Between the Strokes of Night

by Charles Sheffield

  Between the Strokes of Night

  Charles Sheffield

  After the Nuclear Spasm in the 21st century, Homo sapiens was extinct, save for a tiny remnant scattered in small, primitive space colonies. At first Solar Humanity had only one goal: survival. But when the battle for existence was won, humankind began moving outward in slow, multi-generation space ships, and as then millennia passed, planet-based civilizations emerged in many star systems. In the year 27,698 A.D, to these new worlds come the Immortals, beings with strange ties to ancient Earth, who seem to live forever, who can travel light years in days — and who use their strange powers to control the existence of ordinary mortals. On the planet Pentecost, a small group sets out to find and challenge the Immortals. But in the search they themselves are changed: as Immortals, they discover a new threat, not just to themselves, but to the galaxy itself.

  Between the Strokes of Night

  by Charles Sheffield

  INTRODUCTION

  Science fiction has a hundred definitions. That’s all right. You pick the one that you’re comfortable with, and go with it.

  My own definition is pretty unforgiving. If you can take the science out of the story, and still have a story left, it’s not science fiction. More than that, if the science in the story is wrong or ridiculous, again it’s not science fiction. This hard-nosed attitude has consequences. First, and most obviously, it limits reading enjoyment. I’m not totally rigid or self-consistent in my attitude. If I were, I would have to rule out such science fiction staples as faster-than-light travel, telepathy, and time travel, and so miss out on about ninety percent of everything that’s written.

  But there’s no reason not to try it the hard way. Can we have a book with interstellar travel and world-to-world contact, but not allow anything to travel faster than light, or employ one of the usual magic wands like wormholes, ansibles, space tunnels, or interstellar jump points?

  It sounded impossible, but there was the challenge. I wanted to write such a book. “Hard” science fiction ought to be hard not because it’s hard to read, but because it’s hard to write. I also wanted to impose another requirement. Humans must be able to wander over vast spans of time and space, while still imposing the velocity of light as the maximum possible speed that anything can achieve. I wrote the book — this book. And then, about a year ago, I was given the chance to produce a new edition. That’s when I realized that there was another constraint to the kind of science fiction I wanted to write. The science ought to be consistent with what we believe to be true today. No swamps on Venus, no canals on Mars, no anti-gravity machines; but dinosaur extinction through meteorite impact, and braided rings around Saturn, and the Oort Cloud, and an Earth that might possibly be subject to global warming and nuclear winter. Now, in the past few years our view of the universe as a whole has changed radically. Fifteen years ago, a writer could be comfortable with one of three plausible choices: the universe was expanding, and the expansion would never slow down; or, second choice, the universe was expanding, but the expansion would proceed slower and slower, to produce a universe that was ultimately flat in a geometrical sense; or, the third alternative, the universe was expanding, but would eventually stop that expansion, reverse direction, and ultimately collapse back again in a “Big Crunch” fireball beyond which no information from our present universe could possibly survive. Even ten years ago, no scientist was in a position to rule out any one of the three choices.

  These three options are no longer equally plausible. There is good evidence that the universe is not merely expanding, but the expansion is running faster than ever. Unfortunately, I earlier opted for the Big Crunch model. With an accelerating universe, any new edition would need a lot more than the fixing of small errors or minor inconsistencies.

  How much more? Well, this book is now twenty-five percent longer than the first version, with a final new section undreamed of in the original. The universe in which the book exists has changed; and therefore, in what is in some ways the most important change of all, the ending must follow a quite different cosmology.

  Suppose, five or ten years from now, there is another radical change in our understanding of the origins, nature, and future of the universe. Does this mean another major revision of the text?

  The one thing that would change this book so profoundly that I am not sure that it could survive, even with the most radical revisions, would be the discovery that the speed of light is not a physical velocity limit for objects and signals.

  However, such a discovery would bring its compensations. One of the things I would like us to learn, above most other things in this world, is that faster-than-light travel is possible. If that were true, I’d give up this book in a heartbeat. After all, while there is only one universe, I can always write a new and different story.

  — Charles Sheffield

  2002

  Prolog

  Gulf City; New Year 14 (29,872 A.D.)

  From the diary of Charlene Bloom:

  Today I received word from Kallen’s World. Wolfgang IV is dead. He was five hundred and four years old, and like his forebears he was respected by the whole planet. A picture of his own grandson came with the message. I looked at it for a long time, but blood thins across six generations. It was impossible, save in my imagination, to recognize any sign of the original (and to me the one-and-only) Wolfgang in this descendant.

  My Wolfgang is dead, long dead; but the great wager goes on. On days like this I feel that I am the only person in the Universe who cares about the outcome. If Wolfgang and his friends are right, who but I will know and be here to applaud him? And if we win, who but I will know the cost of victory?

