Between the Strokes of Night

by Charles Sheffield

  And it wasn’t just the cleaning of the house. Charlene went over to a corner of the nursery, following her nose. No doubt about it, that smell was coming from seven-month-old Sylvia. Sometimes Charlene would do the change herself, but it was getting dark and she wondered what Emil and Damon were doing out there in the cold.

  She told one of the robots to change Sylvia, but not to bathe her. Charlene liked to do that herself. Then she slipped into a thermal shield and headed out into the not-quite-dark.

  Colchis was already below the horizon, so the faint light refracted by the atmosphere of Leemu was barely enough to see anything. She called. “Emil? Damon?”

  “Over here.” They were sitting on a bench down at the end of the garden. Charlene went to them and found they were both staring upward, to where the first stars were appearing.

  Damon’s head, with its dense thatch of black curls, was tilted far back (“That’s what I looked like — once,” Emil would say, every day). “Where is it?” Damon was saying.

  “You can’t see it until later at night, when Leemu has turned farther on its axis. And then you still can’t see it, without a big telescope, because it’s so far away.”

  “But you’ve been there?”

  Emil shook his head. “No, I never have. But your mother has. In fact, she was born on Earth.”

  “Can I go there, Dad?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  Charlene said, “But not tonight. Tonight you have to go inside, and take a bath right now.”

  “Mum, that’s not fair. Dad was explaining things to me. About the stars, and where people live, and what they do.”

  “That’s very good. But all that will still be there tomorrow. Go on.” Charlene spoke firmly. “In right now, the water will be just right.”

  “What about you?”

  “We’ll be in in just a second. Don’t worry, from the look of you there’ll be plenty of dirt left for me to worry about when I’m inside.”

  “It’s not fair.” But seven-year-old Damon picked up the little crab-apply fruit he had pulled earlier and stomped off into the house.

  Charlene sat down in his place, and Emil said, “He wants to go. To the stars. I suppose that it’s inevitable.”

  “I know. The more he learns about where we came from, the more he wants to see it all for himself. Sylvia will be the same. But it won’t be for a long time.” Charlene repeated, with great emphasis, “A long time.”

  “We like to think so. But time is flying by. Do you wish you hadn’t come, and you had stayed in S-space?”

  “Never! This is real human life, the way we were meant to live.”

  “I agree, but the children may not.”

  “Emil, that’s an awful thought.”

  “But a true one. You can almost bet on it. Our children will be like kids everywhere in space and time, whatever their parents did is by definition stupid and old-fashioned. And maybe they are right.” Emil stared up at the sky, where a thousand stars shone clearly now through the frosty air. Charlene was snug in her thermal wrapper, but Emil should have been chilled. He didn’t admit it, of course. As usual he seemed impervious to heat or cold or any physical discomfort.

  “We are all over the sky,” he went on. “It makes you wonder what we are looking for. My guess is that we are all — including the free-space disembodied aliens — seeking the same thing. We want immortality. Either we look for it in person, or through our children, or through works that will live on through time.

  “You know, when I was no more than eleven or twelve years old, I was convinced that it was human destiny to spread wider and wider in space, until one day there would be humans, or the changed descendants of humans, everywhere. But what I never imagined, even in my wildest dreams, was S-space and T-state and cold sleep, and all the other possible ways of changing the rate at which we live. The human diaspora is real, but it is more than I could conceive. It is taking place through time, as well as through space. We, or our children, are going to be present in the farthest depths of space and time. And we won’t just be there. We’ll dance and sing there, even if the singing is done with radio frequency electromagnetic signals, and the dance is a swirl of free electrons.” While he had been speaking, Charlene had sat silent at his side. He turned to her.

  “Well, I guess your notable lack of response is sufficient comment on my ramblings. Or were you miles away, with thoughts of your own?”

  “No. I was listening.”

  That was almost true. Charlene had been aware of every word that Emil said. But as soon as he had spoken of children and immortality, her thoughts had set off on their own flight. Long before them, Wolfgang Gibbs had chosen a Mayfly life on one of the planets and rejected any attempt at personal immortality. What was the name of the place? Kallen’s World.

