Between the Strokes of Night

by Charles Sheffield

  “We’ll be up there in a few days,” said Peron. He took her arm in his. “We’ll see the Fifty Worlds, and maybe we’ll see The Ship. I’ve dreamed of that since I was four years old.”

  “I know. So have I. My aunt doesn’t even believe there is a Ship. She says we’ve been here on Pentecost forever.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Nothing. For someone with that view, logic is irrelevant — she’ll believe what she chooses, regardless of evidence. Her religion says God placed us here on Pentecost, and for her that’s the end of the argument.”

  “And you?” Peron was aware that she had moved in very close to him. “What do you think?”

  “You know what I think. I’m cursed with a logical mind and a lot of curiosity. That’s why I’m taking a good look. Once we go up there, away from the planet, the sky will all be changed.” She sighed. “When I used to think about going off-planet, back when I was little, it almost seemed the same as going to heaven. I thought that everything would be different there. No controls, no security officers, no guards, everything clear and simple. Now it’s going to be another horrible contest.”

  Peron nodded. “That’s why they won’t let us be contestants after we’re twenty years old. To do your best in the ‘Fest, it’s fatal if you question what you’re doing too much. The trials need an uncluttered mind.”

  “Which we’ll never have again. We’ve left the cradle, and there’s no going back. Let’s hope we’ll find compensations.” She took his hand and ran her fingertips gently over the palm. “Come on, let’s get the interview over. Then you can take me for that walk — the one you were all ready to ask me about when Lum arrived.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  For most of the journey up, Captain Gilby had harangued them incessantly. He had pointed out the features of the ship, dwelling in detail on the things that could go wrong during the ascent phase; he had told them, again and again, that freefall sickness was all psychological, to the point where they would go to any lengths to vomit in private; and he had asked each of the twenty-five to point out their own region of Pentecost as the orbit carried them over it, sniffing contemptuously at their failures. Recognizing a familiar land area from space turned out to be harder than any of them had anticipated. Cloud cover, haze, and oblique angle changed all the usual elements of identification.

  But finally, when the spacecraft was nine thousand kilometers above Pentecost and approaching The Ship, Gilby fell silent. This was a case where he had learned to let the event itself overwhelm the contestants, without his assistance.

  The craft that had carried them up from the surface of Pentecost was bigger than anyone had expected. A vessel capable of carrying thirty people did not sound particularly large, even knowing in principle how much capacity was needed for fuel. The reality had rendered them speechless. They would ride to space at the top of a mammoth obelisk, towering twenty stories high above the flat plain of the Talimantor Desert.

  Now they were facing another change of scale. The Ship had first appeared on the screens as a point of light, far above and ahead of them. As they slowly closed with it, and features became visible, the dimensions could be seen if not comprehended. They were looking at an irregular ovoid, a swollen ball covered with pimples, hair and scratches, like a diseased and mottled fruit. Closer approach brought more details. Each of the small nipples on the underside was a complete docking facility, capable of receiving a vessel the size of the one they rode in; the thin, hair-fine protrusions on the side were landing towers; the regular scratches were composed of a multitude of fine dots, each of them an entry port to the hull.

  All conversation had ceased. They all realized the significance of the moment. They were looking at The Ship, the mystical, almost mythical structure that had carried their ancestors across the void from Earth, from a place so far away in time and space that it was beyond imagining.

  “Take a good look at it,” said Gilby at last. His lecture was continuing, but his voice had a different tone. “That was the only home of your ancestors for fifteen thousand years — three times as long as we’ve lived on Pentecost. The Ship roamed from system to system, never finding anywhere that could be a new home. It visited forty-nine suns and a hundred planets, and everywhere it was frozen, dead worlds, or burning deserts. Cass was the fiftieth system, and they found Pentecost. It was right to support human life. Paradise, eh? Do you know what happened then?”

  They all remained silent, overwhelmed by the swelling presence of The Ship as it filled the screen in front of them.

