The World at the End of Time (18 page)

And it was lost.

The colonists had to have a town meeting to talk it over. The meeting couldn’t decide anything, of course—there weren’t any useful decisions they could make. The meeting was just so that everyone could hear and say everything that could be said—and then, with the catharsis of getting all that out of their systems, get back to their real world—meaning Newmanhome, the only world they had left.

Although the plague had decimated Newmanhome’s population, there were 3,300 people still alive. The only ones over the age of four not present there were the work crews in orbit, at sea, or in the small parties on South Continent and the other somewhat inhabited parts of the planet. Twenty-six hundred people gathered on the hill outside the town, with the loudspeakers relaying what was said to the fringes of the crowd.

They had set up a committee of twelve to put all the information together and make some kind of a report. Pal Sorricaine was on it, of course. So was Billy Stockbridge, and sick old Frances Mtiga (flown back specially from West Archipelago), and old (but far from sick or feeble) Captain Bu Wengzha. As soon as the committee had finished saying what everyone already knew, hands began to go up.

“If we can see that they’re out of position, why can’t the people on
Argosy?”
someone asked.

Pal Sorricaine stood up, tottering on his artificial leg; he hadn’t been doing much drinking, in all the excitement, but he was showing signs of wear. “By now they probably can. Remember, they’re still almost a light-year away. The messages we’re getting from them were sent nearly two Newmanhome years ago.”

Another hand, a woman from Delta: “But we notified them about what was going on, didn’t we?”

“Of course we did!” Captain Bu replied. “But they haven’t had time to receive the message yet. The speed of light is the same in all directions.” He turned to the rest of the committee behind him, where Billy Stockbridge had said something. “What is it, Billy?”

Billy pointed. “It’s my brother. He’s busting to ask something.”

There was Freddy Stockbridge in the front row, conspicuous in clerical garb; he had been studying for the priesthood long enough and, for lack of a handy pope or cardinal, had finally appointed himself ordained. He grabbed one of the roving microphones from an usher and shouted into it. “Can you tell us what is going on, really?”

Pal Sorricaine shrugged. “We’ve told you everything we can,” he said. “The data is clear. Relative to the rest of the galaxy, our little local group is moving—and accelerating. It looks like some other groups are beginning to move in a different direction, too, but we’re not as sure of that. As to
why
all this is happening—God knows.”

And Freddy Stockbridge said strongly, “Yes, that’s right. We don’t know. But He does.”

Viktor walked Reesa home from the meeting. She paused outside her house and gazed up at the stars. “They don’t look any different to me,” she said.

Viktor squinted up. “I can’t see colors in stars most of the time anyway,” he confessed. “They all look about alike, just bright spots. Anyway, we couldn’t really tell the difference with the naked eye.”

She shivered, although the night, like almost every Newmanhome night, was muggily warm. “Let’s tuck the kids in,” she said.

It didn’t take long. Viktor found himself attracted in a way that he wasn’t used to by the sight of Reesa cuddling the baby, whispering to him, changing his diaper, and feeding him. The feeling wasn’t sexual. He didn’t
think
it was sexual, at least, although that was certainly there, too. It was just, well, appealing. “Taking care of kids is a lot of work,” he said sympathetically when they were sitting outside again.

“It is for one person,” she said—rather sharply, he thought. It made him suddenly uncomfortable.

“Well, if you want,” he said awkwardly, “I guess I could take the baby now and then, I mean when I’m in port.”

She shook her head. “That’s no good for him. He needs a home. I think what I need is a husband.”

Now Viktor was definitely ill at ease, not to say alarmed. “Husband? Really? Would you want to, uh, I mean, would you be satisfied to just make love to one guy for the rest of your life?”

“As in marriage?” She thought that over seriously for a moment, then turned and faced him squarely. “Is matrimonial fidelity important to you, Viktor?”

