The World at the End of Time (45 page)

All that being so, Wan-To was lucky he had so much to reminisce about.

He certainly did have a lot of memories. If there had been a contest to see which single being, among all the universe’s inhabitants in all the endless eons of its existence, had the most in the way of stored-up memories to take out and chew over, Wan-To would have been the incontestable winner. If your mind remains clear, and Wan-To’s had, you can remember a lot out of a lifetime of ten-to-the-fortieth years.

Ten to the fortieth power years . . . and maybe much more still to come. That was one of the things Wan-To had to think about, for there still was at least one decision he sooner or later would have to make.

That was going to be a very hard decision. Because it was so very hard he preferred not to think about it. (There was, after all, positively no hurry at all.) What Wan-To liked to think about—the only thing that could be described as a pleasure that he still had left—was the days when he had had all the power any being could ever have desired.

Ah, those long-gone days! Days when he carelessly deployed the energies of stars on the whim of a moment—without a care for the future, without penalty for his spendthrift ways! When he cruised at will from star to star, from galaxy to galaxy (wistfully he remembered how wonderful it was to enter a virgin galaxy, bright with billions upon billions of unoccupied stars, and all his!) When he lived off copies of himself for companionship and battled joyfully against them for survival when they turned against him! (Even the frights and worries of those days were tenderly recalled now.) Wan-To remembered lolling on the surface of a star, taking his ease in the cool luxury of its six or seven thousand degrees (and he’d thought that
cool!)
. . . and swimming through the star’s unimaginably dense core . . . and frolicking in the corona, temperature now up to a couple million degrees, soaked with X rays, dashing out as far as ten million miles from the star’s surface to the corona’s fringe and then happily plunging back.

He remembered the fun (and challenges—oh, he relished remembering the challenges!) when he had created those little copies of himself, Haigh-tik and Mromm and poor, silly Wan-Wan-Wan—and Kind and Happy and all the others he had made; he even remembered, though not very well, the terribly stupid matter-copies he had made, like Five. (He didn’t actually remember Five as an individual, to be sure. Five had not been important to him—just then.)

What he remembered was
living.
And though it gave him a sort of melancholy joy to remember, the knowledge that he would never have such times again made him almost despair.

It was only when he was close to despair that he could force himself to think about that other thing, the one about which he would sooner or later have to make a decision. It concerned the only things in the universe that had ever really frightened Wan-To—because there was so much about them that even he had never been able to understand:

Black holes.

There lay the choice that ultimately Wan-To would have to make. Not right away, to be sure—
nothing
ever had to be “right away” in this dreary eternity—but sooner or later, for the sake of survival.

A black hole might very well give him his best chance for really long-term survival.

Wan-To wasn’t sure he quite wanted to survive on those terms. He did not care for black holes. The locked-in singularities where a star once had been—and then collapsed upon itself and pulled space in around it—were about the only sorts of objects in the universe Wan-To had never investigated in person. He hoped he would never have to. They were
scary.

The frightening thing about black holes was that inside them the laws of the universe—the laws that Wan-To understood so well—did not apply, because black holes were no longer really parts of the universe. They had seceded from it.

It was easy enough to get inside a black hole—in fact, the problem sometimes was to avoid falling into one. Once or twice Wan-To had to exert himself to steer away from one’s neighborhood. But getting in was a purely one-way trip. Once inside, you couldn’t get out again. Even light was stuck there.

That wasn’t because the immense gravitational field of the black hole pulled light back down to its surface, as, say, the gravity of a planet like the Earth pulls a thrown ball back down. Wan-To knew better than that. Wan-To was quite aware that light
can’t
slow down; that’s why
c
is invariant. The reason even light couldn’t escape was simply because the gravity of the black hole wrapped space around it—bent it—so that the light orbited around it eternally, within the Schwarzschild radius of the black hole, as planets orbit around a sun.

But the exact mechanism that caught and held anything that wandered by in those cosmic traps wasn’t really what mattered to Wan-To. What mattered was that once you were inside, you couldn’t get out again
ever
—not
light, not matter. Not even Wan-To himself.

The things were
terrifying.

