Tau zero (25 page)

tics, spectral and velocital. To nobody's surprise, the nearest of that sort had planets. She decelerated toward it.

The procedure differed from the original scheme, which had been to go by at high speed, making observations while she passed through the system. Reymont was responsible for it. This once, he said, let a chance be taken. The odds weren't too bad. Measurements made across light-years with the instruments and techniques developed aboard ship gave reason to expect that a certain attendant of that yellow sun might offer a haven to man.

If not—a year would have been lost, the year required to reap-proach c with respect to the entire galaxy. But if there actually was a planet such as lived in memory, no further deceleration would be called for. Two years would have been gained.

The gamble seemed worthwhile. Given twenty-five fertile couples, an extra two years meant an extra half hundred ancestors for the future race.

Leonora Christine found her world, the very first time.

Chapter 23

On a hill that viewed wide across a beautiful valley, a man stood with his woman.

Here was not New Earth. That would have been too much to expect. The river far below them was tinted gold with tiny life, and ran through meadows whose many-fronded growth was blue. Trees looked as if they were feathered, in shades of the same color, and the wind set some kinds of blossoms in them to chiming. It bore scents which were like cinnamon, and iodine, and horses, and nothing for which men had a name. On the opposite side lifted stark palisades, black and red, fanged with crags, where flashed the horns of a glacier.

Yet the air was warm; and humankind could thrive here. Enormous above river and ridges towered clouds which shone silver in the sun.

Ingrid Lindgren said, "You mustn't leave her, Carl. She deserves too well of us."

"What are you talking about?" Reymont retorted. "We can't leave each other. None of us can. Ai-Ling understands you're something unique to me. But so is she, in her own way. So are we all, everyone to everyone else. Aren't we? After what we've been through together?"

"Yes. It's only— I never thought to hear those words from you, Carl, darling."

He laughed. "What did you expect?"

"Oh, I don't know. Something harsh and unyielding."

"The time for that is over," he said. "We've got where we were going. Now we have to start afresh."

"Also with each other?" she asked, a little teasingly.

"Yes. Of course. Good Lord, hasn't this been discussed enough among the bunch of us? We'll need to take from the past what's good and forget what was bad. Like . . . well, the whole question of jealousy simply isn't relevant. There'll be no later immigrants. We have to share our genes around as much as we can. Fifty of us to start a whole intelligent species over again! So your worry about someone being hurt, or left out, or anything—it doesn't arise. With all the work ahead of us, personalities have no importance whatsoever."

He pulled her to him and chuckled down at her. "Not that we can't tell the universe Ingrid Lindgren is the loveliest object in it," he said,

threw himself down under a tall old tree, and tugged her hand. "Come here. I told you we were going to take a holiday."

Steely-scaled, with a skirling along its wings, passed overhead one of those creatures called dragons.

Lindgren joined Reymont, but hesitantly. "I don't know if we should, Carl," she said.

"Why not?"

"Too much to do."

"Construction, planting, everything's coming along fine. The scientists haven't reported any menace, actual or potential, that we can't deal with. We can well afford to loaf a bit."

"All right, let's face the fact." She brought the words unwillingly forth. "Kings get no holidays."

"What are you babbling about?" Reymont lounged back against the rough, sweet-scented bole and rumpled her hair, which was bright beneath the young sun. After dark there would be three moons to shine upon her, and more stars in the sky than men had known before.

"You," she said. "They look to you, the man who saved them, the man who dared survive, they look to you for—"

He interrupted her in the most enjoyable way.

"Carl!" she protested.

"Do you mind?"

"No. Certainly not. On the contrary. But—I mean, your work—"

"My work," he said, "is my share of the community's job. No more and no less. As for any other position: They had a proverb in America which went, Tf nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve.' "

She looked at him with a kind of terror. "Carl! You can't mean that!"

"I sure as hell can," he answered. For a moment he turned serious again. "Once a crisis is past, once people can manage for themselves . . . what better can a king do for them than take off his crown?"

Then he laughed, and made her laugh with him, and they were merely human.

(Continued from front flap)

so thin they wouldn't need shielding: outside the galaxy. It was a gamble, because to leave the galaxy in a feasible amount of subjective time, they would have to reach very nearly the speed of light.

That meant they had to keep accelerating. Or die.

Suddenly, five years in space seemed like no time at all. For the Leonora Christine was on an unstoppable trajectory...to eternity.

Jacket art by Ron Walotsky