Between the Strokes of Night

by Charles Sheffield

  “Let us say, potential immortality. No one knows the maximum attainable life-span of an intelligence, but this we do know: maximal life extension is impossible for an embodied form that uses S-space, T-state, or any of their variations. Ultimately, time consumes flesh. Maximal life extension requires conversion to immaterial form.”

  “Pure spirit,” Emil Garville said softly.

  “Use that word if you wish. Stabilized fields is a name we would prefer. In any case, your own species faces a choice: material existence, which offers immortality only in the form of offspring; or a move to immaterial form, where we believe that the duration of existence of individual consciousness may be unlimited.

  “Now.” The body of Judith Niles sat up straighter in its chair. “We have given you as much information as we think it wise for you to have. Experience shows that each species must learn for itself, and make its own mistakes.” Sy held up a hand. “The question. The unanswered question. If you do not wish humans harm, why are you destroying us by removing from the galaxy the type of stars that our kind needs?”

  “You will not like this answer, but it is the truth. You were until recently insignificant. The existence of your kind did not impinge on us until your attempted approach to Urstar.”

  “So if we had not come here, you would have changed Sol and the other stars that we need into red dwarfs?”

  “No. There was never a danger of that. Before stellarforming begins there is always a survey. No star is changed whose planets form a home for intelligent — even potentially intelligent — life.” Judith Niles’ face, perceptibly non-human, still managed an apologetic smile. “You sit, at your present level of development, somewhere between the two. It is our intention to leave you alone, to become… . whatever you will become.”

  “But why do you change stellar types at all?” Gus Eldridge said. “You keep telling us how little we know and understand. Well, maybe that’s true. But what makes you think that you know everything? You may be ruining the galaxy.” “If that is the case, we will have committed a sin for which we can never atone. We certainly do not know everything. But we are well-intentioned. We are changing stellar types for good reason — a reason that you are already in a position to understand and appreciate. What are the longest-lived forms of stars?”

  The others looked to Eva Packland. She was the Argo’s astronomical expert. That meant she was also one of the best that humanity, on Gulf City or anywhere else, had to offer. Judith Niles had made her selection of expedition specialists with great care.

  “Well.” Eva hesitated. She was lightning-bright, but shy unless the subject was her own field. Then there was no stopping her. “Well, according to our theories of astrophysics, the stars with the longest active lifetimes are the dwarf stars, ones barely above the minimal mass threshold to sustain a hydrogen-helium fusion reaction. On the other hand, we have nothing in our theories that says stellarforming is possible, even in theory.”

  “Stellarforming calls for the use of a branch of physics which you have yet to discover; however, your notions on the processes of stellar fusion and associated lifetimes will not be changed by that new knowledge. A blue-white supergiant star must inevitably squander its energy resources, running through fusion fuel supplies in just a few million years. A star like your own native Sol is somewhat better, able to shine for more than ten billion years, before expanding to red giant status and then sinking to cold dimness; but a small red dwarf will shine for better than a hundred billion years; and that — to beings with an adequately long perspective of the future — is a minimal requirement. We are not destroying your region of the galaxy; we are engaged in preserving it, for the needs of long-lived beings like ourselves, and perhaps someday for your needs. That will depend on the choices that you make as a species. “And now, there has been more than our intended interaction between your kind, unless and until you proceed to the next level of development. We wish you good fortune, and we leave you.”

  “One more question!” Sy held up his hand again. “The Kermel Objects — “ “No more questions. However, we volunteer the information that we do not control the Kermel Objects. They are in many ways as mysterious to us as they are to you. We propose to do you one other small favor, the nature of which you will shortly discover. But now, goodbye. You can expect no more contact with our kind until some of you learn how to achieve a non-material state.”

  Judith Niles turned her head slowly from side to side, her eyes again lingering for a fraction of a second on each person. She stared at Charlene last of all, and it seemed to Charlene that the gaze was longer and harder than at anyone else. Then JN was gone. A woman sat there still, but Charlene knew that what faced her at the end of the table was nothing more than an empty husk. Already, in just a few seconds, the eyes had dimmed and the face frozen into a dead mask. Charlene reached out and gripped Emil’s hand. He said, very softly, “I know. She’s gone, Charlene. But I’m a believer. Somewhere, in some form, she still lives.”

  His quiet comment was drowned out by an excited cry from Gus Eldridge. “Take a look at that red shift. We’re moving again — and we’re not just moving, we’re flying.”

  Sy was checking their motion relative to the microwave background radiation. “Better than ninety-nine percent of light-speed,” he said cheerfully. “And my guess is that we’re heading right for Gulf City.”

  “Ninety-nine percent of light-speed?” Dan Korwin was anything but cheerful. “Then we’re all dead. There’s no way that the Argo’s engines can slow us down enough for a Gulf City rendezvous.”

