Tau Zero

by Poul Anderson

  “Not a bad idea,” Reymont said. “But I don’t think that’s the sole thing we should do. We should keep flying also. Let me tell you what I told the original discussion group. Nobody disputed it.

  “The fact is, nobody knows for sure what’s going to happen. My guess is that everything will not get squeezed into a single zero-point Something. That’s the kind of oversimplification which helps our math along but never does tell a whole story. I think the central core of mass is bound to have an enormous hydrogen envelope, even before the explosion. The outer parts of that envelope may not be too hot or radiant or dense for us. Space will be small enough, though, that we can circle around and around the monobloc as a kind of satellite. When it blows up and space starts to expand again, we’ll spiral out ourselves. I know this is a sloppy way of phrasing, but it hints at what we can perhaps do… Norbert?”

  “I never thought of myself as a religious man,” Williams said. It was odd and disturbing to see him humbled. “But this is too much. We’re — well, what are we? Animals. My God — very literally, my God — we can’t go on … having regular bowel movements … while creation happens!”

  Beside him, Emma Glassgold looked startled, then determined. Her hand shot aloft. Reymont recognized her.

  “Speaking as a believer myself,” she announced, “I must say that that is sheer nonsense. I’m sorry, Norbert, dear, but it is. God made us the way He wanted us to be. There’s nothing shameful about any part of His handiwork. I would like to watch Him fashion new stars, and praise Him, as long as He sees fit that I should.”

  “Good for you!” Ingrid Lindgren called.

  “I might add,” Reymont said, “I being a man with no poetry in his soul, and I suspect no soul to keep the poetry in … I might suggest you people look into yourselves and ask what psychological twists make you unwilling to live through the moment when time begins over. Isn’t there, down inside, some identification with — your parents, maybe? You shouldn’t see your parents in bed, therefore you shouldn’t see a new cosmos begotten. Now that doesn’t make sense.” He drew breath. “We can’t deny what’s about to happen is awesome. But so is everything else. Always. I never thought stars were more mysterious, or had more magic, than flowers.”

  Others wanted to talk. Eventually everyone did. Their sentences threshed wearily around and around the point. It was not to no purpose. They had to unburden themselves. But by the time they could finally adjourn the meeting, after a unanimous vote to proceed, Reymont and Lindgren were near a collapse of their own.

  They did seize a moment’s low-speaking privacy, as the people broke into groups and the ship roared with the hollow noise of her passage. She took both his hands and said: “How I want to be your woman again.”

  He stammered in gladness, “Tomorrow? We, we’d have to move personal gear … and explain to our partners… Tomorrow, my Ingrid?”

  “No,” she answered. “You didn’t let me finish. All of me wants to, but I can’t.”

  Stricken, he asked, “Why?”

  “We mustn’t risk it. The emotional balance is too fragile. Anything might let hell loose in any one of us. Elof and Ai-Ling would take it hard that we left — when death is this near.”

  “She and he could—” Reymont chopped off in mid-word. “No. He could. She would. But no.”

  “You wouldn’t be the man I lie awake nights wishing for, if you could ask that of her. She never let you talk about those hours she gave us, did she?”

  “No. How did you guess?”

  “I didn’t guess. I know her. And I won’t have her do it again for us, Carl. Once was right. It won us back what we’d built together. Oftener, by stealth, is not any way to treat that thing.” Lindgren’s speech stiffened into practicalities. “Besides, Elof. He needs me. He blames himself, his advice, for letting us run the ship too long — as if any mortal man could have known! If he should learn that I — The desperation, maybe the suicide of a single individual could bring the whole crew down in hysteria.”

  She straightened, faced him squarely, smiled, and said, her tone soft again: “Afterward, yes. When we are safe. I’ll never let you go then.”

  “We may never be safe,” he protested. “Chances are we won’t. I want you back before I die.”

