“I can’t say,” Glassgold answered. She stood on tiptoe to pat his shoulder. “It was not easy to resign myself to the possibility. I did, though, through God’s mercy. Now I can accept whatever comes to us, and feel how good most of it is. Surely you can do the same, Johann.”

“I try,” he said. “It is so dark out there. I never thought that I, grown up, would again be afraid of the dark.”

* * *

The great whirlpool of suns contracted and paled astern. Another began slowly growing forward. In the viewscope it was a thing of delicate, intricate beauty, jeweled gossamer. Beyond it, around it, more appeared, tiny smudges and points of radiance. Despite the Einsteinian shrinkage of space at Leonora Christine‘s velocity, they showed monstrously remote and isolated.

That speed continued to mount, not as fast as in the regions left behind— here, the gas concentration was perhaps a hundred thousandth of that near Sol— but sufficiently to bring her to the next galaxy in some weeks of her own time. Accurate observations were not to be had without radical improvements in astronomical technology: a task into which Nilsson and his team cast themselves with the eagerness of escapers.

Testing a photoconverter unit, he personally made a discovery. A few stars existed out here. He didn’t know whether random perturbations had sent them drifting from their parental galaxies, uncountable billions of years ago, or whether they had actually formed in these deeps, in unknown fashion. By a grotesquely improbable chance, the ship passed near enough to one that he identified it— a dim, ancient red dwarf— and could show that it must have planets, from the glimpse his apparatus got before the system was swallowed anew by distance.

It was an eerie thought, those icy shadowy worlds, manyfold older than Earth, perhaps one or two with life upon them, and never a star to lighten their nights. When he told Lindgren about it, she said not to pass the information any further.

Several days later, returning home from work, he opened the door to their cabin and found her present. She didn’t notice him. She was seated on the bed, facing away, her eyes on a picture of her family. The light was turned low, dusking her but falling so coldly on her hair that it looked white. She strummed her lute and sang… to herself? It was not the merriment of her beloved Bellman. The language, in fact, was Danish. After a moment, Nilsson recognized the lyrics, Jacobsen’s Songs of Gurre, and Schönberg’s melodies for them.

The call of King Valdemar’s men, raised from their coffins to follow him on the spectral ride that he was condemmed to lead, snarled forth.

Be greeted. King, here by Gurre Lake!

Across the island our hunt we take,

From stringless bow let the arrow fly

That we have aimed with a sightless eye.

We chase and strike at the shadow hart,

And dew like blood from the wound will start.