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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Sy hesitated for maybe a minute after leaving Peron and Elissa. Then he moved fast. During their tour of Gulf City they had seen a dozen suspense chambers for movement to and from S-space. Now he headed for the nearest of them and unhesitatingly lowered himself inside one of the tanks. He performed a final check of the monitors to confirm that he was alone and unobserved, then lay back in the casket and initiated the process that would take him to normal space. His eyes closed . . . 

 . . . and opened—to find Judith Niles calmly peering in at him through the tank's transparent cover. She had an unreadable smile on her face, and when he was fully awake she opened the door and helped him out. He looked at her warily.

"Come on, Sy Day," she said. "You and I need to talk, just the two of us. I think my office will feel more comfortable than the chamber here." And without looking at him she turned and led the way.

She took him toward the main labs of Gulf City, in the very center of the station. Sy soon found himself in a well-appointed set of rooms, with pictures on the walls, shelves of genuine books, and serried ranks of monitors. She waved at them.

"First lesson. I'll be throwing a lot of lessons at you. Don't ever assume that you are unobserved in Gulf City. I learned the art of monitoring from a master—the only master I've ever known. From here you can watch everything." She initiated a suite-spin to give an effective gravity about half that of Earth, then sank into an armchair and tucked her feet in under her. She gestured Sy to take a seat opposite. There was a long silence, during which they performed a close inspection of each other.

"Want me to do the talking?" she said at last.

Sy shook his head. "You first, me second. You know I have questions."

"Of course you do." Judith Niles leaned back and sighed. "I wouldn't be interested in you if you didn't. And I think I have some answers. But it has to be a two-way street."

"What do you want from me?"

"Everything. Cooperation, understanding, brain-power, new ideas—maybe partnership." She was staring at him with peculiar intensity, eyes wide and unblinking beneath the scarred forehead. "It's something I haven't had in all the years since we left Earth. I think you can be a full partner. God knows, we need it. We're dying for lack of fresh thoughts here. Every time a new arrival finds a way to Gulf City, I've waited and hoped." Her expression had changed, become almost beseeching. "I think you're different. We can read each other, you and I. That's rarer than you know. I want you to help me recruit your companions, because I'm not sure I can do that. They're a stubborn pair. But you think in the same way as I do. I suspected you would come here, to normal space, because it's exactly what I do myself, when I need quiet time, time to think. You heard that it's bad to go from normal space to S-space and back too often?"

Sy nodded. "That's what Olivia Ferranti told us. She believes it, but I'm not sure I do. I've seen no evidence of it."

"I don't think you will. If there are bad effects, they are very subtle." Judith Niles smiled again, an open smile that lit up her face. "But a system in which people pop into normal space to think is hard to control. You don't take other people's word for much, do you?"

"Should I?" Sy's face was expressionless. "Look, if this is to be more than a waste of time, let's get to specifics. You're right, I came here to think before we met with you again. I needed time. Gulf City seemed like a big charade—a place without a plausible purpose. If you want my cooperation, and the cooperation of Peron and Elissa, begin by telling me what's really going on here—tell me why Gulf City exists."

"I'll do better than that." Judith Niles stood up. "I'll show you. You can see for yourself. I don't often have a chance to brag about the work we've done here, but that doesn't mean I'm not proud of it. Put this suit on—we'll be visiting some cold places."

* * *

She led the way down a long corridor. The first room contained half a dozen people, all frozen in postures of concentration around two beds occupied by recumbent forms.

"Standard S-space lab." Judith Niles shrugged. "No big mysteries here, and no justification for Gulf City. We still conduct sleep experiments in S-space, but there's no reason except my personal interests why this has to be here. This is my own lab. I started out in sleep research, back on Earth—it led us to discover S-space. The main center for sleep research is still back in the Sol System, under Jan de Vries. The best protocol we know reduces sleep to about one hour in thirty. Our end objective is still the same: zero sleep."

She closed the door. Another corridor, another lab, this one entered through a double insulating door. Before they went inside, they sealed their suits.

