The World at the End of Time (10 page)

“Don’t be
disgusting!”

“Oh, Viktor,” she sighed.
“Doing
it isn’t disgusting. Watching somebody is, maybe, so the reason I asked—”

“I said
shut up.”

And for a wonder she did, because his tone was really dangerous. But his internal pain didn’t heal.

Marie-Claude Stockbridge had in her charge a dozen prototypes of Von Neumann finder-homer machines, great, simpleminded automata that weren’t in any real way alive, but shared with living things the ability to forage in their environment, to ingest the kind of chemicals that they were made up of, and to replicate themselves, as people do when they have babies, by making copies of themselves to grow up and do the same thing all over again, generation after generation. And each had a “homing circuit,” like that of the freshwater salmon or the migratory birds, which would bring it back to the place it started from (or its ancestors had) when it was of a certain size, there to be dismantled and forged into whatever metal parts the colony needed.

They were ugly things, but they sure beat the hell out of digging holes in the ground.

The Von Neumann machines came in several varieties. There were digging kinds, that looked like iron bedbugs; there were swimming kinds, to exploit the thermal springs they hoped to find at the bottom of Great Ocean, that looked like chromium-plated versions of the sort of shell people picked up on Earthly beaches. They weren’t purely mechanical. The iron-miner, for instance, had a complex “digestive” system like the second stomach of a ruminant, where genetically tailored iron-concentrating bacteria helped extract the metal from the rock after the jaws of the Von Neumann miner had pulverized it.

What Reesa and Viktor and a couple of other drudges did was only to fetch and carry, to hoist the Von Neumanns in slings while Marie-Claude and Jake Lundy pried off their inspection hatches and checked their circuits, and to test the seals and make sure the mechanical parts were freed from their shipping constraints. It was hard, hot work. Viktor was stiffly ill at ease at first, eyes always on Marie-Claude and Jake Lundy to see if there was any visible affection going on between them; but in the pursuit of her specialty Marie-Claude was all business. And best of all, she was there. She was where he was hardly an arm’s length away, for hours at a time; and if she thought of him as a child she treated him as a colleague. Even Jake Lundy wasn’t so bad. His muscles were a big help when the massive machines needed hoisting or turning, but Viktor was getting pretty strong, too, and he was the one Lundy yelled for when something hard had to be done.

They worked from sunup to school, two or three hours every morning. Reesa was always the first one to tell Viktor it was time to leave, because Viktor had no incentive to leave Marie-Claude’s company for the schoolmaster’s—except one day. On that day Reesa disappeared into the backhouse for several minutes when work was through, and when she appeared she grabbed his arm, looking oddly triumphant. “Look at this, doofus,” she ordered, flushed and excited.

“We’re going to be late for class,” he complained. He wasn’t much annoyed. He was only irritated by the fact that she was
touching
him again—he tolerated with difficulty the fact that she was a touching, hugging kind of person, always wanting physical contact—until he saw what she was displaying for him. Then he recoiled from the scrap of stained white fabric in disgust. “Ugh! Gross!” he cried. “It’s your dirty
underwear!”

Her face was rosy with pride. “Look at what it’s dirty with! That’s
blood!”
she crowed. “That means I’m a grown-up
woman
now, Viktor Sorricaine, and you’re still just a dumb little kid.”

He looked around apprehensively, to see if anyone was observing this, but the others were still hard at work. He understood what she was showing him. What he didn’t understand was
why.
Of course he knew what menstruation was, because the teaching machines had been quite specific about all the physiological details of sex. But, as far as the female reproductive systems were concerned, the overriding impression Viktor had come away with was that it was
messy.
Viktor wasn’t a male chauvinist pig. At least, he didn’t think he was. He didn’t consider himself superior to females simply because of gender. What he thought about sexual dimorphism was mostly charitable compassion for the nasty predicaments females found themselves in every month, and the even worse ones that confronted them in childbearing.

It had never occurred to him that any female would
boast
about it.

