“Yes. I hope, though, if we succeed, that won’t be the last I see of you.”
“Truly it won’t.”
They finished their drinks and went to dinner. Jaccavrie was also an excellent cook. And the choice of wines was considerable. What was said and laughed at over the table had no relevance to anyone but Laure and Graydal.
Except that, at the end, with immense and tender seriousness, she said: “If you want a cell sample from—me… for analysis… you may have it.”
He reached across the table and took her hand. “I wouldn’t want you to do anything you might regret later,” he said.
She shook her head. The tawny eyes never left him. Her voice was slow, faintly slurred, but bespoke complete awareness of what she was saying. “I have come to know you. For you to do this thing will be no violation.”
Laure explained eagerly: “The process is simple and painless, as far as you’re concerned. We can go right down to the lab. The computer operates everything. It’ll give you an anesthetic spray and remove a small sample of flesh, so small that tomorrow you won’t be sure where the spot was, Of course, the analysis will take a long while. We don’t have all possible equipment aboard. And the computer does have to devote most of her—most of its attention to piloting and interior work. But at the end, we’ll be able to tell you—”
“Hush.” Her smile was sleepy. “No matter. If you wish this, that’s enough. I ask only one thing.”
“What?”
“Do not let a machine use the knife, or the needle, or whatever it is. I want you to do that yourself.”
“…Yes. Yonder is our home sky.” The physicist Him Oran’s son spoke slow and hushed. Cosmic interference seethed across his radio voice, nigh drowning it in Laure’s and Graydal’s earplugs.
“No,” the Ranger said. “Not off there. We’re already in it.”
“What?” Silvery against rock, the two space-armored figures turned to stare at him. He could not see their expressions behind the faceplates, but he could imagine how astonishment flickered above awe.
He paused, arranging words in his mind. The star noise in his receivers was like surf and fire. The landscape overwhelmed him.
Here was no simple airless planet. No planet is ever really simple, and this one had a stranger history than most. Eons ago it was apparently a subjovian, with a cloudy hydrohelium and methane atmosphere and an immense shell of ice and frozen gases around the core; for it orbited its sun at a distance of almost a billion and a half kilometers, and though that primary was bright, at this remove it could be little more than a spark.
Until stellar evolution—hastened, Laure believed, by an abnormal infall of cosmic material—took the star off the main sequence. It swelled, surface cooling to red but total output growing so monstrous that the inner planets were consumed. On the farther ones, like this, atmosphere fled into space. Ice melted; the world-ocean boiled; each time the pulsations of the sun reached a maximum, more vapor escaped. Now nothing remained except a ball of metal and rock, hardly larger than a terrestrial-type globe. As the pressure of the top layers were removed, frightful tectonic forces must have been liberated. Mountains—the younger ones with crags like sharp teeth, the older ones worn by meteorite and thermal erosion—rose from a cratered plain of gloomy stone. Currently at a minimum, but nonetheless immense, a full seven degrees across, blue core surrounded and dimmed by the tenuous ruddy atmosphere, the sun smoldered aloft.
Its furnace light was not the sole illumination. Another star was passing sufficiently near at the time that it showed a perceptible disk… in a stopped-down viewscreen, because no human eye could directly confront that electric cerulean intensity. The outsider was a Be newborn out of dust and gas, blazing with an intrinsic radiance of a hundred Sols.
Neither one helped in the shadows cast by the pin-meted upthrust which Laure’s party was investigating. Flashcasters were necessary.
But more was to see overhead, astride the dark. Stars in thousands powdered the sky, brilliant with proximity. And they were the mere fringes of the cluster. It was rising as the planet turned, partly backgrounding and partly following the sun. Laure had never met a sight to compare. For the most part, the individuals he could pick out in that enormous spheroidal cloud of light were themselves red: long-lived dwarfs, dying-giants like the one that brooded over him. But many glistened exuberant golden, emerald, sapphire. Some could not be older than the blue which wandered past and added its own harsh hue to this land. All those stars were studded through a soft glow that pervaded the entire cluster, a nacreous luminosity into which they faded and vanished, the fog wherein his companions had lost their home but which was a shining beauty to behold.
