Between the Strokes of Night

by Charles Sheffield

  “The inertial sensors tell me we’re not moving.”

  Sy added, “And the visuals say we have negligible velocity with respect to the three-degree cosmic background. You goosed the drive?”

  “I sure as hell did.” Dan Korwin glared at his hand-held, as though holding it personally responsible. “I gave the engines as much of a boost as we can take in S-space. We should all have felt it. And with that much drive, all the plates and glasses ought to have slid down to the end of the table and finished in Sy’s lap.”

  Everyone again looked to Judith Niles. She shook her head, as though the whole of the past five minutes had been too much for her. It was left to Charlene, reluctantly and after a nod from Emil, to ask the obvious: “Something brought us from a sixth of light-speed to a flat stop. We can’t move toward Urstar, even when we apply the Argo’s own propulsion system. Where do we go from here?” “We go nowhere.” Sy alone, of all the people in the room, was smiling. “We’re stuck, fixed in one place like an insect in amber until whatever decided to stop us decides to get in touch with us, or lets us move again. It looks bad, but there’s one huge piece of good news: we know now that we didn’t come to the wrong place. The star ahead of us, even if we can’t get there, is the real thing. That’s Urstar.”

  How could Sy possibly be so cheerful? But then Charlene, surveying her companions, noticed that Emil appeared, if not cheerful, then relieved. He smiled across the table at her. His complacent look said, Well, things do look grim. But at least I can relax now. I may have brought us all to our doom — but at least I didn’t bring us to the wrong place!

  Charlene gritted her teeth. Emil! And not just Emil, every man she had ever met. They were all as bad as each other. Which one of the old-timers, back on long-ago and faraway Earth, had said it? — “A man will rather die than look like a fool.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “What the devil is Korwin trying now?” Charlene spoke through clenched teeth. She hung on to the arms of her chair as the Argo shook from end to end in spasms that couldn’t be predicted or resisted.

  “More of the same.” Sy sat next to her in the control room, his eyes fixed on the banks of displays. “My guess is that he’s pogoing us over a range of at least five gees. But I doubt if he’s accomplishing a thing.”

  The crew was again in N-space, where they could tolerate considerable acceleration. Most had gone to their own quarters or the control room, where they could strap in securely while Dan Korwin, aft in the engine room, drove the ship at full power toward the distant spark of Urstar. One gee, two gees, and on up to an off-the-charts acceleration that left everyone feeling flattened. The ship should have been racing toward its destination. Previous attempts to fly closer had been useless, while an attempt to turn the ship and fly away from Urstar had been just as ineffective; the Argo could rotate on its axis, like some great beast impaled on a spit, but all other movement was denied. The acceleration abruptly ended and Korwin’s frustrated voice came over the ship’s central address. “All right. Screw it. I guess that’s all for today.” Sy ran his eyes over the monitors. “Same as before. Hefty acceleration, but according to the sensors we’ve moved not a single millimeter. Hm. I wonder.” Gus Eldridge, one of the communications specialists who had been skeptical of Dan Korwin’s efforts from the start, heard Sy’s comment. He grunted and said, “Of course we haven’t moved. This is — what? — the eighth day of trying? And while he’s accelerating the ship like that, nobody else can do a damned thing. How long do we give him before we tell him to stop fooling himself?”

  Charlene could see Eldridge’s point. The Argo might be unable to move, but most of the scientist crew had plenty to keep them busy. According to the observers at X-ray and gamma ray wavelengths, the space around Urstar crackled with high-frequency energy. If the intensity estimates were anywhere close to correct, the ship would have been forced to halt of its own accord before ever reaching the outermost gas giant; otherwise, the field intensities around the hull would have melted the Argo. Sy had argued, with typical perverse logic, that the ship had been halted to prevent its destruction.

