Between the Strokes of Night

by Charles Sheffield

  “ — which is another reason the Immortals don’t go down to the surface of planets,” said Lum. “They want to spend their time in S-space to increase their subjective lifespans, but then that forces them to live in a very weak acceleration field. They can’t take gravity.”

  “Not even a weak field,” added Rosanne. “They’d fall over before they even knew they were off balance. What did you say the time factor was? — two thousand to one? Then even a millionth of a gravity would be perceived by them as a four-gee field. They have to live in freefall. They have no choice about it. But they perceive a four-millionth of a gee as normal gravity.”

  Peron looked around him in disgust. “All right. So everybody saw it easily except me. Try another one. Tell me what’s going on outside the ship. One reason I thought at first that S-space had to be some kind of hyperspace was the view from the ports. When you look out, you don’t see stars at all. All you see is a sort of faint, glowing haze. It’s yellow-white, and it’s everywhere outside the ship.”

  This time there was not even a moment’s pause.

  “Frequency shift,” said Sy at once. “Let’s see. Two thousand to one. So the wavelengths your eyes could see would be two thousand times as long. Instead of yellow light at half a micrometer, you’d see yellow at a millimeter wavelength. Where would that put us?”

  There was a hush.

  “The Big Bang,” whispered Kallen.

  “The three degree cosmic background radiation,” said Rosanne. “My Lord. Peron, you were seeing leftover radiation from the beginning of the Universe — actually seeing it directly with your eyes.”

  “And it’s uniform and close to isotropic,” added Lum. “That’s why it looked like a general foggy haze. At that wavelength you don’t get a strong signal from stars or nebulae, just a continuous field.”

  “But it can’t be that straightforward.” Sy frowned. “The pupils of our eyes provide too small an aperture to deal with millimeter wavelengths. There has to be a lot more to S-space modification than the obvious changes.”

  Peron looked at Elissa. “Don’t say anything. You’ll tell me it’s all obvious, too. I guess it is. But it was a lot more confusing when I had no idea I was dealing with a difference in time rates. I couldn’t imagine where I might be, for the universe to look like that. Here. Try your hands at something else. This time I think I know what’s going on, but I need help — especially from Sy and Kallen. You’re our computer specialists.”

  He led them back along narrow corridors to the chamber where the patient robots sat in their silent rows. The others watched warily as three of the little machines came to life and glided past them along the passage.

  “Don’t worry,” said Peron. “They don’t move fast enough to be dangerous. We can get out of the way, or even move them around if we have to. They’re the maintenance crew for the ship. All normal functions are automatic and under computer control. One person can run everything, and even he may be unnecessary except for emergencies. But the robots certainly made my life confusing. When I first found myself in S-space I thought I was going mad. Those machines were a big part of the reason. The other people on the ship could make things happen by magic. They asked for something to be done, or they asked to be taken somewhere, and it was accomplished instantly.”

  Peron snapped his fingers. “Just like that. I tried to do the same thing, and it wouldn’t work for me. When I reached this chamber and saw the robots I finally understood what had been happening. The machines respond to commands given by people in S-space. The ship’s computer must be voice-coded through the terminals. When a command is given by someone whose voice is recognized and accepted by the system, the computer mobilizes the robots to carry out the instructions. They don’t move very fast, but they don’t have to. They’re quick enough to be invisible in S-space. Even if it takes the robots ten minutes to bring you a drink, or carry you from one part of the ship to another, you don’t notice. That’s only a fraction of a second as you perceive it.”

  The others had moved closer to the ranks of robots and were looking at them curiously.

  “They seem pretty standard,” said Sy. “I’ve never seen this design before, but they’re computer-controlled. We should be able to understand their instruction procedure.”

  “But why?” said Rosanne. “Even when we understand it, Peron, what are we supposed to do with it?”

  “Dig into the coding. Change it. Make it so that our voices can give acceptable commands, too. And maybe make it so that the system won’t respond to Captain Rinker and the others in S-space.”

  “But what good will all that do?” Elissa was looking puzzled.

  Lum grinned at her. “Isn’t it obvious?” He turned to Peron. “Rinker is quite right, Peron, you are a troublemaker. You intend to take over this ship. Then we’ll go and visit Immortal Headquarters — wherever that is — on our terms.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Olivia Ferranti blinked her eyes. The texture of the illumination seemed a little different, not quite the way that she remembered it before she last went to S-space; and her body was light, floating away, as though she was leaving part of her on the padded floor or the container.

  She shivered and slowly sat up, rubbing at her chilled forearms; then she suddenly jerked to full wakefulness. She was being observed. Five faces were peering in warily at her through the transparent top of the suspense tank. She pulled herself forward to the casket’s door and eased it open. Peron was standing there, nervously watching.

  “You read our message?” he said.

  “Of course we did — you were watching us, weren’t you?”

  He nodded. “We told you to send someone at once. But it seemed to take you an awful long time.”

  Olivia Ferranti was breathing deeply, adjusting to the familiar but surprising taste of the air in her lungs. She shrugged her shoulders, as much for muscular experiment as for any body message.

