are so callous… Do you know what year this is?”

“No. Neither do you. The data are too uncertain. And if you wonder what the year would be at Sol, that’s meaningless.”

“Be quiet! I know the whole simultaneity quacking. We have come something like fifty billion light-years. We are rounding me whole curve of space. If we returned this instant to the Solar System, we would not find anything. Our sun died long ago. It swelled and brightened till Earth was devoured; it became a variable, guttering like a candle in the wind; it sank away to a white dwarf, an ember, an ash. And the other stars followed. Nothing can be left in our galaxy but waning red dwarfs, if that. Otherwise clinkers. The Milky Way has gone out. Everything we knew, everything that made us, is dead. Starting with the human race.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Then it’s become something we could not comprehend. We are ghosts.” Freiwald’s lips trembled. “We hunt on and on, monomaniacs—” Again acceleration thundered through the ship. “There. You heard. “His eyes were white-rimmed, as if with fear. “We passed through another galaxy. Another hundred thousand years. To us, part of a second.”

“Oh, not quite,” Reymontsaid. “Our tau can’t be that far down, can it? We probably quartered a spiral arm.”

“Destroying how many worlds? I know the figures. We are not as massive as a star. But our energy — I think we could pierce the heart of a sun and not notice.”