He was beginning to feel trapped. “I—” He hesitated, pondering what he was saying, and what it might mean. “I think so,” he said at last.

“Well, I probably could,” Reesa said. “Yes, I’m just about sure I could—if I were married, I mean.”

It was quite true that they couldn’t see any change in the color of the stars, not with the naked eye, but the changes were there nevertheless. In one direction starlight was blue-shifted, in the other red. And the shifts grew, week by week.

Pal Sorricaine had something to do now. He and Billy Stockbridge spent all their time poring over the spectrograms, checking every possible reference to anything that might bear on the subject in the datastores—coming up empty, but still driven to go on trying to figure out what the
hell
was happening to their little pocket of space.

The spectral shifts didn’t affect the nearest of the stars; they had established that early on. There were about a dozen of those within a volume of space some six light-years across—including the burnt-out cinder of one of the old “Sorricaine-Mtiga” flares. Their spectrograms were unchanged. Newmanhome’s own sun was nowhere near the center of that volume, but nearly on one edge—so Sorricaine was scathing in answering the colonists who (how superstition did feed on the unexpected!) muttered that it was their blasphemous temerity in colonizing across space that had somehow changed things.

No, it just had happened (somehow!) that a volume of space had disengaged itself from the rest of the galaxy. Either their little group of twelve stars and all their associated planets, moons, and orbiting junk was (somehow!) beginning to hurry in the general direction of the Virgo clusters . . . or the rest of the galaxy was (again somehow—no one could think of any mechanism that might make any of this happen) hurrying away from it.

Of course, all this was terrifying.

At least, it was terrifying if you let yourself think about it. It was
impossible.
Fundamental natural law—law that was rock-solid at the bottom of scientific knowledge, the elements of motion that had been engraved in granite by Isaac Newton and confirmed by everybody since him—was simply being violated.

To think seriously about that was to realize that as a scientist you knew nothing at all. Science was simply
wrong.

But how could that be?

The people who lived on Newmanhome couldn’t question
science.
Science was what had brought them there! They weren’t Third World peasants or stock-herders. They were chemists, engineers, physicists, geneticists, mineralogists, agrotechnicians, mathematicians, doctors, metallurgists—nearly every adult who had boarded either of the two colony ships had had advanced degrees in some scientific field, and every day they were earnestly passing on that knowledge, and that mind-set, to their children.

The result was that there was a burning dichotomy in every head on Newmanhome that simply could not be resolved.

The only way to survive it was not to think about it at all—as long as they could manage that, anyway. After all, the rest of their world was still behaving the way it should. True, there were still those unexplained emissions from the scorched surface of the planet Nebo, but Nebo was a long way away. On the surface of Newmanhome, in the orbiting hulks above it, everything stayed normal. The crops flourished.

And, best news of all, the health teams finally found a microorganism that could flourish in the human system and destroy the spores of the plague. So everyone’s gauze masks came off.

But when the communications from
New Argosy
turned from shock to panic, through forlorn hope to despairing realization that it never would land on Newmanhome, because Newmanhome was accelerating away from the ship faster than it could possibly hope to catch up—then it all became very personal.

When Viktor and Reesa married at last—it was the 43d of Spring in Colony Year 38—the bridal party was loud and happy for the joyous occasion. But that night, out on their balcony for a last sip of wine before they went to bed, Viktor gazed for a long time at the stars. It was a clear night. They could see the spark that was
Mayflower
sliding across the southern horizon, on its umpty-thousandth orbit.

“Should we volunteer?” Viktor asked his bride.

She didn’t have to ask him what he meant. She knew. The colony had at last considered itself strong enough to spare liquid-gas fuel for a rocket. Finally a new crew of volunteers would soon be going into space to relieve the weary orbiting crew, to let them after all these years come down and set foot on the planet they had crossed twenty-odd light-years of space to inhabit.

“Maybe next time. When the children are a little bigger,” she said, her hand in his as they looked up. “Viktor? Do the stars look any different to you now?”