  Sy shook his head. “My bet is we don’t need to worry about that. If they could speed us up without our knowing it, they can slow us down the same way. I wonder just how fast we’re moving. There has to be significant time dilation. Eva, can you get a handle on that, see what sort of a time compression factor we can look forward to? We’re not just going home — we’re going home in style.” Sy, rarely for him, was showing a little excitement. Everyone else, with the possible exception of Korwin, was delighted to be racing home at such high speed. But Charlene alone, it seemed, had heard and understood the main message from the aliens: S-space was not an end point for existence; nor was T-state. Either you returned to N-space, and lived at the same rapid rate as all of humanity through its multimillion years of development; or you abandoned bodily existence completely, to become an abstract entity with no material attributes. In that form you sought to enjoy the hundred-billion or more years that such a transformation might make possible.

  For others, it might be easy. Charlene knew that for her the choice would be difficult. Did she want an existence from which all the usual pleasures of life were excluded? She thought not. But could she then face death itself, that dark part of the future that she had always avoided thinking about?

  She knew only one thing for sure: both alternatives terrified her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The Void

  The form that had occupied the body of Judith Niles had left unspecified the “small favor” being done on behalf of the crew of the Argo. Even when the nature of the favor, as an accelerated return to Gulf City, was recognized, its magnitude had yet to be measured.

  The result, reported by Eva Packland and Gus Eldridge, staggered everyone — even the phlegmatic Sy.

  “Ninety-nine point nine nine seven percent of light-speed,” he said. “Let’s see now.” He entered a couple of numbers into his own hand-held. “That gives us a time dilation factor of almost a hundred and thirty. Shipboard travel time back to Gulf City will be less than seventeen years. Which means just three days in S-space. We’ll be there before we know it.”

  “And then what?” Dan Korwin seemed in a state of permanent rage. The loss of Judith Niles had left a leadership gap, which Korwin obviously felt best qualified to fill. That others, such as Libby Trask, Emil Garville, Charlene Bloom, and Alfredo Roewen, seemed much more ready to assign that role to a reluctant Sy, did nothing to make Korwin less a
ngry. He went on, “You keep insisting, based on no evidence whatsoever, that the aliens will stop the Argo for us when we get to Gulf City. I hope so. Because I’ll tell you now, I don’t know how to stop this ship.”

  “That, I can easily believe.” Sy did not let himself be drawn. “I still say that the aliens will do it.”

  “How?”

  “I have no idea. The same way they’re protecting us on the way. Do you realize what should be happening to us at this speed? Individual atoms of interstellar hydrogen ought to blast through the Argo like bullets, riddling our bodies and equipment. But everything and everyone is just fine.”

  “You have a damned sight more faith in alien goodwill than I do.” Korwin glared at Sy, spun around on his heel, and walked out.

  “He’s right, you know,” Emil said. “We are taking an awful lot on faith.” “Not true.” Sy considered for a moment, then went on, “I have made not one decision or taken a single action that depends in any way on an assumption as to the benign nature of alien intentions. Judith Niles was removed, and her body used, independent of anything I might have thought or wished. I did nothing to increase the speed of this ship to its present value. Nor could I have done so, even if I wished to. I merely point out that if the aliens had wanted to destroy us, they could have done it very easily. Simply allowing the Argo to continue on its course toward the intense fields around Urstar would have accomplished that. Why would they save us then, in order to destroy us now?”

  Emil had shoulders as wide as a door, and now he shrugged them. “You would be the first to tell us not to make assumptions about alien motives.” “I would. I do. I don’t know how aliens think. All I am asking is a certain consistency to their behavior. Admit that, and you will conclude that if they did not stand by and permit us to destroy ourselves then, they will not permit it now. In any case, we will know soon enough if I am right. In three S-days, we will either be stationary at Gulf City and ready to dock the Argo there; or we will be racing past at so close to the speed of light that Gulf City will come and go before we know it.”

  Sy left, heading in the same direction as Dan Korwin. Charlene doubted that his objective was continued polite conversation. Sy didn’t allow his feelings to show, but there was no doubt about Korwin’s intense dislike for him. She glanced at Emil. He rubbed his cratered skull and said, “Just three more days, dear. We waited long enough to get to Urstar. I guess we can stand to wait a little longer to see what happens when we get home.”

  Maybe he could. Charlene couldn’t. What was apparently true for everyone else on the Argo was not true for her. She could not get over the loss of Judith Niles. She had never really liked the Director, in the usual meaning of that word, but her respect for JN had been enormous. To see her gone, so suddenly and finally, the dominant force on the Argo — and before that on Gulf City, and long before that on and around Earth — was too much. JN had been changed in a moment, from the living, breathing legend who embodied human endurance and determination, to a dried husk of dead tissue. The body was in cold storage, pending a full autopsy by medical and state-change specialists back on Gulf City. That was almost worse than if she had disappeared entirely.

  It was all too much for Charlene. No matter what JN might have become in a new incarnation, her vanishing from this one was a break with eighty millennia of work together. No one else on board shared that long history, but to Charlene the separation came as a gigantic shock.

  Emil was eager for her company, and he wanted to discuss with her everything that had happened since their progress toward Urstar had been abruptly terminated. But for Charlene, even Emil’s easy company and conversation were too much to take. She fled forward to where the state-change tanks were housed, and placed herself in cold sleep pending the ship’s arrival at Gulf City. As the cold blue mist swirled about her, she was filled with a sense of old loss and new foreboding.