  That still left the big question: What to do, when they could neither approach Urstar nor escape from it? Charlene, breathing easy now that the violent and intermittent acceleration was over, gazed at the display of the static external scene. She muttered, “Day after day, day after day, we stuck, nor breath nor motion. As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.”

  She had been talking to herself, but Emil Garville as usual had his eye on her. He moved closer and said sharply, “What was that?”

  She smiled at him and shrugged. “Nothing. I’m showing my age, that’s all. Old words — the man who wrote them was dead hundreds of years before the first person flew in space.”

  “Flew in Earth-space?”

  “Yes, flew in Earth-space. I keep telling you that I’m old, but you don’t seem to want to believe me.”

  “You’re only old objectively, not subjectively. Say it again.” Emil listened closely as she recited the words, then nodded. “I don’t know what had happened to them and their ship, but it certainly applies to us. We’re stuck. Unless something changes, we’ll have to go into T-state before we run out of supplies.” “Something has been changing. But not the sort of thing we’re hoping for.” “JN?”

  Charlene nodded wearily. “I’ve talked to Sy about what we should do. He thinks we have to declare the Director incompetent to remain in control, and have someone else take over.”

  “Take over and do what?” Emil waved a hand around the control room. “I agree that JN is deteriorating fast, and she spends most of the time in her cabin sitting and doing nothing. But if she were her old self, what could she do? Urstar is only a few light-days away, but in terms of our getting there it might as well be on the other side of the galaxy. We’re stuck.”

  Sy, as usual, had been listening without comment while he sat busy with his own experiments. Now he said, “We may be stuck, but we’re not going to be on our own much longer. Unless something changes, we’re going to have visitors.” He posted the tiny image on his hand-held unit to the main display. For some reason of his own he had been observing the region around Urstar at the wavelength of the cosmic background radiation. Logic and experience insisted that close to a star there would be nothing to be seen at such wavelengths. The batlike Pipistrelles and the wispy lattice webs of the Gossameres, residents of deep space, were only found light-years away from fierce stellar radiation. Except, apparently, here. On the display, three fuzzy bat shapes were visible, together with a hint of a gauzy rectangle of silvery lines.

  “Doppler insists there’s nothing out there,” Sy said. “I’ve tried active radar, and I’m getting zero returns at all wavelengths. But I’ve also been monitoring the increase in apparent size of their outlines. That shows they’re moving at a constant rate. If they keep it up, they’ll reach the Argo this evening.” Charlene tried, unsuccessfully, to see any increase in the size of the shapes on the display. She said, “We can’t run, and we can’t hide. What do we do?” “We inform the Director of the situation.” Emil shook his head at Charlene and Sy’s perplexed expressions. “I know how you feel. But we’re just three people, among a crew of thirty-eight. Until we discuss this with the others, and they all agree — which I’m not sure they will — JN is still the leader of this expedition. We tell her what we know, we give her our best advice, and we listen to what she says. And unless it’s off-the-wall stark staring lunacy, we do what she says. It’s a rule that’s even older than the poetry that Charlene was quoting a few minutes ago: On a ship, you can have only one captain.” * * *

  It was an unnerving experience to stare out of the Argo’s observation ports and see nothing there but the ruddy glow of Urstar. And then, moments later, glance across at the displays showing the same region of space at microwave wavelengths, and watch the black bat-shapes creeping steadily closer. Charlene had spoken to no one else about Sy’s discovery, but
somehow the word had spread. During the early evening the crew members had wandered one by one into the main control room, to take up their assigned seats. There was very little conversation. Everyone was waiting.

  Judith Niles was the last to arrive. Her face was haggard, and her eyes were wide and lacked focus. Her right pupil was twice the size of her left. To Charlene, however, the most disturbing change was also on the face of it the least significant. From their very first days in S-space, JN had always made a point to cover her bald scalp with a wig. Today, either through oversight or conscious decision, she had omitted to do so. Her scalp, smooth and white and with the faint lines of long-ago surgery tracing across the cranium, was more shocking to Charlene than the possibility of the coming alien contact. Coming, and coming soon. The intangible wisps of the Pipistrelles loomed large in the displays. No one on the Argo could do anything to slow their approach. On the other hand, the Pipistrelles were so insubstantial, so little different from the void itself, any danger from them seemed like a product of overexcited human imagination.

