The Long Night

reason to suppose the interstellar medium was not equally dense everywhere. Nor had you any hint of receding galaxies.

“So your version of relativity made space sharply curved by the mass packed together throughout it. The entire universe was two or three hundred light-years across. Stars condensed and evolved—you could witness every stage of that—but in a chaotic fashion, with no particular overall structure. It’s a wonder to’ me that you went on to gravities and hyperdrive. I wish I were scientist enough to appreciate how different some of the laws and constants must be in your physics. But you did plow ahead. I guess the fact you knew these things were possible was important to your success. Your scientists would keep fudging and finagling, in defiance of theoretical niceties, until they made something work.”

“Urn-m-m… as a matter of fact, yes,” Him said in a slightly abashed tone. Graydal snickered.

“Well, then Makt lost her way, and emerged into the outer universe, which was totally strange,” Laure said. “You had to account somehow for what you saw. Like any scientists, you stayed with accepted ideas as long as feasible—a perfectly correct principle which my people call the razor of Occam. I imagine that the notion of contiguous space-times with varying properties looks quite logical if you’re used to thinking of a universe with an extremely small radius. You may have been puzzled as to how you managed to get out of one ‘bubble’ and into the next, but I daresay you cobbled together a tentative explanation.”

“I did,” Him said. “If we postulate a multidimensional—”

“Never mind,” Laure said. “That’s no longer needful. We can account for the facts much more simply.”

“How? I have been pondering it. I think I can grasp the idea of a universe billions of light-years across, in ,which the stars form galaxies. But our home space—”

“Is a dense star cluster. And as such, it has no definite boundaries. That’s what I meant by saying we are already in it. In the thin verge, at least.” Laure pointed to the diffuse, jeweled magnificence that was rising higher above these wastes, in the wake of the red and blue suns. “Yonder’s the main body, and Kirkasant is somewhere there. But this system here is associated, I’ve checked proper motions and I know.”

“I could have accepted some such picture while on Serieve,” Hirn said. “But Vandange was so insistent that a star cluster like this cannot be.” Laure visualized the sneer behind hi!; faceplate. “I thought that he, belonging to the master civilization, would know whereof he spoke.”

“He does. He’s merely rather unimaginative,” Laure said. “You see, what we have here is a globular cluster. That’s a group made up of stars close together in a roughly spherical volume of space. I’d guess you have a quarter million, packed into a couple of hundred light-years’ diameter.

“But globular clusters haven’t been known like this one. The ones we do know lie mostly well off the galactic plane. The space within them is much clearer than in the spiral arms, almost a perfect vacuum. The individual members are red. Any normal stars of greater than minimal mass have gone off the main sequence long ago. The survivors are metal-poor. That’s another sign of extreme age. Heavy elements are formed in stellar cores, you know, and spewed back into space. So it’s the younger suns, coalescing out of the enriched interstellar medium, that contain a lot of metal. All in all, everything points to the globular clusters being relics of an embryo stage in the galaxy’s life.

“Yours, however—! Dust and gas so thick that not. even a giant can be seen across many parsecs. Plenty of mainsequence stars, including blues which cannot be more than a few million years old, they burn out so fast. Spectra, not to mention planets your explorers visited, showing atomic abundances far skewed toward the high end of the periodic table. A background radiation too powerful for a man like me to dare take up permanent residence in your country.

“Such a cluster shouldn’t be!”

“But it is,” Graydal said.

Laure made bold to squeeze her hand, though little of that could pass through the gauntlets. “I’m glad,” he answered.

“How do you explain the phenomenon?” Hirn asked.

“Oh, that’s obvious… now that I’ve seen the thing and gathered some information on its path,” Laure said. “An improbable situation, maybe unique, but not impossible. This cluster happens to have an extremely eccentric orbit around the galactic center of mass. Once or twice a gigayear, it passes through the vast thick clouds that surround that region. By gravitation, it sweeps up immense quantities of stuff. Meanwhile, I suppose, perturbation causes some of its senior members to drift off. You might say it’s periodically rejuvenated.

“At present, it’s on its way_out again. Hasn’t quite left our spiral arm. It passed near the galactic midpoint just a short while back, cosmically speaking; I’d estimate less than fifty million years. The infall is still turbulent, still condensing out into new stars like that blue giant shining on us. Your home sun and its planets must be a product of an earlier sweep. But there’ve been twenty or thirty such since the galaxy formed, and each one of them was responsible for several generations of giant stars. So Kirkasant has a lot more heavy elements than the normal planet, even though it’s not much_younger than Earth. Do you follow me?”

“Hm-m-m… perhaps. I shall have to think.” Hirn walked off, across the great tilted block on which the party stood, to its edge, where he stopped and looked down into the shadows below. They were deep and knife sharp. The mingled light of red and blue suns, stars, starfog played eerie across the stone land. Laure grew aware of what strangeness and what silence—under the hiss in his ears—pressed in on him.

Graydal must have felt the same, for she edged close until their armors clinked together. He would have liked to see her face. She said: “Do you truly believe we can enter that realm and conquer it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, slow and blunt. “The sheer number,of stars may beat us.”

“A large enough fleet could search them, one by one.”

“If it could navigate. We have yet to find out whether that’s possible.”

“Suppose. Did you guess a quarter million suns in the cluster? Not all are like ours. Not even a majority. On the other coin side, with visibility as low as it is, space must be searched back and forth, light-year by light-year. We of Makt could die of eld before a single vessel chanced on Kirkasant.”

“I’m afraid that’s true.”

“Yet an adequate number of ships, dividing the task, could find our home in a year or two.”

“That would be unattainably expensive, Graydal.”

He thought he sensed her stiffening. “I’ve come on this before,” she said coldly, withdrawing from his touch. “In your Commonalty they count the cost and the profit first. Honor, adventure, simple charity must run a poor second.”

“Be reasonable,” he said. “Cost represents labor, skill, and resources. The gigantic fleet that would go looking for Kirkasant must be diverted from other jobs. Other people would suffer need as a result. Some might suffer sharply.”

“Do you mean a civilization as big, as productive as yours could not spare that much effort for a while without risking disaster?”

She’s quick on the uptake, Laure thought. Knowing what machine technology can do on her single impoverished world, she can well guess what it’s capable of with millions of planets to draw on. But how can I make her realize that matters aren’t that simple?”

“Please, Graydal,” he said. “Won’t you believe I’m working for you? I’ve come this far, and I’ll go as much farther as need be, if something doesn’t kill us.”

He heard her gulp. “Yes. I offer apology. You are different.”

“Not really. I’m a typical Commonalty member. Later, maybe, I can show you how our civilization works, and what an odd problem in political economy we’ve got if Kirkasant is to be rediscovered. But first we have to establish that locating it is physically possible. We have to make long-term observations from here, and then enter those mists, and—One trouble at a time, I beg you!”

She laughed gently. “Indeed, my friend. And you will find a way.” The mirth faded. It had never been strong.

“Won’t you?” The reflection of clouded stars glistened on her faceplate like tears.

Blindness was not dark. It shone.

Standing on the bridge, amidst the view of space, Laure saw nimbus and thunderheads. They piled in cliffs, they eddied and streamed, their color was a sheen of all colors overlying white—mother-of-pearl—but here and there they darkened with shadows and grottoes; here and there they glowed dull red as they reflected a nearby sun. For the stars were scattered about in their myriads, dominantly ruby and ember, some yellow or candent,