Between the Strokes of Night

by Charles Sheffield

  He walked over the brow of the hill and started down the other side. There was a trick to running these training outings. You had to lead the way, but you also needed eyes in the back of your head to know what everyone in the party was doing. Tilda and Jonas, for example, were behind the rest of the group, talking to each other and paying no attention to anyone else or where they were going. Wolfgang said nothing until they reached the flat valley bottom, with its soggy ground and growth of fronded reeds taller than a human. Without a word, he gestured to the others to go on past him and waited for Tilda and Jonas. They came to within a meter of where he stood and then stopped, startled. “You want a private chat?” Wolfgang pointed back toward the settlement they had started from. “That’s the place for it. If you want to learn about Kallen’s World, you’d better keep up with the rest and watch what’s going on. Otherwise you’ll stay home next time.”

  He was still talking when he heard the noise from behind him. It was a rumble, together with a breathy swish of reeds moving against each other. He shouted, “Run uphill!” and started in that direction, head turned to make sure the others were following.

  They didn’t wait — they were, after all, Planetfest winners — but the soggy ground slowed progress. Three people, one of them Demmy, were still in the flat valley bottom when the reeds parted. Five karnoos hurtled blindly toward them like armored tanks.

  Demmy and the other woman threw themselves out of the way, but the man, a heavily-built youngster named Timko, slipped. Even so, he almost made it by flattening himself to the ground. One of the karnoos ran right over him, and merely seemed to brush his left leg as it went by. Wolfgang heard a snap and a gasp of pain, and saw the white of exposed bone. Then the karnoo had passed on. Wolfgang stood and listened. He heard only the sound of the retreating karnoos and Timko’s groans.

  He hurried forward and bent at Timko’s side, at the same time thumbing the emergency button on his call unit. “Camp, we need a lift out, soon as you can make it. We have an injury.”

  “Critical?” A voice answered at once.

  “No.” Wolfgang was studying Timko’s leg. “But nasty. Compound fracture of the lower leg, tibia and fibula.”

  “On our way. We have your coordinates.”

  Wolfgang was already sliding the medical unit from his belt when Timko said, “What’s that for?” His face was pale and the sweat ran down his forehead, but his voice was under control.

  “Painkillers. Don’t move. We’ll have you out of here in five minutes.” “No painkillers.” Timko gave a tiny shake of his head. “They’ll have to put me out to set the bones. No point in giving them a mixed-drug situation.” Wolfgang leaned back on his heels. Not for the first time, he marveled at the toughness of the Planetfest winners who arrived on Kallen’s World. They took pain, and hardship, and hunger and thirst, and shook them off as though they were nothing. He glanced around. The others, without a word from him, had formed a protective circle facing outward. They were utterly silent, and totally alert for any strange sound or movement.

  “What happened?” Timko said softly. “You told us that the karnoos would run away from us, not right at us.”

  He wasn’t rubbing it in, but Wolfgang felt it that way. He had given useless advice and walked everybody into danger.

  “It was a karnoo stampede. I’ve seen it happen before, but only when they were running to get away from humans.” Wolfgang paused, then added — the group might as well learn the full extent of his incompetence — “I didn’t expect to encounter them for at least another couple of kilometers. And then they should have been fleeing.”

  “So we don’t know what happened.” Timko lay back and closed his eyes. “In some ways, I guess that’s good. Maybe we’ll be useful. There’s still things about this planet that need to be learned.”

  Wolfgang heard the whine of high-speed engines and looked up. Seconds later, an aircar was hovering overhead. Wolfgang waved, but the medical unit was already being lowered.

  He turned back to the youth on the ground, silent and tight-lipped. “You’ve got it exactly right, Timko,” he said. “There’s still things about this planet that need to be learned.”

  * * *

  “Now you tell me.” Wolfgang was striding up and down, angrier than Elissa had ever seen him. “When it’s too late, and one of the group I’m responsible for has been damn near killed.”

