Eschaton 1 – The Other End of Time

CHAPTER THIRTY

Patsy

When they started on their trek to their new home, Patsy was filled with worries. What was waiting for them there? Would they be able to follow the Doc's hastily drawn map without getting lost? Would they be able to see where they were going at all, since Dopey had told them it was night outside? But when they reached the edge of the Beloved Leader base-cut as cleanly as with a knife, one moment surrounded by the hulking dead machinery, the next looking out on a sprawl of meadow and woods-at least one of those worries disappeared. They all stopped dead in their tracks, looking up. "Oh, my God," Patsy breathed. "Will you look at that sky?"

They all were looking. They couldn't help it. Overhead there were a zillion stars, far brighter than anything she had ever seen on Earth, and far more of them. There were red stars and blue ones, yellow ones, white ones. On Earth star colors were so muted that you had to stare at even, say, Betelgeuse to be sure that it was really ruddy instead of featureless white. Here there was no doubt. The colors were as unmistakable as traffic lights, and nearly as brilliant. There seemed to be at least a thousand stars up there that were brighter than Venus at its maximum from Earth. There were a dozen or more that seemed even brighter than the Moon. Patsy had heard of, but had never seen, starlight you could read a book by. This was starlight you could do brain surgery by.

Next to her Pat sighed. "You know what, friends?" she murmured. "We're definitely not in Kansas anymore."

Two kilometers wasn't much; Patsy had jogged more than that some mornings before breakfast, along the bridle path in the park… in the days when Patsy was still Dr. Pat Adcock, who not only jogged but worked out in the gym once a week-most weeks, anyway.

Those days were past. Confinement in that tiny cell had left them all out of shape, and a two-kilometer hike was now a lot. They took turns dragging the travoises that were loaded with most of their Starlab food, three of them at a time with Rosaleen limping painfully along when she could and riding on Martin's back when she couldn't, and the other two following behind to pick up whatever rations fell from a travois and toss them back onto the pile.

But there was so much to see! When she was dragging a travois Patsy's eyes were on the sky as much as on where she was going; when Jimmy Lin relieved her to drop back and do pickup she was glad to see who was there with her. "Patrice!" she hissed, trying to keep her voice low enough that the others might not hear. "Do you know what I think? I think we're in the middle of a globular cluster!"

Patrice bent to pick up a pair of soft-plastic packs and tossed them into Jimmy Lin's travois. "So does Pat," she whispered. "We were talking about it before. At first I thought maybe we were at the core of the galaxy, you know? The star density might be about the same. But we'd know that, all right, and-"

"Hey, back there!" Dannerman called. "Pay attention to what you're doing, we can't afford to lose any food." But he had stopped at the edge of a dark lake, setting down the handles of his own travois to consult over the map with Rosaleen and the general.

Patsy would have supposed that Jimmy Lin would be right up there to take part in the debate, but he lingered when everyone had stopped. "What were you guys saying about a globular cluster?"

Patrice frowned. "Sorry, we were trying to keep it quiet. What about it?"

"Well, to start with, what is it?"

"It's what it says it is. It's a tight cluster of thousands of stars, more or less shaped like a ball. But if that's what we're in, then we're really pretty far from home; most of them are in the galactic halo, none of them closer than several thousand light-years."

"Wherever they are, their stars are really jammed close together," Patsy added. "Thousands of them might fit into the space between Earth and Alpha Centauri… a lot like what you see up there."

Jimmy craned his neck, then had an objection. "So how do you know we're not in the core of our own galaxy? Christo Papathanassiou told me once-"

"That there were a lot of stars crowded together there, too? Sure there are. But there's something else at the core, and that's a hell of a big black hole. If we were anywhere near that we'd know, because we'd all be dead now from the radiation."

From up ahead, Dannerman was trying to get their attention. "Quiet!" he ordered. "Do you hear that?"

And as soon as they stopped talking, Patsy did. It was a thick slobbering noise, not quite a roar, definitely not friendly.

In a moment Patsy saw what it was. Something was crossing from a patch of shrubbery toward the lake, off to their right, no more than thirty or forty meters away. There were two somethings, one larger than the other. Patsy couldn't make out details, but the heads looked as huge-mouthed and wide-nostriled as a hippopotamus-though wearing something puzzlingly like a mustache. Not really a mustache, she corrected herself; the strands weren't hair; more like the tentacles of an octopus. The bodies, though, were streamlined as a seal's, and they flopped along the ground on their fins like any pinniped. As she watched, the smaller of the two slipped into the water; the other planted itself on the shore and gargled at them again before following the other.

"Christ," Pat breathed from up ahead. "Was I wrong, or were those things wearing some kind of collars?"

