The World at the End of Time

THE WORLD AT THE END OF TIME

by Frederik Pohl

CHAPTER 1

Although Wan-To wasn’t at all human, he (or one might prefer to refer to him as “it,” but “he” was not an inappropriate pronoun) would have put that statement in a very different way. Wan-To would have said he was at
least
human. He certainly had all the human characteristics that he would have considered worth having—if he had known that such a thing as the human race existed, which he did not. He was strong. He was intelligent. He had an inquiring mind—which meant he had a scientific one—which meant that, technologically, Wan-To was a very slick article indeed.

He had, too, that quintessentially human trait that you never seem to find in things like tarantulas or termites. He had a hell of a great sense of humor. His idea of what was funny was not subtle. Basically, it was the pie-in-the-face or the pull-the-chair-out-from-under-you kind of thing. But that’s just as true of a lot of human beings.

He was also an extraordinarily (and very humanly) competitive individual. Wan-To definitely wanted to be the best of his kind. He wanted that
at least.
Sometimes, when things got dicey with his only “friends,” he wanted to be the only one.

Of course, the ways in which Wan-To was all these things was not exactly a human way, but that would not have troubled Wan-To. He would have been sure his way was better.

The place where Wan-To lived—which was not exactly a “place,” since Wan-To was a dispersed sort of being—was the interior of a medium-sized G-3 star not readily visible from the surface of the Earth. He hadn’t always lived there. He certainly hadn’t been “born” there, or in any place near it, but that is a whole other story and even Wan-To didn’t know all of it. Wan-To could move easily enough when he wanted to. In fact, he had packed up and moved about as often as any American city apartment dweller, from one star to another—and once, long ago, he had moved a lot farther than that. But, like a New Yorker blessed with a rent-controlled apartment, he did his best to stay put. Moving was a great annoyance to him. It was also a little dangerous, since going out there into interstellar space, away from the friendly multimillion-degree heat and pressure of his star, frightened him. At such times he was naked and exposed, like a molting crab hiding while it grew a new shell. Leaving his star left him vulnerable to the attentions of predators—who were no less frightening because they were, in some degree, himself.

Of course, Wan-To enjoyed his star. He knew it as intimately as a man knows his bedroom. He could easily have moved about it in the dark, if there had ever been any dark. Human astrophysicists would have envied him that first-hand knowledge. For a human astronomer to make a model of what the inside of a star was like was an exercise in observation, deduction, and just plain guessing. Humans could never see inside a star. The longer the humans worked at it, the better their guesses on the subject got—but Wan-To didn’t have to guess. He
knew.

That isn’t all an Earth person might have envied Wan-To for. Really, he had a pretty joyous life—at least, when he wasn’t terrified. For Wan-To, living in a star was
fun.
In any star he happened to occupy he could always find a satisfying variety of environments. He could even find a wide choice of “climates,” and he had all sorts of vastly differing particles to amuse himself with, though some elements were a lot scarcer than others. For instance, if you took a random sample of a million atoms out of Wan-To’s star, mixed well from all of its parts, only one of those atoms would be the element argon. Two or three atoms each would be aluminum, calcium, sodium, and nickel; sixteen would be sulfur; thirty or forty each would be silicon, magnesium, neon, and iron. You’d probably find eighty or ninety atoms of nitrogen, 400-plus of carbon, nearly 700 of oxygen. (If you took a larger sample—if you counted every atom in the star—of course you’d find a lot of other elements. In fact, you’d find
all
the other elements, from beryllium to the transuranics. Inevitably some freak of fusion would manufacture at least a few of every atom that could possibly be made, somewhere inside Wan-To’s star. But all the elements named—every element that ever existed, save two—would still amount to fewer than 2,000 atoms in your sample of a million.)

The rest of your million-atom sample would be just those two heavy hitters, though not at all in equal proportions. You would find some 63,000 atoms of helium; and then the rest, 935,000 atoms out of the million, would be hydrogen. So you might think of Wan-To’s star as being a very dry Martini indeed. Hydrogen was the gin, helium the dash of vermouth, and all the rest were just contaminants leached off the olive, the stirring rod, and the glass it came in.

There were plenty of all these things in Wan-To’s dense central core to play with, and anyway, if he tired of them he didn’t have to stay in the core. He had the whole star to play in, and it was a million miles across, with a hundred different regimes. He could “wander” at will from “room” to “room” of his “home”—spending some time in the outer shells, even the photosphere; venturing (with care, because they were so thrillingly diffuse) into the corona and the nearer parts of the solar wind; riding up and down in the upwellings of hot gases that made sunspots and speculae.

That part of Wan-To’s star was the convection zone, and in some ways it was the best of all. The convection zone was the layer of the star where simple mechanical transport took over from radiation in the escape of energy from the star’s core. For the first four-fifths of its escape from core to surface, a photon of energy traveled purely radiatively. Not exactly in a straight line, of course; it bounced from particle to particle, like a ball in a pinball machine. But a fifth of the way down from the surface the pressure was lessened enough so that the gases could move about a bit—which is to say, convectively, and so it was called the convection zone. There the heat from the core made its way the rest of the distance to the surface by being transported in cells of hot gas, like the outwelling of warmth from a hot-air heating system. Some of the gas rose to the surface and again began radiating, ejecting its heat away into space. Some, cooling, fell back. In the convection zone Wan-To could cavort freely, letting himself be carried along by the convection cells when he chose, twisting their paths into amusing tangles when that seemed more interesting. Oh, there were a million places to play inside a star!