  And yet, in the final minutes as those three dark shapes converged on the space-locked Argo, no one in the dim-lit control room could find anything to say. The three Pipistrelles swept on, closer and closer. At microwave wavelengths their winged shapes blocked out half the sky. On their final approach the wings curled around, as though to encompass the helpless ship. “Any second now.” Sy’s calm voice sounded clearly through the hushed chamber. “Closing — closing — contact.”

  There was no sound — no movement — no evidence of impact; but the air within the room glowed with pale-blue luminescence. The walls of the chamber blurred, briefly, as though vibrating at a speed too high for the eye to follow. The Pipistrelles vanished from the displays. At the same moment all lights inside the Argo went out.

  And then, just as suddenly, the Pipistrelles reappeared on the displays. They were receding from the Argo as silently and as mysteriously as they had approached. Nestled among the three bat shapes shone the bright silver web of the Gossamere.

  “That’s it? That’s all we get?” Some crew member muttered the words to herself in the darkness, but she was voicing everyone’s thoughts. They had been tensed for confrontation, for high drama, maybe even for destruction. Now their possible contact retreated, while the ship was once again locked in a featureless void of open space, a few light-days from Urstar but more than two thousand light-years from home.

  In the faint glow cast by the displays, Charlene peered around the chamber. She was examining faces. A few seemed openly relieved, most looked worried or disappointed. Sy was inscrutable — naturally. Emil, massive and imperturbable, caught her eye and winked. Maybe he was trying to reassure her. It didn’t work. Charlene turned her attention again to Judith Niles. The Director still sat hunched in her chair, but something had changed. The wide-eyed blankness was gone, replaced by an alertness that Charlene had not seen for months. Her eyes seemed to throw off a light of their own.

  As Charlene watched, that bright gaze moved steadily from person to person, focusing intently on each for a few moments and then moving on. When the gimlet stare reached her, Charlene shivered. She felt as though the Director had seen into the secret depths of her mind.

  JN was going to speak — Charlene was sure of it; but whatever the Director might have said was lost, because all the lights suddenly came on and as they did so the room filled with an outburst of excited comments.

  “Inertial sensors say we’re moving!”

  “We’re getting positive Doppler — but it shows a red shift, a big one. That means we’re heading away from Urstar — “

  “We’ve had a power drain, a big one. Half our reserves have gone.” “There’s motion relative to the cosmic background radiation.”

  “Data bank security has been violated. Extent of penetration unknown. It’s still being violated.”

  “Hey, we have engine control!”

  Every crew member was busy with a hand-held, checking the ship functions for which they were personally responsible. The noise level suggested that everyone had discovered something significant.

  The old Judith Niles, the dynamo at the center of the Sleep Research Institute, would have snapped out a command at once to silence and organize everyone. The Judith Niles of the past few weeks would have looked on apathetically and done nothing.

  This Judith Niles did neither one. She sat, quietly waiting, until the excited chatter died away to a murmur.

  “Very good,” she said at last, and there a crispness and finality in her tone that made the voices fall silent.

  She went on, “Let me begin with information that will probably disturb you. We are not Judith Niles. We are merely making temporary use of her body.” Charlene was shocked — but at the same time felt that she had known what was coming before it was spoken. The inhibition against speech that she always felt in the presence of the Director was gone, and she blurted out, “You killed her!” “No. We saved her. Was it not evident to you that her condition was deteriorating fast, and she could not long survive?”

  It had been evident, at least to Charlene, but it was Sy who asked, “So what happened to Judith Niles?”

