The World at the End of Time (23 page)

When, rarely, Wan-To bothered to call up to check on progress Five was not fearful. It was only happy to report that it was doing its job.

When you came right down to it, all Five had to do, on a planet that had nothing, was to create an entire industrial complex. It took Five several weeks, but before the castings had quite cooled on the last of its guidance antennae it had already begun reaching out to all of its chosen eleven stars. It wasn’t hard for Five—not for a near (if severely abridged) copy of Wan-To himself.

Five didn’t like to question Wan-To. (Wan-To hadn’t instructed it to ask questions, only to get the work done.) So Five had to make a number of decisions on its own. Wan-To’s orders had been to accelerate this little group of stars. Well, that certainly meant to accelerate at least one planet with them—namely, the one he was on. But what about the other planets, satellites, and lesser things?

Five pondered that for a long time, then decided to play it safe and take everything. Of course, that made its job a little harder. Now there weren’t just a dozen bodies to move. There were roughly half a million, it counted, including all the asteroids and comets big enough to bother with.

It was a daunting job, but Five was not daunted. Five was quite capable of doing all sorts of intricate and difficult things, only not very smart about what things to do.

From time to time Wan-To did communicate with his one surviving matter analogue. Five wasn’t much company, but there were some good things about carrying on a conversation with it. The most important of them was that that kind of conversation was perfectly safe, because the thing was a dolt. It could never threaten Wan-To.

The bad side of that coin was that talking to the matter analogue was terribly boring. To begin with, it was boringly slow. The matter thing took forever to get a simple sentence out. Anyway, what could such a sluggish, rudimentary thing possibly have to say?

The answer to that was, “Not much.”

At first, Wan-To had been mildly interested by the matter-copy’s reports, especially the ones that were transmitted as “pictures.” Wan-To wasn’t much good at pictures. His perceptions operated in nine spatial dimensions (though, true, six of them were only vestiges), and a flat representation wasn’t much good to him. Also, things with definite boundaries of any kind were scarce in Wan-To’s experience, especially when they didn’t flow or fluctuate. (How
stagnant
matter was!) It had been an interesting bit of puzzle solving for Wan-To to attach any meaning at all to the pictorial data the matter-copy turned in. Then, when he had gotten used to the ideas of “shapes” and “edges,” the next question was, “What are all these ‘solid’ things good for?” Why were those great shiny arrays Five was building that swayed from horizon to horizon as the planet turned always pointing toward its little star? (“Energy accumulators,” the matter-analogue informed its master—but how odd to be tapping energy from
outside
the star!) Why those spiraling shapes whose aims converged at a point far beyond the star’s farthest planets? (They were the guides for the graviscalar flow that was pulling the whole group along.) Why the long square structure? or the domed ones? or the ones deep underground? (But you had to have them, Five humbly protested. They sheltered the matter machines that contained the forces that did the job. It was the way it was able to fulfill its mission.)

Of course, Wan-To had left the details of how to do the mission up to the matter-doppel’s own judgment. Wan-To couldn’t be bothered with such details. The matter-copy had been instructed to create a pit of gravitation for that star and its attendant bodies to fall into—endlessly—and it hadn’t been told specifically how. The commissioned officer’s instructions were just to do it, and do it the sergeant had.

That sort of entertainment palled quickly. After a few questions Wan-To began to tire of the answers. Just before Wan-To decided on cutting off communication with the doppel and looking for something more interesting, he asked the important question. “And the stars in your group? Have any survived?”

“Almost all,” Five reported. “Two were damaged some time ago, but there have been no attacks since.”

Wan-To didn’t respond. That was as he had expected. He was just about to cut off, without of course bothering with any such politenesses as a good-bye, when the matter-copy gave its equivalent of a deferential cough. Humbly it told him that it had come across one little phenomenon it hadn’t expected. Nothing in the datastores Wan-To had transferred to him had suggested that small bits of matter might organize themselves into aggregates that seemed to be—well, what else could you call it?—more or less
alive.

For a long time after he had finished wringing out of the doppel every scrap of information it possessed about this new kind of “life,” Wan-To lay in his plasma core, restlessly writhing, marveling at this interesting new thing. How very
odd!
From all the matter-copy had observed, these “living” things were quite small, quite rudimentary (human taxonomists would have called them mosses, bacteria, invertebrates, and a few flowering plants), and certainly quite trivial in any large sense.

So, of course, the relevant word was only “interesting.” It certainly was not in any way
important.
There was surely no way that these things could possibly affect the lives of Wan-To or his like, ever.

Yet it was strange that in all his billions of years of life Wan-To had never come across such a thing before.

True, he rarely bothered with anything concerned with matter—what was the point? And true, he told himself justly, even Wan-To himself was fairly young, as far as his probable life expectancy went. It wasn’t his fault. The universe itself was only about twice as old as Wan-To, though he had already determined that it would survive for a highly exponential number of times that long (and, if he was lucky, he would survive with it). Matter-life was naturally quite transitory. It was also rather new on the scene, he decided, for some quick “ball-park” (not that Wan-To knew anything of ball parks) calculations had suggested to him that it would take quite a while for this matter-life to arise by chance.

He saw how such a thing could happen, though. All it would take was some random combinations of particles that, purely by chance, turned out to have organizing and reproductive capacities.

It was probably not unlike the same random events that, he knew, had brought his own life into being.

Actually it had not been Wan-To himself that had been brought into being by those events, but his predecessors. That was an unimportant distinction, though. Wan-To’s predecessor (being so solitary he hadn’t bothered giving himself a name) had made a nearly exact copy of himself when he made Wan-To, and Wan-To had as many memories as his “father” did.