  It is significant that I record this death first, before acknowledging the report of a faster-than-light drive from Beacon Four. Gulf City is throbbing with the news, but I have heard the same rumor a hundred — a thousand? — times before. For 28,000 years our struggle to escape the yoke of relativity has continued; still it binds us, as strongly as ever. In public I say that the research must go on even if Beacon Four has nothing, that the faster-than-light drive will be the single most important discovery in human history; but deep within me I deny even the possibility. If the Universe is apprehensible to the human mind, then it must have some final laws. I am not permitted to admit it, but I believe the light-speed limit is one. As humans explore the galaxy, it must be done at a sub-light crawl.

  I wish I could believe otherwise. But most of all today I wish that I could spend one hour again with Wolfgang.

  * * *

  They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,

  They brought me bitter news to hear

  and bitter tears to shed.

  I wept as I remembered, how often you and I

  Had tired the sun with talking,

  and sent him down the sky.

  But now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,

  A handful of gray ashes, long, long ago at rest.

  Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;

  For death he taketh all away; but these he cannot take.

  * * *

  PART ONE: A.D. 2010

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Road to Armageddon

  The snow was drifting down in tiny flakes. Its fall, slow and steady, had added almost four inches of new crystals to the frozen surface. Two feet below, torso curled and nose tucked into thick fur, the great she-bear lay motionless. Walls of translucent ice caverned about the shaggy, light-brown pelt.

  The voice came through to the cave as a disembodied thread of sound. “Sodium level still dropping. Looks really bad. Jesus Christ. Try one more cycle.” On the periphery of the cave a fli
cker of colored light began to blink on and off. The walls shone red, clear blue, then sparkled with dazzling green. A stippling of pure colors rippled a pattern to the beast’s closed eyelids. The bear slept on at the brink of death. Its body temperature held steady, ten degrees above freezing point. The massive heart pumped at a sluggish two beats per minute, the metabolic rate down by a factor of fifty. Breathing was steadily weakening, betrayed now only by the thin layer of ice crystals in the fringe of white beard and around the blunt muzzle.

  “No good.” The voice held an added urgency. “Still dropping, and we’re losing the pulse trace. We have to risk it. Give her a bigger jolt.”

  The light pattern altered. There was a stab of magenta, a rapid twinkle of sapphire and cyan, then a scattershot of moving saffron and ruby dots on the icy wall. As the rainbow modulated, the bear responded to the signal. Slate-gray eyes flickered in the long, smooth head. The massive chest shuddered. “That’s as far as I dare take it.” The second voice was deeper. “We’re beginning to get more heart fibrillation.”

  “Hold the level there. And keep an eye on that rectal temperature. Why is it happening now, of all times?”

  The voice echoed anguished through the thick-walled cavern. The chamber where the bear lay was fifteen meters across, and through the outer wall ran a spidery filament of fiber optics. It passed beneath the ice to a squat box next to the beast’s body. Faint electronic signals came from needles implanted deep in the tough skin, where sensors monitored the ebbing currents of life in the great body. Skin conductivity, heartbeat, blood pressure, saliva, temperature, chemical balances, ion concentrations, eye movements and brain waves were continuously monitored. Coded and amplified in the square box, the signals passed as pulses of light along the optic bundle to a panel of equipment set outside the chamber’s wall.

  The woman who leaned over the panel outside the chamber was about thirty years old. Her dark hair was cropped short over a high, smooth forehead that now creased with frown lines as she studied the monitors. She was watching one digital readout as it flickered rapidly through a repeated sequence of values. She was in her stockinged feet, and her toes and feet wriggled nervously as the digital readout values moved faster.

  “It’s no good. She’s still getting worse. Can we reverse it?”

  The man next to her shook his head. “Not without killing her faster. Her temperature’s down too far already, and she’s below our control on brain activity. I’m afraid we’re going to lose her.” His voice was calm and slow under rigid control. He turned to look at the woman, waiting for an instruction. She took a long, shuddering breath.

  “We must not lose her. There must be something else to do. Oh my God.” She stood up, revealing a supple, willowy build that emphasized the thinness of her stooped shoulders. “Jinx might be in the same condition. Did you check on his enclosure, see how he’s doing?”

  Wolfgang Gibbs snorted. “Give me credit for something, Charlene. I checked him a few minutes ago. Everything is stable there. I held him four hours behind Dolly here, because I didn’t know if this move was a safe one.” He shrugged. “I guess we know now. Look at Dolly’s EEG. Better accept it, boss woman. We can’t do one thing for her.”

  On the screen in front of them, the pattern of electrical signals from the bear’s brain was beginning to flatten. All evidence of spindles was gone, and the residual sinusoid was dropping in amplitude.

  The woman shivered, then sighed. “Damn, damn, damn.” She ran her hand through her dark hair. “So what now? I can’t stay here much longer — JN’s meeting starts in less than half an hour. What the hell am I going to tell her? She had such hopes for this one.”

  She straightened under the other’s direct gaze. There was a speculative element to his look that always made her uneasy.

  He shrugged again and laughed harshly. “Tell her we never promised miracles.” His voice had a flat edge to the vowels that hinted at English as a late-learned second language. “Bears don’t hibernate in the same way as other animals do. Even JN will admit that. They sleep a lot, and the body temperature drops, but it’s a different metabolic process.” There was a beep from the monitor console. “Look out now — she’s going.”

