Between the Strokes of Night

by Charles Sheffield

  “Smart.” Olivia Ferranti looked at the group appraisingly. “When I’m through, perhaps you’ll tell me a little more about yourselves. All I know so far is what I was told by Peron and by Captain Rinker.”

  “Won’t he be wondering what’s happening?” said Rosanne. Then she stopped and put her hand to her mouth.

  “He might — in a few more days.” Ferranti smiled and Rosanne grinned back at her. The initial tension of confrontation was fading. They were all increasingly absorbed in the first-person tale of remote history.

  Olivia Ferranti leaned against the wall and pushed back the blue cowl from her forehead, to reveal a mop of jet-black tight curls. “We have lots of time. At the moment, Captain Rinker and the others hardly know I’ve left.” “But you’ve got hair!” blurted out Lum.

  Olivia Ferranti raised her dark eyebrows at him. “I’m glad to hear that you think so.”

  “It’s what I told them,” said Peron. “I thought S-space made you bald.” “It does. Didn’t you ever hear of wigs, down on Pentecost? Most of the men in S-space don’t worry about it, but I don’t care to face the world with a naked scalp. My ideas on the right way for me to look were fixed long before I ever dreamed of S-space. Anyway, I have a lumpy skull that I have no great desire to show off to others.” She patted her dark ringlets. “I much prefer this. The nice thing about it is that it will never go gray.”

  “What else does S-space do to people?” asked Sy. More than the rest of them, except possibly for Kallen who had typically not spoken at all, Sy seemed reserved and unwarmed by Olivia Ferranti’s open manner.

  “I’m getting there,” she said. “Let me tell you that in a few minutes. I want to do this in a logical order, and explain what happened after Earth had been destroyed. It’s important that you know, so you’ll understand why we behave the way we do in the Cass system.

  “While we were still busy working out the stable society for life away from Earth, and some of us were also learning how to live in S-space, we didn’t have time to worry about what was happening to Eleanora and the other arcologies. And to tell the truth, we didn’t really give a damn. They’d selfishly deserted us, said our logic, so to hell with them. As far as we were concerned they could fly away and rot.

  “But after a while those of us who were living in S-space — I was one of the first twenty people to take Mode Two hibernation — became pretty curious. You see, we knew we had the stars within reach. We had the drive we needed, and the time we needed. And Helena, Melissa, and Eleanora had all headed off outside the Solar System, in different directions. We didn’t know how much of the reason for their departure was an interest in exploration, and how much of it was fear of reprisals from us. We weren’t planning revenge of any kind, but how were they to know that? All three of them had shown signs of paranoia, back when they were first colonized. We got more and more curious to know what had happened to those three arcologies.

  “Eventually we equipped four ships with service robots, similar to the ones on this ship, and with limited life-support systems. We didn’t need perfect recycling, only enough for a few months of travel in S-space. The final design gave the ships a useful exploration range of up to fifty light-years. At the slow speed of the arcologies, we knew they couldn’t be farther out than that. And the stellar profiles in the neighborhood of Sol gave us a fairly good idea where the colony ships were likely to be headed. Political systems change, but the physical constraints are still there. We thought we’d find them about twenty light-years out.

  “When we had everything ready, our ships set off with their volunteer crews. We had no shortage of people willing to make the trip — I put my own name in, but didn’t make it. There were many with better qualifications than mine for interstellar cruising.

  “As it happened, we had overestimated the distance they had gone. We had made insufficient allowance for the difficulties that Melissa and the others might be having on board. It hadn’t been a smooth ride by any means. There had been a civil war on Melissa, an economic collapse on Eleanora, and a power plant failure on Helena. Those variables affected both their speeds and their directions. Helena actually reversed and started back for Sol for a while, until the trouble was fixed and she could head outward again.