  “And I you. But we can’t. We mustn’t. They depend on you. Absolutely. You’re the only man who can lead us through what lies ahead. You’ve given me courage till I can help you a little. Nevertheless … Carl, it was never easy to be a king.”

  She wheeled and walked from him.

  He stood for a space, alone. Somebody approached the stage with a question. He waved the somebody aside. “Tomorrow,” he said. Springing to the deck, he made his way to Chi-Yuen, who awaited him at the door.

  She told him in an almost matter-of-fact voice: “If we die with the last stars, Charles, I will still have had more from my life than I ever hoped, knowing you. What can I do for you?”

  He regarded her. The ship’s wild singing closed them off from the rest of humanity. “Come back to our cabin with me,” he said.

  “Nothing else?”

  “No, except to be what you are.” He ran fingers through his gray-shot hair. Awkward and puzzled, he said: “I can’t make fine phrases, Ai-Ling, and I’m not experienced in fine emotions. Tell me, is it possible to love two different people at once?”

  She embraced him. “Of course it is, silly.” Her answer was muffled by his flesh and less steady than before. But when she took his arm and they started for their quarters, she was smiling.

  “Do you know,” she added at length, “I wonder if the biggest surprise in these next months isn’t how stubbornly ordinary life will keep on being.”

  Chapter 21

  Margarita’s daughter was born in the night. No suns remained visible. The ship rolled through gales and thunder. While the birth took place, the father was bossing a work gang, and straining his own muscles, to further strengthen the hull. The baby’s first cry responded to the noise of inward-falling worlds.

  Things quieted down for a time afterward. The scientists had observed and computed until they understood something about those strange forces galloping through the light-years. Reprogrammed, the robots got the ship to sailing with the winds and vortices more often than across them.

  Not everyone was in the mood to celebrate with a party, but those were whom Johann Freiwald and Jane Sadler invited. By dimming lights, she reduced the corner of the gym which they used to a room small and warm. This brought into vivid relief the Halloween ornaments she had hung up.

  “Is that wise?” Reymont asked when he arrived with Chi-Yuen.

  “We’re not far off from the date by the calendar,” Sadler replied. “Why not combine the occasions? Me, I think the jack o’ lanterns add a touch of color we sure can use.”

  “They might be too reminding. Not of Earth, maybe — I suppose we’re getting over that — but of, uh—”

  “Yeh, it crossed my mind. A shipful of witches, devils, vampires, goblins, bogles, and spooks, screaming their way down the sky toward the Black Sabbath. Well, aren’t we?” Sadler grinned and snuggled close to Freiwald. He laughed and hugged her. “I feel exactly like doing that kind of nose thumbing.”

  The rest agreed. They drank more than they were used to and got rowdy. At last they enthroned Boris Fedoroff on the stage, with a garland and a lei and two girls to wait on his every wish. Several other folk stood in a ring, arms linked, bawling out a song that had been ancient when the vessel left home.

  It makes no diff’rence where I end up when I die.

  It makes no diff’rence where I end up when I die.

  Up to heaven or down to hell come,

  I’ve got friends who’ll make me welcome.

  It makes no diff’rence where I end up when I die.

  Michael O’Donnell, entering late after his watch ended — there were live stand-bys at every stress point, these days — pushed through the crowd. “Hey, Boris!” he called. The racket drow
ned him out.

  —Oh, you’ve got no use for money when you die.

  For St. Peter wants no ticket

  When you stand at heaven’s wicket.

  Oh, you’ve got no use for money when you die.

  He reached the stage. “Hey, Boris! Congratulations!”

  You shall have my old bicycle when I die.

  You shall have—

  “Thank you,” Fedoroff boomed. “Mainly Margarita’s work. She runs quite a shipyard, no?”

  For the final kilometer

  Goes on tandem with St. Peter.—

  “What will you name the kid?” O’Donnell asked.

  I’ll shoot craps with old St. Peter when I die.—

  “Haven’t decided yet,” Fedoroff said. He waved a bottle. “I can tell you, though, it won’t be Eve.”

