Otherwise aberration caused them to pass through an aftward cone, attenuated both by distance and by lengthening of their waves. Well did
Envoy
guard her people. Yet thebattle was incessant and the power requirement high. Meanwhile she must fill her capacitors with still more energy.
Thus did she run, for some two hundred astronomical units, far out into the Oort cloud of comets. Observers orbiting Sol registered the time as a bit more than an Earth day. To her and those aboard her, it was slightly under twenty seconds. And both were correct. Her relativistic time dilation was the inverse of her gamma factor, and just as real.
Then the loan fell due. The quantum field collapsed, the high-energy state ended, she moved on trajectory no faster than she had done before, about 150 kilometers per second; for her, lengths and passages of time were the same as they had been at home. Like the acceleration, the deceleration happened too swiftly and pervasively to be felt.
She must repay her loan in
full
. She had done work, moving interstellar matter aside, moving herself farther from Sol. The collapsing field would have reclaimed the deficit from her atoms, disastrously, were she not prepared. As it was, the energy in her capacitors flowed into the field and satisfied. The net expenditure had been precisely zero.
“Jump one!” cried the captain, as was traditional.
It was a gesture, not repeated. Already, in a fractional second, the gate had reopened and
Envoy
was again running on the heels of light.
The optical system soon compensated, and viewscreens once more displayed the stars. Three showed the heavens weirdly distorted by speed, for purposes of monitoring the flight. The rest took photons captured in the brief intervals between jumps and let computers generate an image shifting evenly from point to point. Thus far the scene had scarcely changed. A few light-days, a few light-years, are of little consequence in the vastness of the galaxy. But Sol dwindled fast from a small disk to the brightest of the stars, and second by second it diminished further, as if it were falling down a bottomless black well.
Nansen and Dayan stood in the command center, looking.They belonged together in this first hour, captain and physicist. Theirs were the intuitions, instincts, judgments that no artificial intelligence could ever quite supply. Did it seem best to abort the voyage, they would decide.
They found no reason to. Around them instruments gleamed and gave readings, the ship murmured impersonally, a breeze pretended to blow off a field of new-mown grass. They watched their sun waning, and silence was upon them.
Nansen broke it with a whisper. “…
el infinito
Mapa de Aquél que es todas Sus estrellas.”
“What?” asked Dayan, almost as softly.
“Ay—”
He came out of his reverie and shook himself, like a swimmer climbing ashore. “Oh. A poem that crossed my mind.
‘The infinite map of the One who is all His stars
.’ By Borges, a twentieth-century writer.”
She regarded the lean, grave face before she said, “It’s lovely. I didn’t know you were such a reader.”
He shrugged. “There is much time to fill, crossing space.”
“And it makes a person think, doesn’t it?” She stared out at the cold galactic river. “How insignificant we are to everything except ourselves.”
“Does that trouble you?”
“No.” The red head lifted defiantly. “Ourselves are what we have to measure everything by.”
“I am not so sure of that. The fact that there are countless things we will never know, and many that we could not possibly know, does not mean they do not exist—only that we cannot prove it. I am a philosophical realist.”
“Oh, me too. No physicist today takes seriously any of that metaphysics that sprang up like fungus around quantum mechanics in its early stages. I meant just that we’re tiny, an accident, a blip in space-time, and if and when we go extinct it won’t make, we won’t have made,
Envoy
guard her people. Yet thebattle was incessant and the power requirement high. Meanwhile she must fill her capacitors with still more energy.
Thus did she run, for some two hundred astronomical units, far out into the Oort cloud of comets. Observers orbiting Sol registered the time as a bit more than an Earth day. To her and those aboard her, it was slightly under twenty seconds. And both were correct. Her relativistic time dilation was the inverse of her gamma factor, and just as real.
Then the loan fell due. The quantum field collapsed, the high-energy state ended, she moved on trajectory no faster than she had done before, about 150 kilometers per second; for her, lengths and passages of time were the same as they had been at home. Like the acceleration, the deceleration happened too swiftly and pervasively to be felt.
She must repay her loan in
full
. She had done work, moving interstellar matter aside, moving herself farther from Sol. The collapsing field would have reclaimed the deficit from her atoms, disastrously, were she not prepared. As it was, the energy in her capacitors flowed into the field and satisfied. The net expenditure had been precisely zero.
“Jump one!” cried the captain, as was traditional.
It was a gesture, not repeated. Already, in a fractional second, the gate had reopened and
Envoy
was again running on the heels of light.
The optical system soon compensated, and viewscreens once more displayed the stars. Three showed the heavens weirdly distorted by speed, for purposes of monitoring the flight. The rest took photons captured in the brief intervals between jumps and let computers generate an image shifting evenly from point to point. Thus far the scene had scarcely changed. A few light-days, a few light-years, are of little consequence in the vastness of the galaxy. But Sol dwindled fast from a small disk to the brightest of the stars, and second by second it diminished further, as if it were falling down a bottomless black well.
Nansen and Dayan stood in the command center, looking.They belonged together in this first hour, captain and physicist. Theirs were the intuitions, instincts, judgments that no artificial intelligence could ever quite supply. Did it seem best to abort the voyage, they would decide.
They found no reason to. Around them instruments gleamed and gave readings, the ship murmured impersonally, a breeze pretended to blow off a field of new-mown grass. They watched their sun waning, and silence was upon them.
Nansen broke it with a whisper. “…
el infinito
Mapa de Aquél que es todas Sus estrellas.”
“What?” asked Dayan, almost as softly.
“Ay—”
He came out of his reverie and shook himself, like a swimmer climbing ashore. “Oh. A poem that crossed my mind.
‘The infinite map of the One who is all His stars
.’ By Borges, a twentieth-century writer.”
She regarded the lean, grave face before she said, “It’s lovely. I didn’t know you were such a reader.”
He shrugged. “There is much time to fill, crossing space.”
“And it makes a person think, doesn’t it?” She stared out at the cold galactic river. “How insignificant we are to everything except ourselves.”
“Does that trouble you?”
“No.” The red head lifted defiantly. “Ourselves are what we have to measure everything by.”
“I am not so sure of that. The fact that there are countless things we will never know, and many that we could not possibly know, does not mean they do not exist—only that we cannot prove it. I am a philosophical realist.”
“Oh, me too. No physicist today takes seriously any of that metaphysics that sprang up like fungus around quantum mechanics in its early stages. I meant just that we’re tiny, an accident, a blip in space-time, and if and when we go extinct it won’t make, we won’t have made,
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