"Temperature here is well below freezing." Niles spoke over the suit radio. "This one should be more interesting. We discovered it about seven thousand Earth-years ago. Wolfgang Gibbs stumbled across the condition when we were exploring the long-term physiological effects of cold sleep. He calls it T-state."

The room had four people in it, each sitting in a chair and supported at head, wrists, waist, and thighs. They wore headsets covering eyes and ears, and they did not move.

Sy moved forward and looked at each of them closely. He touched a frozen fingertip, and lifted the front of a headset to peer into an open eye. "They can't be in S-space," he said at last. "This room is too cold for it. Are they conscious?"

"Completely. These four are volunteers. They have been in T-state for almost one thousand Earth-years, but they feel as though they entered it less than five hours ago. Their subjective rate of experience is about a two-millionth of normal, roughly one thousandth of the usual S-space rate."

Sy was silent, but for the first time he looked impressed.

"Mind-boggled?" She nodded. "We all felt the same when Wolfgang showed us. But the real significance of T-state won't be obvious to you for a little while yet. It's hard to grasp just how slow time passes there. Let me tell you how Charlene Bloom put it when she and I had our first one-minute experience of T-state: in the time it takes a T-state clock to strike the hour of midnight, Earth would pass through two whole seasons, from winter to spring to summer. A full life on Earth would flash by in half a T-hour. We have no idea of the human life expectancy for someone who remains in T-state, but we assume it's hundreds of millions of Earth-years."

"Why the headsets?"

"Sensory perception. Humans in T-state are blind, deaf and dumb without computer assistance. Our sense organs are not designed for light and sound waves of such long wavelength. The headsets do the frequency adjustment. Want to try T-state?"

"Definitely."

"I'll put you on the roster to spend a few minutes there. That's enough. Remember the time rate difference—one T-minute costs most of a day in S-space, and nearly four Earth-years."

Again Judith Niles turned to leave the room. Sy, after a final glance at the four cowled and motionless figures, followed her outside and along another long and dimly lit corridor. He noted approvingly that her energy and concentration remained undiminished.

They finally approached a massive metal door, protected against entry by locks that called for fingerprint, vocal, retinal, and DNA matching. When Sy was cleared by the system and stepped inside, he looked around him in surprise. He had expected something new and exotic, perhaps another frozen lab, full of strange experiments in time-slowing or suspension of consciousness; but this room appeared to be no more than a standard communications complex. And a dusty, poorly maintained one at that.

"Don't judge by appearances." Judith Niles had seen his expression. "This is the most important room in Gulf City. If there are any secrets, they're here. And don't think that human nature changes when people move to S-space. It doesn't, and most individuals never question why things are done the way they are in our system. If they do question, they are shown what you are about to see. If not, we don't force the information on them. This is the place where the oldest records are accessed."

She sat down at the console and performed a lengthy coded entry procedure. "You should try cracking this, if you think you're a hot-shot at finding holes in system software. It has six levels of entry protection. Let's feel our way into the data base gradually. This is a good place to begin."

She entered another sequence. The screen lit with the soft, uniform white glow characteristic of S-space. After a few moments there appeared on it a dark network of polyhedral patterns, panels joined by silvery filaments. "You've seen one of these yourself, I gather. Gossameres and Pipistrelles—possibly the first alien intelligence that humans discovered. We ran into them twenty thousand Earth-years ago, as soon as deep space probes began with S-space crews; but we're still not sure if they possess true intelligence. Maybe it depends on our definition. Interesting?"

Sy shrugged in a noncommittal way.

"But not that interesting?" Judith Niles touched the control console again. "I agree. Abstractly interesting, but no more than that unless humans learn to set up a real dialog with them. Well, we have tried. We located their preferred output frequencies, and we found that simple signal sequences would drive them away and discourage them from draining our power supplies. But that's not much of a message, and we never got beyond it. The Gossameres and Pipistrelles proved to be a kind of dead end. But they served one enormously important function. They alerted us to a particular wavelength region. We began to listen on those frequencies anytime we were in deep space and thought there might be a Gossamere around. And that's when we began to intercept other signals on the same wavelengths—regular coded pulses of low-frequency radiation, with a pattern like this."

