To Outlive Eternity

by Poul Anderson

  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. We need the tau for a hunt which may take us past any number of clans, through billions of light-years, until we find one we can enter. I trust you can plot us a course within this first clan that will give us that kind of tau. Don't worry about collisions with anything. We can't afford such worries. Just steer us through the densest dust and gas you can find."

  "You . . . are taking this . . . rather coolly," Telander said.

  "What am I supposed to do? Burst into tears?"

  "That's why I thought you should also hear the news first," Boudreau said. "You may know how to break it to the others."

  Reymont considered both men for a moment that stretched. "I'm not the captain, you know," he said softly.

  Telander's smile was a spasm. "In certain respects, Constable, you are—"

  Reymont turned, went to the instrument console, stood before those goblin eyes with head bent and thumbs hooked in belt. "Well," he said. "If you really want me to take charge."

  "I think you had better."

  "Well, in that case. They're good people. Morale is bound upward 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 is no human difference between a million and a billion, or ten billion, light-years. The exile is still the same."

  "But the time involved—" Telander said.

  "Yes. That." Reymont looked at them again. "I don't know how much more of our own lifespans we can devote to this voyage. Not very much. The conditions are too unnatural. So we absolutely have to raise tau as high as may be, no matter what the hazard. Not simply to make the trip itself short enough for us to endure. But for the psychological need to do our utmost, at all times."

  "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 such terms, they'll rally. For a while, anyhow."

  "The wee birdies sing and the flowers of spring,

  And in sunshine the waters are sleeping—"

  X

  Dark.

  The absolute night.

  Instruments, straining magnification, reconverting wavelengths, identified some glimmer in that pit. Human senses found nothing, nothing.

  "We're dead." Fedoroff's voice echoed in helmets and earplugs.

  "I feel alive," Reymont said.

  "What else is death but the final cutting off? No sun, no stars, no sound, no weight, no shadow—" Fedoroff's breath was ragged, to clear over a radio which no longer carried the surf noise of cosmic interference. His head was invisible against empty space. The lamp at his waist threw a dull puddle of light onto the hull, that was reflected and lost in horrible distances.

  "Keep moving," Reymont ordered.

  "Why are you out with this work party, Constable?" said another man's voice. "What do you know about it?"

  "I know we'd better get the job done. Which seems to be more than you knotheads do."

  "What's the hurry?" Fedoroff gibed. "We have eternity. We're dead, remember."

  "We will indeed be dead if we're caught, force-shields down, in anything like a real concentration of matter," Reymont answered. "One atom per cubic meter—or less—could kill us. And with our tau, the nearest galactic clan is only days away."

  "So?"

  "So are you absolutely certain, Engineer Fedoroff, that we won't strike an embryo galaxy, family, clan . . . some enormous hydrogen cloud, still dark, still falling in on itself . . . at any instant?"

  "At any megayear, you mean," Fedoroff said. But he started aft from the main personnel lock. His gang followed.

  It was, in truth, a flitting of ghosts. One had thought of space as black. But now one remembered that it had been full of stars. Any shape was silhouetted against suns, clusters, constellations, nebulae, sister galaxies; oh, the universe was pervaded with light! The inner universe. Here was worse than a dark background. Here was no background. None whatsoever. The squat, unhuman forms of men in space armor, the long curve of the hull, were seen as gleams, disconnected and fugitive, With acceleration ended, weight was ended also. Not even the slight differential-gravity of being in orbit existed. A man moved as if in an infinite dream of swimming, flying, falling. And yet . . . he remembered that this weightless body of his bore the mass of a mountain. Was there a real heaviness in his floating; or had the constants of inertia subtly changed, out here where the metric of space-time was flattened to nearly a straight line; or was it an illusion, spawned in the tomb of stillness which engulfed him? What was illusion? What was reality? Was reality?

  Roped together, clinging with frantic magnetism to the ship's iron (curious, the horror one felt of getting somehow pitched loose—extinction would be the same as if that had happened in the lost little spaceways of the Solar System—but the thought of blazing across megayears as a stellar-scale meteorite was peculiarly lonely), the engineer detail made their way along the hull and the spidery framework which trailed it. Now that the accelerator system had been shut down, those ribs were all which held the generators together. They seemed terribly frail.

  "Suppose we can't fix the decelerators," came a voice. "Do we go on? What happens to us? I mean, won't the laws be different, out on the edge of the universe? Won't we turn into something not human?"

  "Space is finite," Reymont barked into the blackness. "'The edge of the universe' is a meaningless noise. And let's start by supposing that we can fix this stupid machine."

  He heard a few oaths and grinned the faintest bit. When they halted and began to secure themselves individually to the framework that surrounded their task site, Fedoroff took the chance to lay his helmet against Reymont's and talk in private by conduction.