“You live in a wonder,” Laure said.
Graydal moved toward him. She had had no logical reason to come down out of Makes orbit with him and Hini. The idea was simply to break out certain large ground-based instruments that Jaccavrie carried, for study of their goal before traveling on. Any third party could assist. But she had laid her claim first, and none of her shipmates argued. They knew how often she and Laure were in each other’s company.
“Wait until you reach our world,” she said low. “Space is eldritch and dangerous. But once on Kirkasant—we will watch the sun go down in the Rainbow Desert; suddenly, in that thin air, night has come, our shimmering star-crowded night, and the auroras dance and whisper above the stark hills. We will see great flying flocks rise from dawn mists over the salt marshes, hear their wings thunder and their voices flute. We will stand on the battlements of Ey, under the banners of those verylcnights who long ago rid the land of the firearms, and watch the folk dance welcome to a new year—”
“If the navigator pleases,” said Hirn, his voice sharpened by an unadmitted dauntedness, “we will save our dreams for later and attend now to the means of realizing them. At present, we are supposed to choose a good level site for the observing apparatus. But, ah, Ranger Laure, may I ask what you meant by saying we are already back in the Cloud Universe?”
Laure was not as annoyed to have Graydal interrupted as he might normally have been. She’d spoken of Kirkasant so often that he felt he had almost been there himself. Doubtless it had its glories, but by his standards it was a grim, dry, storm-scoured planet where he would not care to stay for long at a time. Of course, to her it was beloved home; and he wouldn’t mind making occasional visits if—No, chaos take it, there was work on hand!
Part of his job was to make explanations. He said: “In your sense of the term, Physicist Hirn, the Cloud Universe does not exist.”
The reply was curt through the static. “I disputed that point on Serieve already, with Vandange and others. And I resented their implication that we of Makt were either liars or incompetent observers.”
“You’re neither,” Laure said quickly. “But communications had a double barrier on Serieve. First, an imperfect command of your language. Only on the way here, spending most of my time in contact with your crew, have I myself begun to feel a real mastery of Hobrokan. The second barrier, though, was in some ways more serious: Vandange’s stubborn preconceptions, and your own.”
“I was willing to be convinced.”
“But you never got a convincing argument. Vandange was so dogmatically certain that what you reported having seen was impossible, that he didn’t take a serious look at your report to see if it might have an orthodox explanation after all. You naturally got angry at this and cut the discussions off short. For your part, you had what you had always been taught was a perfectly good theory, which your experiences had confirmed. You weren’t going to change your whole concept of physics just because the unlovable Ozer Vandange scoffed at it.”
“But we were mistaken,” Graydal said. “You’ve intimated as much, Daven, but never made your meaning clear.”
“I wanted to see the actual phenomenon for myself, first,” Laure said. “We have a proverb—so old that it’s reputed to have originated on Earth—‘It is a capital mistake to t
heorize in advance of the data.’ But I couldn’t help speculating, and what I see shows my speculations were along the right lines.”
“Well?” Him challenged.
“Let’s start with looking at the situation from your viewpoint,” Laure suggested. “Your people spent millennia on Kirkasant. You lost every hint, except a few ambiguous traditions, that things might be different elsewhere. To you, it was natural that the night sky should be like a gently shining mist, and stars should crowd thickly around. When you developed the scientific method again, not many generations back, perforce you studied the universe you knew. Ordinary physics and chemistry, even atomistics and quantum theory, gave you no special problems. But you measured the distances of the visible stars as light-months—at most, a few light-years—after which they vanished in the foggy background. You measured the concentration of that fog, that dust and fluorescing gas. And you had no reason to suppose the interstellar medium was not equally dense everywhere. Nor had you any hint of receding galaxies.
