Tau Zero

Chapter 11

Force fields shifted about. They were not static tubes and walls. What formed them was the incessant interplay of electromagnetic pulses, whose production, propagation, and heterodyning must be under control at every nanosecond, from the quantum level to the cosmic. As exterior conditions — matter density, radiation, impinging field strengths, gravitational space-curvature — changed, instant by instant, their reaction on the ship’s immaterial web was registered; data were fed into the computers; handling a thousand simultaneous Fourier series as the smallest of their tasks, these machines sent back their answers; the generating and controlling devices, swimming aft of the hull in a vortex of their own output, made their supple adjustments. Into this homeostasis, this tightrope walk across the chance of a response that was improper or merely tardy — which would mean distortion and collapse of the fields, novalike destruction of the ship — entered a human command. It became part of the data. A starboard intake widened, a port intake throttled back: carefully, carefully. Leonora Christine swung around onto her new course.

The stars saw the ponderous movement of a steadily larger and more flattened mass, taking months and years before the deviation from its original track was significant. Not that the object whereon they shone was slow. It was a planet-sized shell of incandescence, where atoms were seized by its outermost force-fringes and excited into thermal, fluorescent, synchrotron radiation. And it came barely behind the wave front which announced its march. But the ship’s luminosity was soon lost across light-years. Her passage crawled through abysses which seemingly had no end.

In her own time, the story was another. She moved in a universe increasingly foreign — more rapidly aging, more massive, more compressed. Thus the rate at which she could gulp down hydrogen, burn part of it to energy and hurl the rest off in a million-kilometer jet flame … that rate kept waxing for her. Each minute, as counted by her clocks, took a larger fraction off her tau than the last minute had done.

Inboard, nothing changed. Air and metal still carried the pulse of acceleration, whose net internal drag still stood at an even one gravity. The interior power plant continued to give light, electricity, equable temperatures. The biosystems and organocycles reclaimed oxygen and water, processed waste, manufactured food, supported life. Entropy increased. People grew older at the ancient rate of sixty seconds per minute, sixty minutes per hour.

Yet those hours were always less related to the hours and years which passed outside. Loneliness closed on the ship like fingers.

Jane Sadler executed a balestra. Johann Freiwald sought to parry. Her foil rang against his in a beat. Immediately, she thrust. “Touchй!” he acknowledged. Laughing behind his mask: “That would have skewered my left lung in a real duel. You have passed your examination.”

“None too soon,” she panted. “I’d … have … been out of air … ’nother minute. Knees like rubber.”

“No more this evening,” Freiwald decided.

They took off their head protection. Sweat gleamed on her face and plastered hair to brow; her breath was noisy; but her eyes sparkled. “Some workout!” She flopped onto a chair. Freiwald joined her. This late in the ship’s evening, they had the gymnasium to themselves. It felt huge and hollow, making them sit close together.

“You will find it easier with other women,” Freiwald told her. “I think you had better start them soon.”

“Me? Instruct a female fencing class at my stage?” “I will continue to work out with you,” Freiwald said. “You can stay ahead of your pupils. Don’t you see, I must begin with the men. And if the sport draws as much interest as I would like, it will take time to make the equipment. Besides more masks and foils, we need йpйes and sabers. We cannot delay.”

Sadler’s merriment faded. She gave him a studying look. “You didn’t propose this of your own accord? I’d assumed, you being the only person who’d fenced back on Earth, you wanted partners.”

“It was Constable Reymont’s idea, when I happened to mention my wish. He arranged that stock be issued me to produce the gear. You see, we must maintain physical fitness—”

“And distract ourselves from the bind we’re in,” she said harshly.

“A sound physique helps keep a sound mind. If you go to bed tired, you don’t lie awake brooding.”

“Yes, I know. Elof—” Sadler stopped.

“Professor Nilsson is perhaps too engaged in his work,” Freiwald dared say. His gaze left her, and he flexed the blade between his hands.

“He’d better be! Unless he can develop unproved astronomical instrumentation, we can’t plot an extragalactic trajectory on anything except guesswork.”

“True. True. I would suggest, Jane, your man might benefit, even in his profession, if he would take exercise.”

It was forced from her: “He’s getting harder to live with every day.” She took the offensive. “So Reymont’s appointed you coach.”