  "Thanks, Constable," he said.

  "What for?"

  "Being such a prosaic bastard."

  "Well, we have a prosaic job of repair to do. We may have come a long way, we may by now have outlived the race that produced us, but we haven't changed from a variety of proboscis monkey. Why take ourselves so mucking seriously?"

  "Hm. I see why the Old Man said you should come along. All right, let's have a look at the problem here."

  XI

  Reymont opened the door to his cabin. Weariness made him careless. Bracing himself a trifle too hard against the bulkhead, he let go the handle and drifted free.

  For a moment he cartwheeled in midair. Then he bumped into the opposite side of the corridor, pushed and darted back across. Once inside the cabin, he grasped a stanchion before shutting the door behind him.

  At this hour, he had expected Chi-yuen to be asleep. But she floated a few centimeters off her bunk, a single line anchoring her amidst currents. As he entered, she returned her book to a drawer with a quickness that showed she hadn't really been paying attention to it.

  "Not you, too?" Reymont asked. His question seemed loud. They had been so long accustomed to the engine pulse as well as the gravity of acceleration that free fall brimmed the ship with silence.

  "What?" Her smile was tentative and troubled. She had had scant contact with him lately. There was too much for him to do under these changed conditions, organizing, ordering, cajoling, arranging, planning. He would come here to snatch what sleep he might.

  "Have you also become unable to rest in zero gee?" he said.

  "No. That is, I can. A strange, light sort of sleep, filled with dreams, but I seem fairly refreshed afterward."

  "Good," he sighed. "Two more cases have developed."

  "Insomniac, do you mean?"

  "Yes. Verging on nervous collapse. Every time they do drift off, you know, they wake again screaming. N
ightmares. I'm not sure whether weightlessness alone does it to them, or if that's only the last bit of breaking stress. Neither is Dr. Winblad. I was just conferring with him. He wanted my opinion on what to do, now that he's running short of psycho-drugs."

  "What did you suggest?"

  Reymont grimaced. "I told him who I thought unconditionally had to have them, and who might survive a while without."

  "The trouble isn't simply the psychological effect, you realize," Chi-yuen said. "It is the exhaustion. Pure physical exhaustion, from trying to do things in a gravityless environment."

  "Of course." Reymont began unfastening his coverall, one leg hooked around a stanchion to hold him in place. "Quite unnecessary. The regular spacemen know how to handle themselves. I do. A few others. We don't get worn out, trying to coordinate our muscles. It's those groundlubber scientists who do."

  "How much longer, Charles?"

  "In free fall? I don't know. We appear to be bearing down on a galactic clan. Our forcefields have already been reactivated, as a precaution. Because we might enter a sufficient gas density at any moment for the jets to work. But we can't be sure. Detailed observation is plain impossible, with the tau we now have."

  "But what is the maximum time before we enter that clan and start to have weight again?"

  "Less than a week, ship's clocks. Can't estimate closer."

  She sighed relief. "We can stand that. And then . . . then we will be making for our new home."

  "Hope so," Reymont grunted. He stored his clothes, shivered a little and took out a pair of pajamas.

  Chi-yuen started. "What do you mean by that? Don't you know?"

  "Look, Ai-ling," he said in an exhausted tone, "we've come two or three billion light-years from Earth. As far in time. We have no charts. No standard of measurement. Our tau is a number to guess at. We take spectrograms of entire galactic families, and assuming they are 'normal'—whatever that is!—we calculate tau from the frequency shift. But the probable error is huge. There are factors like absorption which simply aren't in our handbooks. Quite possibly some of the constants of physics are different enough out here to affect our results. How in hell's flaming name do you expect anyone to bring in an exact answer?"

  "I'm sorry—"

  "This has been explained to everyone," Reymont said. "Repeatedly. Are the officers to blame if passengers won't listen to their reports? Some of you are going to pieces. Some of you have barricaded yourselves with apathy, or religion, or sex, or whatever comes to hand, till nothing registers on your memories. Most of you—well, it was healthy to work on Nilsson's R & D, but that's become a defense reaction in its own right. Another way of focusing your attention so as to exclude the big bad universe. And now, when free fall prevents you carrying on, you too crawl into your nice hidey-holes." His voice lifted in anger. "Go ahead. Do what you want. The whole wretched lot of you. Only don't come and peck at me any longer. D' you hear?"

  He yanked on the pajamas and started to climb into his bunk. Chi-yuen unbuckled her lifeline, pushed across to him, embraced him.

  "Oh, darling," she whispered. "I'm sorry. You are so tired, are you not?"

  "Been hard on us all," he said lethargically.

  "Most on you." Her fingers traced the cheekbones standing out under taut skin, the deep lines, the sunken and bloodshot eyes. "Why don't you rest?"

