Tau Zero

Chapter 16

The course out of the Milky Way was not straight; it zigzagged a little, as much as several light-centuries, to pass through the densest accessible nebulae and dust banks. Nevertheless, the time aboard was counted in days until she was in the marches of the spiral arm, outward bound into a nearly starless night.

Joha

“Thank you.” She beamed as she accepted the article.

“You look happy,” Freiwald said. “Why?”

“Why not?”

His arm swept in a violent gesture. “Everything!”

“Well … a disappointment about the Virgo cluster, naturally. Still, Norbert and I—” She broke off, blushing. “We have a fascinating problem here, a real challenge, and he’s already made a brilliant suggestion about it.” She cocked her head at Freiwald. “I’ve never seen you in this black a mood. What’s become of that cheerful Nietzscheanism of yours?”

“Today we leave the galaxy,” he said. “Forever.”

“Why, you knew—”

“Yes. I also knew, know I must die sometime, and Jane too, which is worse. That does not make it easier.” The big blond man exclaimed suddenly, imploringly: “Do you believe we will ever stop?”

“I can’t say,” Glassgold answered. She stood on tiptoe to pat his shoulder. “It was not easy to resign myself to the possibility. I did, though, through God’s mercy. Now I can accept whatever comes to us, and feel how good most of it is. Surely you can do the same, Joha

“I try,” he said. “It is so dark out there. I never thought that I, grown up, would again be afraid of the dark.”

The great whirlpool of suns contracted and paled astern. Another began slowly growing forward. In the viewscope it was a thing of delicate, intricate beauty, jeweled gossamer. Beyond it, around it, more appeared, tiny smudges and points of radiance. Despite the Einsteinian shrinkage of space at Leonora Christine ’s velocity, they showed monstrously remote and isolated.

That speed continued to mount, not as fast as in the regions left behind — here, the gas concentration was perhaps a hundred thousandth of that near Sol — but sufficiently to bring her to the next galaxy in some weeks of her own time. Accurate observations were not to be had without radical improvements in astronomical technology: a task into which Nilsson and his team cast themselves with the eagerness of escapers.

Testing a photoconverter unit, he personally made a discovery. A few stars existed out here. He didn’t know whether random perturbations had sent them drifting from their parental galaxies, uncountable billions of years ago, or whether they had actually formed in these deeps, in unknown fashion. By a grotesquely improbable chance, the ship passed near enough to one that he identified it — a dim, ancient red dwarf — and could show that it must have planets, from the glimpse his apparatus got before the system was swallowed anew by distance.

It was an eerie thought, those icy shadowy worlds, manyfold older than Earth, perhaps one or two with life upon them, and never a star to lighten their nights. When he told Lindgren about it, she said not to pass the information any further.

Several days later, returning home from work, he opened the door to their cabin and found her present. She didn’t notice him. She was seated on the bed, facing away, her eyes on a picture of her family. The light was turned low, dusking her but falling so coldly on her hair that it looked white. She strummed her lute and sang … to herself? It was not the merriment of her beloved Bellman. The language, in fact, was Danish. After a moment, Nilsson recognized the lyrics, Jacobsen’s Songs of Gurre, and Schцnberg’s melodies for them.

The call of King Valdemar’s men, raised from their coffins to follow him on the spectral ride that he was condemmed to lead, snarled forth.

She started to go on with the next stanza, Valdemar’s cry to his lost darling; but she faltered and went directly to his men’s words as dawn breaks over them.

For a little space there was silence. Nilsson said. “That strikes too near home, my dear.”

She looked about. Weariness had laid a pallor on her face. “I wouldn’t sing it in public,” she answered.

Concerned, he went to her, sat down by her side and asked: ‘‘Do you really think of us as being on the Wild Hunt of the damned? I never knew.”

“I try not to let on.” She stared straight before her. Her fingers plucked shivering chords from the lute. “Sometimes — We are now at about the million-year mark, you know.”

He laid an arm around her waist. “What can I do to help, Ingrid? Anything?”

She shook her head the least bit.

“I owe you so much,” he said. “Your strength, your kindness, yourself. You made me back into a man.” With difficulty: “Not the best man alive, I admit. Not handsome or charming or witty. I often forget even to try to be a good partner to you. But I do want to.”

“Of course, Elof.”

“If you, well, have grown tired of our arrangment … or simply want more, more variety—”

“No. None of that.” She put the lute aside. “We have this ship to get to harbor, if ever we can. We dare not let anything else count.”

He gave her a stricken glance; but before he could inquire just what she meant, she smiled, kissed him, and said: “Still, we could use a rest. A forgetting. You can do something for me, Elof. Draw our liquor ration. Help yourself to most of it; you’re sweet when you’ve dissolved your shyness. We’ll invite somebody young and ungloomy — Luis, I think, and Maria — and laugh and play games and be foolish in this cabin and empty a pitcher of water over anybody who says anything serious… Will you do that?”