  “Our ships had no trouble tracking and finding the arcologies. After all, they had no reason to expect pursuit, and nothing to be gained by concealing their presence. But when we reached them, we found that no arcology had found a habitable planet, and all three were still in deep interstellar space. After reporting back to us — S-space radio signal time was only a couple of days — it was agreed that we would not establish contact with them. We decided to do nothing, and not interfere in any way unless an arcology was in actual danger of extinction. They hadn’t asked for help, and we didn’t want to give it. Your ancestors would be allowed to wander around until either they found a habitable planet, or they decided that a permanent space life suited them better. Then we would reconsider possible contact.

  “Our ships left automated tracking probes to follow the arcologies and report on their movements, and headed for home.

  “It may seem strange to you that we had so little interest in the arcologies. But we were in no hurry. We could wait in S-space and see what developed. And certainly we had plenty of other things to interest us, because by that time Earth was finally being visited again on a regular basis.

  “Still we had doubts that humans could thrive there. The long dust-winter had exterminated ninety percent of the plant species, and all land-based animal forms bigger than the rat — I mean an Earth rat, not one of the thirty-kilo monsters you call rats on Pentecost. We also found that the surviving plants and animals had changed from their old forms. The grasses were unrecognizable. Many of the old food plants tasted wrong in subtle ways, and some had lost all their nutritional value. We all realized that it would take millennia to restore Earth and make it a place worth living. But oddly enough, we all thought it a worthwhile effort — even those who had found life on Earth absolutely intolerable before the holocaust.

  “By the time that the Earth visits began we were feeling much more comfortable about S-space. Some of us had been living there for many Earth-generations, and we were all fine — better than fine, because we didn’t seem to be aging at all. Our best estimate, based on limited data, was that the aging rate was twenty times as slow subjectively as it was in normal living. That extrapolated to a seventeen hundred year subjective lifetime — and even if we were wrong by a factor of two, that was still a mighty attractive thought.

  “When our result became known, naturally more and more people wanted to move to S-space. It didn’t happen overnight, but as time went by we learned how to make the transitions both ways, with minimal danger. By then we also knew the big problem with S-space existence.”

  “You keep referring to problems and never telling us about them,” said Elissa. “What problem?”

  “I’ve not been talking because I’m not supposed to talk,” said Ferranti. “No one back on Pentecost should know what I’m telling you until they’ve been through indoctrination, and not one of you has; but you’ll realize the problem for yourselves in two seconds as soon as we arrive at local Headquarters, so I’m not revealing any great secrets.”

  Olivia Ferranti moved her thin hands to her cheeks, framing her eyes. “You’ll find no children at Headquarters,” she said abruptly. “A woman cannot conceive in S-space, or a man produce active sperm. S-space is a wonderful place for an individual, but it’s an evolutionary blind alley. Worse than that, anyone who makes frequent transitions between S-space and normal space suffers reduced fertility.

  “That presented us with a terrible choice. Did we opt for extended personal life span in S-space, or would we guarantee the survival of the human race by staying in normal space?

  “While we were still agonizing over that, we received a signal from the probe that had been tracking Melissa. The colony ship was in the Tau Ceti system, and
it had finally found a habitable planet. They were exploring it. We eventually found out that they had named it Thule.

  “It was twelve light-years from Earth, which made it a four week one-way journey in S-space when we allowed for acceleration and deceleration. I don’t think I mentioned it, but no matter how we tried we had been unable to come up with an economical drive that would take us much faster than a tenth of light-speed. But it wasn’t important any more. As you can see, that’s good enough when you live in S-space.