  * * *

  Progress. There had been progress. The return from cold sleep, once a procedure that left the subject shaky and uncertain, had become quick and easy. Charlene opened her eyes in what felt like the middle of a continued thought, and saw Emil staring down at her.

  “Did I? — “ she began.

  “You did. We’re at Gulf City, and it’s not at all the way we expected. Can you walk?”

  “Of course I can.”

  “Then let’s go.” He lifted her effortlessly from the tank and led the way out of the tank room and out of the ship.

  The Argo was sitting in one of Gulf City’s monster docking stations. Charlene and Emil were in N-space, not S-space. She knew that at once, not because they were moving in a field that was a substantial fraction of a gee, but because the robots around them trundled along slowly enough to be visible at all times. “Where are the others?” she asked, meaning the others of the Argo’s crew. Emil misunderstood the question. “I wish I could tell you,” he said. “All we know at the moment is that the whole place seems to be deserted. Abandoned.” Charlene stared at the busy robots. “But there are scores of these, all over the place.”

  “I meant empty of people. We’re scattering through Gulf City, looking for humans, but so far no one has reported finding any. We’re also checking the data banks, to learn what happened here. Come on.”

  Over the centuries and millennia, Gulf City had grown from a docking port and temporary facility to an extended space city. Charlene, carried to any preferred destination by service robots when in S-space, had never had a feeling for Gulf City’s swelling dimensions. Now, walking along corridors and through chambers in N-space, she became aware of the city’s size and complexity. Without the guidance robots, she and Emil would have been helpless. The idea of a systematic search of the whole of Gulf City for possible human presence was unthinkable. “Won’t be necessary,” Emil said in answer to her question. His tone was grim. “We have reason to believe that we will find no other humans anywhere on Gulf City.”

  “Everyone left?”

  “They did; but they also left messages.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Better if you see for yourself, rather than my trying to summarize. We’re there.”

  The robot guide was leading them into a place that seemed oddly familiar. It was the old control center for Gulf City, but a control center that had been modified by the addition of arrays of unfamiliar equipment. Most of the crew of the Argo slumped in chairs around the periphery of the chamber, with expressions ranging from suspicion to despair.

  Four people stood in front of a narrow two-meter-high cylinder with rounded contours, a machine unlike anything that Charlene had ever seen before. The four were members of the Argo’s crew: Sy Day, Gus Eldridge, Eva Packland, and a taciturn technician named Delsy Gretz who was the Argo’s specialist in hardware interfaces. Gretz was holding a small gray handset, and pressing a sequence of points on its surface.

  “There’s the complete set,” he said. “A hundred and seventy-eight of them.” A long list of names, each with stellar coordinates, stood out against the gray surface of the machine. Charlene recognized maybe a dozen of them: Pentecost, Kallen’s World, Wendell, Derville, Marsden, Lysander. The rest were unfamiliar, scattered more widely through the spiral arm than the stars and settled planets that she knew.

  “Colonies of widely varying ages,” Delsy Gretz went on. “All apparently thriving, all working at the same time rate — N-space, no one is using S-space. And all of them apparently in communication with each other. Gulf City receives messages from every world in the galactic web, but it seems to generate none of its own.”

  “I don’t get it,” Gus Eldridge said. “Gulf City is the central hub for development of this spiral arm. Decisions on new colonies, and pacing for use of resources, all come from here.”

  “Not any more.” Sy had been peering at the list of worlds. He moved backward and flopped onto a chair. It was a mark of his unusual emotional condition that the man he sat down next to was Dan Korwin. “Don’t you get it?”

/>   No one spoke, until Charlene — better a fool who would ask questions than one who would hide ignorance — said, “I don’t get anything, Sy, except that Gulf City is nothing like we expected.”

  He nodded. “Right. But not just Gulf City, Charlene — the whole of the spiral arm. When we left on the Argo to travel to Urstar, we all realized we were going off on a long journey. We spent most of the trip out in T-state or cold sleep, so not much subjective time passed for us, but we knew that back here on Gulf City more than seven S-years would flash by while we were on the way there. It would take another S-year for us to return, so far as people here were concerned — our time dilation on the way back because of relativistic effects did not apply to them at all.

  “We knew all this; knew, no matter what happened, that so far as anyone on Gulf City was concerned we might be gone for ten S-years, allowing a reasonable span for us to explore Urstar and try to discover what had happened there. “Our logic seemed impeccable when we left, but there was one huge flaw in it. We assumed that the way to measure time was as intervals in S-space, which is where we and the majority of people on Gulf City were and would be living. “We were wrong. Most of the new colonies are down on planetary surfaces. We have known since S-space was first discovered that even a modest surface gravity makes existence in S-space impossible, because no one would be able to walk or even stand up. They would be flat on the ground before they knew they were off balance.

  “So people living on planets inhabit N-space, because they have no choice. From their point of view, the ship that left for Urstar would not be gone for just ten years or so. The Argo was gone for more than twenty thousand of their years. Long enough for many new planets to be colonized, long enough to establish an interstellar communications web, long enough to discover new branches of science totally unknown to the living fossils — us — aboard the Argo.”