Tau Zero

by Poul Anderson

  She had a respite while she crossed the region of clear space at the center, like passing through the eye of a hurricane. Foxe-Jameson looked into the viewscope at thronged suns — red, white and neutron dwarfs, two- and three-fold older than Sol or its neighbors; others, glimpsed, unlike any ever seen or suspected in the outer galaxy — and came near weeping. “Too bloody awful! The answers to a million questions, right here, and not a single instrument I can use!”

  His shipmates grinned. “Where would you publish?” somebody asked. Renascent hope was often expressing itself in a kind of gallows humor.

  But there was no joking when Boudreau called a conference with Telander and Reymont. That was soon after the ship had emerged from the nebulae on the far side of the nucleus and headed back through the spiral arm whence she came. The scene behind was of a dwindling fireball, ahead of a gathering darkness. Yet the reefs had been run, the Journey to the Virgo galaxies would take only a few more months of human life, the program of research and development on planet-finding techniques had been announced with high optimism. A dance and slightly drunken brawl was held in commons to celebrate. Its laughter, stamping, lilt of Urho Latvala’s accordion drifted faintly down to the bridge.

  “I should perhaps have let you enjoy yourselves like everybody else,” Boudreau said. His skin was shockingly sallow against hair and beard. “But Mohandas Chidambaran gave me the results of his calculations from the latest readings after we emerged from the core. He felt I was best qualified to gauge the practical consequences … as if any rulebook existed for intergalactic navigation! Now he sits alone in his cabin and meditates. Me, when I got over being stunned, I thought I should notify you immediately.”

  Captain Telander’s visage drew tight, readying for a new blow. “What is the result?” he asked.

  “What is the subject?” Reymont added.

  “Matter density in space before us,” Boudreau said. “Within this galaxy, between galaxies, between whole galactic clusters. Given our present tau, the frequency shift of the neutral hydrogen radio emission, the instruments already built by the astronomical team obtain unprecedented accuracy.”

  “What have they learned, then?”

  Boudreau braced himself. “The gas concentration drops off slower than we supposed. With the tau we will probably have by the time we leave the Milky Way galaxy … twenty million light-years out, halfway to the Virgo group … as nearly as can be determined, we will still not dare turn off the force fields.”

  Telander closed his eyes.

  Reymont spoke jerkily: “We’ve discussed that possibility in the past.” The scar stood livid on his brow. “That even between two clusters, we won’t be able to make our repair. It’s part of the reason why Fedoroff and Pereira want to improve the life support systems. You act as if you had a different proposal.”

  “The one we talked about not long ago, you and I,” Boudreau said to the captain.

  Reymont waited.

  Boudreau told him in a voice turned dispassionate: “Astronomers learned centuries’ back, a cluster or family of galaxies like our local group is not the highest form in which stars are organized. These collections of one or two dozen galaxies do, in turn, tend to occur in larger associations. Superfamilies—”

  Reymont made a rusty laugh. “Call them clans,” he suggested.

  “Hein? Why … all right, A clan is composed of several families. Now the average distance between members of a family — individual galaxies within a cluster — is, oh, say a million light-years. The average distance between one family and the next is greater, as you would expect: on the order of fifty million light-years. Our plan was to leave this family and go to the nearest beyond, the Virgo group. Both belong to the same clan.”

  ‘‘Instead, if we’re to have any hope of stopping, we’ll have to leave the entire clan.”

  “Yes, I am afraid so.”

  “How far to the next one?”

  “I can’t say. I didn’t take journals along. They would be a bit obsolete by now, no?”

  “Be careful,” Telander warned.

  Boudreau gulped. “I beg the captain’s pardon. That was a rather dangerous joke.” He went back to lecturing tone: “Chidambaran doesn’t believe anyone was sure. The concentration of galactic clusters drops off sharply at a distance of about sixty million light-years from here. Beyond that, it is a long way to other rich regions. Chidambaran guessed at a hundred million light-years, or somewhat less. Else the hierarchical structure of the universe would have been easier for astronomers to identify than it was.

  “Surely, between clans, space is so close to a perfect vacuum that we won’t need protection.”

  “Can we navigate there?” Reymont snapped. Sweat glistened on Boudreau’s countenance. “You see the hazard,” he said. “We will be bound into the unknown more deeply than we dreamed. Accurate sightings and placements will be unobtainable. We shall need such a tau—”

  “A minute,” Reymont said. “Let me outline the situation in my layman’s language to make sure I understand you.” He paused, rubbing his chin with a sandpapery sound (under the distant music), frowning, until his thoughts were marshalled.

  “We must get … not only into interfamily, but interclan space,” he said. “We must do this in a moderate shipboard time. Therefore we must run tau down to a value of a billionth or less. Can we do it? Evidently, or you wouldn’t talk as you’ve done. I imagine the method is to lay a course within this family that takes us through the nucleus of at least one other galaxy. And then likewise through the next family — be it the Virgo cluster or a different one determined by our new flight pattern — through as many individual galaxies as possible, always accelerating.

