XLIII
Jump.
Blackness, nothing, blind and absolute. Folk moaned in a kind of terror.
The beacons around the T machine were not candles, red, violet, emerald, amber, lit against the accursed dark; they shone lost and tiny, as if at any moment they might gutter out. Then afar, the least of glimmers on the edge of being seeable, vision found a single point of light.
“Be calm,” ordered a part of Joelle that she detached from herself for this. “We’re in no immediate danger. I will investigate.” She reunited her mind.
With the ship’s organs and senses, she reached forth.
Radar drew the spinning cylinder for her. It was the largest they had yet encountered. Free falling, she nonetheless felt its mass and the power locked within. Optics and radio, vastly amplified, showed her stars scattered thinly and widely, feeble coals smoldering toward oblivion. About the hull was almost a total vacuum. What radiation and material particles she erstwhile knew were almost altogether gone, leaving a hollow that it was meaningless to call empty and cold. She searched and found neighbor galaxies as cindered as this.
Their forms were chaotic. She tried to find other whole clusters of them, and should have been able to spy a few of the nearest, such as the Virgo group, by the last photons they would ever breathe out; but she failed. They had receded too far.
Her awareness came back to immediate surroundings. Instruments had accumulated sufficient data for her to realize that the machine was in orbit around a wholly dead sun. Akin to Sol, it had never exploded, being too small, but passed through its red giant and variable phases, shrank to a planet-sized globe of the maximum density whereunder atoms could still be atoms, and slowly cooled from white heat to a clinker. Some true planets remained, bare rocks or sheathed in their own frozen atmospheres. Save for one- Joelle remembered she ought to descend from the heights and tell her people what had been revealed unto her.
“We’re in the remote future – spatially, back inside the galaxy, but temporally, sometime between seventy and a hundred billion years after we were born. No stars are left alive except the dimmest the meek shall inherit, and they are now dying, while the galaxy itself is disintegrating. The universe has expanded to four or five times the size it had in our day. If we go much onward, I think we’ll learn whether it really will widen forever, or if the old idea is right after all, that it will collapse inward to a new fireball and a new cosmos.”
“Us go onward?” a crewman cried. She didn’t identify his distorted voice, nor wanted to. “Oh, no, oh, no.”
Brodersen’s came in, carefully pragmatic. “What’s that mite of yellow shine we see? Must be nearby.”
“It is. The black dwarf we’re circling has attendants, and the light source is a satellite of one of those. I have no clear notion of its nature. We ought to take a look. The T machine is in a Trojan position with respect to its primary, and the distance is about onepoint-five a.u: not quite four standard days at a full gee.”
“Yes, I suppose we ought,” Brodersen said.
Joelle reminded him levelly – the wonder of it stayed singing and thundering within her holothetic self- “It’s doubtless a work of the Others, you know.”
Chinook flew.
The viewsereens in the common room were blanked, and nobody was sure who had first proposed that; there had been no slightest argument. Instead, the data retrievals bore images, forlornly brilliant, of manwork – Pericles, Shah Jehan, Side 170
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The Hokusai, Monet, Phidias, Rodin, on and on in multiple sequences – while music reveled. Few paid much attention.
Since the vessel was undermanned, a custom had developed that after meals, everyone not on duty helped the quartermaster and her assistant clear things away. Thus Philip Weisenberg found himself walking from the washer beside Caitlin.
“You’re pretty downcast this evening, aren’t you?” he asked. “What’s wrong? Anything I can help with?”
“I thank you, but it’s nothing,” she said, sketching a smile. “A mood, a whimsy.”