  “They argued,” said Gilby. He paused in his fidgeting with his shoulder strap to touch his gunbelt. “They squabbled in The Ship, over whether or not they should leave it and land on Pentecost. The Ship was home, and half the people didn’t want to leave. It took two hundred years before the last transfer down took place and The Ship was left deserted. The final act was to move it to a high orbit, where it could circle Pentecost forever.”

  They had approached within a couple of kilometers, and were spiralling slowly around the shining hull. There was a burred, matte finish to the surface, the evidence of eons of meteor impact and the scouring of interstellar dust. “Any chance we can all go on board?” asked Wilmer. Like a small child, he had pressed his nose to the transparent port.

  Gilby smiled. “It’s a shrine. No visitors allowed. The original travellers stated only one situation in which The Ship could be opened up to use again. It’s not one we care to think about. The Ship will be reopened and refurbished if nuclear weapons are ever used on Pentecost.”

  He pointed to the port. “Look out there now, and fix it in your memories. You won’t see this again.”

  As he spoke they felt a steadily increasing acceleration pressing them back into the seats. The Ship moved past their spacecraft, fell behind, and dwindled rapidly in size. They were heading farther out, out to the sprawling menagerie of planets that moved around and beyond Cassay and together made up the Fifty Worlds.

  * * *

  Seen through the best Earth telescopes, the system of Eta Cassiopeiae had been no more than twin points of light. It appeared as a striking red-and-gold binary, a glittering topaz-and-garnet jewel less than twenty light-years away from Sol. No amount of magnification by Earth observers could give any structural detail of the stellar components. But to the multiple sensors of Eleanora, curving on a slowing trajectory toward the brighter component of Cassiopeia-A, a system of bewildering complexity had revealed itself. Cassiopeia-A is a yellow-gold star, stellar type GO V. It is a little brighter and more massive than Sol. Its companion is a red dwarf, lighter and only one twenty-fifth as luminous.

  Dense, rust-red, and metal-poor, Cassiopeia-B keeps its distance from the bright partner. It never approaches closer than ten billion kilometers. Seen from the planets near Cass-A, the weak, rusted cinder of the companion appears far too feeble to have any influence. But the gravitational field is a long-range force. Gravitational effects of Cass-B had profound influence on the whole system. The planetary family that evolved around Eta Cassiopeiae is a whole zoo, with a bewildering variety of specimens.

  Over fifty worlds reel and gyrate around the star pair. Their orbits are at all inclinations and eccentricities. The planets within a few hundred million kilometers of Cass-A exhibit orbital regularity and stable cycles, with well-defined orbital periods and near-circular orbits. But the outer worlds show no such uniformity. Some follow paths with both Cass-A and Cass-B as foci, and their years can last for many Earth centuries. Others, locked into resonances with both primaries, weave complicated curves through space, never repeating the pattern. Sometimes they will journey in lonely isolation, billions of kilometers from either star; sometimes they dip in close to the searing surface of Cass-A. The travellers on Eleanora had concluded that a close encounter of a major planet was also the cause of the system’s complexity. Millions of years earlier, a gas giant had come too close. It had skirted the very photosphere of Cass-A. First the vola
tile gases were evaporated away; then irresistible tidal forces caused disruption of the remaining core. The ejecta from that disintegration had been hurled in all directions, to become parts of the Fifty Worlds. To the visitors approaching the system, the wild variations of the outer worlds at first seemed to dominate everything. The Cassiopeia binary complex was an unlikely candidate for human attention. Where orbits are wildly varying, life has no chance to develop. Changes are too extreme. Temperatures melt tin, then solidify nitrogen. If it is once established, life is persistent; it can adapt to many extremes. But there is a fragility in the original creation that calls for a long period of tightly-controlled variations.

  The automated probes were sent out from Eleanora, but only because that was the procedure followed for many centuries. First returns confirmed an impression of scarred and barren worlds, bleak and empty of life. When the electronic reports were beamed back from the probe to Pentecost, they seemed just too good to be true. Here was a stable planetary orbit, close to circular, one hundred and ninety million kilometers from Cass-A. And Pentecost was a real Earth-analog, with native vegetation and animal life, acceptable temperatures, an eighteen degree axial tilt, twenty-two hour day, breathable atmosphere, forty percent ocean cover, a mass that was only ten percent less than Earth, and an orbital period only four percent longer than an Earth year.