“Informally,” Freiwald said. “He urged me to take leadership, develop new, attractive sports — Well, I am one of his unofficial deputies.”

“Uh-huh. And he himself can’t. They’d see his motives, they’d think of him as a drillmaster, the fun would be gone, and they’d stay away by dozens.” Sadler smiled. “Okay, Johann. Count me in on your conspiracy.”

She offered her hand. He took it. The clasp continued.

“Let’s get out of this wet padding and into a wet swimming pool,” she proposed.

He replied scratchily: “No, thank you. Not tonight. We would be alone. I don’t dare that any longer, Jane.”

Leonora Christine encountered another region of increased matter density. It was more tenuous than the nebulina which had caused her trouble, and she ran it without difficulty. But it reached for many parsecs. Her tau shrank at a pace which in her own chronology was stupefying. By the time she emerged, she was going so fast that the normal one atom per cubic centimeter counted for about as much as the cloud had done. Not only did she keep the speed she had gained, she kept the acceleration.

Her folk continued regardless to follow Earth’s calendar, including observances for the tiny congregations of different religions. Each seventh morning, Captain Telander led his handful of Protestants in divine service.

On a particular Sunday, he had asked Ingrid Lindgren to meet him in his cabin afterward. She was waiting there when he entered. Her fairness and a short red gown cast her vivid against books, desk, papers. Though he rated a double section to himself, its austerity was relieved by little except a few pictures of family and a half-built model of a clipper ship.

“Good morning,” he said with accustomed solemnity. He laid down his Bible and loosened the collar of his dress uniform. “Won’t you be seated?” The beds being up, there was room for a couple of folding armchairs. “I’ll send after coffee.”

“How did it go?” she asked, sitting down opposite him, nervously trying to make conversation. “Did Malcolm attend?”

“Not today. I suspect our friend Foxe-Jameson is not yet sure whether he wants to return to the faith of his fathers or stay a loyal agnostic.” Telander smiled a bit. “He’ll come, though, he’ll come. He simply needs to get it through his head that it’s possible to be a Christian and an astrophysicist. When are we going to lure you, Ingrid?”

“Probably never. If there is any directing intelligence behind reality — and we’ve no scientific evidence in favor of that — why should it care about a chemical accident like man?”

“You quote Charles Reymont almost precisely, did you know?” Telander said. Her features tensed. He hurried on: “A being that concerns itself with everything from quanta to quasars can spare attention for us. Rational proof — But I don’t want to repeat stale arguments. We’ve something else on hand.” He tuned his intercom to the galley: “A pot of coffee, cream and sugar, two cups, in the captain’s cabin, please.”

“Cream!” Lindgren muttered.

“I don’t think our food technicians fake it badly,” Telander said. “By the way, Carducci is quite taken with Reymont’s suggestion.”

“What’s that?”

“Working with the food team to invent new dishes. Not a beefsteak put together out of algae and tissue cultures, but stuff never experienced before. I’m glad he’s found an interest.”

“Yes, as a chef he’s been slipping.” Lindgren’s garb of casualness fell off. She struck her chair arm. “Why?” burst from her. “What’s wrong? We’ve been under weigh scarcely half as long as we planned on. Morale shouldn’t rot this soon.”

“We’ve lost every assurance—”

“I know, I know. And shouldn’t people be stimulated by danger? As for the chance we won’t ever end our voyage, well, it hit me badly too, I admit, at first. But I think I’ve rallied.”

“You and I have an ongoing purpose,” Telander said. “We, the regular crew, we’re responsible for lives. It helps. And even for us—” He paused. “This is what I wished to talk over with you, Ingrid. We’re at a critical date. The hundred-year mark on Earth since we departed.”

“Nonsensical,” she said. “You can’t speak of simultaneity under these conditions.”

“It’s far from psychologically nonsensical,” he answered. “At Beta Virginis we would have had a thread of contact with home. We would have thought that the younger ones we left behind, given longevity treatments, were still alive. If we must return, surely enough continuity would have persisted that we didn’t come back as utter aliens. Now, though — the fact that in some sense, whether a mathematical one or not — at best, babies whom we saw in their cribs are nearing the end of life — it reminds us too hard, we can never regain any trace of what we once loved.”

