Tau zero (2 page)

Her laugh was uncertain.

He managed to keep the talk inconsequential while he nosed into Strommen, docked the boat, and led her on foot across the bridge to

Old Town. Beyond the royal palace they found themselves under softer illumination, walking down narrow streets between high golden-hued buildings that had stood much as they were for several hundred years. Tourist season was past; of the uncounted foreigners in the city, few had reason to visit this enclave; except for an occasional pedestrian or electrocyclist, Reymont and Lindgren were nearly alone.

"I shall miss this," she said.

"It's picturesque," he conceded.

"More than that, Carl. It's not just an outdoor museum. Real human beings live here. And the ones who were before them, they stay real too. In, oh, Birger Jarl's Tower, the Riddarholm Church, the shields in the House of Nobles, the Golden Peace where Bellman drank and sang— It's going to be lonely in space, Carl, so far from our dead."

"Nevertheless you're leaving."

"Yes. Not easily. My mother who bore me, my father who took me by the hand and led me out to teach me constellations. Did he know what he was doing to me that night?" She drew a breath. "That's partly why I got in touch with you. I had to escape from what I'm doing to them. If only for a single day."

"You need a drink," he said, "and here we are."

The restaurant fronted on the Great Marketplace. Between the surrounding steep facades you could imagine how knights had clattered merrily across the paving stones. You did not remember how the gutters ran with blood and heads were stacked high during a certain winter week, for that was long past and men seldom dwell on the hurts that befell other men. Reymont conducted Lindgren to a table in a candlelit room which they had to themselves, and ordered akvavit with beer chasers.

She matched him drink for drink, though she had less mass and less practice. The meal that followed was lengthy even by Scandinavian standards, with considerable wine during it and considerable cognac afterward. He let her do most of the talking.

—of a house near Drottningholm, whose park and gardens were almost her own; sunlight through windows, gleaming over burnished wood floors and on silver that had been passed down for ten generations; a sloop on the lake, heeled to the wind, her father at the tiller with a pipe in his teeth, her hair blowing loose; monstrous nights at wintertime, and in their middle that warm cave named Christmas; the short light nights of summer, the balefires kindled on St. John's Eve that had once been lit to welcome Baldr home from the underworld; a walk in the rain with a first sweetheart, the air cool, drenched with

water and odor of lilacs; travels around Earth, the Pyramids, the Parthenon, Paris at sunset from the top of Montparnasse, the Taj Mahal, Angkor Wat, the Kremlin, the Golden Gate Bridge, yes, and Fujiyama, the Grand Canyon, Victoria Falls, the Great Barrier Reef—

—of love and merriment at home but discipline too, order, gravity in the presence of strangers; music around, Mozart the dearest; a fine school, where teachers and classmates brought a complete new universe exploding into her awareness; the Academy, harder work than she had known she could do, and how pleased she was to discover she was able; cruises through space, to the planets, oh, she had stood on the snows of Titan with Saturn overhead, stunned by beauty; always, always her kindred to return to—

—in a good world, its people, their doings, their pleasures all good; yes, there remained problems, outright cruelties, but those could be solved in time through reason and good will; it would be a joy to believe in some kind of religion, since that would perfect the world by giving it ultimate purpose, but in the absence of convincing proof she could still do her best to help supply that meaning, help mankind move toward something loftier—

—but no, she wasn't a prig, he mustn't believe that; in fact, she often wondered if she wasn't too hedonistic, a bit more liberated than was best; however, she did get fun out of life without hurting anyone else, as far as she could tell; she lived with high hopes.

Reymont poured the last coffee for her. The waiter had finally brought the bill, though he seemed in no more hurry to collect than most of his kind in Stockholm. "I expect that in spite of the drawbacks," Reymont said, "you'll manage to enjoy our voyage."

Her voice had gotten a bit slurred. Her eyes, regarding him, stayed bright and level. "I plan to," she declared. "That's the main reason I called you. Remember, during training I urged you to come here for part of your furlough." By now they were using the intimate pronoun.