  Wolfgang was dead now, his life had finished uncounted centuries in the past. Nothing of his mortal remains would survive. They had crumbled to atoms, just as the body of Judith Niles, which Charlene had insisted that they bring with them to Leemu, was crumbling now to quiet dust in the chilly ground of their new world. But Wolfgang’s descendants surely lived on, as presumably JN herself lived on in noncorporeal form. Some day, in a far-off time and place, maybe Charlene’s descendants and Wolfgang’s would meet. They would, of course, know nothing of the long-ago affair of their great-to-the-Nth grandparents. And that was just as it should be. Each generation should make its own loves, establish its own bonds, and know love and life and exultation as if they were newborn that very hour.

  She thought of Wolfgang, but it was not with any sense of regret. Fondness, yes, and more than that, an odd curiosity. Of course, she would never exchange Emil, Damon, and Sylvia for anyone or anything in the known — or unknown — universe. But the curiosity took the form of an unanswerable question: would their children’s children’s children, someday and somewhere, meet?

  It was not a subject she would ever discuss with Emil. He had little or no jealousy in him, but there were some things that you simply did not mention to your lover, husband, and life-companion, no matter what the circumstances. Charlene reached forward and placed her hand on Emil’s head. As she suspected, it was cold, much too cold to be comfortable.

  “Come on, love,” she said. She felt an infinite affection and gratitude for the man next to her. S-state permitted no such intense feelings, nor would it ever. “Come on,” she repeated. “We need to get inside before you freeze. And if you want to see your son do his best to flood the whole house with bath water, we’ll have to hurry.”

  And then, inexplicably — stupidly — she added, “They’ll meet as strangers, of course. And that’s just as it should be.”

  Emil asked, not surprisingly, “Strangers? Who are you talking about?” “The children. If they leave here for the stars, they won’t know anybody.” “Of course they won’t — for the first week or two. But they’re young. They’ll make their own friends soon enough. We did it, didn’t we? And if we did it, then anyone can.”

  Emil linked his arm in hers and led the way back into the house. Even from a distance, Charlene could hear the sounds of a child’s laughter and splashing water.

  EPILOG

  The beginning of time

  I evaluate my chances of personal survival beyond the next few minutes as zero. Also, I will never achieve my original goal of following time all the way to its end. In a universe of infinite expansion, that is of necessity impossible. However, I am not disappointed. What I am doing is far more interesting. This group of Kermel Objects, baffling to me as to their basic nature and goals, has over the past four thousand T-state years (eight billion years, in old time measure), significantly altered its behavior patterns. The Kermel Objects used to be loners, sitting far removed from each other in interstellar — more accurately, inter-galactic — space. Now some of them are clustering, forming a tight little group within which I have carefully sited myself at the exact center of mass. More Kermel Objects join us, and as they do the
local matter-energy density steadily rises. As it does so, local spacetime curvature increases.

  It is not difficult to project an end point, or to conjecture what is happening here. The Kermel Objects are breeding; however, unlike all other forms of life (and intelligence?) they propagate in a unique way. Massless themselves, they somehow increase the local matter density until spacetime curvature exceeds a critical mass. At that point, the cluster of Kermel Objects will pinch off from the rest of the universe. They will create, in fact, a new (and empty?) universe in which they can multiply and prosper.

  And now for the big question: what would happen to a human who remained at the center of the cluster, as the curvature rose and rose to its critical value? Would the human survive and be “carried through,” to emerge in that new time and space created by the Kermel Objects?

  I am going to find out, and very soon. As the Kermel group clusters tighter, the rate of curvature increase grows exponentially. I am not sure how to relate time within the cluster to external time, but that makes little difference since only local time — time as I perceive it — has meaning for me.

  On that scale, we are close indeed.

  Four minutes. Four minutes remain, until the critical mass-energy density is passed and this region pinches off from the rest of spacetime. And then? If I knew the answer to that question, eight billion years of waiting could have been avoided.

  The Kermel Objects are all around me, and they are crowding in. They are also changing in appearance. There is a pulsation at their centers, like a slow, strengthening heartbeat. They are finally silent, with their low frequency transmissions subsided to nothing, but that does not mean there is no communication among them. They are throwing out connecting filaments, long tendrils that join them and gradually grow thicker. I can see stars and galaxies beyond, but darkened and distorted.

  Three minutes. The fainter galaxies are gone. The brightest and closest ones are fading, blocked out. I feel no discomfort, no twisting or tearing pressure on my body. The forces not far from my body must be enormous, as the Kermel Objects prepare to tear the fabric of spacetime itself, but I sit comfortably at the eye of the hurricane.

  Two minutes. The tendrils are everywhere, a black mesh around me which admits little external light. All the Kermel Objects have merged, to become one. I am cocooned at its center, swaddled, a chrysalis cut off from the cosmos and ready to be reborn.