  “I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t know.” Elissa was trying to soothe him, because she would have been at least as mad if it had happened to her. “In fact, no one knew.”

  “How can that be?” Wolfgang swung round to face her. “Are you telling me that settlements on this planet aren’t planned, they just happen at random?” “Of course not. We start with surveys — you’ve taken part in those. Then we proceed to site selection. After we’ve picked the next place for a settlement, we make a second survey to be sure we didn’t miss anything. And then, when that’s all done, we give the go-ahead for ground clearing and construction.” “Who gives the go-ahead?”

  “Sometimes I do. Sometimes Peron does” — Peron himself had just entered the room — “and sometimes it’s a member of the development team. But Wolfgang, you haven’t let me get to my point. The clearbots and the conbots and the agbots are always busy. So once we give a go-ahead for development of a new area, the work is placed in the queue. After that, no human is involved. As soon as machines are available, work begins on clearing the area.”

  “Well, that’s got to end.” Wolfgang finally stopped pacing and flung himself angrily into a chair. “I’m never again taking a group of new arrivals smack into a place where our own robots have started clearing the ground, and driven every karnoo in the whole area into a panic. I said I’d only seen karnoos stampede when they were running to get away from humans, and damn it, I was right. The karnoos were fleeing from us, or at least from our machines.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “It was my responsibility. Those kids were in my charge. I want to know, what changes do you plan to make?”

  He glared at Elissa, and then, even harder, at Peron. The other man was sitting opposite Wolfgang, and his face bore a strange and distant expression. “What changes?” Wolfgang repeated. “Peron, are you listening?”

  Peron turned to him. “I was at first, but then what you and Elissa said gave me an idea.”

  “For changing procedures?”

  “Yes. But not the procedures we need for protecting your training groups. I was listening to you, talking about the karnoo stampede. And I suddenly thought, suppose we are the karnoos?”

  Elissa said, “Peron, I’m not following. And I understand the way you think better than anybody.”

  “My fault.” Peron pulled his chair forward. “Listen to me for a few minutes, then if you agree I think we have a ton of work to do. Wolfgang, do we have all the records received at Gulf City relating to the Kermel Objects?” “Every last bit of data, right up to the time we left. They’re in the bank down here, with a back-up copy in orbit.”

  “Good. I think we’re going to need all of them. Here’s my understanding of how you and your party got into trouble today. Tell me if at any point you see things differently.…”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Gulf City

  Charlene was late, as she always seemed to be late for any meeting called by Judith Niles.

  “Sorry, sorry.” She slipped into her chair, out of breath. Sy, together with staff members Emil Garville, Alfredo Roewen, and Libby Trask, was already there, as was Judith Niles herself.

  Charlene saw Judith’s mouth opening and did her best to forestall the criticism. “I know, punctuality, punctuality, and I’m wasting everyone’s time. But I was in the middle of an experiment when I heard about a signal, and I never for a moment suspected the call might be that signal. I mean, a message so soon — they left only a few weeks ago.”

  “From our point of view, but not from theirs.” Judith Niles pointed to the
wall of her office, where dual chronometers displayed N-space and S-space passage of time. “It’s been two hundred and forty years in N-space since they left Gulf City. While they were travelling they were in S-space, the same as we are, but for the past fifteen of their years they’ve been in N-space, struggling to set up the colony on Kallen’s World. Even the signal we’re about to see took seventeen of their years to get here. From their point of view, it’s all old history. But this is so important, I decided I had to call this meeting at once. Ready?”

  “I’m ready.” Charlene slipped her shoes off. S-space, N-space,

  no-matter-what-the-hell-space, she had never found a place to live where her feet felt right in shoes.

