The World at the End of Time (30 page)

But that was one more of the many sources of friction among the communities, because the Greats were rapidly filling them up.

The four communities rubbed abrasively against each other in plenty of other ways. The Great Transporters hated to see even unbelievers profane their Sabbath. The Moslems lost their tempers when they saw anyone drinking alcohol; the Peeps were constantly irate about the wasteful, sinful “luxuries” of the other three groups, while the Reformers simply hated everyone else.

That was where the work of the Four-Power Council came in. They usually made sure that the frictions were kept minor. The system worked pretty well. They had not fought a real war for nearly eighteen years.

Viktor slept badly that night, in his barracks with forty other unattached male Greats sniffling and snoring and muttering in their sleep all around him, and the next day at his loathsome job was no better than the last.

Even the children seemed to have second thoughts about their undisciplined behavior of the day before. When Viktor asked Mooni-bet if she had seen Reesa the girl hung her head. She looked worriedly to see if anyone was listening, then whispered,

“We are on overload now, Viktor. She has been moved to the Peeps.”

And then, when Viktor tried to ask Vandot, the boy from the People’s Republic snapped at him. “We are here to work, not to chatter like religious fanatics.”

“Watch your mouth!” the girl from the Reformers snarled at him.

“I only say what is true,” Vandot muttered. “In any case, I know nothing of your wife, Viktor. It is not my business. Nor is it yours; because your duty is to pay us all back for reviving you from—” He hesitated, not willing to say the word. “For reviving you,” he finished. “Now get to work.”

Viktor didn’t answer that. It wasn’t because he had been ordered by a child. He hadn’t quite figured out what an answer to that sort of remark ought to be. It was true that he was alive. That is to say, his heart pumped, his eyes saw, his bowels moved. Even his genital organs were still in working condition, at least he thought they would be if he were allowed to be with Reesa long enough, in enough privacy, to test them out.

But was that really a “life”?

It was certainly a kind of life, but Viktor could not believe that it was the only life he was ever going to have again. It was not at all
his
life.

His
life had been on a very different Newmanhome, with very different friends, family, and job. Especially job. Viktor Sorricaine’s job had never been simply the thing he put hours into in order to keep himself fed. Viktor’s job had been his profession. His
position.
His skills. It was the thing he could organize his life around, the thing he
was.
And Viktor Sorricaine could not recognize himself as a shoveler of human dung. He was a trained pilot! More than that, he was at least an amateur, thanks to his father’s endless lecturing, of such things as astrophysics—the very person these people needed to investigate this eerie ghost in the sky that they called the universe. That was what Viktor Sorricaine was . . .

From which it followed that this chilly, weary dung shoveler wasn’t the real Viktor Sorricaine, and this life was not
his.

And when Mooni-bet came near him again in her gathering of dung beetles, he spoke to her, not keeping his voice down. “I do have a complaint, Mooni-bet,” he told her. “I’m being wasted here. I have skills that ought to be used.”

The girl looked at him desperately. “Please,” she whispered, looking over her shoulder.

“But it’s important,” Viktor insisted. “That thing they call the universe. It needs to be understood, and I have scientific training—”

“Be still!” the Peeps boy cried, coming up to them. “You are interfering with the work!”

“Anyone can do this work,” Viktor said reasonably, refraining from pointing out that it was a task that even silly children could handle. Obviously.

“We
all
must work,” Vandot cried, his shrill boy’s voice almost cracking. He rubbed his hands nervously on his smeared kilt, staring around at the others in the gloom. Mordi, the Great Transporter girl, averted her eyes, but when she glanced toward Viktor her look was almost guilty. Vandot asserted his righteous young masculinity. “The most important thing is survival,” the boy declared. “And the most important part of that is food. Shut up and get those beds prepared!”

Survival,
Viktor thought bleakly. True enough. That seemed to be the central rule of the game.

It was natural enough that the social structure for these people had to bend to conform. Their rigid ways were a pattern for survival. Earth’s Eskimos, in their far milder climate, had developed unusual social institutions of their own to deal with the brutal facts of their lives. True, the Eskimos had solved the problem in a different way—without rigid laws and stern central government, without punishment (and these people were absolutely
devoted
to punishment)—but then the Eskimos had started from a different position. They hadn’t had long-ingrained traditions of certain kinds of governments and religions to try to preserve. They came into their harsh new environment without the baggage of any real government or religion at all.

The people of this new Newmanhome, in Viktor’s eyes, were both authoritarian in government and fanatic in religion. So they lived their dreary, deprived, regimented lives in the caverns under the ice crags that had once been the city of Newmanhome. They had a few things going for them—fortunately, because otherwise they could not have survived at all. The most important one was that, although their sun had gone pale, the fires inside the planet still burned as hot as ever. The geothermal wells produced heat to keep their warrens livable, and even power enough to run their little factories (not to mention their freezers). The supply was not at all lavish. There certainly wasn’t enough energy to be had to keep Newmanhome’s tens of thousands of people alive . . .

But then there weren’t that many people left alive anymore. Not on Newmanhome. Not anywhere.

When, grudgingly, Vandot allowed that work was through for the day, Viktor tried to scrape some of the filth off his hands. He looked around for Mordi, expecting to walk back to the Greats residence together, but she had already left the growing cavern.

What a drag, Viktor thought irritably. He was fairly sure he could find his way by himself, but there was no reason she couldn’t have waited for him . . .

She had.

She was standing outside the cavern, looking both frightened and resolute, and next to her was his supervisor, Mirian.

