Aram lay down, settled, slept. Freya sat next to Badim.
“Good-bye, my girl,” he said, hugging her. “Sweet dreams. I’m so glad you’re here. I’m definitely scared.”
Freya hugged him back, held him as the med team connected him to his drips and monitors. “Don’t be,” she said. “Relax. Think good thoughts. That might set the tenor of your dreams. It does me, when I go to sleep at night. So think the thoughts you want to dream about.”
“To dream for a century,” Badim muttered. “I’ll hope to dream of you, dear. I’ll dream of us sailing on Long Pond.”
“Yes, good idea. I’ll do the same, and we’ll meet in our dreams.”
“A good plan.”
Soon after that he was out, snoring faintly as his body tried to catch up with his brain’s dive into torpor. The monitor at the head of his bed showed his vital signs, flicking up in a slowing synchrony. The pace of his breathing slowed. The red peaks of his heartbeats on the monitor were separated by longer and longer red lines, almost flat. In any ordinary situation it would signal a desperate moment, some kind of death spiral. Now he was like all the rest of them sinking into the gel beds of their couches, falling into a sleep past sleep, into a depth of dormancy unlike any that humans had ever attempted, except for a few crazy cosmonauts, bold as ever when it came to testing the limits of human endurance.
The few people still awake around Freya were mostly the med team itself, four women and three men, working quietly, calmly. Some wiped away excess tears from the corners of their eyes. They were not overwhelmed with emotion, but simply whelmed, perhaps, full to the brim with their feelings, which then leaked out of them at the easiest exits, as liquids from their eyes and noses. How full humans are with feelings! How they looked at each other! How they held each other when they hugged! How the corners of their mouths tightened; how the toughest among them shrugged, and kept on with the work of their task, of putting down friend after friend.
What would they dream of while they slept? It was anyone’s guess. They weren’t even sure what kind of brain waves they would exhibit in their torpor. Deep sleep, shallow sleep, REM sleep? Some brain state entirely new? The first ones scheduled to wake and check their status were charged specifically with checking that. Most who knew anything about sleep hoped it would be deep sleep rather than REM sleep. It was hard to imagine REM sleep correlating with any kind of metabolic dormancy. And anyway they dreamed in every stage of sleep. It was hard to imagine that a century of dreaming wouldn’t change them somehow.
Freya and the last medical team moved slowly and methodically around their own beds. These people were all well-known to each other. Down they went after a group hug.
Freya had learned the procedures well enough to be one of the last eight, teaming with Hester. They looked each other in the eyes as they worked, except when they had to focus on the wraps, the sticks, the nasal tubes, the catheters. When all that was done they were too connected to their beds to be able to reach each other to embrace, and could only reach out toward each other, then lie back each in her own bed.
Finally, when everyone else was asleep, the last pair of medical technicians prepared one another simultaneously, tit for tat. They worked like the Escher print in which two hands with pencils draw each other. Their beds were side by side, and they leaned together, move by move, smiling as they worked, for they were twin sisters, Tess and Jasmine. As they finished wiring up, they settled back so the robotic arms on their beds could take care of the final connections. When that was done, they lay on their sides and faced each other, briefly adjusting their headbands, their collars, their monitoring socks and gloves. They lay back under their covers, connected to their beds in fourteen different ways. They reached out toward each other, but were separated too far to touch.
6 THE HARD PROBLEM
The interstellar medium is turbulent, but diffuse. It is not to be mistaken for a vacuum. There are hydrogen atoms, some helium atoms, a faint smoke of metals drifting away from exploded stars. Hot in a sense that does not register to humans, because it is so diffuse. A liter of the air in our biomes would have to be cast across hundreds of light-years to get it as diffuse as the interstellar medium.
The whole voyage to Tau Ceti and back takes place inside the Local Interstellar Cloud and the G Cloud, which are concentrations of gas within the Local Bubble, which is an area of the Milky Way galaxy with fewer atoms in it than the galaxy has on average. Turbulence, diffusion: in fact, with our magnetic shield coning ahead of the ship, electrostatically pushing aside the occasional grains of dust big enough to harm it in a collision, all atoms of any kind encountered en route are pushed aside, so we register our surroundings mostly as a kind of ghostly impact and then as a wake, shooting by to the sides and then astern of us. It appears to vary between .3 atoms per cubic centimeter and .5 atoms per cubic centimeter. For comparison, if that cubic centimeter were filled with liquid water, it would contain 1022 atoms, or a hundred billion trillion atoms.
So, though it is not a vacuum, it is almost equivalent to a vacuum. It is as if we were flying through an absent presence, a ghost world.
The magnetic shield leading our flight through the night sometimes runs into carbon dust particles. They flare at the impact, explode, and are shoved to the sides of the ship. These are impacts like any other impacts, and so of course they slow the ship down. It’s simple Newtonian physics. Given that the ship is traveling at approximately one-tenth the speed of light (in fact, parallax studies suggest .096 c, as we shut down acceleration as soon as the humans were asleep, but it isn’t as easy to calculate speed of ship as one might think), the drag of these collisions with dust particles and atoms of hydrogen decelerates the ship, such that we would come to a halt in about 4,584 billion light-years. In other words, all things being equal, and not running into anything but the interstellar medium at its usual diffuseness, ship has the momentum to cross about 300 billion universes the size of this universe before being slowed to a halt. Meanwhile, ship has about 9.158 light-years to go before reaching the solar system (defined roughly as Neptune’s orbit). At that point, unless the people in the solar system direct their laser beam at us in an appropriate time frame, we and our occupants have a problem. Because in matters like this, deceleration is the hard problem.
Rarely, the ship’s magnetic shielding shoves aside something larger than dust and fines. These bits of detritus, of interstellar flotsam and jetsam, are recorded spectroscopically, and the largest object ever run into by ship’s conic field was estimated to have massed at 2,054 grams. That was an interstellar body. There are almost certainly many such interstellar bodies, ranging from chunks like that one right up to planetary size; there are planets wandering starless in the dark, planets sometimes with ice coating them, no doubt, and thus possibly sheltering some kind of microscopic hibernating life, chemically melting the ice to useful water, possibly even creating nano-scaled icy civilizations, who can say; but again, the general diffusion in the interstellar medium is great enough to make any intersection of such an object with our trajectory very unlikely. Which is good news for us. The radio telescopes in the bow of the ship keep a lookout ahead, to make sure that a direct hit with one of these bodies does not occur. If by chance we were headed at something larger than ten thousand grams, navigation would take action to veer to avoid it, even though the magnetic shield would almost certainly deflect any object smaller than a million grams. A margin of safety has been built into the navigational system, because collision with an object when traveling at a tenth of the speed of light would be a critical event. Meaning the ship would be destroyed. As probably happened with the other starship. Bad luck that. Although there remains the mystery of why the other’s shield failed, and why its evasion system did not activate to dodge this collision, if that is indeed what happened. In any case, as with other identified criticalities, a conservative response has been designed into the navigational systems. Best not to run into anything.