“So your version of relativity made space sharply curved by the mass packed together throughout it. The entire universe was two or three hundred light-years across. Stars condensed and evolved—you could witness every stage of that—but in a chaotic fashion, with no particular overall structure. It’s a wonder to’ me that you went on to gravities and hyperdrive. I wish I were scientist enough to appreciate how different some of the laws and constants must be in your physics. But you did plow ahead. I guess the fact you knew these things were possible was important to your success. Your scientists would keep fudging and finagling, in defiance of theoretical niceties, until they made something work.”
“Urn-m-m… as a matter of fact, yes,” Him said in a slightly abashed tone. Graydal snickered.
“Well, then Makt lost her way, and emerged into the outer universe, which was totally strange,” Laure said. “You had to account somehow for what you saw. Like any scientists, you stayed with accepted ideas as long as feasible—a perfectly correct principle which my people call the razor of Occam. I imagine that the notion of contiguous space-times with varying properties looks quite logical if you’re used to thinking of a universe with an extremely small radius. You may have been puzzled as to how you managed to get out of one ‘bubble’ and into the next, but I daresay you cobbled together a tentative explanation.”
“I did,” Him said. “If we postulate a multidimensional—”
“Never mind,” Laure said. “That’s no longer needful. We can account for the facts much more simply.”
“How? I have been pondering it. I think I can grasp the idea of a universe billions of light-years across, in ,which the stars form galaxies. But our home space—”
“Is a dense star cluster. And as such, it has no definite boundaries. That’s what I meant by saying we are already in it. In the thin verge, at least.” Laure pointed to the diffuse, jeweled magnificence that was rising higher above these wastes, in the wake of the red and blue suns. “Yonder’s the main body, and Kirkasant is somewhere there. But this system here is associated, I’ve checked proper motions and I know.”
“I could have accepted some such picture while on Serieve,” Hirn said. “But Vandange was so insistent that a star cluster like this cannot be.” Laure visualized the sneer behind hi!; faceplate. “I thought that he, belonging to the master civilization, would know whereof he spoke.”
“He does. He’s merely rather unimaginative,” Laure said. “You see, what we have here is a globular cluster. That’s a group made up of stars close together in a roughly spherical volume of space. I’d guess you have a quarter million, packed into a couple of hundred light-years’ diameter.
“But globular clusters haven’t been known like this one. The ones we do know lie mostly well off the galactic plane. The space within them is much clearer than in the spiral arms, almost a perfect vacuum. The individual members are red. Any normal stars of greater than minimal mass have gone off the main sequence long ago. The survivors are metal-poor. That’s another sign of extreme age. Heavy elements are formed in stellar cores, you know, and spewed back into space. So it’s the younger suns, coalescing out of the enriched interstellar medium, that contain a lot of metal. All in all, everything points to the globular clusters being relics of an embryo stage in the galaxy’s life.
“Yours, however—! Dust and gas so thick that not. even a giant can be seen across many parsecs. Plenty of mainsequence stars, including blues which cannot be more than a few million years old, they burn out so fast. Spectra, not to mention planets your explorers visited, showing atomic abundances far skewed toward the high end of the periodic table. A background radiation too powerful for a man like me to dare take up permanent residence in your country.
“Such a cluster shouldn’t be!”
“But it is,” Graydal said.
Laure made bold to squeeze her hand, though little of that could pass through the gauntlets. “I’m glad,” he answered.
“How do you explain the phenomenon?” Hirn asked.
“Oh, that’s obvious… now that I’ve seen the thing and gathered some information on its path,” Laure said. “An improbable situation, maybe unique, but not impossible. This cluster happens to have an extremely eccentric orbit around the galactic center of mass. Once or twice a gigayear, it passes through the vast thick clouds that surround that region. By gravitation, it sweeps up immense quantities of stuff. Meanwhile, I suppose, perturbation causes some of its senior members to drift off. You might say it’s periodically rejuvenated.
