The World at the End of Time (34 page)

To begin with, there was the task of repairing
Ark
from what was left of
Mayflower.
How were they going to manage that? They didn’t have an orbiting shipyard to do it in; they didn’t have the big tools to do the job; they didn’t have the shuttles to launch the tools they did have into orbit. They didn’t even have the plans of the ships to work from. Those records might still be in the files somewhere, the stored data fiches that no one had looked at for a hundred years; but it would take a hundred years more, Viktor estimated, to find them again.

What he did have was a vast collection of pictures of the old interstellar ships, which Tortee had had taken from orbit, scaled, and computerized so that at least you could take some rough dimensions from them and hope the parts would fit where you wanted them to. Of course, no one expected a neat job. In space a few wrinkles or bumps made no difference—you didn’t have to streamline a spaceship. All it had to do was hold its air and stay together under acceleration.

Assuming somehow they could deal with that, the harder job was still ahead of them: Invading hostile Nebo itself.

Tortee’s promise was good there. She had provided them with a detailed mosaic of Nebo’s surface, with fine-scale blowups of all the areas where the lasers (were they really lasers? The things that jolted foreign spaceships, anyway) were based.

Reesa was the one who converted all of Tortee’s photos into three-dimensional plans for the computer to display. Tortee had good programs, painfully salvaged and restored from the ancient vaults. Viktor had seen most of the pictures before: the great, tulip-shaped horn antennae, the spiral things that had to be some other kind of antenna (or perhaps a sort of waveguide for some sort of discharge?). He even saw, with a shock, a familiar shape near one of the clusters that magnification revealed to be the wreck of Ark’s lander.

There was no sign of bodies anywhere near the lander. There was no sign of anything alive there, either, or anywhere else on Nebo.

After a week of hard work Viktor began to believe that targeting those conspicuous artifacts might indeed be possible after all. But after you targeted them, what were you going to hit them with?

That was when Tortee delivered on another promise. She had undertaken to find someone who knew something about rocket weaponry, and when she produced him Viktor was astonished to see that it was Mirian.

Viktor met Reesa as she came in from the Peeps’ chambers, and the two of them went hand in hand to the workroom next to Tortee’s. Mirian was waiting for them, nervously stroking his pale beard. “Listen, Viktor,” he said at once, “I didn’t give you any breaks before, you know? I’m sorry about that. Things were tough for me. I hope you won’t hold it against me.”

“Yeah?” Viktor said, not committing himself.

“I mean it,” Mirian said earnestly. “I don’t blame you if you’re mad, but, see, I need this job. Working in the freezers . . .“ He looked embarrassed. “Well, when they send you there to work what they’re saying is, ‘Watch it, fellow, or you’ll be
inside
them before you know it.’ So this is a big chance for me. I’ll do my best for you. I swear I will.”

“I’m not the one you have to worry about; Tortee’s in charge,” Viktor said uncomfortably.

Reesa was more practical. “Do you know anything about space weapons?” she asked.

“I know as much as anybody else does.” Mirian told her, and managed a grin. Which was to say, Viktor realized as the man began describing his ideas, not very much at all. There was not much call for long-range weaponry in this frozen-over world; there weren’t any long-range targets. When the sects fought among themselves it was mostly with clubs and knives, and the big terror weapon was a hand grenade.

Still, grenades meant explosives; and once you had explosives you could put a bunch of them in a warhead and mount it on a rocket. There was nothing intrinsically hard about building a rocket, either—the ancient Chinese had done it when most of the world still lived in mud huts. The hard part was guidance.

But, Mirian explained eagerly, guidance only meant cannibalizing instrumentation from
Ark
and
Mayflower
and the surviving lander shuttles. In the long retreat from near-Nebo, while Reesa and Viktor had still been slumbering undiscovered in the freezer pods, Mirian had put in weeks in a space suit, roaming the old ship, investigating the resources it still provided, and planning a revengeful return. “We can do it,” he promised. “Honest to Fred we can!”

