The World at the End of Time (19 page)

And now destined to remain largely empty for most of that time, because the great cargoes of frozen biological materials from
New Argosy
were never going to get there.

No wonder the celebration was short and not at all raucous.

There was other bad news, too. Ibtissam Khadek died that year, quite unexpectedly, still protesting that the colony should be investigating her grandfather’s prize brown dwarf. Reesa’s mother, Rosalind McGann, was having a bad time with her own health—no one seemed to be able to say what the problem was, exactly, except that it might be the long-delayed consequences of undetected internal “freezer burn.”

And Pal Sorricaine had started drinking again.

Worse than that, Reesa told Viktor, he was making his own brew. There was plenty of native vegetation around, and it certainly fermented into alcohol readily enough, but it was stupid for anyone to drink it.

Viktor was alarmed. “What about the kids?” he asked worriedly.

“They’re fine,” Reesa said. “Edwina’s quite a grown-up little lady now, you know. She and the boys are living with Sam and Sally Broad—they don’t have any children of their own, though God knows they’ve tried hard enough.” She hesitated. “Maybe you ought to go see them,” she offered.

Viktor nodded. “I will,” he said. “But first I’ll talk to the old man. Not that I think he’ll listen to me,” he finished bitterly.

So Viktor went back to his parents’ home early the next morning. His father was just getting up, and he listened to his son’s fatherly advice without much patience. “What’s the matter with you?” Viktor yelled at last. “Do you want to poison yourself? Don’t you have anything to do with your life?”

Pal Sorricaine bent to tie his leg a little tighter. “It isn’t that I don’t have anything to do,” he explained. “It’s just that I don’t know how to do the things I have to do. Nobody does. We’re all stupid, Vik; we don’t know what’s going on. Not just about the fact that we’re moving—Jesus, we don’t even know what’s happening on Nebo!”

“What about Nebo?” Viktor asked, distracted in spite of himself.

“I don’t
know
what about Nebo! Have you seen any pictures of it lately? All those damned clouds! We can’t see a thing now with the opticals.”

“Well, clouds aren’t so surprising,” Viktor began.

“Don’t you remember
anything?”
his father demanded angrily. “Nebo used to be bone-dry! Now—now I don’t know where all that water vapor came from, and that’s not the only thing. Something there is emitting a lot of high-energy radiation, and I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know why it’s doing it.”

“Does it have anything to do with, uh, with the fact that we’re moving?”

“I don’t know that, either! And did you see the new Doppler shifts? We’re not only moving, we’re
accelerating.”
Pal looked wearier and more defeated than Viktor had ever seen him. “We’re going to be getting up to a significant fraction of the speed of light soon, if this goes on. Do you know what that means?” he demanded.

“Why—” Viktor thought, then blinked as an idea came to him. “Are you trying to tell me there might be relativistic effects? Will we be getting into time dilation, like on the
Mayflower
coming out here?”

“God knows!” his father cried triumphantly. “Certainly I don’t! And I never will, because nobody
cares.”
He licked his lips, avoiding Viktor’s eyes. Then, defiantly, he got up and limped over to a cupboard to take out a bottle. As he poured himself a drink he said, “I can’t help thinking there’s a connection with Nebo. If I could get the goddamn town meeting to send a probe, we could find out something!” he grated. “But they don’t want to spend the resources.”

“That’s a copout, Dad,” Viktor said sternly. “I don’t want to talk about spaceships, I want to talk about you. You’re going to kill yourself if you don’t leave that stuff alone.”

His father grinned at him, his face gaunt and wolfish. “Get them to send a probe, and I’ll stay sober and go on it,” he promised.

“I can’t do that. You know I can’t.”

“Then,” his father said, “the next best thing you can do is mind your own business.”

On Viktor’s next voyage his family came along.