  “She still exists, although not in material form. She left the ship with the Pipistrelles, and is undergoing necessary indoctrination.”

  Sy spoke again. “Pipistrelles. You know our words. Who are you, and how are you able to speak to us in our own language?”

  “Let us answer your second question first.” One hand of Judith Niles reached forward to the table in front of her, ready to check off points on her fingers. Charlene, who had seen that gesture for seventy millennia, quivered with tension.

  “First” — the forefinger tapped on the table — “it should be clear to you that normally we do not exist in material form. We are currently embodied, but that is merely for ease of communication. Second” — a tap of the second finger — “one of you already observed that we have access to the data banks of this ship. We have absorbed those data sources in their entirety. We know how you came to this star, and why. We know your complete history, as individuals and as a species. Therefore, we know not only this language, the one that we are now employing, but all languages in use by your kind. Third” — a finger tap — “and most important: we do not seek to harm you. Your forward progress toward what you know as Urstar was arrested, because had you continued all life on board this ship would have been extinguished.”

  “So you claim you’re the good guys,” Dan Korwin said. The shock around the room was being replaced by a swelling anger, and he more than anyone had resented the loss of the Argo’s freedom of motion. “But you haven’t answered Sy’s other question: Who are you? And while you’re thinking about that, I’ve got another one for you: If you mean us no harm, why are you systematically removing the type of stars that our kind need in order to survive? Are you going to tell us you have nothing to do with it, that somebody else is wrecking the galaxy?” “Of course not.” The replacement for Judith Niles enjoyed all the calm controlling ability of the original. “However, you have completely misunderstood the situation. When a species first goes into space — “

  Korwin burst out, “You don’t know us. We’ve been a spacefaring species for more than seventy millennia!”

  “We do not know you, although indeed your records indicate seventy thousand of your years of experience in space.” The intelligence embodied in Judith Niles regarded Korwin calmly. “However, I repeat, when a species first goes into space, perhaps during their initial million years of off-planet wandering, that species tends to believe it knows all. All about S-space, all about the T-state. All of the advantages, and all the possible dangers. Such, however, is not the case.”

  Bright eyes stared steadily around the control room. Seeing them now, Charlene could not believe that she had ever seen them as human.

  The JN embodiment continued, “You are already aware of some consequences of S-space living. Sterility is an ob
vious side effect, which could scarcely be missed. And, in fact, it is a side effect which can, by suitable treatments, be partially remedied. A slight loss of creativity is a more serious problem, although again palliative measures exist. What cannot ever be remedied — or rather, since we lack the hubris to believe that we know all, let us say it can possibly never be remedied — is the long-term deterioration of organic life confined to S-space existence. You ask, who are we? Let us rather say what we were. Once we, like you, were carbon-based organic life forms. In S-space, there is an inevitable decline in the physical condition of such forms. Normally, such a decline occurs only after, at a minimum, half a million years for individuals in a species of your type. That it happened so quickly to Judith Niles puzzled us, but we have concluded that was a consequence of her earlier medical problems. Her entry to S-space appears anomalous. Can any of you confirm that? It predates anything in your ship’s data bases.”

  “I can,” Charlene said. She swallowed, overwhelmed by a memory more than eighty-one thousand years old. “I was there when it happened. We had very little idea what we were doing, but we had no choice. If we hadn’t taken JN to S-space she would have died within months — N-space months.”

  “Of the medical problems unique to your species, we know only what is in your data bank. However, our knowledge is based on experience with more than two hundred other space-going intelligences. The pattern in every one is the same: discovery of S-space; exploitation of S-space, as a means of subjective life extension and interstellar space travel; and then, after a shorter or longer period, the realization that S-space existence, sufficiently continued, brings with it physical decline and finally death. As a means of seeking immortality, S-space is a blind alley.”

  “Immortality!” It was not clear how many people said the word, but it lingered as a murmur around the chamber.