“At least,” Reesa said practically, “we can see if we can. If it’s possible at all—”

“It
has
to be!” Mirian cried.

Viktor’s doubts did not diminish as the days went on. He had a very clear memory of the jolting blows
Ark
had suffered. The idea of taking on that sort of technology with the improvised firecracker rockets Mirian was trying to build was ludicrous.

Now and then, in the privacy of pillow talk with his wife, Viktor expressed his doubts. The rest of the time he kept his mouth shut. Yet, grudgingly, he admitted to himself that whatever these people lacked in wisdom or manners they made up in courage. Nothing was easy for them. Even food was so scarce that the storehouses were tiny: food didn’t need to be stored for long when Sunday’s harvest was Wednesday’s memory. The 2,350 inhabitants of the four colonies lived on a marginal 2,200 calories a day—yet that added up to five million calories that had to be supplied each day. So many kilograms of chicken, frogs, rabbits, and fish; so many metric tons of grains, tubers, and pulses; so many cubic meters of leafy vegetables and fruits. The vegetables were not very leafy, nor were the fruits the handsome, unblemished objects Viktor remembered from his childhood supermarkets. But there was just so much you could do about growing things in caverns under the ice. Viktor’s “shit detail” mushroom farm had supplied only a tiny fraction of that everyday crush of provender, but every tiny fraction was urgently needed. The alternative was overload—and if overload wasn’t checked the next step was starvation.

Still they had managed to refurbish an old chemical rocket and send it clear to Nebo’s orbit, board old
Ark,
and get it going again. The old interstellar ship had been at the aphelion of its stretched-out orbit of the time. They had not risked coming close to the faceless enemy on Nebo—yet they had stolen old
Ark
away from him. Whoever he was.

Viktor disliked these people very much. All the same, there was a faint touch of admiration coloring his contempt.

Even Mirian turned out to be quite human as they worked together. The man was a lot younger than Viktor had thought. Mirian was only thirty-nine—in Newmanhome years, at that; the equivalent of an Earthly college kid. That surprised Viktor. He seemed much too young to have volunteered for the mission on Nebo. Yet it also turned out that Mirian was married and had even left a child behind when he took off for the long mission. “But of course I volunteered, Viktor,” he explained. “The Greats were pretty close to overload, and when I got caught—”

“Caught at what?” Viktor asked, guessing that the girl had turned up pregnant and Mirian had had to marry. But it wasn’t that.

Mirian looked shamefaced, picking at his beard. “They charged me with theft. Said I’d eaten some of the community’s honey. Well, I did,” he conceded, “but it was only a few drips in a broken comb. It probably would have been just wasted otherwise. So they said they wouldn’t prosecute if I volunteered for Nebo duty.” He looked around apprehensively and lowered his voice. “It was Tortee’s honey,” he whispered. “She was the one who said I had to choose between the ship or the freezer.”

“Tortee seems to have a lot of authority,” Viktor commented.

“You’d better say that! She’s—well, listen. How old do you think she is?”

Viktor shrugged. “Maybe a hundred and twenty?” Newmanhome years, of course, but none of these people had ever counted in anything else.

“Try seventy-five,” Mirian chortled, enjoying Viktor’s astonishment—why, the woman was Reesa’s age! “That’s right. She could still be having babies, except her husband’s in the freezer—he worked there, and they caught him making a fire to keep warm. So she just eats, instead of, you know, being with a
man.
And—”

He stopped, looking suddenly frightened. “Oh, I thought I heard her coming,” he said. “Listen, we’d better get to work. Now, we’ve got these fuel canisters; we can use them for the body of the rockets . . .”

The people on Newmanhome had a fair supply of explosives. They needed them now and then. When the ice moved, as it unpredictably did, glacier lips had to be blasted to keep them from burying what was left of Homeport too deep to survive.