  “Once the clan is well behind us, we should be able to make our repair. Afterward we’ll need a similar period of deceleration. And because our tau will be so low, and space so utterly empty, we’ll be unable to steer. Not enough material will be there for the jets to work on, nor enough navigational data to guide us. We’ll have to hope that we pass through another clan.

  “We should do that. Eventually. By sheer statistics. However, we may be out yonder a long while indeed.”

  “Correct,” Telander said. “You do understand.” They had begun to sing upstairs.

  — But me and my true love will never meet again

  On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.

  “Well,” Reymont said, “there doesn’t appear to be any virtue in caution. In fact, for us it’s become a vice.”

  “What do you mean?” Boudreau asked.

  Reymont shrugged. ‘‘We need more than the tau for crossing space to the next clan, a hundred million light-years or however far off it is. We need the tau for a hunt which will take us past any number of them, maybe through billions of light-years, until we find one we can enter. I trust you can plot a course within this first clan that will give us that kind of speed. Don’t worry about possible collisions. We can’t afford worries. Send us through the densest gas and dust you can find.”

  “You … are taking this … rather coolly,” Telander said.

  “What am I supposed to do? Burst into tears?”

  “That is why I thought you should also hear the news first,” Boudreau said. “You can break it to the others.”

  Reymont considered both men for a moment that stretched. “I’m not the captain, you know,” he reminded them.

  Telander’s smile was a spasm. “In certain respects. Constable, you are.”

  Reymont went to the closest instrument panel. He stood before its goblin eyes with head bent and thumbs hooked in belt. “Well,” he mumbled. “If you really want me to take charge.”

  “I think you had better.”

  “Well, in that case. They’re good people. Morale is upward bound again, now that they see some genuine accomplishment of their own. I think they’ll be able to realize, not just intellectually, but emotionally, that there’s no human difference between a million and a billion, or ten billion, lig
ht-years. The exile is the same.”

  “The time involved, though—” Telander said.

  “Yes.” Reymont looked at them again. “I don’t know how much more of our life spans we can devote to this voyage. Not very much. The conditions are too unnatural. Some of us can adapt, but I’ve learned that others can’t. So we absolutely have to push tau down as low as may be, no matter what the dangers. Not simply to make the trip itself short enough for us to endure. But for the psychological need to do our utmost.”

  “How is that?”

  “Don’t you see? It’s our way of fighting back at the universe. Vogue la galère. Go for broke. Full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes. I think, if I can put the matter to our people in those terms, they’ll rally. For a while, anyhow.”

  The wee birdies and the wild flowers spring,

  And in sunshine the waters are sleeping—

  Chapter 16

  The course out of the Milky Way was not straight; it zigzagged a little, as much as several light-centuries, to pass through the densest accessible nebulae and dust banks. Nevertheless, the time aboard was counted in days until she was in the marches of the spiral arm, outward bound into a nearly starless night.

  Johann Freiwald brought Emma Glassgold a piece of equipment he had made to her order. As had been proposed, she was joining forces with Norbert Williams to devise long-range life detectors. The machinist found her trotting about in her laboratory, hands busy, humming to herself. The apparatus and glassware were esoteric, the smells chemically. pungent, the background that endless murmur and quiver which told how the ship plunged forward; and somehow she might have been a new bride making her man a birthday cake.

  “Thank you.” She beamed as she accepted the article.

  “You look happy,” Freiwald said. “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  His arm swept in a violent gesture. “Everything!”

  “Well … a disappointment about the Virgo cluster, naturally. Still, Norbert and I—” She broke off, blushing. “We have a fascinating problem here, a real challenge, and he’s already made a brilliant suggestion about it.” She cocked her head at Freiwald. “I’ve never seen you in this black a mood. What’s become of that cheerful Nietzscheanism of yours?”

  “Today we leave the galaxy,” he said. “Forever.”

  “Why, you knew—”

  “Yes. I also knew, know I must die sometime, and Jane too, which is worse. That does not make it easier.” The big blond man exclaimed suddenly, imploringly: “Do you believe we will ever stop?”

  “I can’t say,” Glassgold answered. She stood on tiptoe to pat his shoulder. “It was not easy to resign myself to the possibility. I did, though, through God’s mercy. Now I can accept whatever comes to us, and feel how good most of it is. Surely you can do the same, Johann.”

  “I try,” he said. “It is so dark out there. I never thought that I, grown up, would again be afraid of the dark.”

  The great whirlpool of suns contracted and paled astern. Another began slowly growing forward. In the viewscope it was a thing of delicate, intricate beauty, jeweled gossamer. Beyond it, around it, more appeared, tiny smudges and points of radiance. Despite the Einsteinian shrinkage of space at Leonora Christine ’s velocity, they showed monstrously remote and isolated.

  That speed continued to mount, not as fast as in the regions left behind — here, the gas concentration was perhaps a hundred thousandth of that near Sol — but sufficiently to bring her to the next galaxy in some weeks of her own time. Accurate observations were not to be had without radical improvements in astronomical technology: a task into which Nilsson and his team cast themselves with the eagerness of escapers.