Reymont drew on his cigar. Smoking would be prohibited in space, to avoid overloading the life support systems, but tonight he could still put a blue cloud in front of him.

She leaned forward, laying a hand over his free one on the table. "I was thinking ahead," she told him. "Twenty-five men and twenty-five women. Five years in a metal shell. Another five years if we turn back immediately. Even with antisenescence treatments, a decade is a big piece out of a life."

He nodded.

"And of course we'll stay to explore," she went on. "If that third planet is habitable, we'll stay to colonize—forever—and we'll start

having children. Whatever we do, there are going to be liaisons. We'll pair off."

He said, low lest it seem too blunt: "You think you and I might make a couple?"

"Yes." Her tone strengthened. "It may seem immodest of me, whether or not I am a spacewoman. But I'll be busier than most, the first several weeks of travel especially. I won't have time for nuances and rituals. It could end with me in a situation I don't want. Unless I think ahead and make preparations. As I'm doing."

He lifted her hand to his lips. "I am deeply honored, Ingrid. Though we may be too unlike."

"No, I suspect that's what draws me." Her palm curved around his mouth and slid down his cheek. "I want to know you. You are more a man than any I've met before."

He counted money onto the bill. It was the first time that she had seen him move not entirely steadily. He ground out his cigar, watching it as he did. "I'm staying at a hotel over on T^ska Brinken," he said. "Rather shabby."

"I don't mind," she answered. "I doubt if I'll notice."

Chapter 2

Seen from one of the shuttles that brought her crew to her, Leonora Christine resembled a dagger pointed at the stars.

Her hull was a conoid, tapering toward the bow. Its burnished smoothness seemed ornamented rather than broken by the exterior fittings. These were locks and hatches; sensors for instruments; housings for the two boats that would make the planetfalls for which she herself was not designed; and the web of the Bussard drive, now folded flat. The base of the conoid was quite broad, since it contained the reaction mass among other things; but the length was too great for this to be particularly noticeable.

At the top of the dagger blade, a structure fanned out which you might have imagined to be the guard of a basket hilt. Its rim supported eight skeletal cylinders pointing aft. These were the thrust tubes, that accelerated the reaction mass backward when the ship moved at merely interplanetary speeds. The "basket" enclosed their controls and power plant.

Beyond this, darker in hue, extended the haft of the dagger, ending finally in an intricate pommel. The latter was the Bussard engine; the rest was shielding against its radiation when it should be activated.

Thus Leonora Christine, seventh, and youngest of her class. Her outward simplicity was required by the nature of her mission and was as deceptive as a human skin; inside, she was very nearly as complex and subtle. The time since the basic idea of her was first conceived, in the middle twentieth century, had included perhaps a million man-years of thought and work directed toward achieving the reality; and some of those men had possessed intellects equal to any that had ever existed. Though practical experience and essential tools had already been gotten when construction was begun upon her, and though technological civilization had reached its fantastic flowering (and finally, for a while, was not burdened by war or the threat of war)—nevertheless, her cost was by no means negligible, had indeed provoked widespread complaint. All this, to send fifty people to one practically nextdoor star?

Right. That's the size of the universe.

It loomed behind her, around her, where she circled Earth. Staring away from sun and planet, you saw a crystal darkness huger than you

dared comprehend. It did not appear totally black; there were light reflections within your eyeballs, if nowhere else; but it was the final night, that our kindly sky holds from us. The stars thronged it, unwinking, their brilliance winter-cold. Those sufficiently luminous to be seen from the ground showed their colors clear in space: steel-blue Vega, golden Capella, ember of Betelgeuse. And if you were not trained, the lesser members of the galaxy that had become visible were so many as to drown the familiar constellations. The night was wild with suns.

And the Milky Way belted heaven with ice and silver; and the Magellanic Clouds were not vague shimmers but roiling and glowing; and the Andromeda galaxy gleamed sharp across more than a million light-years; and you felt your soul drowning in those depths and hastily pulled your vision back to the snug cabin that held you.

