The World at the End of Time (37 page)

But where was all this happening?

And what was
hurting
him so much? As the explosion of pain in his skull dwindled again he became aware of two other hurting places—a mean, burning sensation in his right leg below the knee, and a sharper, smaller, but still very painful, hurt in his buttock. None of it made any sense to Viktor. Nothing else did, either. “Sense” was beyond him; he was dazed, confused, disoriented, and he was even having trouble
remembering.
On all the evidence, he was quite sure he had just been thawed out from a time in the freezer. But he remembered, or thought he remembered, that he had been frozen before. More than once, he thought, and which time was this? He reasoned that it couldn’t have been the times when he was facing a long interstellar flight, because he had been a child then. He wasn’t a child anymore, of course. Was he? And who was this woman, who was now coaxing him to lie down again?

The name “Reesa” crossed his foggy mind, but he didn’t think this woman was she—whoever “Reesa” was.

He shook his head to try to dispel the confusion. That turned out to be a bad mistake; the pain burst through him again. But he felt the need to demonstrate his wakeful competence at once, like someone waked in the middle of the night by the telephone who instantly protests he wasn’t asleep. He licked his lips, getting ready to speak.

“I don’t feel very well,” he said, forming the sentence with care.

Funnily, the words didn’t come out right. It was more like an animal growl than a voice. He discovered that his throat, too, was extraordinarily sore.

The woman looked amused again and gestured to the man with her in the room. The man, Viktor saw, was quite normal-looking—neither as wraithfully thin nor as tall—but he wore what the woman wore, a sort of gossamer gown. He turned out to be quite strong. He pushed Viktor back down, holding him so that the woman could do something to him again.

The woman leaned close to Viktor. With her came a fragrance half like flowers, half like distant wood smoke.

Her nearness made Viktor suddenly aware that he was quite naked. The woman didn’t seem to notice, or at least to care. She peered into his eyes. She touched the base of his throat with an instrument that glittered like metal but was soft and warm to the touch, while she studied a tiny, dancing firework display of color at the instrument’s base.

Then she pulled down his lower lip. Instinctively he tried to twist his head away—again that explosion of pain!—but the man in the filmy gown gripped his head roughly, holding it immobile while the woman touched the damp, tender inside of Viktor’s lip with some other kind of thing, and Viktor went quickly and helplessly to sleep.

When he woke up again he was alone in the room. Even the other resuscitation pans were empty.

His head still hurt, but the other pains were gone—well, not gone entirely, but now they were only little annoyances rather than agony. When he sat up he saw that his right calf, from knee to ankle, was encased in some sort of a pale pink sausagelike contrivance. He puzzled over that for a while, poking at it with a finger. He didn’t understand it. He didn’t understand much of anything at all; everything seemed so
complicated.
The way he felt, he thought, was almost like being drunk.

He tried to recollect how he had got here. There was a memory of being told he had to go back in the freezer . . .

Yes, that was true, he was pretty sure. It wasn’t a comforting thought, though. He had a vague memory about freezing, something that someone had told him—was her name Wanda?—long before. It did not do to be frozen too many times. That he was sure of, though what it meant was very unclear.

He heard a man’s voice growling something from the doorway, and when he looked around it was the fellow in the gown, looking at him. “You’re awake,” the man said—wonderfully, in words that Viktor understood. “Stay there. I’ll see if Nrina wants to look at you.”

Viktor made himself sit up. At least some questions were beginning to be clear. For some reason these people had decided to revive him from cryonic suspension. All right, he could understand that. He wondered how long he had been in the freezer this time. It couldn’t be a matter of centuries again, of course. He simply would not accept that. But it had been long enough, at least, for the Reforms, or whoever’s turn it was at the power plant detail this time, to get a little decent heat in the freezatorium. (But hadn’t he just decided he wasn’t in the freezatorium anymore? He wasn’t sure.) And, if these people actually were Reforms, or if they were any other sect from frozen Newmanhome for that matter, they’d certainly changed their mode of dress. The man was taking off the filmy robe, and under it he wore nothing but a kind of kilt. Then, when the impossibly thin woman came back, Viktor observed that the gown she was wearing was the kind of clothing one wore for decoration or for modesty—well, no, not for modesty either, he thought; but certainly not for keeping out the cold. The thing was a long white smock, almost transparent, and he could clearly see that there was nothing much under it.

The woman looked different, though. She seemed to be more fretful and tired than when he had first seen her, as though she had been working hard, and the silky, gossamer gown was soiled with new spots of blood.

When he shifted position to look at her he thought to look down at himself, and was suddenly ashamed of his nakedness. Then, twisting for a better look, he saw that there was a wound on his right buttock. That was where one of the pains he had almost forgotten had come from. It wasn’t an insect bite, but a sort of stab wound in the flesh. Someone had put some soft, rubbery film over it, transparent, almost invisible. The film peeled away easily when he poked at it, and under the dressing the wound was still oozing blood.

The skinny woman pushed his hand away, clucking reprovingly at him.

The man came over and firmly pressed the padding back in place. “Damn it! Leave it alone, can’t you?” he said irritably. “Now sit still. Nrina’s got to examine you to see if there’s any more freezer burn, so you just let her do it, all right? I’ve got to check on the others.”

Viktor puzzled earnestly over all of that. He understood all the words, though they had a strange quality, as though they had come from afar. But whatever was wrong with Viktor’s head kept him from putting them together to make any kind of coherent picture. “Freezer burn—” Viktor began, but the man was already gone.

Lacking any better alternatives that he could see, Viktor did as he was told. He let the woman peer into his eyes, touch him in all sorts of personal places with her shiny instruments with their rainbow lights, lift up a corner of the pale pink sausage on his leg and peer under it, and finally replace it, looking satisfied. She patted his head—so gently, this time, that it didn’t send him into a blaze of new pain.

