The World at the End of Time (40 page)

Viktor blinked at her. “What?”

“I have . . . inserted . . . additional material . . . in your brain . . . to replace . . . what was lost. It may take. I think it has . . . partly.”

“Partly?”

“Perhaps more. We must wait.”

“I have been waiting,” he said bitterly.

She studied him thoughtfully for a moment. Then, smiling, she said, “You will . . . wait some more. Now go. You will help Manett. You must learn . . . to do his work.”

Manett was waiting for Viktor outside the examination room, and his expression was even more dour than usual. When Viktor asked him what Nrina had meant, Manett flared up. “It means she’s going to give you my
job,
damn your hide!” he rasped. “Come on. I’ll show you what to do—but just don’t
talk
to me!” And he led the way to the outermost shell of the habitat, where the wraithlike but oddly muscled man who had tattooed Viktor in the first place was waiting impatiently for them.

The man wasn’t wearing a filmy robe now; he was dressed in shiny, copper-colored things like overalls, which covered everything from neck to feet, and he had a hood of the same material in his hand. “This is Dekkaduk,” Manett said, short and surly. “Get dressed.”

Dekkaduk looked at him inquiringly, but didn’t say anything either. He waited while Viktor struggled into the same sort of garment. It was light and flexible, but it felt metallic. Still, it was elastic, too, because it slid over the sausage around Viktor’s lower leg easily enough.

“Now,” Dekkaduk said, “we go inside.” He was speaking the language of the habitat people. Because Viktor was concentrating on what he was doing it took a moment for him to understand. Manett helped him along with a shove.

“Dekkaduk said
move,”
he snapped. “Get your damn hood on!”

Then Viktor found out what his job was. All three of them donned their hoods, then crowded all together into a tiny cubicle; Manett pulled the outer door closed—it was thick but light—and opened a door on the other side.

Immediately the transparent front of Viktor’s hood clouded over and he felt a stinging cold. A moment later he could feel Manett roughly poking at his back, doing something that resulted first in a faint click, then a hiss. The icy cold of the suit warmed; warm air began to flow through the hood. Gradually the frosted inside of the faceplate began to clear.

Viktor could see Manett’s face bending toward his, and through the two visors he could see the man’s look of sour satisfaction. When Manett spoke Viktor could see his lips move, but the voice came from inside the hood, right next to his ear. “You’re all hooked up,” Manett announced. “Now let’s shift some stiffs.”

And so they did. For an hour or more. Warm inside their heated suits, with their warmed air supply from the cables that connected them to sockets in the wall; and the stiffs they moved were corpsicles from the cryonics chambers on Newmanhome.

What Manett and Viktor did was the hard work—pulling out the old capsules, opening them to show the frozen bodies inside. The air in the freezer must have been searingly dry, for no frost had collected on either capsules or bodies. Some were facedown, and they were the easiest; all Viktor or Manett had to do was to pull or cut away the hard-frozen fabric over the hip and then stand aside while Dekkaduk thrust a triangle-bladed instrument into each patch of rock-hard flesh to gouge out a tiny sample. The ones who had been frozen faceup were more difficult. They had to be lifted out, or at least turned to one side, so that Dekkaduk could get at them; and then Viktor could see the frozen faces. Some were almost as though only asleep. Some were contorted. Some seemed to be silently screaming.

Then they slid the capsules back—each marked with its star or cross or crescent. Viktor was glad when it was over, because it was frightening to look on the corpsicles and know that not long before he had been just like them—and not very far in the future, maybe, might well be back there again.

Back in his own study room, as he leaned over the teaching desk, he blew on his fingers. They weren’t really cold. It was his soul that was cold. He thought it would never be warm again.

But as he talked to his unreal mentor in the desk he began to forget the freezer. “What shall we study today, Viktor?” the simulacrum greeted him. “It is up to you to choose.”

“Thank you,” Viktor said, aware that he was thanking no one real. “Can you show me some more pictures, please?”

“Of course. Incidentally, your accent is getting much better. But what pictures would you like to see?”

“Well,” Viktor said, “I used to be interested in astronomy. Can you show me what the skies look like now? I mean, not just Nergal, but everything?”

“Of course,” the tutor said. “Perhaps it would be best to display it as a surround.” It disappeared from the desk, and at once an image sprang up all around Viktor. The image blotted out everything but itself, and it was almost all black. “You are looking,” the disembodied voice went on, “at every astronomical object that is visible from your present position. The habitats have been omitted.” Indeed, Viktor saw, there was the glowing cinder of Nergal. There, behind Viktor, the sun blazed—not very bright, he thought, but then they were much farther away than Newmanhome; perhaps it really had regained all of its luminosity. A couple of quite bright things had perceptible disks—some of Nergal’s moons, no doubt. He picked out a few smaller, bright objects—stars and a couple of planets . . .

Apart from that, nothing.

Nothing?
Viktor sat up straight, staring around at the sparsely featured sky. “But where’s the
universe?”
he cried.

“You are referring to the optical concentration that was visible for some time,” the calm, disembodied voice said. “That began to dim one thousand three hundred years ago, Viktor, and by eight hundred years ago, it was no longer detectable at all. What you see
is
the universe, Viktor. There isn’t anything else.”

And then, with a sickening certainty, Viktor at last began to believe. It had indeed been four thousand years.

Two days later what Manett said came true. When Viktor and the others started toward the room with the sample tubes, ready to do their work of filling them, Manett appeared. He looked angry and frightened at the same time. “Forget it,” he said. “Nrina says she’s got enough from you guys. We—” He swallowed. “We’re leaving. All but Viktor, he stays here.”

“Leaving for where?” Korelto demanded, startled.