  “Four days — four days here. But we only talked for a few minutes in S-space. I call that a fast response.” She looked around her, at Peron and the others. “Relax. I was only sent here to talk. What do you think I’m going to do, knock the lot of you down and tie you up? Any one of you could beat me in a fight. You’re the Planetfest winners, remember?”

  “We remember,” said Peron. “We just want to be sure that you do. You and the others. Why are you here, and not Rinker?”

  “He made the transition very recently, just a couple of hours ago, when the automatic systems were going wrong. Transitions too close together have bad effects. In fact, frequent transitions shorten subjective life expectancy. And he doesn’t trust you, either.”

  She licked her lips. “I guess he thinks I’m more expendable. Look, I know you’re in a hurry to talk, but I’d like a drink of water.”

  Peron glanced briefly at the others, then led the way back through the winding corridor, taking them once more to the central food processing chamber of the ship.

  “He didn’t really want anybody to talk to you,” said Ferranti as they moved along the corridor. “But he agreed that there was no choice. ‘They’ll be like a band of wild apes,’ he said. ‘Fiddling around with my ship! They don’t know how anything works — my God, there’s no way of knowing what they may do to it and to us!’ “

  She looked around her at the intent young faces that closely watched her every movement. “I must say that I have to agree with him. I’m sure you’re feeling pretty cocky at the moment, with everything under control. But you could kill this ship by pure accident. It’s frightening — you’re smart, but there are so many things you simply don’t know.”

  “So why don’t you tell us some of them?” Sy asked in a surly voice. “You’ll find we’re all quick learners.”

  “I’m not supposed to tell you much — and some things I don’t even know myself. And before you get paranoid as to why I’m holding some things back from you, I’ll tell you the reason for that. There’s a sound logic for why you were
n’t told everything back on Whirlygig.”

  They had reached the food chamber. Olivia Ferranti bent over a water spigot, took a long, leisurely drink, then sighed and shook her head.

  “That’s one of the things that I really miss. Water just doesn’t taste right in S-space.” She turned to face the group. “How much do you know about the history of your civilization on Pentecost?”

  “We know that the first settlers came off The Ship,” said Peron. “It was called Eleanora, and it started out from a planet called Earth, thousands of years earlier.”

  “That’s a beginning.” Olivia Ferranti settled herself cross-legged, floating a handsbreadth above the floor, and gestured to the others to gather round her there. “And if you’re anything like most of the candidates we get from Pentecost for indoctrination, that’s almost all that you’ll know. So make yourselves comfortable. I need to give you a bit of a history lesson. You may not like some of it too well, but bear with me.

  “Eleanora was the biggest and most advanced of half a dozen arcologies that were built as colony ships in the Sol System, more than twenty-five thousand Earth-years ago. The arcologies were all constructed in orbits close to Earth. Just as Eleanora was close to complete, and the colonists had arrived on board it, the nations down on Earth did what we’d all been afraid they would do for generations. They went mad. Someone pulled the trigger, and after that there was no stopping it. It was a full-scale nuclear war.

  “When that war happened, there were about thirty-five thousand people living away from Earth. They were working on mining and construction, or on applications satellites and stations, or they were inhabitants of the colony ships. We were all helpless, watching the world explode before our eyes. And at first none of us knew what to do next. We were numb with shock and horror.” “You said ‘we.’ You mean you were there — yourself?” asked Elissa.

  “I was. Me, myself, in person. I was a physician on one of the orbiting space stations.” Olivia Ferranti shook her head and rubbed gently at her eyes. She seemed to be staring far beyond the circle of her listeners, out across space and time to the death of a planet. “Initially we just wouldn’t believe it. Earth couldn’t destroy itself like that. We knew it must have been terrible on the surface, because we had seen the whole globe change in a few hours from a beautiful blue-green marble to a dusky purple-black grape, and the smoke plumes had risen well into the stratosphere. Even so, emotional acceptance was beyond us. Somehow, beyond logic, we believed that the damage was temporary and the surface nations would recover. We waited for radio signals from survivor groups, messages that would tell us that civilization was still going on beneath those dark clouds of dust and smoke. The signals never came. After a few weeks we sent shuttles down into the atmosphere, shielded against high levels of radioactivity and designed to go down below the clouds and examine the surface. There was so much dust in the northern hemisphere that we could see nothing, not even from low altitude. We tried south of the equator, and after a couple of months we finally knew. It was the end.

  “We couldn’t rule out the possibility of isolated survivors, clinging on to existence down there in the darkness. But as time went by even that hope seemed less and less likely.

  “Some plants would survive, we knew that; and we felt sure there would be life in the sea — but we had no idea how much. We tried to calculate what would happen to the whole food chain when photosynthesis was reduced to less than a tenth of the usual value, but we had no faith in our answers. Anyway, they didn’t really make any difference. For mankind on Earth, it was the end. And we felt as though it was the end for us, too. We seemed like a handful of mourners, circling the funeral pyre of all our friends and relations.