"Perhaps they are pets," Rosaleen said dryly. "I don't think I want to try to return them to their owners just now, though. Please, can we proceed?"

They did. They gave the lakeside a wide berth, all of them watching worriedly to see what might come up at them out of the water. But nothing did.

Once past the lake the distance was short. They crossed a meadow-delightfully speckled with patches of phosphorescent grasses, smelling peculiarly of mown wild onions and mint. Once or twice Patsy thought she heard a distant whickering from the woods, and Jimmy Lin startled everybody when he declared he'd seen something flying there. But then they crossed a little ridge, and there before them, laid out in the brilliant starshine, was a valley with a bright stream running through it, and some sort of structures beside the stream.

"They look like tents," Patrice said in awe.

"Yes," said Rosaleen, summoning up the strength to stand for die last little bit. "Dopey said there would be dwellings for us."

"Tents aren't 'dwellings,' " Jimmy Lin complained; and then, when they were closer: "My God, they aren't even tents! They're what you call 'yurts.' Like the things the Uighur ethnics live in, up in Xinjiang Province, you know? And they stink."

So they did; as soon as Patsy came within range she smelled it, a long-ago aroma of spice and decay. On the other hand, she was well aware that she herself was far from fragrant, and she eyed the stream water longingly.

She wasn't the only one, though not for the same reason. Behind her Dannerman asked, "Think we can drink that river water?"

Rosaleen was limping after him. "What choice do we have?" she asked, painfully crouching over the stream for a closer look. Most of the others followed. At that point in its course the stream ran over a pebbly bottom, and, in the glory of starlight from that blazing sky, it looked crystal-clear. It also looked empty. If the stream held any population offish or insects-or of whatever would pass for either in this place-Patsy couldn't see them.

She put a finger in the water and quickly revised her thoughts of a quick bath; that water was cold. Next to her Dannerman hesitated, then dipped his cupped hands into the stream. He lifted the water to his nose to smell, then tasted it.

"It seems all right," he said judiciously. "Tastes good, in fact."

That was enough for Patsy. She cupped her hands in the stream, drank; and then realized how thirsty she was and drank more, and then more still. She wasn't the only one, either. Most of the others were following Dannerman's example, until Rosaleen said thoughtfully, "I wonder if we shouldn't have boiled it first."

"Boiled it how?" Pat asked, but Patsy wasn't listening. She was remembering what a case of violent diarrhea was like, learned well from some heavy-drinking and poorly sanitized picnics in her college days. What would that be like here, without any pink medicine waiting in the dorm dispensary to calm the outraged bowels down?

But it was a little late to think of that, and now everybody- no, she corrected herself: every one of the men; the women seemed less bossy-had a plan to offer. "We need to make a fire," Jimmy Lin was saying, and Martin was arguing, "First we must fix up some sleeping accommodations for Rosaleen," and Dannerman was urging that they check the woods out, in case there were surprises there.

"Fire first," Jimmy insisted. "To keep vermin away, and so we can cook some of this crap instead of eating it cold."

"Cook it in what?" Pat asked. It was a reasonable question. Patsy thought wistfully of the score or so of pots and kettles and asparagus cookers and omelette pans in her (seldom-used) kitchen in New York. Would they have to reinvent pottery? Dig out clay? Throw bowls on a wheel, the way she vaguely remembered from one of the less enjoyable courses she'd taken in high school? But Jimmy dismissed all questions. "Get me firewood," he ordered. "Preferably dead stuff that's fallen to the ground; let me worry about the rest of it." And, when there still were arguments, grandly: "Don't forget, I was an Eagle Scout at Kamehameha High."

It was Dannerman who lost out. Exploration, they decreed, would have to wait for daylight; meanwhile Martin and Jimmy Lin had their way. Patsy found herself carting wood from the edge of the forest-ears alert for any sound, eyes searching the dimness-while Dannerman cut it into quarter-meter lengths with the serrated blade from his belt, and Martin drafted Pat and Patrice to drag everything out of the yurts for inspection. Everything the yurts contained was old, fragile and decayed; but there had been things that could only have been pallets that still seemed useful. Well, maybe useful. Certainly not comfortable. They were sacks filled with powder that had once been leaves and grasses, along with brittle sticks that still had sharp edges; and they were more than three meters long and less than a meter wide.

They would do. Martin ordered four of them returned to the largest and cleanest of the yurts, three to another-why, Patsy thought, amused, they were doing sex-segregated dormitories! And when he had made sure Rosaleen was comfortable, or as comfortable as she could hope for, he emerged to help Jimmy Lin rasp deadwood into a kind of powder with the little files from Rosaleen's hair sticks. And then Jimmy did his Eagle Scout thing, spinning a stick between his palms against a rock, finally getting a smoldering glow from the friction. And ten minutes later he had his campfire going, throwing out orders in all directions. "Only put in small sticks," he commanded. "Not too much wood. What we want is an Indian campfire-small, so it won't use up our fuel too fast. And now-who's for a real home-cooked meal?"