  “Our ship went out, and in due course it made contact with Melissa. That first meeting was traumatic for the Melissa inhabitants. They had left Earth twelve thousand years earlier — five hundred generations of shipboard life. Earth was nothing but a distant legend. It was something that was still talked about, but stories of Earth’s destruction were regarded as of the same practical importance as tales about the Garden of Eden. When our crew contacted them and claimed to remember the death of Earth, that was too much for the Melissans to take. “After we learned something of their history since leaving the solar system, we could see why. They had never had a stable and trustworthy government that lasted more than a century. We found historical evidence of every form of rule from water-control to neo-Confucianism. When they discovered Thule they were just recovering from the effects of a long dictatorship. Their mistrust and suspicion was considerable. Even the most rational of them had difficulty believing that our intentions were wholly innocent, nothing more than curiosity to learn how another culture was faring after so long without any kind of planetary home. They would not let us visit their colony on Thule. Putting it mildly, they suspected our motives.”

  Olivia Ferranti slowly shook her head. “And, of course, they were wholly correct in doing so. Even in S-space, one is not wholly protected from accidents and disease. There would inevitably be deaths, and without replenishment we foresaw our society shrinking — not at once, but over many thousands of Earth years. In Melissa and the other arcologies we saw a possible answer.

  “Either we were unusually stupid, or we were simply naive. To make the Melissans believe us, and to show how we could be people who actually remembered Earth’s final war, we explained S-space to them.

  “They went crazy. They wanted S-space more than anything else in the Universe. You see, we were misled by our own experiences. We had been slow to accept and move to S-space. We didn’t realize that our reluctance wouldn’t apply to them. They hadn’t been there for the early, risky experiments. To them, our existence proved that S-space must be safe. So they thought we were deliberately goading them, tormenting them with a look at immortality while refusing to share its secret with them.

  “Most of our ship’s crew had gone on board Melissa. They took them, eight men and six women, and tried to draw the secret of S-space from them by force. It was useless, of course. The conversion equipment was on the ship, as it is on this ship, and the crew had used it to go from S-space to the perception rate of the Melissans. But they didn’t know the theory, any more than Garao or Captain Rinker know the theory.

  “The inquisitors tortured those crew members to death. Only the two who had remained on our ship were able to escape and come back to tell us what had happened.

  “That’s when we adopted our rules for interaction with all colony ships and colony worlds. We would have limited contact, and it would be handled with great care and with fixed procedures. We would never again return ourselves to normal space for the purpose of first contact, as was done with Melissa. Contact would be done with robots as intermediaries; and we would never, under any circumstances, allow ourselves to fall into the hands of the colonists.” Olivia Ferranti shrugged. “We just flunked that one, right here. Well, let’s skip forward four thousand years. That’s when another of the arcologies, Helena, finally found a habitable planet. They named it Beacon’s World, colonized it, and moved on. That’s when we learned another lesson. Beacon’s World was settled long before we sent a ship to visit it. When our ship finally got there we found that the population had increased from the original few thousand to forty million; but along the way much of their scientific knowledge had been lost, or had degenerated to hearsay and legend.

  “We tried to help. We reintroduced the basis for a more advanced technology. They were keen to receive the information from us — but they applied it to weapons development. Then they started a war, between the two major settlement centers on Beacon’s World. Our ship and crew felt helpless, watching while they slaughtered each other. But we felt we had to do something — it was impossible to stand by, uninvolved, when we knew the information we provided had allowed the conflict to be so savage. The crew of our ship tried a desperation tactic: through our robots, they ordered the warring parties to stop fighting — without saying what would happen if the order were disobeyed.

  “It worked. The fighting stopped.

  “We had learned another important truth. By being ‘Immortals,’ with a technology and a life pattern that was incomprehensible to the colonists, we could have enormous influence.

  “That provided us with our next rule of contact: remain as aloof and mysterious as possible. And if we recruited anyone to join us in S-space — we wanted only exceptional specimens — we would introduce them to our society gradually, through a long and thorough indoctrination.

  “Our rules worked very well. People joined us from Maremar and Jade — two other planets settled by Helena — and have been working in those systems and at Headquarters for thousands of Earth-years.

  “Finally, there was your world. You probably don’t know it, but Pentecost is a very recent addition to our planetary visits. We found you only a few months ago, as we perceive time in S-space, and it was a minor miracle that we found you at all.