“M-m-m … I suppose. Like watching somebody you care about die of a slow disease. You aren’t surprised when the end comes; nevertheless, it is the end.” Lindgren blinked. “Damn!”

“You must do what you can to help them through this period,” Telander said. “You know how better than I.”

“You could do a good deal yourself.”

The gaunt head shook. “Best not. On the contrary, I’m going to withdraw.”

“What do you mean?” she asked with a touch of alarm.

“Nothing dramatic,” he said. “My work with the engineering and navigation departments, in these unpredictable circumstances, does take most of my waking hours. It’ll provide a cover for my gradually ceasing to mix in shipboard society.”

“Whatever for?”

“I’ve had several talks with Charles Reymont. He has made an excellent point — a crucial one, I do believe. When uncertainty surrounds us, when despair is always waiting to break us … the average person aboard has to feel his life is in competent hands. Of course, no one is going to suppose consciously that the captain is infallible. But there’s an unconscious need for such an aura. And I — I have my share of weakness and stupidity. My human-level judgments can’t stand up to daily testing under high stress.”

Lindgren crouched in her seat. “What does the constable want of you?”

“That I stop operating on an informal, intimate basis. The excuse will be that I mustn’t be distracted by ordinary business, when my whole attention must go to getting us safely through the galaxy’s clouds and clusters. It’s a reasonable excuse, it will be accepted. In the end, I shall be dining separately, in here, except on ceremonial occasions. I shall take my exercise and recreation here too, alone. What personal visitors I have will be the highest-ranking officers, like you. We will surround me with official etiquette. Through his own assistants, Reymont will pass the word that polite forms of address toward me are expected of everyone.

“In short, your good gray friend Lars Telander is about to change into the Old Man.”

“It sounds like Reymont’s kind of scheme,” she said bitterly.

“He’s convinced me it’s desirable,” the captain replied.

“With no thought for what it can do to you!”

“I’n manage. I never was hail-fellow-well-met. We have many books along in the microtapes that I always wanted to read.” Telander regarded her earnestly. Though the air was nearing the warmest part of its cycle and was tinged with a smell like new-mown hay, the fine hairs were standing erect on her arms. “You have a role also, Ingrid. More than ever, you will handle the human problems. Organization, mediation, alleviation … it won’t be easy.”

“I can’t do it alone.” Her words wavered.

“You can if you must,” he told her. “In practice you can delegate or divert much. That’s a question of proper planning. We’ll work it out as we go.”

He hesitated. Uneasiness came upon him; color actually entered his cheeks. “Ah … a matter in that connection—”

“Yes?” she said.

The door chime rescued him. He accepted the coffee tray from the bull cook and made a performance of carrying it to his desk and pouring. It enabled him to keep his back to her.

“In your position,” he said. “That is, your new position. The necessity of giving officers a special status — You needn’t hold aloof like me, entirely — but a certain limitation of, well, accessibility—”

He couldn’t see if it was actual amusement coloring her voice. “Poor Lars! You mean the first officer should not change boy friends so often, don’t you?”

“Well, I don’t suggest, ah, celibacy. I myself must, of course, ah, hold back from such things hereafter. In your case — well, the experimental phase is past for most of us. Stable relationships are forming. If you could make one—”

“I can do better,” she said. “I can turn solitary.”

He could delay no further handing her a cup. “Th-that isn’t required,” he stammered.

“Thanks.” She inhaled the coffee’s fragrance. Her eyes crinkled at him over the rim. “We don’t have to be absolutely abbot and nun, we two. The captain needs a private conference once in a while with his first officer.”

“Er — no. You are sweet, Ingrid, but no.” Telander paced the narrow width of the cabin, back and forth. “In as little and cramped a community as this, how long can any secret last? I dare not risk hypocrisy. And while I … I would love to have you for a permanent partner … it can’t be. You have to be everyone else’s liaison with me: not my, my direct collaborator. Do you follow me? Reymont explained it better.”

Her humor died. “I don’t altogether like the way he’s jockeyed you.”

“He’s had experience in crisis situations. His arguments were sound. We can go over them in detail.”