  The display came alive. A group of a dozen people stared out at Charlene. Peron and Elissa were in the middle, smiling a greeting. Elissa was visibly pregnant and had a three-year-old holding her tightly by the hand. Four strangers stood on each side of them, somber and serious. And then, next to the end — Wolfgang! Charlene felt her heart turn over. It seemed he had been gone only a few weeks — for her, it had been only a few weeks — but he looked older and different. His bare arms were more muscular, he wore a heavy suntan, and there were fine wrinkles about his eyes and on his forehead. As though he had become aware of Charlene’s gaze, he also smiled. Any pleasure that Charlene might have felt was taken away by the sight of the woman standing next to Wolfgang. She was a tall, slender brunette, and although she was not touching him, there was something in the way she stood that proclaimed a more-than-casual interest.

  Peron spoke. “I don’t quite know how to say this. We’ve been away for a long time so far as we are concerned, and although we’ve worked as hard as we know how it doesn’t seem we’ve done very much. Most of the first few years went into breaking ground and starting the settlements, which took longer than we expected. On the other hand, we realize that as far as you are concerned we left just a little while ago.”

  Judith Niles muttered, “Get on with it! What’s wrong with Peron?” “Give him time.” Sy was nodding to himself. “He’s feeling uneasy. I know Peron, and I know Elissa. If there’s any way they can do a thing for themselves, they will. He’s working himself up to say something that comes hard to him. He’s going to make a request.”

  Peron was continuing. “We’ve been picking sites for our new settlements, with good logic for each, and we’re steadily expanding. If you’ve been reading our progress reports — I’m sure you have — then you already know about the karnoos. They have special diet requirements, and they prefer a certain kind of terrain. Until recently we’ve had little interaction with them — or thought we did. But it turned out, without our knowing it, the selection criteria that we use to pick out settlement sites choose exactly the places where the karnoos like to live. Our clearings destroy their main food sources. If the karnoos were smart enough — and maybe they are — they’d decide that we were out to get them, by deliberately destroying their habitats.”

  Sy muttered, “Preferred habitats: G-2 V dwarf stars. Preferred habitat for others? Maybe, around red dwarfs?”

  “The karnoos are peaceful,” Peron went on, “but we learned the hard way that they can be dangerous when they feel threatened. If they were smarter, they might not just run away from the places where we are clearing the ground. They might try to find out the source of their trouble, the place where all the new land clearing and settlement first began. And then they’d either attack us and try to wipe us out, or they’d come and try to talk to us.

  “You’ve got people at your end smarter than anyone here, so you’re probably way ahead of me and know what we’ve been trying to do here for the past few years. Stars all over the local spiral arm have been changing stellar type for millions of years, we know that from the records we’ve picked up from the Kermel Objects. When we were at Gulf City no one could ever spot any kind of pattern that would let us predict which particular stars were likely to change next. We’ve done no better here. But we decided we have been proposing the wrong question. Rather than asking which star is likely to be the next to change, we should ask which star was the first to change. Just the way the karnoos ought to seek our first settlement on Kallen’s World.

  “Well” — Peron glanced first at Elissa, and then at Wolfgang for encouragement — “we tried. We took every scrap of data that had come in from the Kermel Objects, and we analyzed it every way we know how. We hoped we’d be able to send you stellar coordinates for the first changed star and ask you to go there and take a look. Obviously, it would mean a long trip in S-space, maybe even need the use of T-state or cold sleep. But it turned out to mean neither one, because we failed. Either the data just aren’t there, or we don’t know the right way to process it. So now you can see why we are calling. We’ll keep on trying here, but we’re passing the buck. Maybe the Kermel Object data that’s needed won’t come in for another ten thousand years, or maybe it arrived since we left. Either way, we know we won’t live long enough, ourselves, to see the end of this.” “But no regrets,” Elissa added. “We were here for the beginning, and that should be enough for anyone.”

  The three-year-old was tugging urgently at her hand, and she made a wry face. “We have to go now, or at least I do. Some things won’t wait. I’ll talk to you again — from your point of view, it will probably be before you’ve eaten your next meal.”