On the screen appeared a series of rising and falling curves, an interlocking sequence of complex sinusoids broken by regularly spaced even pulses.

"We became convinced they were signals, not just natural emissions. But they were faint and intermittent, and we couldn't locate their sources. Sometimes, a ship on an interstellar transit would pick up a signal on the receiver, long enough for the crew to lock an imaging antenna onto the signal source direction. They might receive a faint source image for a while, then they would lose it as the ship moved on. It was tantalizing, but over the years we built up a library of partial, blurred images. Finally we had enough to plug everything into a computer and look for a pattern. We found one. The 'sightings' took place only near the midpoints of the trips, and only when the ships were far from all material bodies and signal sources. The signals were received only when we were in deep space—the deeper, the better.

"By then we knew we were seeing something different from Gossameres and Pipistrelles. The new sources were very faint and distant, and the reconstructed image outlines showed a hint of a spiral structure, nothing like those paneled polyhedra. But we were still too short of information. It seemed a fascinating scientific mystery, but not much more. That was when Otto Kermel proposed a series of missions for a long-term search and study of the objects.

"I don't claim or deserve any credit for what happened next. I thought his idea would go nowhere, and gave him minimal resources and support. He did all the pioneer work on his own. We gave him the use of a one-man ship, and he went away to a quiet location about seven light-years from Sol. He argued that the absence of electromagnetic and gravitational fields was essential to studying the objects. Although his first objective was communication with them, he found that a round-trip message to even the nearest of them took two S-years. That limited him, but during his studies he discovered lots of other things.

"First, he found many Kermel Objects, all around the Galaxy. The signals we intercept are not intended for us. We are eavesdroppers on transmissions between the Kermels, and those signals between them are numerous. Based on the length of those transmissions, Otto concluded that the Kermel Objects are immensely old, with a natural life-rate so slow that S-space is inadequate to study them—in thousands of Earth-years, he was receiving only partial signals. Otto claimed that he could partially decode their messages, and he believed that they have been in existence since the formation of the Universe—since before the Big Bang, according to one of his wilder reports. He also suggested that they propagate not by exchange of genetic material, but by radio exchange of genetic information. We have not been able to verify any of those conjectures, and Otto could not provide enough data for convincing proof. What he needed was the T-state, and a chance for more extended study periods on a time scale appropriate to the Kermel Objects. But by an accident of timing, he departed for a second expedition just before the T-state was discovered. And he has never returned.

"By the time he left, though, we had changed our ideas about the practical importance of studying the Kermel Objects. We decided that it is central to the future of the human species. We have continued his work, but without much of his data base. Take a look at this."

Judith Niles projected another scene onto the display. "Does it seem familiar?"

Sy studied it for a second or two, then shrugged. "It's a picture of a spiral galaxy, looking down on the disk. I've no idea which one."

"Correct. There's no way you'd recognize it, but it's this galaxy, seen from outside. That signal was recorded by Otto Kermel, from one of the Objects sitting way up above the galactic plane. And as part of the same signal, this image came with it." At her keyed command, another picture overlaid the first one. It was the same galaxy, but now the star patterns were shown in different colors. "Keep watching closely. I'm going to zoom."

The star fields expanded steadily as the field of view moved in to focus on one of the spiral arms. Soon individual stars could be distinguished on the screen.

Judith Niles halted the zoom and moved the image to occupy one quadrant of the display. "Once you look at particular stars, you can see what's going on. The stars in this image have been color-coded according to spectral type. And by looking at the stars in our own stellar neighborhood, it was easy for us to read the code. For instance, Sol is a G-2 V dwarf, and G-types show in pale green. Red giants are magenta, O-type supergiants are purple, and red dwarf stars are shown as orange-yellow.

"There is another important piece of information in this display. Stars don't sit in fixed positions, they move relative to each other. So by looking at the configuration of stars in the main stellar clusters, you can determine the date of an image. All the evidence was consistent, and told us that this image represented the situation as it was nine hundred thousand Earth-years ago. When Otto Kermel received another signal of the same type, he thought at first that it was just a copy. But it wasn't. Here it is."

