“I think we busted out of the edge of the Saddle Point network. We know the network is no more than a couple of thousand light-years across, extending just a fraction of the way to the center of the Galaxy. We must have reached a radius where the Saddle Points aren’t working anymore. Which is a problem if you want to go farther… I think this is just the start of the true journey.”
He was speaking steadily, evenly, as if discussing a hiking tour of Yosemite. She felt her self-control waver again. But she didn’t want to seem weak in front of Malenfant, this difficult cold man.
“And,” she said, “where will that true journey take us?”
He shrugged. “Maybe all the way to the center of the Galaxy.” He studied her, perhaps to see how well she could take this. Then he pointed. “Look, Madeleine — the Lagoon Nebula, up there, is five thousand light-years from Earth.”
And so, therefore, she thought, the year is A.D. 8800, or thereabouts. It was a number that meant nothing to her at all. And, even if she turned around now and headed for home, assuming that was possible, it would be another five thousand years before she could get back to Earth.
But the center of the Galaxy was twenty-five thousand light-years from the Sun. Even at light speed it would take fifty thousand years to get there and back. Fifty thousand years. This was no ordinary journey, not even like a history-wrenching Saddle Point hop; the human species itself was only a hundred thousand years old…
He was still watching her. “I’ve had time to get used to this.”
“I’m fine.”
“Madeleine…”
“I mean it,” she snapped. She got up, turned her back, and walked away. She found a stream, drank and splashed her face, spent a few minutes alone, eyes closed, breathing deeply.
Perhaps it’s just as well we humans can’t grasp the immensities we have begun to cross. If we were any smarter, we’d go crazy.
Remember why you came here, Madeleine. For Malenfant. Whether he appreciates it or not, the asshole. Malenfant is strong. But maybe it helps him just to have me here. Somebody he has to look after.
But her grasp of psychology always had been shaky. Anyhow, she was here, whether he needed her or not.
She went back to Malenfant, at his patient vigil.
One of the Neandertal women was working a rock, making tools. She held a core of what looked like obsidian, a glassy volcanic rock. She gave the core one sharp strike, and a flake of it dropped off. A few light strokes along the edge and the flake had become a tear-shaped blade, like an arrowhead. The woman, with a lopsided grin, gave the knife to one of the males, signing rapidly.
“She’s saying he should be careful of the edge,” Malenfant murmured.
She frowned. “I don’t understand how those guys got here.”
He told her what he’d observed of the Neandertals’ burial practices: the mysterious Staff of Kintu.
“So you think the Gaijin were rewarding the dying Neandertal workers for all their labors with this — a soapy Heaven.”
He laughed. “If they were, they are the first gods in history to deliver on their afterlife promises.”
She paced, feeling the texture of the grass under her feet, the breeze on her face. “Why is it like this? Trees, grass, streams — it feels like Africa. But it isn’t Africa, is it?”
“No. But if you ask almost any human, anywhere, what type of landscape they prefer, it’s something like this. Open grass, a few flat-topped trees. Even Clear Lake, Houston, fits the pattern: grass out front, maybe a tree or two. And you never put your tree in front of your window; you need to be able to look out of your cave, to see the predators coming. After taking us apart for a thousand years, the Gaijin know us well. And our Neandertal cousins. We’re a hundred millennia out of Africa, Madeleine, and five thousand light-years distant.” He tapped his chest. “But it’s still here, inside us.”
“You’re saying they’ve given us an environment that we’re comfortable with. A Neandertal theme park.”
He nodded. “I think very little of what we see is real.” He pointed at the sky. “But that is real.”
“How so?”
“Because it’s changing.”
She slept and woke again.
And the sky, once more, had changed dramatically. She lay on her back alongside Malenfant, gazing up at the evolving sky.
He started talking about how he had traveled here.
“They put me through a whole series of Saddle Point jumps, taking me across the geography of the Galaxy… First I headed toward Scorpio. Our Sun is in the middle of a bubble in space, hundreds of light-years across — did you know that? A vacuum blown into the galactic medium by an ancient supernova explosion. But the Saddle Point leaps got longer and longer…”
With the Sun already invisible, he had been taken out of the local bubble, into a neighboring void the astronomers called Loop One.
“I saw Antares through the murk,” he said, “a glowing red jewel set against a glowing patch of sky, a burst of young stars they call the Rho Opiuchi complex. Hell of a sight. I looked back for the Sun. I couldn’t find it. But I saw a great sheet of young stars that slices through the galactic plane, right past Sol. They call that Gould’s Belt, and I knew that was where home was.
“And when I looked ahead, there was a band of darkness. I was reaching the inner limit of our spiral arm, looking into the rift between the arms, the dense dark clouds there. And then, beyond the rift, I arrived here — in this place, with the Neandertals…”
“And the stars.”
“Yes.”
While she slept, the stars had continued to migrate. Now they had all swum their way up toward that Sagittarius Arm horizon, the way Malenfant said they were heading. The opposite horizon looked dark, for all its stars had fled. All the stars in the sky, in fact, had crowded themselves into a disc, centered on a point some way above the brighter horizon — at least she guessed it was a disc; some of it was below her horizon. And the colors had changed; the stars had become green and yellow and blue.
Now, in what situation would you expect to see the stars swimming around the sky like fish?
“This is the aberration of starlight, isn’t it, Malenfant? The distortion of the visible universe, which you would see if—”
“If you travel extremely quickly. Yes,” he said softly.
She understood the principle. It was like running in the rain, a rain of starlight. As she ran faster, the rain would hit her harder, in her face, her body. If she ran extremely fast indeed, it would be as if the rain were almost horizontal…
“We’re on a starship,” she breathed.
“Yeah. We’re moving so fast that most of the stars we see up ahead must be red giants, infrared sources, invisible to us in normal times. All the regular stars have been blue-shifted to invisibility. Wherever we’re going, we’re traveling the old-fashioned way: in a spaceship, pushed up to relativistic speeds. And we’re still accelerating.”
She sat up and dug her fingers into the grass. “But it doesn’t feel like a starship. Where is the crew? Where are we going? What will happen when we get there?”
“When I found you, I hoped you were going to tell me.” He got to his feet. “What do you think we should do now?”
She shrugged. “Walk. There’s nothing to stay for here.”
“Okay. Which way?”
She pointed to the glowing Sagittarius Arm horizon, the place the stars were fleeing, their putative destination.
He smiled. “And add a couple of kilometers an hour to our eighty percent of light speed? Why not? We’re walking animals, we humans.”