But no one was. What they wanted was sleep. Exploration could wait, eating could wait- it had been a long day for everyone. For Patsy, too, but somehow she found herself volunteering to take the first watch to keep the fire fed. She had had some idea that, once everyone else was well and truly asleep, she might just dip herself into that brook and try to get at least the surface layers of grime and stench off her long-unwashed body. That notion didn't last; when she tried the water with one toe it was even colder than she had remembered.

Replenishing the fire was about the easiest job Patsy had ever had. Jimmy's orders had been explicit: no more than four or five sticks at a time, none at all until there were no more flames, just glowing coals, because you didn't want actual flames. Patsy debated what to do with the longest sticks, too long to fit in the tiny fire. She didn't want to try to break them for fear of waking the others up, wasn't sure she had the strength to do it, anyhow, and had no idea where Dannerman had left his glassy blade; but then she worked out a simple solution. She laid them across the fire until the middle sections had burned through, then picked up the ends and tossed them in. Nothing to it.

The hard part was staying awake. For the first hour or so little pinpricks of fear kept the adrenaline flowing. Distant whickerings in the wood, the gentle plop of something falling from a tree, a nearby growl (which turned out only to be Martin snoring)-every sound was an alarm. Almost anything, Patsy thought, could leap raging at her out of the trees; but then time passed and nothing did, and the fears, while not going away, changed character. Were they really going to try to take on the might of the Horch killing machines with a handful of popguns? Should they be doing that, anyhow? (Or was Dannerman right about the dangers of taking sides?) And, that biggest question of all, how much truth was there in the promise of eternal bliss (or otherwise) in this improbable eschaton? The questions revolved themselves through her tired brain-with, of course, no answers. She was fed up with the endless supply of unanswerable questions.

But then she had only to lift her eyes to the sky to see the kind of marvel she had never expected to behold. It was-there was only one word for it-magnificent. She noticed, as time went on, that the stars were appropriately wheeling across the heaven, just as they should do; that pair of blue-white beacons that had been low on the horizon when they arrived was now gone from view, and on the other side of the sky-she supposed she should call it the "east"-there was a whole new puzzle to gape at. Streamers of pale light stretched among the newly risen stars, some of them almost as bright as the stars themselves, almost enough to make her squint. She realized with a sudden shiver- part excitement, part wonder at being privileged to see such a thing with her own unaided eyes-that she was looking at stars in the very act of stealing gas from one another, a spectacle she had never before beheld except in plates from Starlab or the old Kecks.

She was so absorbed in the sight overhead that she wasn't aware Dannerman was coming up to her until he called her name, and then she jumped. "Jesus, Dan-Dan! What are you doing up?"

"Time to relieve you," he said, following her example and staring toward the east. "What the hell's that? It looks like something you'd see under a microscope?"

Well, it did; all filamentary and webby. But she was glad to be able to explain something at least, when so little was explainable. "They're exchanging matter. Stars can do that when they're close, and some of those are probably nearer each other than Pluto is to the Sun. So you're looking at the naked hearts of stars, Dan. If our models of star evolution are right," she went on, warming to the subject, "some of those stars used to be red giants, but when the gas was stripped away they were rejuvenated. They became what we call 'blue stragglers,' with surface temperatures five or six times as hot as our own Sun. The bad part of that," she began, but Dannerman held up his hand.

"Please, Patsy. Don't tell me any bad parts right now, okay?' You better get some sleep while you can. It's almost daylight."

And he was right about that, too, of course. Past the cobwebby gas streamers the far horizon was beginning to lighten; and Patsy felt the sudden weight of her fatigue. Gratefully enough she climbed onto the pallet that had been set aside for her, Pat stirring gently as she came in, Rosaleen moaning faintly in her sleep. It was not a comfortable bed. Whoever made it must have had skins like armor plate, she thought, and closed her eyes.

But she hadn't told him what the bad part was.

The bad part was that some of those cannibal stars would sooner or later glut themselves on the mass they had stolen from the others. And then there would be a nova, maybe even a supernova, flooding the space around it with radiation of all kinds… at the congested distances of the globular cluster.

When might that happen? The astronomical time scale was far slower than the human. Such things might take centuries to occur, but when they did-

When they did, this would not be a good place to be, and the life expectancy of anyone out in the open under that suddenly lethal sky would be short indeed.