She brought another image on the screen, placing it in a second quadrant of the display. "For one thing, you can see that the star positions are different. This shows the stellar distribution at a different date. It is still our local arm of the galaxy, but as it was six hundred thousand Earth-years ago. Now watch closely."

Yet another image appeared in a third quadrant.

"Here's one which we date at a hundred and fifty thousand years ago. Take a good look at all three—they are the most important pictures in human history."

Sy stared at the screen in silence for a couple of minutes. "Can you display the color key for spectral type again?" he said at last.

Without speaking, Judith Niles flashed a color code onto the screen header. Sy was silent for an even longer period.

"Where's Sol?" he finally asked.

Judith Niles smiled grimly, and moved the screen cursor to indicate a green star in the field. "That's Sol, as it was a hundred and fifty thousand years ago; just as it has been for the past few billion years, and as it is today, and as it ought to be a billion years from now."

Sy nodded. "It hasn't changed. But you can see there have been changes in the spectral types of other stars. Far too many of them, and far too fast. Stellar evolution is a very slow process."

"Exactly. And all the changes have been taking place in one direction. I only showed you the situation for three different times, but we have others. We can use them to extrapolate forward. Here"—a new image occupied the final quadrant of the display—"is the local spiral arm, as our projection says it will be a million years from now."

She moved the cursor to a point of orange-yellow. "And that is Sol."

"But the color code is for a red dwarf star!"

"That's right. And that's why we—and you—are here in Gulf City."

Sy was studying the images. "Red dwarfs. The whole spiral arm is full of red dwarf stars—far too high a proportion of them." He looked at each image in turn. "This is impossible. There's no way that stellar types could change so much, and in such a short time. You must be misinterpreting the data."

"That's what we thought—at first. Then we began to compare recent star catalogs with ones made in the earliest days of stellar astronomy. There's no mistake. The main sequence stars in our spiral have been changing. Randomly, with no pattern that we can see, but what used to be spectral classes G and K are becoming class M. We can't tell when a particular star is likely to change—that's a guess we made about the future of Sol—but in general—"

"No way!" Sy shook his head vigorously. "Not unless all the astrophysics I learned back on Pentecost is nonsense. It takes hundreds of millions of years at least for a stable star to move from one spectral class to another."

"You know the same astrophysics as we do. And we can only think of one mechanism for change. Class G and class K stars have surface temperatures between about four and six thousand degrees. Class M are more like two to three thousand. You could get those changes in stellar type for dwarf stars, if somehow you could damp the fusion reaction inside them. Lower the internal energy production, and you would lower the overall temperature."

Sy looked frustrated. "Maybe. But can you suggest any process that could possibly do that? I know of none."

"Nor do we. No natural process. That keeps leading us to one unpleasant conclusion. The information we've received from the Kermel Objects is true—we've done other checks on changes in stellar types. And there's no natural way for these changes to happen. So: some other entity, living in our spiral arm of the galaxy, prefers stars of lower temperature and luminosity."

"You mean something or someone is inducing reduced fusion reactions through the spiral arm—intentionally."

"I mean exactly that." Judith Niles' forehead filled with frown lines, and she looked a dozen years older. "It's a frightening conclusion, but it's the only one. I don't think the Kermel Objects are doing this, even though they seem to know a lot about it. We have some evidence that suggests they understand the whole process, and they certainly seem able to predict the rate of change in the spiral arm. But I believe the action doesn't originate with them. What we're seeing is the work of another species, one more like ourselves—one that has no use for the deep space preferred by Gossameres or Kermel Objects. These other creatures want to live near a star. A red, low luminosity star."

She cleared the display, leaned back, and closed her eyes. "A long time ago humans talked of terraforming Mars and Venus, but we never did it. Just too busy blowing ourselves up, I guess, ever to get round to it. Now maybe we've met someone more rational and more ambitious than we were. What we are seeing is stellarforming. If it goes on, and if we don't understand it and find out how to stop it, in another million years this whole spiral arm will have few G-type stars. That will mean the end of human planetary colonies. Eventually, that will be the end of humans. Finis."

Judith Niles paused. She switched off all the displays.