  "I'd like to."

  She maneuvered his mass into a stretched-out position, clipped on his leash, and drew herself close. Her hair floated across his face, smelling of summers on Earth. "Do," she said. "You can." For you, isn't it good not to have weight?"

  "M-m-m, yes. Ai-ling, you know Tetsuo Iwasaki pretty well. Do you think he can manage without tranquilizers? Sven Winblad and I weren't sure—"

  "Hush." Her palm covered his mouth. "None of that."

  "But—"

  "No. I won't have it. The ship isn't going to fall apart if you get one decent night's sleep."

  "Well . . . well . . . maybe not."

  "Close your eyes. Let me stroke your face—so. Isn't that better already? Now think of nice things."

  "Like what?"

  "Have you forgotten? Think of home. No. Best not that, I suppose. Think of the home we are going to find. Blue sky. Warm bright sun, light falling through leaves, dappling the shade, blinking on a river; and the river flows, flows, flows, singing you to sleep—"

  "Um-m-m."

  She kissed him very lightly. "Our own house. A garden. Strange colorful flowers. Oh, but we will plant seeds from Earth too, roses, honeysuckle, rosemary for remembrance. Our children."

  He stirred. The fret returned to him. "Wait a minute, we can't make personal commitments. Not yet. You might not want, uh, any given man. I'm fond of you, of course, but—"

  She brushed his eyes shut again before he saw the pain on her. "We are daydreaming, Charles," she laughed low. "Do stop being so solemn and literal-minded. Just think about children, everyone's children, playing in a garden. Think about the river. Forests. Mountains. Birdsong. Peace."

  He tightened an arm around her waist. "You're a good person," he murmured.

  "So are you. A good person who needs to be cuddled. Would you like me to sing you to sleep?"

  "Yes." His words were already becoming indistinct. "Please. I like Chinese cradle songs."

  She continued smoothing his forehead while she drew breath.

  The intercom circuit clicked shut. "Constable," said Telander's voice, "are you there?"

  Reymont jerked awake. "Don't," Chi-yuen begged. "Yes," Reymont said, "here I am."

  "Would you come to the bridge? And don't alert anyone."

  "Aye, aye. Right away." Reymont unbuckled his lifeline and pulled the pajama top over his head.

  "They could not give you five minutes, could they?" she said bitterly.

  "Must be serious," he rapped. "You'll keep this confidential till you hear from me." In a few motions he had donned coverall and shoes again and was on his way.

  Telander and, surprisingly, Nilsson awaited him. The captain looked as if he had been struck in the belly. The astronomer was excited but had not lost his recent air of confidence and self-control He clutched a bescribbled sheet of paper. "Navigation difficulty, eh?" Reymont deduced. "Where's Boudreau?"

  "This doesn't concern him immediately," Nilsson said. "I have been making my own observations with some of the new instruments. I have reached a, ah, disappointing conclusion."

  Reymont wrapped fingers around a grip and hung in the stillness, regarding them. The fluorolight cast the hollows of his face into shadow. The gray streaks which had lately appeared in his hair seemed vivid by contrast. "We can't make that galactic clan ahead of us after all," he said.

  "That's right." Telander drooped.

  "No, not strictly right," Nilsson declared fussily. "We will pass through. In fact, we will pass through not just the general region, but a fair number of galaxies within the families that comprise the clan."

  "You can distinguish so much detail already?" Reymont wondered. "Boudreau can't."

  "I told you I have some of the equipment working," Nilsson said. "The precision seems even greater than hoped for when, ah, we instigated the project. Yes, I have a reasonably good map of the part of the clan which we might traverse. I have now finished making certain computations on that basis."

  "Go on," Reymont said. "Once we get in where the jets have some matter to work on, why can't we brake?"

  "We can. Of course we can. But our inverse tau is enormous. Remember, we acquired it by passing through the densest attainable portions of several galaxies, en route to interclan space. It was necessary. I do not dispute the wisdom of the decision. But the result is that this particular clan, at least, does not have enough material in it—not enough, I mean, within that conoidal volume which includes all our possible paths intersecting that clan, from this point we are now at—not enough for us to lose our entire velocity. We will emerge on the other side of the clan—after an estimated six months of ship
's time under deceleration, mind you—with a tau that is still ten to the minus third or fourth. This, you can see, will make it quite impossible to reach another clan before we die of old age. Especially in view of the fact which we are currently experiencing, that no significant acceleration is possible between clans."

  The pompous voice cut off, the beady eyes looked expectant. Reymont met that gaze rather than Telander's sick, gutted stare. "Why am I being told this, and not Lindgren?" he asked.

  A tenderness made Nilsson, briefly, another man. "She works so very hard. What can she do here? I thought I had best let her sleep."