Between the Strokes of Night

“You can’t see it until later at night, when Leemu has turned farther on its axis. And then you still can’t see it, without a big telescope, because it’s so far away.”

“But you’ve been there?”

Emil shook his head. “No, I never have. But your mother has. In fact, she was born on Earth.”

“Can I go there, Dad?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Charlene said, “But not tonight. Tonight you have to go inside, and take a bath right now.”

“Mum, that’s not fair. Dad was explaining things to me. About the stars, and where people live, and what they do.”

“That’s very good. But all that will still be there tomorrow. Go on.” Charlene spoke firmly. “In right now, the water will be just right.”

“What about you?”

“We’ll be in in just a second. Don’t worry, from the look of you there’ll be plenty of dirt left for me to worry about when I’m inside.”

“It’s not fair.” But seven-year-old Damon picked up the little crab-apply fruit he had pulled earlier and stomped off into the house.

Charlene sat down in his place, and Emil said, “He wants to go. To the stars. I suppose that it’s inevitable.”

“I know. The more he learns about where we came from, the more he wants to see it all for himself. Sylvia will be the same. But it won’t be for a long time.” Charlene repeated, with great emphasis, “A long time.”

“We like to think so. But time is flying by. Do you wish you hadn’t come, and you had stayed in S-space?”

“Never! This is real human life, the way we were meant to live.”

“I agree, but the children may not.”

“Emil, that’s an awful thought.”

“But a true one. You can almost bet on it. Our children will be like kids everywhere in space and time, whatever their parents did is by definition stupid and old-fashioned. And maybe they are right.” Emil stared up at the sky, where a thousand stars shone clearly now through the frosty air. Charlene was snug in her thermal wrapper, but Emil should have been chilled. He didn’t admit it, of course. As usual he seemed impervious to heat or cold or any physical discomfort.

“We are all over the sky,” he went on. “It makes you wonder what we are looking for. My guess is that we are all — including the free-space disembodied aliens — seeking the same thing. We want immortality. Either we look for it in person, or through our children, or through works that will live on through time.

“You know, when I was no more than eleven or twelve years old, I was convinced that it was human destiny to spread wider and wider in space, until one day there would be humans, or the changed descendants of humans, everywhere. But what I never imagined, even in my wildest dreams, was S-space and T-state and cold sleep, and all the other possible ways of changing the rate at which we live. The human diaspora is real, but it is more than I could conceive. It is taking place through time, as well as through space. We, or our children, are going to be present in the farthest depths of space and time. And we won’t just be there. We’ll dance and sing there, even if the singing is done with radio frequency electromagnetic signals, and the dance is a swirl of free electrons.” While he had been speaking, Charlene had sat silent at his side. He turned to her.

“Well, I guess your notable lack of response is sufficient comment on my ramblings. Or were you miles away, with thoughts of your own?”

“No. I was listening.”

That was almost true. Charlene had been aware of every word that Emil said. But as soon as he had spoken of children and immortality, her thoughts had set off on their own flight. Long before them, Wolfgang Gibbs had chosen a Mayfly life on one of the planets and rejected any attempt at personal immortality. What was the name of the place? Kallen’s World.

Wolfgang was dead now, his life had finished uncounted centuries in the past. Nothing of his mortal remains would survive. They had crumbled to atoms, just as the body of Judith Niles, which Charlene had insisted that they bring with them to Leemu, was crumbling now to quiet dust in the chilly ground of their new world. But Wolfgang’s descendants surely lived on, as presumably JN herself lived on in noncorporeal form. Some day, in a far-off time and place, maybe Charlene’s descendants and Wolfgang’s would meet. They would, of course, know nothing of the long-ago affair of their great-to-the-Nth grandparents. And that was just as it should be. Each generation should make its own loves, establish its own bonds, and know love and life and exultation as if they were newborn that very hour.

She thought of Wolfgang, but it was not with any sense of regret. Fondness, yes, and more than that, an odd curiosity. Of course, she would never exchange Emil, Damon, and Sylvia for anyone or anything in the known — or unknown — universe. But the curiosity took the form of an unanswerable question: would their children’s children’s children, someday and somewhere, meet?