But explosives were too dangerous to be freely available; half a dozen little wars among the sects had proved that. The explosives plant was located three kilometers away, heavily guarded by a fully armed squad from each of the sects, and the shuttle that would someday take people back up to
Ark
and
Mayflower
was within its perimeter, guarded just as heavily.

Viktor eagerly accepted the chance to go outside to visit the launch site. It was the Peeps’ day off, so Reesa was obliged to stay idle with the others in the warrens of the People’s Republic, but Viktor and three others, one from each but the Peeps sect, struggled into extra layers of clothing topped with sheepskins; an electrically warmed mesh covered his mouth and nose, and a visor was over his eyes. Even so, that first Arctic-plus blast that struck him soaked through the furs and the four layers of garments in moments, leaving him shaking as he toiled after the other four to the place where stronger, colder men were tanking up the lander shuttle with liquid oxygen and alcohol.

At least the winds were only winds. They did not drive blizzards of snow against the struggling men and women. The winds couldn’t do that; snow almost never fell anymore. The air of Newmanhome had been squeezed skin-cracking dry, for there were no longer any warm oceans anywhere on the planet to steam water vapor into the air so that it could come down somewhere else as rain or snow. There wasn’t any somewhere else when the whole planet was frozen over.

Squinting against the blast, Viktor could see the dark, cold sky.

It was not anything like the skies he had known before. The shrunken sun gave little heat. Even the dozen stars that were left were themselves, Viktor was almost sure, dimmer than they had been.

And then, as Newmanhome turned, red Nergal appeared, as bloodily scarlet-bright as ever. Minutes later that great puzzle, “the universe,” burst eye-blindingly white over the horizon. Viktor gazed at it and sighed.

If only his father had lived to see. If only these people were willing to try to understand! If only—

He felt Mirian tapping him on the shoulder. Viktor looked where the younger man was pointing, up toward that same eastern horizon. “Yes, the universe,” Viktor said eagerly through the mesh. “I’ve been thinking—”

Mirian looked suddenly fearful. “Hey, not that!” he cried over the sound of the wind. “Please don’t talk about
that!
I meant over there, next to it.”

Squinting through the mesh, Viktor saw what Mirian was calling his attention to. It was a faint spot of light, barely visible as it moved down toward its setting:
Ark,
in its low orbit, moving toward its final rendezvous with
Mayflower.

Viktor stared at it. The time was getting close. When
Ark
and
Mayflower
were linked together the lander would be launched, and then it would all start.

He was suddenly coldly certain that Tortee was going to order him onto the shuttle. And he didn’t want to go.

 
When they were back in the dining hall again Mirian was charged up with optimism. “We’re going to do it,” he told Viktor positively. “We’ve got crews trained for repair all ready; they’ll be taking off for Ark in a couple of weeks, and then—”

“And then,” Viktor said, as gently as possible, “we have to hope that they can get the ship habitable again; and that these rockets will work; and that that little bit of antimatter left in
Ark’s
drive will hold out long enough to ferry people back and forth.”

Mirian paused, a spoonful of the stew of corn and beans halfway to his mouth. “Don’t talk like that, Viktor,” he begged.

Viktor shrugged and remembered to smile. He was beginning to thaw out after his long run outside, and even the meatless-day stew tasted good. The important thing, he told himself, wasn’t that this harebrained project should work, it was only that people could
believe
that it might. Even a false hope was better than no hope at all.

“I do wish,” he said, “that we had some more antimatter. We could do a lot with more power. Even maybe build some lasers or something—something better than—” He stopped himself from saying what he had been about to say about the feeble rockets Mirian was putting together. “It was pretty nice when we had Earth technology going for us,” he said wistfully.

“Is it true that you people actually
made
this antimatter stuff?” Mirian asked enviously.

“Not me. Not here—but, back on Earth, sure. They made all kinds of things, Mirian. Why, back on Earth . . .”

Mirian wasn’t the only one listening as Viktor reminisced about the wonders of the planet he had left as a child. A woman across the table put in, “You mean you just walked around?
Outside?
Without even any clothes on? And things just grew out in the open?”