Which, in this case, was not very many. Apart from any other consideration, the proto-Wan-To hadn’t been very smart then—well, he had been an infant, after all! His entire network had hardly amounted to more than two or three hundred billion particles altogether, and none of them fully integrated with the others as yet. But as he had grown over the eons to be very smart indeed, and, quite curious, he had spent a lot of thought in deducing how that event had had to be.

As his galaxy (the old one, the one Wan-To had left when it became uninhabitable) turned on its axis, the leading edge of one of its spiral arms passed through a “density wave,” and a patch of ionized gases was compressed by the shock of contact.

That was just the beginning. It didn’t create Wan-To’s predecessor. It only made it possible for the next nearby event to do so.

That event came when a particular star of a rather rare kind came to the end of its hydrogen-burning life. It had been a very large star, so it used up its hydrogen quite quickly. Then, with most of its hydrogen turned into helium, it was running out of its best fusion fuel and destined for trouble.

The star could, to be sure, go on burning the helium into heavier elements still. But it took four hydrogen nuclei to make one helium, so when you got down to helium there was only a quarter as much fuel to begin with. Worse than that, helium burning doesn’t yield as much energy. Energy was what that old star was beginning to run out of. Energy was what it needed to keep its shape, because it was only the pressure of the terrible heat from within that kept the immense pressure of its outer layers from collapsing into its core.

When the energy from the hydrogen at last ran out, it did collapse.

All that vast mass dropped—“like a stone,” a human being might say, but much faster, and with far vaster impact, than any stone ever dropped on Earth. It struck the core, squeezing it from all directions at once. The core rebounded. Four-fifths of the mass of the star blasted itself into space in that great bursting, with floods of X rays and gammas and neutrinos, as well as ten-million-million-degree heat and blinding light; and as that furiously energetic mass raced through space it struck the already compacted mass of gas that was the womb that held the not-yet-existent precursor of Wan-To.

That was what Earthly astronomers would have called a “supernova.” The humans, too, had wondered about how things began, and they had worked out that their own sun and most others had been born in that way. They rarely saw a real super nova, of course—especially not one in their own galaxy—because human beings didn’t live long enough for that. But they knew that such events happened, over and over, hundreds of millions of times in each galaxy.

They did not, however, ordinarily give rise to anything like a Wan-To.

The supernova that gave birth to Wan-To’s forebear was not any ordinary Type I or Type II. It was of the rare kind Earthly astronomers had named an “Urtrobin supernova,” after the Soviet astronomer who had found the first of its kind in an obscure galaxy in the constellation Perseus. Urtrobin supernovae don’t start with any ordinary supergiant star, a mere twenty or a hundred times as massive as the Earth’s sun. What is required for an Urtrobin supernova is that very rare celestial object, a star that masses as much as two thousand suns put together.

There aren’t many stars like that. A lot of Earthly astronomers
refused to believe that any such overbloated body could ever form—at least, they refused until they began to calculate in the relativistic effects and saw that those did in fact make it possible. But when such a supermassive star collapses its explosion does not last for a mere matter of months. It takes as much as a year for it to reach peak brightness. Then it declines to obscurity only over a period of decades.

It was in just such a godlike hammer blow that Wan-To’s ancestor’s wisp of gas was squeezed and drenched. It was enough. The ancestor was born.

Such an event, affecting such a scarce collection of ionized gases, was very rare indeed in the universe. There could not have been very many such beings formed, not in all the dozen billion years since the Big Bang.

Indeed, Wan-To would have thought his unfortunate parent had been very likely the only one . . . if he had not observed the wreck of some distant galaxies and realized that creatures like himself must have done the wrecking.

He did not want his present galaxy wrecked. It was such a chore to move.

CHAPTER 12

It was a long trip to Nebo, a hundred and twenty hard days, tough times for any small group of people locked into each other’s company. For Viktor the trip was grim.

Black worry began creeping over him as soon as they pulled out of Low Newmanhome Orbit. It got worse. First it was the radio; the surprised, then frantic, then furious calls began to come in from the surface. It got worse still when his sister Edwina got on to plead with him, worst of all when she turned the microphone over to little Tanya. That was pretty close to heartbreaking, the sweet, worried little voice, begging. “Mommy? Daddy Jake? Daddy Viktor? Won’t you please come home?” It sent Reesa fleeing into a dark and empty cargo compartment, and when Viktor found her she was weeping uncontrollably. Then she closed up, would hardly talk at all. Not just Reesa, either. Everyone was having second thoughts; everyone was in a touchy, grouchy mood. By the time Captain Rodericks had inserted
Ark
into its parking orbit around Nebo and the lander was stocked and ready to take a crew down to the surface, hardly anyone was speaking to anyone else.

In Viktor’s black cloud of worry he kept turning their decision over and over in his mind, asking himself the same nagging questions. Did the kids really need them at home? Well, of course they did, but . . . And did the
people
need them there, for that matter? Wasn’t it, maybe, their
duty
to be there, sharing whatever came of this unexpected, this
unexplained
new calamity that was (maybe) threatening the colony’s very survival? Well, maybe that was so, but still . . .

But still what they were doing was
necessary!
They had to find out what was happening on Nebo! Didn’t they?

And even if they didn’t, if the whole thing was criminal folly, it was long too late to be asking any of those questions. They were committed.

The other part of Viktor’s black cloud was the unhappy state of his relations with Reesa. Something had gone very wrong. In all those hundred and twenty days they did not make love once. True, there wasn’t any privacy to speak of in the stripped-down ship. True, Captain Rodericks (who took as an article of faith that only a busy crew could possibly be a happy crew—however laughable it was to use the word “happy” in the present circumstances) had set up an elaborate routine of drills and practice emergencies, Captain Bu backing him up all the way, and everybody was exhausted most of the time. But Reesa hardly even
talked
to Viktor any more.