  “We were too shocked to think logically, but we were certainly far more than a handful. As I said, there were thirty-five thousand of us, with slightly more men than women. And we had ample power and materials available. There was no question that we could survive very well if we pooled our resources and all worked together. We knew it might be centuries before Earth could be re-visited and repopulated, but there was no reason why we could not go on indefinitely as a stable, spaceborne society.”

  Ferranti smiled bitterly. “God knows, many of us had said we wanted just that for long enough. Then when we had no choice, most of us in our dreams imagined ourselves back on Terra.

  “There’s one good thing about humans: we forget. Despair can’t last forever. We pulled ourselves together, little by little, and began to think again. On Salter Station we finally arranged for a radio conference of all the space groups. It was difficult to handle, because one arcology had been out near Mars, and we had long radio lags. But we pulled everyone into the circuits — all the arcologies, the mining groups that had been smelting from the Amor asteroids, and the scientists who had been building the Farside station up on Earth’s moon. Everything in space had always been controlled from Salter Station, so it seemed natural that we would still be the organizers.

  “Natural to us, on Salter Station. But others didn’t see it that way. “The arcologies had been set up to be as self-sufficient as possible, with independent power plants and six-nines recycling systems. The other space facilities were different. They were dependent on supplies provided from Earth, or on spaceborne resources provided by the mining and extractive industries. “The first planning session to discuss pooling of resources went smoothly. Everyone participated. But when the time came to act, three of the arcologies backed out. I believe that they each operated independently, without even discussing it among themselves. They were afraid, you see — scared that the total group might not be stably self-sustaining, even though they had no doubt about their own ability to survive. There were other reasons, too. From the very beginning the arcologies had been developing their own social and political preferences and differences. Like called to like — colonists tended to apply to the same place as their friends, and to avoid a colony where their views would be ridiculed or in the minority. The last thing that Helena, Melissa, and Eleanora wanted was a merger with Salter Station and the other arcologies. They didn’t ever admit that they were not going to cooperate; they simply cut off radio contact and moved farther out, away from Earth.

  “The rest of us were angry with them, but we didn’t take as much notice as you might think. We had our own hands full without them for the first few years. We had to establish our own system, self-sufficient and as foolproof as we could make it. That took ninety-nine percent of our energies. And the rest went into the work on reduced metabolic survival — what we finally called S-space existence. As a doctor I was naturally interested in that, and after a while I began to work on it exclusively. Within a couple of months of the first experiments with human subjects on Salter Station it was clear that we had something absolutely revolutionary, something that changed all our ideas about perception and human consciousness. But it took several years more before we saw the other implications. With our work, humanity had found the easy way to the stars. “There was no need for multi-generation arcologies, or for faster-than-light drives — “

  “ — which seem to be impossible,” murmured Sy softly.

  “Which may be impossible,” said Ferranti. “Keep an open mind. Anyway, we didn’t need them. The drive system research on Salter Station would allow us to accelerate a ship up to better than a tenth of light-speed, and that was enough. In Mode Two consciousness — S-space — a human being could remain fully aware, live an extended subjective life, and travel across the whole Galaxy in a single lifetime.

  “That led to a new crisis. Everyone loved the idea of an extended subjective life span — if it were safe. But everyone was terrified of possible side effects. “We split into two groups. Some of us said, let’s move to S-space, and wait there at least until Earth is habitable again. No one knew how long that would be, but in S-space we could afford to wait centuries and perceive them as only a few weeks. Others were afraid. They argued that there were too many unknowns and too many
risks in S-space living; until those were pinned down it was better to stay with our normal perception.”

  Olivia Ferranti smiled ruefully. “As it turned out, both groups were right. Earth recovered slowly. It took more than a thousand years to develop new and stable plant and animal communities. None of us had ever dreamed it would be so long. And at the same time, we were discovering serious physical consequences of S-space living.

  “Fortunately we didn’t fight over our differences of opinion on the move to S-space. Maybe the destruction of Earth had taught us all something about the need for peaceful resolution of conflicts. We agreed we would pursue both actions. Most people elected to stay as they were, creating a decent society in the spaceborne environment. After a few generations it was clear that a life in space was as satisfying as most of us had ever hoped. By then a few hundred of us had long since moved to S-space, using ourselves as the subjects for experiments that might reduce the risk for those who followed. While we were doing that we discovered a new mode of metabolic change, this one a true suspended animation. Five of you have personal experience of that cold sleep, here on the ship. We still don’t know how long someone can remain safely unconscious in that mode, but it’s certainly a long time — thousands of years at least.

  “The move to S-space had two other important consequences. First, we realized that we couldn’t go back down and live on Earth, or anywhere with a substantial gravity field, even if we wanted to. That had been deduced when the experiments were still all on animals, and it was one major reason for moving the work out to orbit and away from the surface of Earth. You see, perceived accelerations — “ “We understand,” said Peron. “Kallen and Sy” — he pointed to them — “figured it out.”