  It was hard to believe that Pentecost could exist amid the dizzying variations that comprised the Fifty Worlds. But the probes never lied. At last, after eons of travel between the stars, and endless disappointment, humanity had found a new home.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Fifty Worlds held enormous diversity. Peron knew that. They were of all sizes, shapes, orbits, and environments. No two seemed even remotely alike, not even the twins of the doublet planet of Sambella. And most of them fit poorly anyone’s idea of a desirable place to visit, still less as the site for another trial.

  And as for Whirlygig…

  Peron was approaching it now. He had to land there. Of all of the worlds, he thought gloomily, this one has to be the most alien and baffling. In the past two months the Planetfest winners had orbited over a dozen worlds. The planets ranged from depressing to unspeakable. Barchan was a baking, swirling dust-ball, its surface forever invisible behind a scouring screen of wind-borne particles. They were held aloft by a thin, poisonous atmosphere. Gilby had warned them that Barchan would be a terrible choice for a trial (but he had said that about most places!). The dust and sand found its way into everything — including a ship’s controls. There was a good chance that a landing on Barchan might be final.

  Gimperstand was no better. The contestants had voted not even to look at it, after one of the ship’s crew had produced a sample bottle of sap from Stinker’s juicy vines. The bottle had been opened for less than two minutes. A full day later the air through the whole ship still tasted like rotting corpses. Air purifier units didn’t even touch it.

  From a distance, Glug had looked pretty good. The ship’s telescopes and scanners showed a green, fertile world, ninety percent cloud covered. They had actually made a field trip down there, and spent a couple of hours squelching and sticking on the viscous surface. A steady gray rain drifted endlessly down from an ash-dark sky, and the sodden fronds of vegetation all drooped mournfully to touch the gluey soil. Once a boot had been placed firmly, the planet acted as though reluctant ever to release it. It clung lovingly. Walking was a pained sequence of sucking, glutinous steps, dragging the foot upward inch by inch until it came free with a disgusting gurgle. As Wilmer had put it, once you had pulled your boot out you never wanted to put it back again — except that your other boot was steadily sinking in deeper.

  Glug was revolting, but Peron thought it would still make the final list. Sy had even voted to make it his first choice. Maybe his complex thought processes had discovered something about Glug that could be turned to his advantage. Lum had pointed it out long ago to Peron and Kallen: Sy did not need an edge over others to win; all he needed was a situation that cancelled the handicap of his withered arm. Given that, he would wipe the floor with all of them. Some of the others had also cast a tentative vote in favor of Glug; for by the time the contestants went there they had already visited some choice specimens: Boom-Boom — constant volcanic activity and earthquakes; an ambient noise level that seemed to shatter eardrums; foul, sulphurous air and treacherous terrain, where fragile crusts of solidified lava stood above molten slag.

  Firedance — only microscopic animal life, and at any time one sixth of the vegetation that covered the whole world was a smoldering, charred mass: the rest was bone dry and ready to spring to blazing life after any random lightning stroke; ribbons of flame danced and crackled their twisting paths along the surface, changing direction unpredictably and moving far faster than a running human.

  Fuzzball — every living thing, every plant or animal that lived under or on the surface, or in the salty seas of Fuzzball, served as a host to a single species of fungal growth; evolutionary adaptation appeared complete, so that the fungus did no harm; but its white, hair-fine tendrils sprouted from every inch of skin, and every animal’s ears and nostrils carried their own harvest of delicate, trailing fronds; the prospect had been too much for the contestants, even though Gilby assured them that the fungus could be removed from them completely after leaving the planet. Fuzzball had received zero votes.

  Goneagain sounded tolerable; but that little world had been ruled out by simple geometry. Its orbit was wildly eccentric, carrying it tens of billions of kilometers away from Cassay and Cassby. It would not return to the Inner System for another three thousand years.