“We will. They might be logical at that … whatever his motives.” Lindgren took a sip of coffee, set the cup down on her lap, and declared in a whetted voice:

“Regarding myself, all right. I’m tired of the whole childish business anyway. You’re correct, monogamy is becoming fashionable, and a girl’s choices are poxy limited. I’ve already considered stopping. Olga Sobieski feels the same. I’ll tell Kato to trade cabin halves with her. Some calm and coolness will be welcome, Lars, a chance to think about several things, now that we really have gone by that hundred-year mark.”

Leonora Christine was aimed well away from the Virgin, but not yet at the Archer. Only after she had swung almost halfway around the galaxy would the majestic spiral of her path strike toward its heart. At present the Sagittarian nebulae stood off her port bow. What lay beyond them was inferred, not known. Astromoners expected a volume of clear space, with scant dust or gas, housing a crowded population of ancient stars. But no telescope had seen past the clouds which surrounded that realm, and no one had yet gone to look.

“Unless an expedition went off since we left,” pilot Lenkei suggested. “It’s been centuries on Earth. I imagine they’re doing marvelous things.”

“Not dispatching probes to the core, surely,” cosmologist Chidambaran objected. “Thirty millennia to get there, and as much to flash a message back? It does not make sense. I expect man will spread slowly inward, colony by colony.”

“Failing a faster-than-light drive,” Lenkei said.

Chidambaran’s swarthy features and small-boned body came as near registering scorn as had ever been seen on him. “That fantasy! If you want to rewrite everything we have learned since Einstein — no, since Aristotle, considering the logical contradiction involved in a signal without a limiting velocity — proceed.”

“Not my line of work.” Lenkei’s greyhound slenderness seemed abruptly haggard. “I don’t want faster-than-light, anyhow. The idea that others might be speeding from star to star like birds — like me from town to town when I was home — while we’re caged here … that would be too cruel.”

“Our fate would not be changed by their fortune,” Chidambaran replied. “Indeed, irony would add another dimension to it, another challenge if you will.”

“I’ve more challenge than I want,” Lenkei said.

Their footfalls resounded on the winding stairs and up the well. They had come together from a low-level shop where Nilsson had been consulting Foxe-Jameson and Chidambaran about the design of a large crystal diffraction grating.

“It’s easier for you,” exploded from the pilot. “You’ve got a real use. We depend on your team. If you can’t produce new instruments for us — Me, till we reach a planet where they need space ferries and aircraft, what am I?”

“You are helping build those instruments, or will be when we have plans drawn up,” Chidambaran said.

“Yes, I apprenticed myself to Sadek. To pass this bloody empty time.” Lenkei collected his wits. “I’m sorry. An attitude we’ve get to steer clear of, I know. Mohandas, may I ask you something?”

“Certainly.”

“Why did you sign on? You’re important today. But if we hadn’t had the accident — couldn’t you have gone further toward understanding the universe back on Earth? You’re a theoretician, I’m told. Why not leave the fact gathering to men like Nilsson?”

“I would scarcely have lived to do much with reports from Beta Virginis. It seemed of possible value that a scientist of my sort expose himself to wholly new experiences and impressions. I might have gained insights that would never come otherwise. If I didn’t, the loss would not be large, and at a minimum I would have continued thinking approximately as well as at home.”

Lenkei tugged his chin. “Do you know,” he said, “I suspect you don’t need dream-box sessions.”

“It may be. I confess I find the process undignified.”

“Then for heaven’s sake, why?”

“Regulations. We must all receive the treatment. I did request exemption. Constable Reymont persuaded First Officer Lindgren that special privilege, albeit justified, would set a bad precedent.”

“Reymont! That bastard again!”

“He may be correct,” Chidambaran said. “It does me no harm, unless one counts the interruption of a train of thought, and that happens too seldom to be a major handicap.”

“Huh! You’re more patient than I’d be.”

“I suspect Reymont must force himself into the box,” Chidambaran remarked. “He, too, goes as infrequently as allowed. Have you observed, similarly, that he will take a drink but will never get tipsy? I believe he is under a compulsion, arising perhaps from a buried fear, to stay in control.”

“He is that. Do you know what he said to me last week? I’d only borrowed some sheet copper, it’d have gone right back by way of the furnace and the rolling mill, soon as I was through with it, so I hadn’t bothered to check it out. That bastard said—”

“Forget it,” Chidambaran advised. “He had a point. We are not on a planet. Whatever we lose is lost for good. Best not to take chances; and surely we have time for bureaucratic procedures.” The entrance to commons appeared. “Here we are.”