  “You see, Eleanora was the unlucky one of the colony ships. The other two arcologies found several planets suitable for settlements. But your ancestors had to wander the interstellar wilderness for over fifteen thousand years, without ever once approaching a habitable world. We know why, now. For the past four thousand Earth-years we’ve been able to predict pretty well the stellar systems and planets likely to support life. And Eleanora just went to the wrong star systems, in terms of our new knowledge. Unfortunately, that same knowledge led us astray in following Eleanora, when our tracking probe finally wore out. As it happens, the Cass system is generally not suited to life, or the occurrence of habitable worlds. The existence of Pentecost, Gimperstand, Fuzzball, and Glug is an accident, the by-product of resonance locks between planetary orbits.

  “We could have found you on Pentecost four thousand years ago if we had thought to look. As it was, we only detected your radio emissions a few hundred years ago. And we finally made contact with you.

  “We followed our standard rules. Slow and limited involvement, and don’t try to change the government of the world. As it happens, Pentecost has had a classical totalitarian regime ever since first contact — a government more concerned to remain in power than anything else, and sublimely disinterested in interstellar affairs. From our point of view, that was perfect. Everything worked according to plan for hundreds of your years — until this Planetfest, when Headquarters was informed that an unusual group of winners was likely. You don’t know who the winners will be in advance, you see, but our people down on Pentecost had a pretty good idea. We expected trouble, but we didn’t know what. Personally, I think something would have happened even if Wilmer hadn’t taken the action he did on Whirlygig. Your profiles are all too far away from the standard patterns. But that’s my speculation. The main thing is, something did happen. And” — Olivia Ferranti looked at the intent young faces around her and shook her head — “here we are. We have to decide what will happen next.

  “I’ll accept that you have control of the ship. And I hope you’ll accept my word when I tell you your control could be dangerous, with the limited knowledge you have. The present situation is bad for everyone, including you. So let me start the ball rolling for mo
re discussions, by telling you that I was sent here with a proposition from all of us — even including Captain Rinker.”

  The group around her came to life. They were suddenly fidgeting, looking at each other questioningly. For over half an hour their present situation had been pushed into the background by interest in the fate of others. The return to the present was an uncomfortable one.

  Peron met the eyes of each of them in turn. Finally he nodded.

  “We’ve nothing to lose by listening to you, so long as you remember that we have physical control of you and of the ship. So all right. We’ll listen. What’s your proposition?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Slowly, millimeter by millimeter, Olivia Ferranti’s eyes were opening. A thin line of white had appeared behind the long false eyelashes. It broadened, to become a slender crescent. The lids crept apart, at last, to reveal dilated pupils and the luminous brown irises, flecked with gold.

  “That’s it,” said Peron finally. “She’s in S-space. At last. There’s no way that anyone could fake an awakening like that. Let’s get back to the chamber and talk.”

  Every one of the six had known that a discussion was urgently needed; but the urge to watch Olivia Ferranti had been irresistible and tacitly admitted by all. They had gathered around the great tank as she prepared to enter. They watched in silence while she, impressively calm, went inside. And as soon as the heavy casket door slid into sealed position she lay back, stared up at them through the transparent upper surface, and gave a little wave of her fingertips. Then she reached for the interior control panel and hit the key sequence to initiate her return to S-space.

  After a few seconds, clusters of contact sprays moved to drift a fine fluid vapor over her limbs and body, while delicate catheters snaked from the casket walls and insinuated themselves gently into the orifices of her head and trunk. A dense yellow-green vapor filled the interior of the tank, rising after a few minutes to hide Olivia Ferranti’s still form in a soft-edged shroud. There was little to see after that, but they had stood waiting for almost two hours, exchanging brief phrases in hushed tones. Only when the air in the casket finally cleared and Olivia Ferranti began to stir again to slow consciousness were they able to think of other matters.