  On the screen in front of them the trace of brain activity was reduced to a single horizontal line. They watched in silence for a full minute, until there was a final, faint shiver from the heart monitor.

  The man leaned forward and turned the gain as high as it would go. He grunted. “Nothing. She’s gone. Poor old Dolly.”

  “And what do I tell JN?”

  “The truth. She already knows most of it. We’ve gone farther with Jinx and Dolly than JN had any reason to hope we could. I told you we were into a risky area with the bears, but we kept pushing on.”

  “I was hoping to keep Jinx under at least another four days. Now, we can’t risk it. I’ll have to tell JN we’re going to wake him up now.”

  “It’s that, or kill him. You saw the monitors.” As he spoke, he had already switched to the injection control system for the second experimental chamber, and was carefully increasing the hormonal levels through Jinx’s half-ton body mass. “But you’re the boss. If you insist on it, I’ll hold him under a bit longer.”

  “No.” She was chewing her lip, rocking backwards and forwards in front of the screen. “We can’t take the risk. Go ahead, Wolfgang, bring him up all the way. Full consciousness. How long had Dolly been under, total time?”

  “One hundred and ninety one hours and fourteen minutes.”

  She laughed nervously and wriggled her feet back into her shoes. “Well, it’s a record for the species. We have that much to comfort us. I have to go. Can you finish all right without me?”

  “I’ll have to, won’t I? Don’t worry, this is my fourth hour of overtime already today.” He smiled sourly, but more to himself than to Charlene. “You know what I think? If JN ever does find a way for a human to stay awake and sane for twenty-four hours a day, first thing she’ll do is work people like us triple shifts.”

  Charlene Bloom smiled at him and nodded, but her mind was already moving on to the dreaded meeting. Head down, she set off through the hangarlike building, her footsteps echoing to the high, corrugated-steel roof. Behind her, Wolfgang watched her departure. His look was a combination of rage and sorrow. “That’s right, Charlene,” he grunted under his breath. “You’re the boss, so you go off and take the heat. Fair enough. We both deserve it after what we did to poor old Dolly. But you ought to stop kissing JN’s ass and tell her she’s pushing us too fast. She’d probably put you in charge of paperclips, but serve you right — you should have put your foot down before we lost one.” A hundred yards away along the length of the open floor, Charlene Bloom abruptly turned to stare back at him. He looked startled, raised his hand, and gave an awkward half-wave.

  “Reading my thoughts?” He sniffed and turned back to his control console. “Nah. She’s just chicken. She’d rather stay here than tell JN what’s happened in the last half-hour.”

  He switched to Jinx’s displays. The big brown bear had to be eased back up to consciousness, a fraction of a degree at a time. They couldn’t afford to lose another one.

  He rubbed at his unshaven chin, scratched absentmindedly at his crotch, and pored over the telemetry signals. What was the best way? Nobody had real experience at this, not even JN herself.

  “Come on, Jinx. Let’s do this right. We don’t want you in pain when the circulation comes back. Blood sugar first, shall we, then serotonin and potassium balance? That sounds pretty good.”

  Wolfgang Gibbs wasn’t really angry at Charlene — he liked her too well. It was worry about Dolly and Jinx that upset him. He had little patience or respect for many of his superiors; but for the Kodiak bears and the other animal charges, he had a good deal of affection and concern.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Charlene Bloom took almost a quarter of an hour to make her way along the length of the main hangar. More than reluctance to att
end the impending meeting slowed her steps. Fifty experiments went on in the building, most of them under her administrative control.

  In one dim-lit vault a score of domestic cats prowled, sleepless and deranged. A delicate operation had removed part of the reticular formation, the section of the hindbrain that controls sleep. She scanned the records. They had been continuously awake now for eleven hundred and eighty hours — a month and a half. The monitors were at last showing evidence of neurological malfunction. She could reasonably call it feline madness in her monthly report.

  Most of the animals now showed no interest in food or sex. A handful had become feral, attacking anything that came near them. But they were all still alive. That was progress. Their last experiment had failed after less than half the time.

  Each section of the building held temperature-controlled enclosures. In the next area she came to the rooms where the hibernating rodents and marsupials were housed. She walked slowly past each walled cage, her attention divided between the animals and thoughts of the coming meeting.

  Marmots and ground squirrels here, next to the mutated jerboas. Who was running this one? Aston Naugle, if she had it right. Not as organized as Wolfgang Gibbs, and not as hardworking — but at least he didn’t make the shivers run up and down her spine. She was taller than Wolfgang. And his senior by three grades. But there was something about those tawny eyes… like one of the animals. He wasn’t afraid of the bears, or the big cats — or his superior. A sudden disquieting thought came to her. That look. He would ask her out one evening, she was sure of it. And then?

  Suddenly conscious that time was passing, she began to hurry along the next corridor. Her shoes were crippling, but it wouldn’t do to be late. These damned shoes — why could she never get any that fitted right, the way other people did? Mustn’t be late. In the labs since JN had been made Director, unpunctuality was a cardinal sin (“When you delay the start of a meeting, you steal everyone’s time to pay for your own lack of efficiency.…”).