Between the Strokes of Night

Garville was a huge man, slow-moving and slow-talking. He was one of the Gulf City residents who didn’t bother to wear a wig, and at some time — almost certainly in a Planetfest accident — something had fractured his skull with a frightful blow just above the forehead. He rubbed at the scar-tissued fissure while he took his time answering Sy’s question.

“I’ve tried the obvious tricks,” he said at last. “I have all the images we’ve ever received, and the stellar geometry allows me to assign an age to each one. The times themselves seem random. I’ve used the images and their ages to plot out the number of red dwarfs in the whole affected area of the spiral arm as a function of time, and it’s monotonically increasing. The numbers go up, and once a star has changed to a red dwarf it never changes back.

“I’ve analyzed the plots, number of red dwarfs against time, but they don’t follow any smooth function. The most you can say is that the rate of increase with time is somewhere between linear and quadratic, which is bad news for the future. I’ve done my best to extrapolate backwards, and I can make rough estimates of the time when the fraction of red dwarf stars to total stellar population in our local spiral arm is the same as in other arms of our galaxy. What we don’t have are pairs of Kermel Object images corresponding to those times, which might show the first stellarforming change taking place and allow us to pinpoint the star involved. We have a couple of images showing the situation from long ago — thirty million years and more — and the star counts from those give me confidence that at one time this galactic arm had the same stellar type distribution as everywhere else. But that’s all. I’ve never seen a way to use the results.”

Sy was nodding. “You’re not alone in that. I believe you’ve squeezed out of the data all there is to be squeezed. We could all take another look, but I doubt we’ll add to what you have.”

“So you have nothing to add?” Judith Niles made an attempt to recapture control of the meeting. “In that case — “

“I didn’t say I had nothing to add.” As Sy continued, Charlene could feel the tension returning. “I believe I know exactly what we must do. It’s simple, it calls for huge patience, and it’s going to be enormously frustrating for people like me — because it’s totally passive.”

He became silent, until finally Judith Niles betrayed her own lack of patience and said, “Well, then?”

“We do what you established Gulf City to allow us to do. We remain in S-space, or even in T-state, and we wait. While we wait, our instruments eavesdrop on the whole sky, listening all the while for more signals from the Kermel Objects. Eventually we will acquire the pair of images that we need, a pair which Emil assures us are not in the current data bank. We’ll find two consecutive images in which exactly one star has changed to become a red dwarf in the interval between the two. And that star will be the one we want.”

Judith Niles said, “Eventually! How long might that be? By the time that the images you’re asking for come in, we might be millions of years into the future. The whole spiral arm might be red dwarfs.”

“True.” Sy sounded casual as he stared around the little group. “The Director is quite right. ‘Eventually’ could also mean ‘too late.’ That’s always a possibility. But I still propose to do what I’ve suggested. And if somebody comes up with an idea that’s definitely better, while I’m watching and waiting, then I’ll be delighted to switch.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The Void: A.D. 83,253

Charlene had done none of the work herself, which was perhaps why the results so fascinated her.

She pressed the button again, and in front of her, in all its sprawling orange-red splendor, lay the local galactic arm. It hung for a few moments, glowing and static; then the change began. Here and there, at scattered points within the display, specks of orange-red were replaced by points of cyan, magenta, blue-white, and luminous green. At the same time, the whole spiral arm shifted, creeping to a slightly different configuration.

It was a slow process, because the stars were so numerous; but in the time it took to blink, somewhere in the image a spark of orange-red was turned off and a mote of some other hue took its place.

Blink. Another star was transformed.

Blink: another star.

Again and again and again. Now the display was no longer predominantly orange-red. Other star colors were becoming more numerous, even starting to dominate. The lost stars formed no pattern, but somehow the eye discovered a shrinking circle. As the display proceeded farther, that circle became an explicit overlay, a colored ring whose center might shift but whose size always diminished.