“That means I could have a
baby!”
Reesa chortled.

“Not without some guy to help you,” Viktor pointed out defensively.

“Oh,” Reesa said, starry-eyed, “there isn’t going to be any problem with
that.”

And the colony grew.

Even while Marie-Claude was turning loose the first few of her Von Neumanns, her fingers crossed in the hope that they wouldn’t break down, that they would work the way they were supposed to, that they would find their way back as they should—even then the construction workers were finishing the great steel skeleton of the vast rectenna that, very soon, would deliver the first
Mayflower
-generated
microwave power to the colony. A model steel plant was half done, ready for the first of Marie-Claude’s Von Neumanns to come back with raw metal. And wells were being sunk into the hot water that underlay the hills behind the town they were beginning to call Homeport. When those geothermal wells were beginning to produce electricity there would be plenty to spare, enough to run the immense freezers whose foundations were being dug, to store all the samples still on
Mayflower
and
Ark.

That wasn’t all. Real homes were being built, with a lottery every week to see which half-dozen lucky families would get to move out of their tents into something with walls. The beamed broadcasts from Earth still came in, all the hours of every day, along with the regular reports from
New Argosy,
now more than halfway to Newmanhome; but people watched them now only for entertainment, not with the hopeless yearning of the first years.

It was a time for—well, not for rejoicing, exactly, because there were still endless years of hard work ahead. But at least it was a time when the three thousand and more (every day more) human beings could look back on how much had been accomplished, and look around at the farms and the docks and the sprawling town with satisfaction that the planet was being tamed to their needs.

Of course, they hadn’t yet seen any new strange objects in the sky.

Fifth (Navigator) Officer Pal Sorricaine had no ship to be an officer of anymore, and nowhere to navigate anyway.

It meant a considerable comedown for him. He was still a kind of astronomer, of course. But the flare star was only a memory, which meant there was nothing much to do about that still-troubling puzzle, and anyway there wasn’t much he could have done about solving it. There weren’t any decent-sized telescopes on the surface of Newmanhome.
Mayflower’s
sensors were still operating, but they weren’t telling anybody anything they didn’t already know, except for some peculiar readings from the innermost planet, Nebo. There was a little group of interested people who got together to talk about it from time to time, Sorricaine and Frances Mtiga and the Iraqi woman, Tiss Khadek. They spent hours trying to find in the datastores some suggestion of why the hot little planet had an atmosphere, and what the gamma radiation that seemed to come from parts of its surface might mean, but there was nothing in previous astronomical history to help. It didn’t seem very urgent, even to them. No one thought the readings were important enough to spend scarce man-hours on, not while the rectenna was still unfinished and the new food warehouses were still almost empty.

So Pal Sorricaine did odd jobs.

It was the kind of work the kids did when not in school. Unskilled work. Hard labor, sometimes, and in inconvenient places. He was away from the community two or three days at a time, with a team of other men similarly among the technologically unemployed. They spent their time collecting the low-priority cargo pods that had fallen at the inconveniently far perimeter of the drop zone, or even outside it. They sledged them into the city; not only hard work, but not even very interesting.

Pal Sorricaine didn’t seem to mind. He took on the job of cartography when he was out in the wildwoods, searching for lost pods, and his maps became the best the community had. When he was home he was cheerful. He took his turn at minding Baby Weeny. He was loving to his wife and affectionate to Viktor. It was puzzling to Viktor that his mother seemed to worry about her husband. But when he asked her about it she simply laughed and said, “It’s a kind of a problem for your dad, Viktor. He was one of the most important men on the ship. Now he’s sort of—well—general labor, you know? When things get more settled and he can do real astronomy again . . .”

She let it trail off there. Viktor didn’t bother to ask her when she thought things would be that settled. Of course, she didn’t know any more than he did. Maybe the only right answer would have been “never.” But that night, when his father returned with the tractor team, four great pods of steel bumping and scraping behind them, he seemed content enough. Pal was in a good mood, anxious to hear about what had been going on in the town while he was away, and bursting with a couple of pieces of gossip he had brought back from long night talks with the other men. “Do you know what Marie-Claude’s been doing?” he asked his wife, chuckling. “She’s pregnant, that’s what!”