  If I shoot as I’ve shot here—

  “Embala?” Ingrid Lindgren suggested. “The first woman in the Eddie story.”

  I can take him for a beer.

  “Not that either,” Fedoroff said.

  I’ll shoot craps with old St. Peter when I die.

  “Nor Leonora Christine,” the engineer went on. “She’s not going to be any damned symbol. She’s going to be herself.”

  The singers began dancing in a circle.

  It’s not certain we’ll get liquor when we die.

  It’s not certain we’ll get liquor when we die.

  Let us then drink hell for leather

  Now tonight when we’re together.

  It’s not certain we’ll get liquor when we die.

  Chidambaran and Foxe-Jameson seemed dwarfed by the sprawling masses of the observatory apparatus, and artless amidst its meters and controls and flickering indicator lights, and loud and clumsy in the humming stillness that pervaded this deck. They rose when Captain Telander appeared.

  “You asked me to come?” he said pointlessly. His wasted features set. “What news? We’ve had calm this past month…”

  “That won’t last.” Foxe-Jameson spoke half in exultation. “Elof’s gone in person to fetch Ingrid. We couldn’t do that for you, sir. The image is still very faint, might get lost if we don’t ride herd. You should be the first to know.” He returned to his chair before an electronic console. A screen above it showed darkness.

  Telander shuffled close. “What have you found?”

  Chidambaran took him by the elbow and pointed at the screen. “There. Do you see?”

  On the edge of perception gleamed the dimmest and tiniest of sparks.

  “A good ways off, naturally,” Foxe-Jameson said into the silence. “We’ll want to maintain a most respectful distance.”

  “What is it?” Telander quavered.

  “The germ of the monobloc,” Dhidambaran answered. “The new beginning.”

  Telander stood long and long, staring, before he went to his knees. The tears ran quietly down his face. “Father, I thank Thee,” he said.

  Rising: “And I thank you, gentlemen. Whatever happens next … we have come this far, we have done this much. I think I can carry on again … after what you have just shown me.”

  When he finally left to return to the bridge, he walked with the stride of a commander.

  Leonora Christine shouted, shuddered, and leaped.

  Space flamed around her, a firestorm, hydrogen aglow from that supernal sun which was forming at the heart of existence, which burned brighter and brighter as the galaxies rained down into it. The gas hid the central travail behind sheets, banners, and spears of radiance, aurora, flame, lightning. Forces, immeasurably vast, tore through and through the atmosphere: electric, magnetic, gravitational, nuclear fields; shock waves bursting across megaparsecs; tides and currents and cataracts. On the fringes of creation, through billion-year cycles which passed as moments, the ship of man flew.

  Flew.

  There was no other word. As far as humanity was concerned, or the most swiftly computing and reacting of machines, she fought a hurricane — but such a hurricane as had not been known since last the stars were melted together and hammered afresh.

  “Ya-a-ah-h-h!” screamed Lenkei, and rode the ship down the trough of a wave whose crest shook loose a foam of supemovae. The haggard men on the steering bridge with him stared into the screen that had been built for this hour. What raged in it was not reality — present reality transcended any picturing or understanding — but a display of exterior force fields. It burned and roiled and spewed great sparks and globes. It bellowed in the metal of the ship, in flesh and skulls.

  “Can’t you stand any more?” Reymont shouted from his own seat. “Barrios, relieve him.”

  The other jet man shook his head. He was too stunned, too beaten from his previous watch.

  “Okay.” Reymont unharnessed himself. “I’ll try. I’ve handled a lot of different types of craft.” No one heard him through the fury around, but all saw him fight across the pitching, whirling deck. He took the auxiliary control chair, on the opposite side of Lenkei from Barrios, and laid his mouth close to the pilot’s ear. “Phase me in.”

  Lenkei nodded. Together their hands moved across the board.