  She turned and hurried away toward one of the buildings.

  “That just about says it all. We work our butts off for a whole year, while you’re eating dinner.” Peron’s grin took any bite away from the remark. “Sy, if you’re listening, you always said you were interested in long-range projects. This one should be enough even for you. We don’t know where the stellar changes started, but the average distance of stellarformed stars from Gulf City is eighteen hundred light-years. Goodbye, and good luck.”

  The others in the image nodded, and the display faded.

  * * *

  The years had made little difference, and Judith Niles had lost none of her impatience. As Peron and the others vanished slowly from the display, she turned to her companions.

  “That was clear enough. Conclusions?”

  Sy said, “First conclusion is one I’ve suspected for a while. People aren’t as smart in S-space.”

  As the others bristled, he went on, “Oh, it’s not a big difference, and it won’t affect the average person. I doubt if you could measure a change in memory or logical ability. What goes is a tiny creative edge.”

  Judith Niles was frowning. “You have no evidence at all for that statement.” “Only the evidence that the first new idea for what to do about the stellarforming didn’t come from here. It came from a group working in N-space. I’ll admit that Peron and Elissa are far from being your average person, but I’ll not agree they’re brighter than we are.” Sy shrugged. “Anyway, I didn’t want to start an argument. I’ll give you another conclusion, and this one we can back up from our own analysis of distant galaxies. Red dwarf stars occur naturally, and they are fairly common. So the idea of looking for a ‘first red dwarf’ in our local galactic arm is hopeless.”

  Libby Trask, who had found her way to Gulf City not long before Sy and his friends, said, “Isn’t that exactly what their message was proposing?” “Not quite. They are telling us we have to identify the first star that changed — changed in a rather short period of time, say a few thousand years — from some other spectral type into a red dwarf. If we can find that one, we’ll know where the stellarforming started. Then it’s a good working assumption that whatever did it was and is still near that star.”

  “And we are supposed to discover that star — how?” Judith Niles had called the meeting, but Charlene sensed that she was no longer running it. Somehow Sy had taken over.

  “I don’t know, but if Peron and Elissa say they’ve combed the existing data base received from Kermel Objects, I believe them. That’s the bad news. The good news is that new data are received here all the time, and
we never know until it arrives and we’ve analyzed the geometry of stellar positions whether it portrays this galaxy as it was last week, or ten million years ago.” He turned to Emil Garville. “You have the most experience time-ordering the Kermel Object image data. What do you think?”

  Garville was a huge man, slow-moving and slow-talking. He was one of the Gulf City residents who didn’t bother to wear a wig, and at some time — almost certainly in a Planetfest accident — something had fractured his skull with a frightful blow just above the forehead. He rubbed at the scar-tissued fissure while he took his time answering Sy’s question.

  “I’ve tried the obvious tricks,” he said at last. “I have all the images we’ve ever received, and the stellar geometry allows me to assign an age to each one. The times themselves seem random. I’ve used the images and their ages to plot out the number of red dwarfs in the whole affected area of the spiral arm as a function of time, and it’s monotonically increasing. The numbers go up, and once a star has changed to a red dwarf it never changes back.

  “I’ve analyzed the plots, number of red dwarfs against time, but they don’t follow any smooth function. The most you can say is that the rate of increase with time is somewhere between linear and quadratic, which is bad news for the future. I’ve done my best to extrapolate backwards, and I can make rough estimates of the time when the fraction of red dwarf stars to total stellar population in our local spiral arm is the same as in other arms of our galaxy. What we don’t have are pairs of Kermel Object images corresponding to those times, which might show the first stellarforming change taking place and allow us to pinpoint the star involved. We have a couple of images showing the situation from long ago — thirty million years and more — and the star counts from those give me confidence that at one time this galactic arm had the same stellar type distribution as everywhere else. But that’s all. I’ve never seen a way to use the results.”