I suspect eternity is a human superstition and the Others know better, Brodersen thought. Aloud: “Yonder must be an observatory, similar to what we found earlier, except I’ll bet with a lot of damned enlightening differences.
We’ll investigate. The background count isn’t too high for us to stay a while.”
“No.” Joelle’s voice grew urgent. “Don’t. Go on. Right away.”
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you. A hunch… We holothetes work on hunches, Dan, often as not, and here- Forces, energies, the very shape of space, everything feels too strange. I’m afraid we can’t cope.”
Without more knowledge, her self-respect said. The Others can teach me how to come back and learn, when I find them, if I find them.
XLI
Jump.
Again the sky was thronged with stars, almost as thickly as two leaps ago, nearly all of them a red hue, from that of blood to that of roses, but crystalline sharp. Most showed less bright than those of the cluster, more bright than those of the inner spiral arm, which fact bespoke their distances and spacings. No trace of nebulae, exterior galaxies, or Milky Way appeared. In one direction the stellar density grew greater and greater, until vision saw it melt into a ruby globe like some huge talismanic sun.
The T machine was alone, light-months from the closest astronomical body and that a dimness which merely happened to be passing by. Whatever path it followed was made for it by the entire multitude. The cylinder was twice the size of any that the voyagers had seen before. Twenty-three beacons attended it, spread across a hundred thousand kilometers.
“We are near the center of the galaxy, inside the clouds.” Joelle’s tone had regained steadiness, a dreamlike tranquility. “Here are many more stars than it holds elsewhere, and the survivors we see are its oldest, formed close to its beginning. There may be a black hole of monster size which has swallowed up millions of them and is still doing so. If that is true, then the rate of it has become very low – for the radiation background is only moderate – and we must have come far into our own future, when none but the longest-lived dwarfs remain shining.”
Weightless in his command seat, in silence and wonderment, Brodersen heard himself ask, “Why didn’t the gate we took lead to any of them?” Pegeen might find words for what I feel right now, but my dumb brain can only bring up flat quackings – could only do that even if I weren’t stunned.
“The T machines cannot have infinite range. Relays must be necessary, placed at the optimum space-time locations for their purpose. This one could serve more places, by orders of magnitude, than the galaxy has members. That, and its dimensions, and what I have already observed and calculated while we traveled, make me believe that the longer paths it generates go extremely far.”
“A junction- Wait!” Brodersen roared. Revelation exploded in him. His pulse became a war-drum. “Listen, listen! A civilization, a whole set of Side 164
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The civilizations, or, or likelier something we’ve no word for, no idea of – and the Others themselves – their people must pass through here. If we stay, we’ll meet them!”
A shout and a babble rang through the intercom from every station in the ship. Weisenberg let it subside before he uttered his caution: “Hold on. How often does anybody come by? Probably most transits get made directly, just because the average machine can take you to more worlds than you could exhaust the possibilities of in a million-year lifetime. Maybe this is used once a century or thereabouts. On the time scale the Others know, that’d make constructing it worthwhile.”
“We can’t tell before we’ve tried,” Brodersen said, calmer.
“We can’t lie in free fall the whole while,” Caitlin warned. “Indeed, our latest boost was much too short for keeping us healthy.”
Brodersen considered. “Right.” In sheer exuberance: “You’ve got to kick that foul habit of yours, Pegeen, of being always right.
“Okay, we need weight, and we don’t want to go into spin mode before we must, but keep our options open as long as possible. So we’ll boost back and forth in the neighborhood. Say -urm – four hours outward, turnover, and four hours back, decelerating. That way we’d never be more than a million kilometers off, nor have too high a relative velocity. Shouldn’t be any problem to detect a spacecraft appearing and punch a signal at her.”