"We think the Kermel Objects hold the key," she said softly. "Now do you see why we're living out here in the middle of nowhere, and why S-space and T-state are so important? In normal space, a million years used to seem like forever. But I expect to be alive, ten thousand Earth-centuries from now."

Sy wore an expression that Peron and Elissa would have found unfamiliar. He seemed uneasy, and lacking in confidence. "I read it wrong. I thought the reason for being here in Gulf City was safety from outside interference, and control of S-space. The whole advantage of being an 'Immortal' was presented to us as increased subjective life span—but now I wonder about that."

"You are right to do so. We have life-extension methods available, ones that came out of S-space research and allow increased life span in normal space. And probably they will let the subject enjoy life more keenly, too. But you can't solve the problem thrown at us by the Kermel Objects unless you can work on it for a long time. That means Gulf City, and it means S-space." She stood up. "Will you work on this? And will you help me to persuade your friends to do the same?"

"I'll try." Sy hesitated. "But I still need to think. I've not had the thinking time that I wanted when I headed for the tanks."

Judith Niles nodded. "I know. But I wanted you to do your thinking with a full knowledge of what's going on here. You have that. I'll head back now. This chamber is self-locking when you leave. And as soon as you're ready to do it, let's meet again with your friends." Now she hesitated, and her expression matched Sy's for uneasiness. "There's something else to be discussed, but it's on another subject. And I want to do it when all of you are together."

She gave him a worried smile and headed for the door. For the first time, Sy could see her as a lonely and vulnerable figure. The power and intensity of personality were still there, unmistakable, but they were muted, overlain with an awareness of a monstrous unsolved problem. He thought of the splendid confidence with which the Planetfest winners had lifted off from Pentecost. They had the shining conviction that any problem in the galaxy would fall to their combined attack. And now? Sy felt older, and a great need for time to think. Judith Niles had been carrying a killing load of responsibility for a long time. She needed help, but could he provide it? Could anyone? He wanted to try. For the first time in his life, he had met someone whose intellect walked the same paths as his own, someone in whose presence he felt totally at ease.

Sy leaned back in his chair. It would be ironic if that satisfaction of mind-meeting came at the same time as a problem too big for both of them.

* * *

An hour later Sy was still sitting in the same position. In spite of every effort, his mind had driven back relentlessly to a single focus: the Kermel Objects. He began to see the Universe as they must see it, from that unique vantage point of the longest perspective of evolutionary time. With the T-state available, humans had a chance to experience that other world-view.

Here was a cosmos which exploded from an initial singular point of incomprehensible heat and light, in which great galaxies formed, tightened into spirals, and whirled about their central axes like giant pinwheels. They clustered together in loose galactic families, threw off supercharged jets of gas and radiation, collided and passed through each other, and spawned within themselves vast gaseous nebulae.

Suns coalesced quickly from dark clouds of dust and gas, blooming from faintest red to fiery blue-white. As he watched in his mind's eye, they brightened, expanded, exploded, dimmed, threw off trains of planets, or spun dizzily around each other. A myriad planetary fragments cooled, cracked, and breathed off their protective sheaths of gases. They caught the spark of life within their oceans of water and air, fanned it, nurtured it, and finally hurled it aloft into surrounding space. Then there was a seething jitter of life around the stars, a Brownian dance of ceaseless human activity against the changing stellar background. The space close to the stars filled with the humming-bird beat and shimmer of intelligent organic life. The whole universe lay open before it.

And now the T-state became essential. Planet-based humans, less than mayflies, flickered through their brief existence in a tiny fraction of a cosmic day. The whole of human history had run its course in a single T-week, while mankind moved out from the dervish whirl of the planets into the space surrounding Sol. Then S-space had given the nearer stars; but the whole galaxy and the open vastness of intergalactic space still beckoned. And in that space, in T-state, humans could be free to thrive forever.

Sy sat back in the chair, drunk with his new vision. He could see a bright path that led from mankind's earliest beginnings, stretching out unbroken into the farthest future.

It was the road to forever. It was a road that he wanted to take, whatever the consequences. But first, humanity had to find a way to survive the stellarforming catastrophe.

 

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