It was a question they went on asking each other. Viktor squinted thoughtfully at the constellations. He said at last, “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

Behind them little Yan came out on the balcony. His fingers were in his mouth, reaching with his other hand to clutch at Reesa’s dress but with his eyes fixed on Viktor. Behind him his older half sister, Jake Lundy’s daughter Tanya, was quietly playing. Yan wasn’t used to seeing his parents together. He was hardly used to seeing Viktor at all, because, although Viktor had spent an hour or two, at least, with the child every time his ship was in port, Yan had seen more of a good many other men.

Viktor picked the boy up. Yan didn’t resist, but he didn’t let go of Reesa’s skirt, either, rucking it up until, laughing, his mother pulled the little fingers loose.

“Why,” Viktor said wonderingly to his son, “we’re a family now, aren’t we?”

Reesa studied his face. “Do you like being a family?” she asked—a serious question, wanting a trustworthy answer.

“Of course I do,” Viktor said quickly, and then nodded twice to show he really meant it. “We’re a
great
family. All of us,” he added. “Yours and mine and ours—would you mind if we had Shan with us?”

“I wouldn’t, but I think Alice wouldn’t like it. Still, she’s at sea a lot, and really she shouldn’t be taking the boy along. He needs school.” She stopped there, but in a way that suggested there was a sentence or two unsaid.

“What is it?” Viktor asked, puzzled.

She stroked Yan’s small head. “I guess you aren’t going to stop going to sea yourself,” she said, not looking at him.

“No, why should I? It’s my job, and—” Then a light broke over him. “Reesa, are you worried about me shipping out with Alice?”

“I’m not
worried.”

But she was certainly concerned. Viktor could see that clearly enough. “I suppose I could get a different ship,” he offered, thinking that there were a lot of things involved in being a family that were going to take some getting used to.

“If you want to,” she said.

He didn’t say that the question was what
she
wanted; he had learned that much about being a family already. “That way I could be here when Alice was at sea some of the time, so it would make sense to have Shan with us,” he pointed out.

“That would be good,” she said, gazing at the stars. “Well, if you’ll put Tanny back to bed—I’ve got to be a cow for the baby—I’ll come in in a few minutes. We might as well consummate our marriage, again.”

The life of the colony went on. When Viktor Sorricaine, honeymoon over, shipped out again for South Continent, he discovered some of the disadvantages of being a
family.
The ship’s radio operator was an unattached young woman named Nureddin, and normally he would probably have expected to wind up in bed with her. Now it didn’t seem right. By the time he got back to the colony he was gladder to see his wife than he had expected, even. She hadn’t wasted any time. She was a quarter of a Newmanhome year pregnant by then, with a year and a bit still to go, her belly quite definitely rounded out, her movements a little clumsy—but not in bed.

If a person managed to put out of his mind some of the gnawing, unsettling questions about what the hell had
happened
to the outside universe, it was a pretty good time on Newmanhome. There were even some celebrations. Up in the hills over Homeport, in the growing complex by the geothermal power plant and the microwave rectennae, the big new cryonics freezers were completed at last. The first thing that meant was that now there was fuel for the long-idle landing craft, because the same gas-liquefying plants that kept the freezers cold could also manufacture liquid hydrogen and oxygen to fuel the little spacecraft.

That was a big plus—though Viktor had been disappointed to learn that he was not even on the shortlist of space pilots; there were too many others ahead of him. But it was a tempered joy, all the same. The freezers had not just been another job. They were a major philosophical commitment—no, damned near a
religious
commitment—to the future. They were built to last, and they were built
big.
They were meant to hold all the frozen specimens and tissue samples that were all the people on Newmanhome had left of horse-chestnut trees and ginkgos and aardvarks and Luna moths and salamanders. They were their best tie with old Earth, fully automatic, with power from the geothermal wells—also fully automatic—built to last a thousand years . . .