  They must hold Leonora Christine well away from the growing monobloc, whose radiation would otherwise surely kill them; at the same time, they must stay where the gas was so dense that tau could continue to decrease for them, turning these final phoenix gigayears into hours; and they must keep the ship riding safely through a chaos that, did it ever strike her full on, would rip her into nuclear particles. No computers, no instruments, no precedents might guide them, It must be done on instinct and trained reflex.

  Gradually Reymont entered the pattern, until he could steer alone. The rhthms of rebirth were wild, but they were there. Ease on starboard … vector at nine o’clock low … now push that thrust! … brake a little here … don’t let her broach … swing wide of that flame cloud if you can… Thunder brawled. The air was sharp with ozone, and cold.

  The screen blanked. An instant later, every fluoropanel in the ship turned simultaneously ultraviolet and infrared, and blackness plunged down. Those who lay harnessed alone, throughout the hull, heard invisible lightnings walk the corridors. Those in command bridge, pilot bridge, engine room, who manned the ship, felt a heaviness greater than planets — they could not move, nor stop a movement once begun — and then felt a lightness such that their bodies began to shake asunder — and this was a change in inertia itself, in every constant of nature as space-time-matter-energy underwent its ultimate convulsion — for a moment infinitesimal and infinite, men, women, child, ship, and death were one.

  It passed, so swiftly that they could not tell if it had been. Light came back, and outside vision. The storm grew fiercer. But now through it, seen distorted so that they flew, fountaining off in two huge curving sheets, now came the nascent galaxies.

  The monobloc had exploded. Creation had begun. Reymont went over to full deceleration. Leonora Christine started slowly to slow; and she flew out into a reborn light.

  Chapter 22

  Boudreau and Nilsson nodded at each other. They grinned. “Yes, indeed,” the astronomer said.

  Reymont looked restlessly around the observatory. “Yes, what?” he demanded. He jerked one thumb at a visual screen. Space swarmed with little dancing incandescences. “I can see for myself. The galactic groups are still close together. Most of them are still nothing but hydrogen nebulae. And hydrogen atoms are still thick between them, comparatively speaking. What of it?”

  “Computation on the basis of data,” Boudreau said. “I have been consulting with the team leaders here. We felt you deserved as well as needed to hear in confidence what we have learned, so that you might make the decision.”

  Reymont stiffened. “Lars Telander is the captain.”

  “Yes, yes. Nobody wants to go behind his back, especially when he is once more doing a superb job with the ship. The folk within the ship, though, they are another matter. Be realistic, Charles. You know what you are to them.”<
br />
  Reymont folded his arms. “Well, proceed, then.”

  Nilsson went into lecture gear. “Never mind details,” he said. “This result came out of the problem you set us, to find in which directions the matter was headed, and which the antimatter. You recall, we were able to do this by tracing the paths of plasma masses through the magnetic fields of the universe as a whole while its radius was small. And thereby the officers were enabled to bring this vessel safely into the matter half of the plenum.

  “Now in the course of making those studies, we collected and processed an astonishing amount of data. And here is what else we have come up with. The cosmos is new and in some respects disordered. Things have not yet sorted themselves out. Within a short range of us, compared to distances we have already traversed, are material complexes — galaxies and protogalaxies — with every possible velocity.

  “We can use that fact to our advantage. That is, we can pick the clan, family, cluster, and individual galaxy we want to make our destination — pick one at which we can arrive with zero relative speed at any point of its evolution that we choose. Within fairly wide limits, anyhow. We couldn’t get to a galaxy which is more than about fifteen billion years old by the time we reach it: not unless we wanted to approach it circuitously. Nor can we overtake any before it is about one billion years old. But otherwise we can choose what we like.

  “And … whatever we elect, the maximum shipboard time required to come there, braked, will be no longer than weeks!”

  Reymont said an amazed obscenity.

  “You see,” Nilsson explained, “we can select a target whose velocity will be almost identical with ours when we fetch it.”