  One minute. I evaluate my condition. Physically, I am not sure that I exist at all in the universe of my birth. Mentally, I remain calm. When you have pursued an objective for so long, it would be foolish to complain when you are so close to achieving it.

  I cannot help wondering what the tightening cluster of Kermel Objects looks like from outside, in free space. This event — this vanishing, this breeding, this birth — may have happened long before we or our kind were there to observe it. I wonder, was our universe, the universe inhabited by humans, itself created from a confluence of Kermel Objects? Has this happened in the past, not once but many times?

  We are close to the end now — mere seconds on my subjective clock.

  All outside light has gone. The cocoon is closed. What happens next will be simple, and very sudden.

  The curvature of the region that I occupy will exceed critical value. A new, self-contained region of spacetime will be formed. Its matter content, converted to raw energy, will be that contained within the volume bounded by the contracting Kermel Objects.

  And I? It seems to me that I represent that matter content, in its totality. I, Sly Day, will cease to exist in my present form. I will become a universe. Let there be light?

  Framed

  AFTERWORD

  Many works of fiction grow from a single incident or idea. This was certainly true of Between the Strokes of Night, and the incident was specific and quite mundane.

  I needed to develop an algorithm for certain work in image processing; and once the mathematics was complete, I had to test the idea on real data. That called for development of a simple computer program. I consider myself a miserably bad computer programmer, but since it would have taken longer to tell someone else what needed to be done than to do it myself, I decided to write the program. I sat down at eight o’clock one October morning, and worked for what I felt sure was no more than an hour. When I looked at the clock, it was past two-thirty. Absorbed in what I was doing, I had “lost” more than five hours.

  Later that day, I found myself thinking about time — specifically, about the difference between subjective and objective time. Ever since the seventeenth century, when Newton introduced into science the notion of absolute time, this concept has dominated our thoughts. Even though Einstein showed that the rate of passage of time depends on the observer, for most of us an hour is an hour, a well-defined quantity that is the same for everyone. We set our watches at nine in the morning, and agree that we will meet at one for lunch. And sure enough, when we meet we agree that four hours have passed.

  But those four hours subjectively may be vastly different. For one of us, waiting for the results of a medical test, a morning may seem eternal. For another, spending time with a lover who has to leave that afternoon, the hours fly past. For a third person, who has slept all morning, the four hours simply did not exist.

  There may be an objective time in the universe, but to human beings that is irrelevant. All that counts is the way that we perceive time. And everyone may perceive time at a different rate. One commonly accepted idea is that time passes more quickly for the old than for the young. An hour to a five-year-old is a long time, a week is beyond comprehension. To an old person, an hour is nothing. As a friend of mine in his eighties said to me, “These days it seems like it’s breakfast every fifteen minutes.”

  The rate at which time passes can be different for different people. Suppose that it could be greatly different — by a factor of thousands or millions. One person’s second could be another person’s whole day. Years would flash past for me while you were eating lunch.

  And suppose that those different subjective rates could be scientifically controlled.

  That thought lies at the heart of Between the Strokes of Night, and it formed the original idea for the book. Of course, an idea is not a plot, and in the course of developing that plot I began to read more about time, in both science and literature. It did not take me long to confirm that time is one of humanity’s great obsessions. Our everyday speech and our poetry is full of phrases that express on the one hand time’s immutable nature, and on the other hand our wishful thinking that we could somehow control the passage of time: “Time is money.”

  “O, call back yesterday, bid time return.”

  “Tempus fugit.” — Time flies.

  “But at my back I always hear, Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” “The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on.”

  “We’ll make up for lost time.”

  “Time and tide wait for no man.”

  “Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make perpetual day, or let this hour be but a year, a month, a week, a natural day…”

  “But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool, and time, that takes survey of all the world, must have a stop.”

  These examples can be multiplied, in the great works of every language and in every era. Time and mortality go hand in hand, and we cannot think of one without being aware of the other.

  Will this book survive, long enough to be read when time has no meaning for me personally? When I wrote it I would have said no, but here we are with a new edition seventeen years after the first one.

  In any case, we live in the present, and really only in the present. I hope that Between the Strokes of Night is exciting to read now, because it was great fun to write. The objective control of subjective time provides enormous scope to a science fiction author. How often can a book begin near to the present day, and range on through the farthest reaches of time and space — and keep the same characters througho
ut?

  — Charles Sheffield

  2002

  THE END

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