Ingrid Lindgren entered the bridge, caught a handhold, and poised in mid-air. "Reporting for duty, Mr. Captain," she announced formally.

Lars Telander turned about to greet her. In free fall, his gaunt and gawky figure became lovely to watch, like a fish in water or a hawk on the wing. Otherwise he could have been any gray-haired man of fifty-odd. Neither of them had bothered to put insignia of rank on the coveralls that were standard shipboard working attire.

"Good day," he said. "I trust you had a pleasant leave."

"I certainly did." The color mounted in her cheeks. "And you?"

"Oh ... it was all right. Mostly I played tourist, from end to end of Earth. I was surprised at how much I had not seen before."

Lindgren regarded him with some compassion. He floated alone by his command seat, one of three clustered around a control and communications console at the middle of the circular room. The meters, readout screens, indicators, and other gear that crowded the bulkheads, already blinking and quivering and tracing out scrawls, only emphasized his isolation. Until she came, he had not been listening to anything except the murmur of ventilators or the infrequent click of a relay.

"You have nobody whatsoever left?" she asked.

"Nobody close." Telander's long features crinkled in a smile. "Don't forget, as far as the Solar System is concerned, I have almost counted a century. When last I visited my home village in Dalarna, my brother's grandson was the proud father of two adolescents. It was not to be expected that they would consider me a near relative."

(He was born three years before the first manned expedition departed for Alpha Centauri. He entered kindergarten two years before the first maser messages from it reached Farside Station on Luna.

That set the life of an introverted, idealistic child on trajectory. At age twenty-five, an Academy graduate with a notable performance in the interplanetary ships, he was allowed on the first crew for Epsilon Er-idani. They returned twenty-nine years later; but because of the time dilation, they had experienced just eleven, including the six spent at the goal planets. The discoveries they had made covered them with glory. The Tau Ceti ship was outfitting when they came back. Telander could be the first officer if he was willing to leave in less than a year. He was. Thirteen years of his own went by before he returned, commander in place of a captain who had died on a world of peculiar savageries. On Earth, the interval had been thirty-one years. Leonora Christine was being assembled in orbit. Who better than him for her master? He hesitated. She was to start in barely three years. If he accepted, most of those thousand days would be spent planning and preparing. . . . But not to accept was probably not thinkable; and too, he walked as a stranger on an Earth grown strange to him.)

"Let's get busy," he said. "I assume Boris Fedoroff and his engineers rode up with you?"

She nodded. "You'll hear him on the intercom after he's organized, he told me."

"Hm. He might have observed the courtesy of notifying me of his arrival."

"He's in a foul mood. Sulked the whole way from ground. I don't know why. Does it matter?"

"We are going to be together in this hull for quite a while, Ingrid," Telander remarked. "Our behavior will indeed matter."

"Oh, Boris will get over his fit. I suppose he has a hangover, or some girl said no to him last night, or something. He struck me during training as a rather soft-hearted person."

"The psychoprofile indicates it. Still, there are things—potentialities—in each of us that no testing shows. You have to be yonder—" Telander gestured at the hood of the optical periscope, as if it were the remoteness that it watched—"before those develop, for good or bad. And they do. They always do." He cleared his throat. "Well. The scientific personnel are on schedule also?"

"Yes. They'll arrive in two ferries, first at 1340 hours, second at 1500." Telander noted agreement with the program clamped to the desk part of the console. Lindgren added: "I don't believe we need that much interval between them."

"Safety margin," Telander replied absently. "Besides, training or no, we'll need time to get that many groundlubbers to their berths, when they can't handle themselves properly in weightlessness."

"Carl can handle them," Lindgren said. "If need be, he can carry them individually, faster than you'd credit till you saw him."

"Reymont? Our constable?" Telander studied her fluttering lashes. "I know he's skilled in free fall, and he'll come on the first ferry, but is he that good?"

"We visited L'Etoile de Plaisir."

"Where?"

"A resort satellite."

"Hm, yes, that one. And you played null-gee games?" Lindgren nodded, not looking at the captain. He smiled again. "Among other things, no doubt."