Mescro looked searchingly at his mentor’s face. “You’ve been fired,” he guessed accusingly.

“Shut up, Mescro!” Manett snarled. “Let’s go. There’s a bus waiting.”

“But—but—” Jeren cried, blinking as he tried to take the new situation in, “but we need to get
ready!”

“For what? You’ve got nothing to pack,” Manett said cruelly. “Come on. Not you,” he added to Viktor, with poison in his voice. “Nrina wants to see you. Now.”

And thus, without warning, they were gone. Only Jeren tarried to shake Viktor’s hand sadly and to say good-bye. Viktor wasn’t even allowed to follow them to their “bus.”

Nrina was in the corridor, and she beckoned him to follow her. She was wearing a filmy rainbow-colored thing that might once have been called a negligee. It veiled, without hiding, the fact that under it she wore nothing at all, not even the cache-sex. Viktor averted his eyes, because there was something he really wanted to ask the woman, and her scanty attire made it difficult.

“It is very interesting to me that you were born on Old Earth,” she told him seriously as they walked. “Here, this is my home. You may come in.”

He followed her uneasily through a doorway. When they were inside she clapped her hands, and it closed behind them. It was not a large room, but it was prettily festooned with growing things, and there was a scent of flowers in the air. There was one of those desk things, of course, and soft pillows thrown about. The only other large bit of furniture in the room was a soft, cup-shaped thing, like the cap of a mushroom turned upside down.

It looked very much like a bed.

Nrina sat on the edge of the cup-shaped thing, which was large enough for her to stretch out in easily. She looked at Viktor appraisingly before she spoke. “Have you any questions for me, Viktor?” she asked.

Indeed he had—many, and a number that he didn’t quite want to ask. He fumbled. “I did—I did want to know something, Nrina. Is my, uh, my brain severely damaged?”

“Severely?” She thought for a moment. “No, I would not say ‘severely,’ ” she said at last. “Much of your memory has come back, has it not? Perhaps more will. The damage may not be permanent.”

“May
not!”

She shrugged—it was a graceful movement, but with the extreme slimness of her body it made Viktor think of a snake slowly writhing in its coils. “What difference does that make?”

“It make a great difference to me!”

 
She thought that over, looking at him carefully. Then she smiled. “But it makes none to me, Viktor,” she pointed out. And she lay back on the bed, still smiling at him, but now with a wholly different expression.

He felt himself responding. Instinctively his hand went to the brand on his forehead.

“Oh,” she said, reaching out with her own hand to take his, “that is all right, Viktor. I have fixed myself so that I cannot be fertilized. But I do want to know, I want very much to know, how you people from Old Earth made love.”

CHAPTER 21

By now the universe was getting pretty old, and Wan-To was very nearly the age of the universe. There was a redeeming feature to that, though, because the older Wan-To got, the longer it took for him to become older still.

That wasn’t because of the relativistic effect of time dilation. It had nothing to do with the velocity of his motion. It was only a matter of energy supply. Wan-To was living on a starvation diet, and it had made him very
slow
.

When Wan-To was young or middle-aged—or even quite elderly, say when he had reached the age of a few hundred billion years—he aged quickly because he did
everything
quickly. Wan-To was a plasma person. It was the flashing pace of nuclear fusion that drove his metabolism; changes of state happened at the speed of the creation and destruction of virtual particles, winking in and out of existence as vacuum fluctuations.

That was how it had been, once.

It wasn’t that way anymore. Wan-To was almost blind now. He could not spare the energy for all those external eyes—but it didn’t much matter, because what was there to see in this sparse, dark, cold universe? He did keep a tiny “ear” open for the sounds of possible communication—though even “possible,” he knew, was stretching it. Who was there to communicate?

Wan-To’s physical condition in itself was awful. (How awful just to have a “physical” condition at all!) He was trapped. He was embedded in a nearly solid mass, like a man buried in sand up to his neck. It wasn’t impossible for him to move. It was only very difficult, and painful, and agonizingly slow.

He could have left. He could have cut himself loose from this corpse of a star to seek another. But there weren’t any others better than the one he was in.

The wonderful quick, bright phase of his existence was so far in the past that Wan-To hardly remembered it. (His memory, too, was a function of how much energy he had to spare for it. A lot of memory was, so to speak, shut down—“on standby,” one might say, to hoard what powers he had available.) The kind of energies to support that sort of life had disappeared. There wasn’t any nuclear fusion anymore, not anywhere in the universe as far as Wan-To could see or imagine. Every fusible element had long since fused, every fissionable one had fissed.

And so the stars had gone out.

All of them. Every last one. Stars were history; and history, now, had run for so many endless eons that even Wan-To no longer kept count of the time. But time passed anyway, and now the universe had lived for more than ten thousand million million million million million million years.

That was a number without much meaning even to Wan-To. A human would have written it as the number 1 followed by forty zeroes—10,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. He wouldn’t have understood it, either, but he could have juggled numbers around to give an idea of what it meant. He might, for instance, have said that if the entire age of the universe at the time when the human race first started thinking seriously about it—everything from the Big Bang to, say, the twentieth century on Earth—had been only
one second,
then on the same scale its present age was coming right up on something like fifty thousand billion billion years . . .

And, of course, that number wouldn’t have meant much, either, except that anyone could see it was a very, very long time.

If Wan-To had been of a philosophical bent, he might have said to himself something consoling, like, At least I’ve had a good run for my money. Or, You only live once—but if you do it right, once is enough.

Wan-To was not that philosophical. He was not at all willing to go gladly into that long, dark night. He would have resisted it with all his force . . . if he had known a way to do it . . . and if he had had enough force to be worth talking about to resist it with.