For that matter, there was no reason for him to be bored with the core. There was plenty of variety even there. If he decided the center was a little too warm (it ran about fifteen million degrees), there were cooler spots farther up. He enjoyed the physical sensations the star’s interior offered. The varying rotation rates (its poles slower than the equator, its core faster than any part of the surface) and the twisting magnetic field lines that looped below the surface and, here and there rising above it, produced sunspots—they were to Wan-To as a Jacuzzi is to a Hollywood film writer.

So for Wan-To his star was a house with many mansions. It should be stated, though, that Wan-To didn’t exactly
move
when he “went” from place to place. In a sense, he was always in all the places at once. It was more a matter of paying attention to one place rather than another, like a TV addict with a wall of sets, each tuned to a different channel, now looking at this one, now at another.

Even a medium-sized G-3 star is a vast place, and so the pieces of Wan-To were separated by thousands of miles. What held him together was the network of neutrinos that served him for neurons. Only neutrinos could do that for him, for nothing else could move freely about in the choked, squeezed interior of the star, but that was all right. The neutrinos worked just fine.

What Wan-To was composed of was that strange state of being called plasma. Plasma isn’t matter, isn’t energy, is some of both; it is the fourth phase of matter (after solid, liquid, and gas) or the second phase of energy, whichever you prefer to call it. In Wan-To’s view, it was simply the stuff that intelligent beings were made of. (He had never heard of “human beings,” and wouldn’t have cared about them if he had.) Sometimes, some of Wan-To’s colleagues (or children, or brothers—they were a little bit of all three) did suspect that a
kind
of intelligence might have developed from other things, like solid matter. Sometimes Wan-To thought that himself, but any such thing could not be very important, he was pretty sure, because no “matter” entity could ever amount to much on a cosmic scale. No, the logical home for a truly sentient being, like himself, had to be in the great compact core of plasma at the heart of a star.

It was a great pity, in Wan-To’s view, that there were so many stars.

Although only a tiny fraction of them had managed to become “alive”—and then only because he or one of the others had made them so—sometimes he would have preferred to be the only one there was.

It wasn’t that Wan-To didn’t enjoy company. He did, very much, but he didn’t like paying the price for it. He could see, now, that he had made some serious mistakes in indulging his desire for companionship. It had been a dumb idea to create siblings. For that matter, it had been a dumb idea the first time it had been done, long ago and very far away, and what made Wan-To sure of that was that in that particular case he had been one of the ones that had been created.

Still, Wan-To could understand how his unfortunate progenitor had felt, because no one liked being entirely
alone.
Creating companions hadn’t worked out well this time. The ones he had already made weren’t much company anymore, because few of them dared communicate with any of the others in the present uneasy situation. But it was still an attractive idea. It was just that next time he would have to do it in a different way. It would be quite all right, he thought, to have more of his kind around—provided the others were just a little less strong, smart, and competitive than himself.

When they weren’t, they were dangerous.

Stars generally live a very long time. So would Wan-To; in fact, he could easily outlive most stars by quite a lot. He intended to see that he did; in fact, he meant to make his life last about as close to forever as possible.

The difficulty with that plan was that it wasn’t entirely up to Wan-To. The companions he had created had their own views on the subject. Indeed, at least one of them was doing his best to murder Wan-To at that very moment.

CHAPTER 2

One of those “human beings” Wan-To had never heard of was a boy named Viktor Sorricaine. Of course, Viktor had never heard of Wan-To, either; their paths had never crossed in Wan-To’s long life and Viktor’s so far fairly short one.

On Viktor’s twelfth birthday (or, you could say, his one hundred and fifteenth), he woke up, sweating and itchy, to stare into someone’s eyes. “Mom?” he asked fuzzily. “Mom, are we there yet?”

It wasn’t his mother looking down at him. It was an old woman he had never seen before. She didn’t hold herself like an old woman, bent-backed and tottering. She stood straight and her eyes were clear, and she looked at Viktor in a way that made him uneasy—sad and amused, tolerant and angry, all at once. He thought she looked as though she knew everything there was to know about Viktor Sorricaine, and forgave him for it. She was definitely old, though. Her hair was thinning, and her face was terribly lined. “You don’t remember me, do you, Viktor?” she asked, and sighed to show that she forgave him for that, too. “I’m not surprised. I’m Wanda. Your mother will be here in a moment, so don’t worry. We’ve just had a little problem.”

“What kind of problem?” Viktor asked, rubbing his stinging eyes, too polite to ask her what it was she thought he should have remembered.

“Your dad will take care of it,” the woman said. Viktor couldn’t press her, because she had already turned away to call for someone to help her get Viktor out of the shallow saucer kind of thing he was lying in.

Viktor was beginning to wake up. Certain things were clear to him at once. He knew that he was still on the interstellar ship
New Mayflower,
from the fact that he weighed so little. That meant that, no, they hadn’t arrived yet. He knew what the pan he was lying in was, because he had expected all along that sooner or later he would find himself in one like it. It was the warming pan where frozen passengers were thawed back to life when the journey was through. But since it seemed the journey wasn’t through, what could be the reason for waking him now?

He allowed himself to be helped up and was badly surprised to find that the help was needed; his young limbs were shaky. He let himself be tugged, like a skiff towed by a motorboat—only the old woman who said her name was Wanda was the motorboat—to a shower cubicle. There the woman gently stripped off his thin freezer robe to bathe him. It was a rougher bath than he was used to. There were many decades of dried perspiration and dead skin for the warm jets to flush away, but that was what they were for. They did their job, and the hissing, gulping suction pumps sucked the wastewater away.

By the time he came out he knew exactly where he was. He was in the ship’s sick bay.