The Leonora Christine has traveled three hundred megaparsecs over a thousand million years and is now overtaking galaxies that are receding from the Milky Way at very high velocities. It is hoped that the velocity changes will overbalance the reduction in Bussard efficiency, enabling the ship to stop.
In this chapter, a woman is pregnant and it is recognized that the universe is visibly aging. A man crosses himself for the first time since early youth. Spectra are changing. A galaxy is seen to lack Population II stars and blue giants. Dying, exploding stars scatter some atoms into the interstellar medium but retain most of their mass in dense cooling bodies. Thus, the interstellar medium is depleted, space becomes emptier and less new stars coalesce. There is less fuel for the Bussard ramjet although its present tau will soon enable it to utilize even the thin interclan gas.
Poul Anderson endlessly takes us into places where no one has ever been before. As the ship approaches without ever reaching light speed, we approach the end of the novel and wonder whether the action has to end in a big crash.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
In such a remote, distant future I have to wonder what it must be LIKE for any intelligent races living then? I mean, what would it FEEL like to them, knowing they in a dying universe? Would some feel despondency or despair?
For the most part, of course, it might not really matter for most such beings, not when you have to think in terms of billions of years.
Sean
I think the late, great Peggy Lee said it best:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCRZZC-DH7M
or:
"Hey, we outlasted those ****ers!
or:
"Did you remember to turn off the stove?"
-Keith
Kaor, Keith!
Ha, ha!!! That's one way of looking at it!
Sean
Thank you Sean. It makes me think of the fellow who said it didn't matter to him whether he went to Heaven or Hell: he had friends (and owed people money) in both places...
-kh
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