“You simply won’t cooperate, will you?” Mirian said angrily. “What Mordi reported was true. You not only don’t do your own job, you interfere with the others.”

Viktor gave the girl a reproachful look. She shrugged disdainfully and turned to leave. “All right,” Viktor said, “you’ve made your point. Now let’s get something to eat.”

“Eat!” the supervisor growled. “We’ll be lucky if we eat at all this night, you’ve seen to that. I’ve got to bring you to the Four-Power Council for a hearing. Come on!”

There wasn’t any use questioning Mirian when the man didn’t want to talk. Viktor tried anyway, of course. He wasn’t surprised when Mirian simply shook his head and pointed toward a rack of parkas.

That was the first Viktor had known that they were going outside.

And then, as they battled their way across the hummocks in the teeth of a freezing gale, he looked up and saw the thing that had puzzled him most: the “universe.” It was like a sun, but it was immensely brighter than any sun, a pure, blue-white point in the sky that seared his eyes.

He tried to imagine how their little group of stars could possibly have been flung so fast, so far, that they were catching up with the light from every body in the universe. They had to be moving almost at the velocity of light itself! If only there were someone to ask, someone to talk to . . .

But while they were in the open it was too cold to talk, and then, when they were in the separate cavern that housed the meetings of the Four-Power Council, Viktor almost forgot his questions about the strange thing. For an unexpected joy was waiting for him.

Reesa was there.

It was the first time they had been together in the two weeks since landing, and as Viktor saw her sitting there, in the bare, cramped waiting room, with her People’s Republic “hosts” watchful on either side, he felt a sudden, unanticipated rush of longing, pleasure and—what was it? He thought it over, as he held her in his arms, while the Peeps grumbled menacingly, and decided it was simply love.

He understood that with wonder. It was a novel thought for him. Reesa had been his wife, of course. She had been a comfort, a pleasure, a partner—she had been a useful adjunct to his life in many ways; but he had never before realized that he had somehow grown to center his life around her in the classical tradition of monogamous love. That sort of romantic fixation had been reserved for Marie-Claude Stockbridge.

It was a surprise to Viktor to realize that he had not even thought of Marie-Claude since they had come back to life in this icy hell.

“Are you all right?” he whispered into his wife’s fine, warm-smelling hair.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’ve been tending the gerbils and the chickens—you wouldn’t believe what they feed them! Bugs and worms and—”

“Oh, I believe, all right,” Victor assured her, hesitating at the choice: tell her about his own work, or tell her about the startling new truth he was bursting to share? He released her, looking at her consideringly. She didn’t
look
fine. She looked careworn.

Nevertheless, the impulse to tell the truth won out. “That bright spot we saw—the universe? Do you know what it means? It means that somehow—God! I can’t imagine how!—our whole solar system and some of the others nearby are rushing through space at relativistic speeds! We’re traveling so fast we’re actually sort of catching up with the light ahead of us! And—” He paused, blinking at the expression on her face. “What’s the matter?” he demanded.

“Go on, Viktor,” she said encouragingly. “You were saying about the stars that are moving at nearly light speed—ours and eleven others, right?”

He stared at her. “You
knew
that?”

“The Peeps told me, yes,” she said. “They say it’s been like that for three hundred years, almost, except that it used to be brighter than it is now.”

“Well,
shit,”
he said angrily. “If these people knew that, why wouldn’t the Greats tell me?”

She looked at him absently for a moment. Then she nodded. “I forgot you were with the Greats,” she said. “They don’t believe in it. I mean, they don’t believe in asking questions about
why.
They go by their Bible. If there’s anything that isn’t in the Third Testament, they don’t want to discuss it at all.”

“But—” he began, and then stopped. What was there to say? He was fuming inside, but there was no point in burdening Reesa with his anger against these people and their folly, especially when she herself was staring unhappily into space.

It took that long for Viktor to realize there was something else on his wife’s mind.

“What is it?” he demanded. “Are the Peeps giving you a hard time?”

She looked at him in surprise. “No harder than anyone else, really.”

“Then what’s the matter with you?”

She looked at him blankly, then shook her head. “It’s just—” She hesitated. Then, looking away, she finished. “It’s just that I keep—wondering, Viktor.”

“Wondering about what?”

“I wonder if Quinn had a happy life,” she said, and would say no more.

It was a long, silent time before the door to the council chamber opened, and Mirian came out.

He came over to them. “You are granted asylum,” he said grudgingly. “The council has just made its decision.”

“But—but—but I thought we’d appear before them!” Viktor exclaimed.

Mirian looked at him curiously. “Why would the council want you to do that? What could you tell them that they don’t already know, from the transcripts of your questioning?”

“I wanted to talk about the universe!” Viktor shouted. “My father was an astrophysicist—I learned from him! The way that thing looks in the sky has to mean that our whole group of stars is traveling very close to the speed of light, and I want to help to figure out
why!”

Mirian looked suddenly gray. “Shut your face,” he hissed, glancing around. “Do you want the freezer again? Most of us are on overload now, you know—if the orbital power plant doesn’t start working soon there’ll be a hell of a big freezing bee! No, count your blessings, Viktor. The council thinks you two might be helpful in launching the rockets for the fuel transfer—that’s a break you don’t deserve. Don’t screw it up by talking blasphemy!”

CHAPTER 17

Wan-To’s first few thousand years in the galaxy that was his new home went like the twinkling of an eye, and he was busy all the time. There was so much to do!