Viktor dropped the spoon he was trying to feed his baby sister with. “But—her husband’s
dead!”
he cried, appalled at the news.

“Did I say anything about a husband?” Pal Sorricaine asked good-naturedly. “I just said she’s going to have a baby. I didn’t say she was getting married. I guess she likes the idea of being a merry widow.”

“Pal,”
Viktor’s mother said warningly, looking at her son. “Don’t make it sound awful, Pal. Marie-Claude’s a good person, and besides we need more babies.”

Pal grinned at her. “So it’s all okay with you? You wouldn’t mind if I, uh, volunteered to help out along those lines next time?”

“Pal,”
she said again, but the tone was different; she was almost laughing. “What’s the matter, aren’t I keeping you happy?”

His father grinned and began to mix a cocktail. Halfway through, he paused and looked thoughtfully at his son. Then he glanced at his wife and added more of the gin—it was real gin, almost the last they had—to the mix. “You’re old enough to try one now, Vik,” he said kindly.

In pain and misery, Viktor took the plastic tumbler and gulped a mouthful. The juniper stung the inside of his nasal passages; the alcohol scorched the inside of his mouth. He swallowed and coughed at the same time.

“Viktor!” his mother cried in alarm.
“Pal!”

But Pal was already beside his son, arm around his shoulder. “It’s better if you just sip it a little at a time,” he said, laughing.

Viktor was having none of that. He wrenched free and, as soon as he could postpone a cough long enough to swallow, downed the rest of the drink. Fortunately, there wasn’t much of it; his father had measured out only a junior-sized amount for his son’s first official cocktail.

Viktor wasn’t short of willpower. He used it all. He managed to strangle the coughing fit, though his voice was hoarse while he was reassuring his mother that, really, he was absolutely all right. His throat burned. His eyes were watering. His nose still stung. But there was a warmth, too, that started in his chest and spread through his whole body.

It almost seemed to numb his stark interior pain. It was, really, not a bad sensation at all. Was that why people like his parents drank this stuff?

Now that his mother had realized her son wasn’t dying she was sipping her own drink, but not in any relaxed or jovial manner. Her gaze stayed on Viktor. Pal Sorricaine tried to jolly her out of it, without much success. Viktor ignored them both. He sat hunched over the empty tumbler, staring into it as he turned it in his hands, as he had seen an actor in a transmitted Earth film do when he, like Viktor, discovered the woman he loved had been bedding another man.

Viktor was crushed.

For Marie-Claude to make love with her husband had been bad enough. This was incomparably worse. There was a sudden knot of physical pain in Viktor’s stomach, like a stab wound. Even the warm, ginny glow didn’t stop the pain.

His mother turned from studying her son to face her husband. “Pal,” she said seriously, “we’ve got to talk to Viktor.”

Viktor felt the tips of his ears burning with resentment. He refused to look up. He heard his father sigh. “All right,” Pal Sorricaine conceded. “I guess it’s about time. Viktor? Vik, listen to me. Are you—” He fumbled for the right words. “Uh, all right?”

Viktor raised his head to give his father the cold stare of a stranger. “Sure I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I mean about, you know, Mrs. Stockbridge,” his father persisted. He looked more embarrassed than Viktor had ever seen him, but determinedly sympathetic. “Son, I didn’t mean to say anything that would get you upset. Do you understand that? Listen, it’s only natural for a b—for a young man to be attracted to an older woman, especially when the woman is as sexy and—” He caught his wife’s look just in time. “When she’s as nice a person, I mean, as Marie-Claude. There’s nothing wrong about that. I remember, when I was sixteen, there was a dancer in the ballet school at the Warsaw Opera, about twenty, so thin and graceful—”