Then she beckoned him to follow her.

He tried. He did his best, but his best wasn’t very good. The right side of his head felt numb, and his right leg wouldn’t support him, even in the astonishingly light gravity of the place they were in. She had to let him lean on her as they walked—it was more like gliding in a dream; like getting about in a spaceship under microdrive—through an amber-walled corridor, to their first stop.

The first stop was a tiny room containing an amber, glassy bowl in which water gently whirled. Viktor identified it easily enough: a toilet.

Viktor had not forgotten that he was quite naked, though the woman didn’t seem interested in that fact. Neither did she watch him while, embarrassed, he relieved himself, nor on the other hand did she specially look away. The second stop was a shower. He looked at it doubtfully. He wasn’t sure how to make it work, and he wasn’t sure he could stand alone in it.

When he tried it, the leg, at least, was feeling stronger. The woman turned the shower on for him. He limped inside, bracing himself against the soft, shiny wall of the cubicle. As the gentle, warm cascade began to pour over him it was so relaxing that he found that he was actually enjoying it.

When Viktor came out of the shower the woman handed him a round, soft towel for drying himself. “Thank you,” he said hoarsely, rubbing his face.

The woman looked pleased, as though at a dog that had given an appreciative
woof.
But when he pointed at the dressings on leg and hip, trying to ask if they had been harmed by the shower,
she only shrugged, either uncomprehending or just not interested in his question.

The third stop they made was stranger and a lot less pleasant.

The woman abandoned him in another room, to the care of a different man. This one was almost as skinny as herself, though he did have some strangely knotted muscles—whereas the woman’s calves were like pencils and she had no visible biceps at all. The man gestured Viktor to a seat in something that looked like a dentist’s chair.

When Viktor sat down as ordered, the arms of the thing quite suddenly swung out and wrapped themselves around him. He couldn’t move. At the same time something else slipped around his head and gripped it as in a vise. It wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t resistible, either. Then the man approached Viktor with a different kind of a glittery instrument.

He touched it to Viktor’s forehead.

This metallic thing wasn’t soft at all. It bit into the flesh of Viktor’s forehead and stung like a wasp. Viktor shouted in surprise and tried to struggle. That was no use. He was held fast. When the man took the instrument away the spot itched terribly, like a bee sting; but then the man sprayed the spot where he had been working with a different kind of metallic thing. The itching stopped at once, and the man touched something that caused the chair to release Viktor.

That ruled out the cloudy theory Viktor had just begun to formulate provisionally, that these people had thawed him out for the purpose of a little recreational torture. Then the man led him, stepping in long, gentle, high-rising paces, to another chamber, where he shoved Viktor inside and closed the door behind him.

Viktor looked around him. He was in a room with a number of flimsy-looking chairs (perhaps a waiting room?) and a kind of glass-topped desk (but it showed no other signs of being an office). Glassware and some metallic things sat under a mirror that was set against one wall, but it wasn’t, as far as Viktor could decide, a laboratory.

He was not alone in it. Three other men, as naked as Viktor himself, were sitting uneasily in the frail chairs, talking to each other in worried, low tones. One of the men was black, one short and pale. The third was also pale but taller than Viktor and hugely built; and all three had the human-scale bodily form Viktor was used to, not the famine-victim limbs and structure of the woman who had thawed him out.

As Viktor came in, all three of the men looked quickly up at him with a fearful sort of suspicion in their eyes. Then their expressions cleared quickly, as though they had recognized him.

Well, they couldn’t have. Viktor knew that. He was quite sure they were all total strangers to him; but then he saw that each of them bore a bright blue device tattooed on their foreheads, and in the wall mirror he caught a glimpse of the same design on his own. It was an elliptical border enclosing some hen-scratchings that might have been numbers or words.

It was that tattoo that they had recognized. They all wore the same brand. So they were all in the same boat—whatever that boat was.

The tall man got up, offering a hand to shake. “Welcome to the party,” he said, in the quick, rough English of the quarreling sects of frozen Newmanhome. “What did you get the freeze for?”

Viktor puzzled over the meaning of what the man had just said to him, rubbing the mark on his forehead absently. When he had put it together, through the cloud that seemed to pervade his mind, he rehearsed for a moment, then managed a full sentence. “They just didn’t like me,” he croaked.

“Mary!” the black one said. “When did they start doing it for
that?
I got my own freeze in three eighty-six, but at least I had a trial. They said it was for unauthorized parenting. Well, it was just her word against mine, but what could I do? Jeren here was frozen for drunkenness, and Mescro got it for thievery—”

The short, pale man cut in, scowling. “Watch your mouth, Korelto! I didn’t
steal
anything. I just made a mistake and went through the meal line twice—it could’ve happened to anybody when they were on overload!”

“Does it matter?” The black man smiled. “Only it looks to me as though things must’ve got really bad by the time they froze you—uh—”

It took Viktor a moment to realize he was being asked his name. “Ah, Viktor,” he got out.

The black man—Korelto?—looked at him searchingly, then glanced at his companions. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“He’s a dummy,” the short one named Mescro declared.

“Aw, no,” the big one said. He looked down at the floor, as though abashed at his own temerity in trying to contradict the other. “He’s just, you know, mixed up.” He looked up appealingly at Viktor, then at the doorway. “Isn’t that true, Manett?” he asked.

The man who had been in the thawing-out room stood there, gazing at them without pleasure. “No, Jeren, he’s a dummy, all right,” Manett confirmed. “Nrina says he’s got freezer burn. Looks like it got his leg and his brain. But he’ll do for what Nrina wants him for.”

There was a satisfied, challenging look on his face that made the black man ask worriedly, “What’s that, Manett?”