Poul Anderson - Tau Zero

Michael O’Donnell, entering late after his watch ended — there were live stand-bys at every stress point, these days — pushed through the crowd. “Hey, Boris!” he called. The racket drowned him out.

He reached the stage. “Hey, Boris! Congratulations!”

“Thank you,” Fedoroff boomed. “Mainly Margarita’s work. She runs quite a shipyard, no?”

“What will you name the kid?” O’Donnell asked.

“Haven’t decided yet,” Fedoroff said. He waved a bottle. “I can tell you, though, it won’t be Eve.”

“Embala?” Ingrid Lindgren suggested. “The first woman in the Eddie story.”

“Not that either,” Fedoroff said.

“Nor Leonora Christine,” the engineer went on. “She’s not going to be any damned symbol. She’s going to be herself.”

The singers began dancing in a circle.

Chidambaran and Foxe-Jameson seemed dwarfed by the sprawling masses of the observatory apparatus, and artless amidst its meters and controls and flickering indicator lights, and loud and clumsy in the humming stillness that pervaded this deck. They rose when Captain Telander appeared.

“You asked me to come?” he said pointlessly. His wasted features set. “What news? We’ve had calm this past month…”

“That won’t last.” Foxe-Jameson spoke half in exultation. “Elof’s gone in person to fetch Ingrid. We couldn’t do that for you, sir. The image is still very faint, might get lost if we don’t ride herd. You should be the first to know.” He returned to his chair before an electronic console. A screen above it showed darkness.

Telander shuffled close. “What have you found?”

Chidambaran took him by the elbow and pointed at the screen. “There. Do you see?”

On the edge of perception gleamed the dimmest and tiniest of sparks.

“A good ways off, naturally,” Foxe-Jameson said into the silence. “We’ll want to maintain a most respectful distance.”

“What is it?” Telander quavered.

“The germ of the monobloc,” Dhidambaran answered. “The new beginning.”

Telander stood long and long, staring, before he went to his knees. The tears ran quietly down his face. “Father, I thank Thee,” he said.

Rising: “And I thank you, gentlemen. Whatever happens next … we have come this far, we have done this much. I think I can carry on again … after what you have just shown me.”

When he finally left to return to the bridge, he walked with the stride of a commander.

Leonora Christine shouted, shuddered, and leaped.

Space flamed around her, a firestorm, hydrogen aglow from that supernal sun which was forming at the heart of existence, which burned brighter and brighter as the galaxies rained down into it. The gas hid the central travail behind sheets, banners, and spears of radiance, aurora, flame, lightning. Forces, immeasurably vast, tore through and through the atmosphere: electric, magnetic, gravitational, nuclear fields; shock waves bursting across megaparsecs; tides and currents and cataracts. On the fringes of creation, through billion-year cycles which passed as moments, the ship of man flew.

Flew.

There was no other word. As far as humanity was concerned, or the most swiftly computing and reacting of machines, she fought a hurricane — but such a hurricane as had not been known since last the stars were melted together and hammered afresh.

“ Ya-a-ah-h-h! ” screamed Lenkei, and rode the ship down the trough of a wave whose crest shook loose a foam of supemovae. The haggard men on the steering bridge with him stared into the screen that had been built for this hour. What raged in it was not reality — present reality transcended any picturing or understanding — but a display of exterior force fields. It burned and roiled and spewed great sparks and globes. It bellowed in the metal of the ship, in flesh and skulls.

“Can’t you stand any more?” Reymont shouted from his own seat. “Barrios, relieve him.”

The other jet man shook his head. He was too stunned, too beaten from his previous watch.

“Okay.” Reymont unharnessed himself. “I’ll try. I’ve handled a lot of different types of craft.” No one heard him through the fury around, but all saw him fight across the pitching, whirling deck. He took the auxiliary control chair, on the opposite side of Lenkei from Barrios, and laid his mouth close to the pilot’s ear. “Phase me in.”

Lenkei nodded. Together their hands moved across the board.

They must hold Leonora Christine well away from the growing monobloc, whose radiation would otherwise surely kill them; at the same time, they must stay where the gas was so dense that tau could continue to decrease for them, turning these final phoenix gigayears into hours; and they must keep the ship riding safely through a chaos that, did it ever strike her full on, would rip her into nuclear particles. No computers, no instruments, no precedents might guide them, It must be done on instinct and trained reflex.

Gradually Reymont entered the pattern, until he could steer alone. The rhthms of rebirth were wild, but they were there. Ease on starboard … vector at nine o’clock low … now push that thrust! … brake a little here … don’t let her broach … swing wide of that flame cloud if you can… Thunder brawled. The air was sharp with ozone, and cold.

The screen blanked. An instant later, every fluoropanel in the ship turned simultaneously ultraviolet and infrared, and blackness plunged down. Those who lay harnessed alone, throughout the hull, heard invisible lightnings walk the corridors. Those in command bridge, pilot bridge, engine room, who manned the ship, felt a heaviness greater than planets — they could not move, nor stop a movement once begun — and then felt a lightness such that their bodies began to shake asunder — and this was a change in inertia itself, in every constant of nature as space-time-matter-energy underwent its ultimate convulsion — for a moment infinitesimal and infinite, men, women, child, ship, and death were one.

It passed, so swiftly that they could not tell if it had been. Light came back, and outside vision. The storm grew fiercer. But now through it, seen distorted so that they flew, fountaining off in two huge curving sheets, now came the nascent galaxies.

The monobloc had exploded. Creation had begun. Reymont went over to full deceleration. Leonora Christine started slowly to slow; and she flew out into a reborn light.

Boudreau and Nilsson nodded at each other. They grinned. “Yes, indeed,” the astronomer said.

Reymont looked restlessly around the observatory. “Yes, what?” he demanded. He jerked one thumb at a visual screen. Space swarmed with little dancing incandescences. “I can see for myself. The galactic groups are still close together. Most of them are still nothing but hydrogen nebulae. And hydrogen atoms are still thick between them, comparatively speaking. What of it?”