  And then there was Whirlygig. Peron peered ahead through the faceplate of his suit. Three hours to go, then he would be landing there — without a ship. Later (if all went according to plan) he would leave in the same way. Meanwhile, there was not a thing to be done until the moment of grazing impact was reached. Peron — not for the first time — wondered about his velocity calculation. He had checked it ten times, but if he were off by a few meters a second… He resolutely turned his mind to their earlier travels, and struggled to put Whirlygig out of his thoughts for the next three hours.

  There were plenty of other things to think about. For the first two weeks of the journey away from Pentecost, privacy had been impossible for all of them. The shuttle vessel was impressively big, but with thirty people squeezed into a space intended for three crew and cargo, the contestants had been shoulder to shoulder. Not until transfer to the big Inter-System ship, after a short visit to Little Moon, did they have room to spare. And at last Peron had been able to compare notes with the others.

  By careful cross-checking that had taken them several days, Lum and Kallen had accounted for all the winners. Wilmer was the only bogus contestant. They had also confirmed Peron’s first impression: no one had been with Wilmer in any trial, and he had been suspiciously fresh after all of them. But the reason for his presence among them? No ideas from anyone. And to add to the mystery, Wilmer certainly had been with them on all the activities since they lifted off from Pentecost — which had sometimes been dangerous, as well as unpleasant. Wilmer’s innocent request to Gilby that they be allowed to visit The Ship, along with Gilby’s answer, had registered on both Peron and Elissa. Someone wanted the winners to know that The Ship was off-limits. But again, what did it mean? How was it connected with the fact that some previous winners of the Planetfest games had not returned to Pentecost?

  Peron had bounced the questions off Sy, when they had a few minutes of privacy in the Inter-System ship. Sy had stood motionless, his eyes aloof. “I don’t know why The Ship is off-limits,” he said at last. “But I agree with you that Gilby was prompted to tell us that. Let me tell you of a bigger mystery. After the off-planet trials the Immortals will supposedly appear. We are told that they will come from the stars, after a journey that will take just a few days. Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t know.” It was one of Peron
’s own worries. “If it is possible to travel faster than light, our theories of the nature of the universe must be wrong.” “That is possible,” said Sy slowly — with a tone of voice that said clearly, that is quite impossible. “But don’t you see the problem? If the Immortals can exceed light-speed, they must have improved on our theories. And if they are so friendly to us, why do they keep that better theory from us?”

  Peron had shaken his head. Anything about the Immortals remained a mystery. “It is my personal belief that nothing can exceed light-speed,” said Sy at last. “I will mistrust anyone, Government or Immortal, man or woman, human or alien, who attempts to tell me otherwise without providing convincing evidence.” And he had moved quietly away, leaving Peron more puzzled than ever. Conversation with Sy often left that unsettling feeling. Lum had explained it in his offhand way — Sy was just a whole lot smarter than the rest of them. And Elissa had thrown in her own evaluation: Sy was not smarter, not if that meant either memory or speed of thought; but he could somehow see problems from a different angle from everyone else, almost as though he were located at a different point in space. His perspective was different, and so his answers were always surprising.

  And if he weren’t so strange, she had then added irrelevantly to Peron, he would be really attractive; which had of course irritated Peron greatly. His thoughts moved inevitably back to Elissa and their last night on Pentecost. While Lum and Kallen had been working conscientiously to screen contestants, Peron had been subjected to a pleasant but intense cross-examination. He and Elissa had found a quiet place in the Planetfest gardens. They stretched out on the soft ground cover and stared up at the stars, and Elissa must have asked him a thousand questions. Did he have brothers and sisters? What was his family like? Were they rich? (Peron had laughed at the idea that his father could ever be rich.) What were his hobbies? His favorite foods? Did he have any pets back home? Had he ever been on a ship, across one of Pentecost’s saltwater seas. What was his birthdate? Do you have a girl friend, back in Turcanta?