Between the Strokes of Night

“That presented us with a terrible choice. Did we opt for extended personal life span in S-space, or would we guarantee the survival of the human race by staying in normal space?

“While we were still agonizing over that, we received a signal from the probe that had been tracking Melissa. The colony ship was in the Tau Ceti system, and it had finally found a habitable planet. They were exploring it. We eventually found out that they had named it Thule.

“It was twelve light-years from Earth, which made it a four week one-way journey in S-space when we allowed for acceleration and deceleration. I don’t think I mentioned it, but no matter how we tried we had been unable to come up with an economical drive that would take us much faster than a tenth of light-speed. But it wasn’t important any more. As you can see, that’s good enough when you live in S-space.

“Our ship went out, and in due course it made contact with Melissa. That first meeting was traumatic for the Melissa inhabitants. They had left Earth twelve thousand years earlier — five hundred generations of shipboard life. Earth was nothing but a distant legend. It was something that was still talked about, but stories of Earth’s destruction were regarded as of the same practical importance as tales about the Garden of Eden. When our crew contacted them and claimed to remember the death of Earth, that was too much for the Melissans to take. “After we learned something of their history since leaving the solar system, we could see why. They had never had a stable and trustworthy government that lasted more than a century. We found historical evidence of every form of rule from water-control to neo-Confucianism. When they discovered Thule they were just recovering from the effects of a long dictatorship. Their mistrust and suspicion was considerable. Even the most rational of them had difficulty believing that our intentions were wholly innocent, nothing more than curiosity to learn how another culture was faring after so long without any kind of planetary home. They would not let us visit their colony on Thule. Putting it mildly, they suspected our motives.”

Olivia Ferranti slowly shook her head. “And, of course, they were wholly correct in doing so. Even in S-space, one is not wholly protected from accidents and disease. There would inevitably be deaths, and without replenishment we foresaw our society shrinking — not at once, but over many thousands of Earth years. In Melissa and the other arcologies we saw a possible answer.

“Either we were unusually stupid, or we were simply naive. To make the Melissans believe us, and to show how we could be people who actually remembered Earth’s final war, we explained S-space to them.

“They went crazy. They wanted S-space more than anything else in the Universe. You see, we were misled by our own experiences. We had been slow to accept and move to S-space. We didn’t realize that our reluctance wouldn’t apply to them. They hadn’t been there for the early, risky experiments. To them, our existence proved that S-space must be safe. So they thought we were deliberately goading them, tormenting them with a look at immortality while refusing to share its secret with them.

“Most of our ship’s crew had gone on board Melissa. They took them, eight men and six women, and tried to draw the secret of S-space from them by force. It was useless, of course. The conversion equipment was on the ship, as it is on this ship, and the crew had used it to go from S-space to the perception rate of the Melissans. But they didn’t know the theory, any more than Garao or Captain Rinker know the theory.

“The inquisitors tortured those crew members to death. Only the two who had remained on our ship were able to escape and come back to tell us what had happened.

“That’s when we adopted our rules for interaction with all colony ships and colony worlds. We would have limited contact, and it would be handled with great care and with fixed procedures. We would never again return ourselves to normal space for the purpose of first contact, as was done with Melissa. Contact would be done with robots as intermediaries; and we would never, under any circumstances, allow ourselves to fall into the hands of the colonists.” Olivia Ferranti shrugged. “We just flunked that one, right here. Well, let’s skip forward four thousand years. That’s when another of the arcologies, Helena, finally found a habitable planet. They named it Beacon’s World, colonized it, and moved on. That’s when we learned another lesson. Beacon’s World was settled long before we sent a ship to visit it. When our ship finally got there we found that the population had increased from the original few thousand to forty million; but along the way much of their scientific knowledge had been lost, or had degenerated to hearsay and legend.