They headed toward the hypnotherapeutic room. “I trust your experience will be pleasant, Matyas,” Chidambaran said.

“Me too.” Lenkei winced. “I’ve had a few terrible nightmares in there.” Brightening: “And a wild lot of fun!”

Stars grew scattered. Leonora Christine was not crossing from one spiral arm of the galaxy to another — not yet; she was just in a lane of comparative emptiness. For lack of much intake mass, her acceleration diminished. That condition was very temporary, so shrunken was her tau: a few hundred cosmic years. But for some time inboard, the viewscreens to starboard opened mainly on black night.

A number of the crew found it preferable to the eldritch shapes and colors blazing to port.

Another Covenant Day arrived. The ceremonies and the subsequent party were less forlorn than might have been expected. Shock and grief had gotten eroded by ordinariness. At present, the dominant mood was of defiance.

Not everybody attended. Elof Nilsson, for one, stayed in the cabin he and Jane Sadler shared. He spent a lengthy while making sketches and estimates for his exterior telescope. When his brain wearied, he dialed the library index for fiction. The novel he selected, at random out of thousands, proved absorbing. He hadn’t finished it when she returned.

He raised eyes that were bloodshot with fatigue. Except for the scanner screen, the room was unlighted. She stood, big, gaudy, not altogether steady, in shadow.

“Good Lord!” he exclaimed. “It’s five in the morning!”

“Have you finally noticed?” She grinned. The whisky haze around her reached his nostrils, together with a muski-ness. He took a pinch of snuff, a luxury that occupied a large part of his baggage allowance.

“I’m not due at work in three hours,” he said.

“Nor I. I told my boss I wanted a week’s leave. He agreed. He’d better. Who else has he got?”

“What attitude is that? Suppose others on whom the ship depends behaved thus.”

“Tetso Iwamoto … Iwamoto Tetsuo, really; Japanese put last name first, like Chinese … like Hungarians, did you know? — ’cept when they’re being polite to us ignorant Westerners—” Sadler captured her thought. “He’s a nice man to work for. He can manage a spell ’thout me. So why not?”

“Nevertheless—”

She lifted a finger. “I will not be scolded, Elof. You hear? I’ve borne with that o-ver-com-pensated inferiority complex of yours more’n I should’ve. And a lot else. Thinking maybe the rest of you’d grow up to match that IQ of yours. Enough’s enough. Gather ye roses while ye may.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Sort of.” Wistfully: “You should’ve come along.”

“What for? Why not confess how weary I am of the same faces, the same actions, the same inane conversations? I’m far from unique in that.”

Her voice dropped. “Are you tired of me?”

“Why—” Nilsson’s Kewpie-doll form clambered erect. “What’s the matter, my dear?”

“You haven’t exactly bowled me over with attention, these past months.”

“No? No, perhaps not.” He drummed a dresser top. “I’ve been preoccupied.”

She drew a breath. “I’ll say it straight. I was with Johann tonight.”

“Frewald? The machinist?” Nilsson stood speechless for a humming minute. She waited. Soberness had come upon her. He said at length, with difficulty, watching the tattoo of his fingers: “Well, you have the legal and doubtless the moral right. I am no handsome young animal. I am … was … more proud and happy than I knew how to express when you agreed to be my partner. I let you teach me a number of things I did not understand before. Probably I was not the most adept pupil anyone ever had.”

“Oh, Elof!”

“You are leaving me, aren’t you?”

“We’re in love, he and I.” Her vision blurred. “I thought it’d be easier than this to tell you. I didn’t figure you cared a lot.”

“You wouldn’t consider a discreet — No, discretion isn’t feasible. Besides, you couldn’t bring yourself to it. And I have my own pride.” Nilsson sat down again and reached for his snuffbox. “You had better go. You can remove your things later.”

“That quick?”

“Get out!” he shrieked.

She fled, weeping but on eager feet.

Leonora Christine re-entered populated country. Passing within fifty light-years of a giant new-born sun, she transited the gas envelope that surrounded it. Being ionized, the atoms were seizable with maximum efficiency. Her tau plummeted close to asymptotic zero: and with it, her time rate.