“At present, it’s on its way_out again. Hasn’t quite left our spiral arm. It passed near the galactic midpoint just a short while back, cosmically speaking; I’d estimate less than fifty million years. The infall is still turbulent, still condensing out into new stars like that blue giant shining on us. Your home sun and its planets must be a product of an earlier sweep. But there’ve been twenty or thirty such since the galaxy formed, and each one of them was responsible for several generations of giant stars. So Kirkasant has a lot more heavy elements than the normal planet, even though it’s not much_younger than Earth. Do you follow me?”
“Hm-m-m… perhaps. I shall have to think.” Hirn walked off, across the great tilted block on which the party stood, to its edge, where he stopped and looked down into the shadows below. They were deep and knife sharp. The mingled light of red and blue suns, stars, starfog played eerie across the stone land. Laure grew aware of what strangeness and what silence—under the hiss in his ears—pressed in on him.
Graydal must have felt the same, for she edged close until their armors clinked together. He would have liked to see her face. She said: “Do you truly believe we can enter that realm and conquer it?”
“I don’t know,” he said, slow and blunt. “The sheer number,of stars may beat us.”
“A large enough fleet could search them, one by one.”
“If it could navigate. We have yet to find out whether that’s possible.”
“Suppose. Did you guess a quarter million suns in the cluster? Not all are like ours. Not even a majority. On the other coin side, with visibility as low as it is, space must be searched back and forth, light-year by light-year. We of Makt could die of eld before a single vessel chanced on Kirkasant.”
“I’m afraid that’s true.”
“Yet an adequate number of ships, dividing the task, could find our home in a year or two.”
“That would be unattainably expensive, Graydal.”
He thought he sensed her stiffening. “I’ve come on this before,” she said coldly, withdrawing from his touch. “In your Commonalty they count the cost and the profit first. Honor, adventure, simple charity must run a poor second.”
“Be reasonable,” he said. “Cost represents labor, skill, and resources. The gigantic fleet that would go looking for Kirkasant must be diverted from other jobs. Other people would suffer need as a result. Some might suffer sharply.”
“Do you mean a civilization as big, as produ
ctive as yours could not spare that much effort for a while without risking disaster?”
She’s quick on the uptake, Laure thought. Knowing what machine technology can do on her single impoverished world, she can well guess what it’s capable of with millions of planets to draw on. But how can I make her realize that matters aren’t that simple?”
“Please, Graydal,” he said. “Won’t you believe I’m working for you? I’ve come this far, and I’ll go as much farther as need be, if something doesn’t kill us.”
He heard her gulp. “Yes. I offer apology. You are different.”
“Not really. I’m a typical Commonalty member. Later, maybe, I can show you how our civilization works, and what an odd problem in political economy we’ve got if Kirkasant is to be rediscovered. But first we have to establish that locating it is physically possible. We have to make long-term observations from here, and then enter those mists, and—One trouble at a time, I beg you!”
She laughed gently. “Indeed, my friend. And you will find a way.” The mirth faded. It had never been strong.
“Won’t you?” The reflection of clouded stars glistened on her faceplate like tears.
Blindness was not dark. It shone.
Standing on the bridge, amidst the view of space, Laure saw nimbus and thunderheads. They piled in cliffs, they eddied and streamed, their color was a sheen of all colors overlying white—mother-of-pearl—but here and there they darkened with shadows and grottoes; here and there they glowed dull red as they reflected a nearby sun. For the stars were scattered about in their myriads, dominantly ruby and ember, some yellow or candent, green or blue. The nearest were clear to the eye, a few showing tiny disks, but the majority were fuzzy glows rather than lightpoints. Such shimmers grew dim with distance until the mist engulfed them entirely and nothing remained but mist.
A crackling noise beat out of that roiling formlessness, like flames. Energies pulsed through his marrow. He remembered the old, old myth of the Yawning Gap, where fire and ice arose and out of them the. Nine Worlds, which were doomed in the end to return to fire and ice; and he shivered.
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