It was an experiment. Reesa was a qualified navigator herself, though somewhat rusty. Though the ship didn’t need two navigators—it hardly needed one—there was always work for extra hands to do in supervising the rotor speed and double-checking the orbital position fixes against star-sighting . . . though, actually, when Reesa or Viktor took a sextant reading on a star they weren’t as much thinking about whether their ship was in its proper place as whether the star was. Some of the parallax shifts were now detectable even with the sextant.

Alice Begstine had proved unexpectedly unwilling to turn Shan over to the newly married couple, so they left without him. They couldn’t ship out together more than once or twice, they knew, because when the new baby came Reesa would want to stay on land for a season or so, at least. But it was worth trying, and as a matter of fact they all enjoyed it. Tanya was a touch seasick at first, but it was more psychological than real—Great Ocean behaved itself, as it usually did. The children roamed the ship. One of the crew was always glad to keep an eye on them and make sure Tanny spent her allotted hours at the ship’s teaching machines. The baby was as happy on shipboard as anywhere else, and Reesa enjoyed the new experience. They basked in the sun; at South Continent they explored the hills and swam in the gentle surf. On the way back Viktor almost wished they could do it forever.

There was, of course, always in the back of their minds the worry about what the hell had happened to the universe.

It bothered even little Tanya, though mostly, of course, because she could see that the grown-ups were bothered by it. And when Viktor took his turn in tucking them in at night he was eager to do for Tanya what Pal had, so often, done for him. The stories he told her were about Earth, and the long voyage to Newmanhome, and the stars. On the last night before they landed he was standing with her on the deck outside the cook house where their dinner was simmering to completion, the rotors grumbling as they turned. Tanya squinted at the sunset they were watching and asked, “What makes the sun burn?”

“Don’t look at it too long, Tanny,” Viktor cautioned. “It’s not good for your eyes. A lot of people had their sight damaged a few years ago, when everybody was—” He hesitated. He didn’t want to finish the sentence:
When everybody was looking at the sun every few minutes, wondering if it was going to flare like so many of the other stars nearby, and burn them all up.
“When we were first on Newmanhome,” he finished. “Now it’s your bedtime.”

“But what makes it burn anyway?” she persisted.

“It doesn’t really
burn,
you know,” he said. “Not like a fire burns. That’s a chemical reaction. What the sun does is combine hydrogen atoms to make helium atoms.”

Tanny said proudly, to show she understood. “You mean if I take some hydrogen out of the stove fuel tank, and—and what would I have to do then? To make that helium, I mean?”

“Well, you couldn’t really. Not just like that. It takes a lot of energy to make protons—the proton is the heavy part of the hydrogen atom, the nucleus—to make protons stick together. They’re positively charged, remember? And positive charges?”

“They push each other away,” Tanny said with satisfaction.

“Exactly right, honey! So you need to
force
them into each other. That’s hard to do. But inside a star like Earthsun, or our own sun—like any star, really—the star is so big that it squeezes and squeezes.”

He hesitated, wondering how far it made sense to go in describing the CNO cycle to Tanya. But, gratifyingly, she seemed to be following every word. “So tell me, Daddy,” she persisted.

He couldn’t resist Jake Lundy’s daughter when she called him that! “Well,” he began, but looked up to see Reesa coming toward them, the baby in her arms, the unborn one making her belly stick out farther every day.

“It’s almost dinnertime,” she warned.

Viktor looked at his watch. “We’ve got a few minutes,” he said. “I just put the vegetables on, but you can call the crew if you want to.”

“Tell me first, Daddy,” Tanya begged.

“Well,” Viktor said, “there are some complications. I don’t think we have time to explain them right now. But if you can make four protons stick together, and turn two of them into neutrons—you remember what a neutron is?”

Tanya said, careful of how she pronounced the hard words, “A neutron is a proton with an electron added.”

“That’s it. Then you have the nucleus of a helium atom. Two protons, two neutrons. Only, as it happens, the mass of the helium nucleus is a little less than the combined mass of four hydrogen nuclei. There’s some mass left over—”

“I know!” Tanny cried.
“E
equals
m c
squared! The extra mass turns into energy!”