  Testing a photoconverter unit, he personally made a discovery. A few stars existed out here. He didn’t know whether random perturbations had sent them drifting from their parental galaxies, uncountable billions of years ago, or whether they had actually formed in these deeps, in unknown fashion. By a grotesquely improbable chance, the ship passed near enough to one that he identified it — a dim, ancient red dwarf — and could show that it must have planets, from the glimpse his apparatus got before the system was swallowed anew by distance.

  It was an eerie thought, those icy shadowy worlds, manyfold older than Earth, perhaps one or two with life upon them, and never a star to lighten their nights. When he told Lindgren about it, she said not to pass the information any further.

  Several days later, returning home from work, he opened the door to their cabin and found her present. She didn’t notice him. She was seated on the bed, facing away, her eyes on a picture of her family. The light was turned low, dusking her but falling so coldly on her hair that it looked white. She strummed her lute and sang … to herself? It was not the merriment of her beloved Bellman. The language, in fact, was Danish. After a moment, Nilsson recognized the lyrics, Jacobsen’s Songs of Gurre, and Schцnberg’s melodies for them.

  The call of King Valdemar’s men, raised from their coffins to follow him on the spectral ride that he was condemmed to lead, snarled forth.

  Be greeted. King, here by Gurre Lake!

  Across the island our hunt we take,

  From stringless bow let the arrow fly

  That we have aimed with a sightless eye.

  We chase and strike at the shadow hart,

  And dew like blood from the wound will start.

  Night raven swinging And darkly winging,

  And leafage foaming where hoofs are ringing,

  So shall we hunt ev’ry night, they say,

  Until that hunt on the Judgment Day.

  Holla, horse, and holla, hound,

  Stop awhile upon this ground!

  Here’s the castle which erstwhile was.

  Feed your horses on thistledown;

  Man may eat of his own renown.

  She started to go on with the next stanza, Valdemar’s cry to his lost darling; but she faltered and went directly to his men’s words as dawn breaks over them.

  The cock lifts up his head to crow,

  Has the day within him,

  And morning dew is running red

  With rust, from off our swords.

  Past is the moment!

  Graves are calling with open mouths,

  And earth sucks down ev’ry light-shy horror.

  Sink ye, sink ye! Strong and radiant, life comes forth

  With deeds and hammering pulses.

  And we are death folk,

  Sorrow and death folk,

  Anguish and death folk.

  To graves! To graves! To dream-bewildered sleep —

  Oh, could we but rest peaceful!

  For a little space there was silence. Nilsson said. “That strikes too near home, my dear.”

  She looked about. Weariness had laid a pallor on her face. “I wouldn’t sing it in public,” she answered.

  Concerned, he went to her, sat down by her side and asked: ‘‘Do you really think of us as being on the Wild Hunt of the damned? I never knew.”

  “I try not to let on.” She stared straight before her. Her fingers plucked shivering chords from the lute. “Sometimes — We are now at about the million-year mark, you know.”

  He laid an arm around her waist. “What can I do to help, Ingrid? Anything?”

  She shook her head the least bit.

  “I owe you so much,” he said. “Your strength, your kindness, yourself. You made me back into a man.” With difficulty: “Not the best man alive, I admit. Not handsome or charming or witty. I often forget even to try to be a good partner to you. But I do want to.”

  “Of course, Elof.”

  “If you, well, have grown tired of our arrangment … or simply want more, more variety—”

  “No. None of that.” She put the lute aside. “We have this ship to get to harbor, if ever we can. We dare not let anything else count.”

  He gave her a stricken glance; but before he could inquire just what she meant, she smiled, kissed him, and said: “Sti
ll, we could use a rest. A forgetting. You can do something for me, Elof. Draw our liquor ration. Help yourself to most of it; you’re sweet when you’ve dissolved your shyness. We’ll invite somebody young and ungloomy — Luis, I think, and Maria — and laugh and play games and be foolish in this cabin and empty a pitcher of water over anybody who says anything serious… Will you do that?”

  “That I can,” he said.

  Leonora Christine entered the next galaxy in its equatorial plane, to maximize the distance she would traverse through its wealth of gas and star dust. Already on the fringes, where the suns were as yet widely scattered, she began to bound at high acceleration. The fury of that passage vibrated ever more strongly and noisily through her.

  Captain Telander kept the bridge. Seemingly he had little control. The commitment was made; the spiral arm curved ahead like a road shining blue and silver. Occasional giant stars came sufficiently close to show in the now modified screens, distorted with the speed effects that sent them whirling past as if they were sparks blown by the wind that shouted against the ship. Occasional dense nebulae enclosed her in night or in the fluorescence of hot newbom stellar fires.

  Lenkei and Barrios were the men.who counted then, conning her manually through that fantastic hundred-thousand-year plunge. The displays before them, the intercom voices of Navigator Boudreau explaining what appeared to lie ahead or Engineer Fedoroff warning of undue stresses, gave them some guidance. But the vessel had gotten too swift, too massive for much veering; and under these conditions, once-reliable instruments were turned into Delphic oracles. Mostly the pilots flew on skill and instinct, perhaps on prayer.