“Exactly,” Viktor said with pleasure. “And that’s what makes the sun burn. Now help me get dinner on the table.”

As they reached the door she lifted her head. “Daddy? Will it ever stop?”

“You mean will the sun cool down? Not in our lifetimes,” Viktor told her confidently, not knowing that he lied.

So the voyage was absolutely perfect, right up until the end of it . . . but the end wasn’t perfect.

It was horrible.

Probably Reesa should not have been trying to guide the grain nozzles into the holds while she had the baby in her arms. The dock operator was a new man; he couldn’t get the nozzle into position; Reesa put the baby down to shove the recalcitrant nozzle.

She shoved too hard.

She lost her footing and tumbled. She only fell two or three meters, and it was onto the yielding grain—but that was enough. When Viktor frantically scrambled down after her she, was moaning, and there was blood soaking into the top layers of grain.

They got her to the hospital in time to save the baby. It was premature, of course, but a healthy young girl for all that; there was every chance the newborn would survive. And so would Reesa, but she would be a long time recovering.

Definitely, she would not be making the next voyage with her husband and the kids. When Reesa’s mother came over, aching and complaining, she seemed to consider it all Viktor’s fault, too. It was the first time he had thought of Roz McGann as a mother-in-law. He accepted all blame. “I shouldn’t have let her do that,” he admitted sadly. “Thank God she’s going to be all right, anyway.”

“God,” Roz McGann sniffed. “What do you know about God?”

Viktor stared at the woman, feeling he had somehow missed the thread of the conversation. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about God,” she said firmly. “Why didn’t you marry Reesa properly? In church? With a priest?”

Viktor blinked, astonished. “You mean with Freddy Stockbridge?

“I mean
properly.
Why do you think we’re having all these troubles, Viktor? We’ve turned away from religion. Now we’re paying for it!”

Later on, walking away from the hospital in the moonless Newmanhome night, Viktor found himself perplexed. He knew, of course, that there had been a religious revival on Newmanhome—half a dozen of them, in fact. The Sunni Moslems and the Shi’ites hadn’t stopped splintering when they broke into two groups; they schismed again over which way was East, and almost did it again over the calendar. (How could you set the time of that first sighting of the new moon that began Ramadan when there was no moon to sight?) The Baptists had refused to be ecumenical with the Unitarians; the Church of Rome had separated itself from Greek Orthodox and Episcopalian. Even Captain Bu had declared himself a born-again Christian, and every other soul on Newmanhome tragically doomed to eternal hellfire.

By the third year after the spectral shift there were twenty-eight separate religious establishments on Newmanhome, claiming fourteen hundred members—divided in everything, except in their unanimous distaste for the three thousand other colonists who belonged to no church at all.

When Viktor looked in on his father he found the old man sitting by himself in the doorway of his home, gazing at the sky—and drinking.

“Oh,
shit,”
Viktor said, stopping short and scowling at his father.

His father looked up at him, unconcerned. “Have a drink,” he said. “It isn’t ropy vine, it’s made out of potatoes. It won’t kill you.”

Viktor curtly refused the drink, but he sat down, watching his father with some puzzlement mixed in with the anger. The old man didn’t really seem drunk. He seemed somber. Weary. Most of all he seemed abstracted, as though there were something on his mind that wouldn’t go away. “Reesa’s going to be all right, I think,” Viktor volunteered—angrily, since Pal Sorricaine hadn’t had the decency to ask.

His father nodded. “I know. I was at the hospital until they said she was out of danger. She’s a good strong woman, Vik. You did a good thing when you married her.”

Baffled, slightly mollified, too, Viktor said, “So you decided to come back here and get drunk to celebrate.”

“Trying, anyway,” Pal said cheerfully. “It isn’t seeming to work.”

“What
is
the matter with everybody?” Viktor exploded. “The whole town’s going queer! I heard people fighting with each other over, for God’s sake, whether there was one God or three! And nobody’s got a smile on his face—”