Nevertheless, they had their virtues, Wan-To told himself. One of those virtues was that a good-sized black hole, say even one of as little as three or four solar masses, would continue its existence for a
long
time.

That was not just a very long time, like Wan-To’s present age of ten-to-the-fortieth years. It was a long
long
time: ten-to-the-sixty-sixth years, anyway.

Those are numbers that few human beings can ever grasp. Even Wan-To had trouble working with them. Ordinary arithmetic isn’t meant for such numbers. But what they mean was that if Wan-To were to take the plunge so that he could live as long as one of those fair-sized black holes—

Which is to say, for 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years—

And if you subtracted from that his present lifetime (which was to say, the present age of the universe, because by now they were pretty much the same number)—

Which amounted to 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years—

If, then, he succeeded in living as long as that black hole continued to radiate energy, he had still to look forward to—

Another 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,990,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years of existence. If such numbers meant anything at all, even to Wan-To.

And if, of course, you could call that “existence.”

Because that radiated “energy” from the black hole wasn’t really very energetic at all. Such a black hole didn’t begin to radiate in the first place until the mean temperature of the universe—what was called the “background radiation” when human beings first discovered it in their silly little microwave dishes, back in the twentieth century—had dropped to the very low value of one ten-millionth of one degree above absolute zero. It was only at that temperature that the black hole would begin to radiate.

That was very feeble warmth indeed.

Wan-To knew dismally that he could manage to survive, more or less, even with that sort of input—but he did not like the idea at all.

The only thing was that he didn’t see any better alternative . . .

Until he became aware that the tiny tick his few remaining sensors had registered some time earlier was, strangely enough, a sudden and wholly unidentified flux of tachyons.

CHAPTER 24

Nrina was flushed and excited as they boarded the bus. “It’s going to be a nice party,” she was saying. She seemed younger than Viktor had ever seen her, happily making sure her packages were stored and that Viktor got a window seat. “Have you got the cat? Please, don’t let go of it. We’ll have a couple of velocity changes, and we don’t want it flying around and hitting some other passenger in the face. You don’t get spacesick, do you?”

Viktor Sorricaine, who was fairly sure he was the oldest living space pilot in the known universe, didn’t dignify that with an answer. “How far are we going?” he asked as he settled himself into the soft webbing of the seat, carefully adjusting the belt so that it didn’t squeeze the restless little kitten on his lap. The dark-haired man across the aisle was staring at the little animal.

“Not far. Frit’s family lives on a fabrication habitat; they make things. It’s two or three levels down, but it’s less than a quarter-orbit away. It’ll take about two hours to get there.”

Two hours! A spaceflight of only two hours? But he had picked up on something else she had said. “Is it a family party? I’m not family,” he objected.

She looked at him in surprise. “That doesn’t matter. I am. Sort of, anyway. They’ll certainly be glad to have you; there are always guests at this kind of party—” She stopped to nod to a young-looking woman who was strolling languidly through the bus, glancing to see that everyone was strapped in. “That’s the driver,” Nrina informed him as the woman passed. “We’ll be leaving in a moment now.” The driver seated herself in the front of the bus, before a broad screen. Casually she pulled a board of pale lights and twinkling colors down into her lap, glancing over it for a moment. Then she touched the control that closed the entrance hatch behind them, and Nrina said, “Here we go, Viktor. Don’t let go of the cat.”

Then they were in space. In
space!

Viktor was thrilled by the feel of the bus launching itself free of the habitat. It wasn’t violent. The launch was no more than a gentle thrust against the back of the webbing, a quarter-gravity at most. Viktor found himself grinning in pleasure, though he felt Nrina, beside him, shifting uncomfortably in her seat. Absently, Viktor patted her knee with his free hand. (Under his other hand, the kitten didn’t seem to mind the acceleration at all. It was actually purring.)

Considered as a spaceship, the bus was—a bus. Even the old Newmanhome lander shuttles had been twice its size, but then they necessarily had to be; they had to carry the fuel and rockets capable of fighting a planet’s gravity. The bus had no such needs. All it needed were air and room for its dozen or so passengers, and engines enough to push it along through inter-orbital space.

Just outside Viktor’s window, it seemed, was the smoldering, bloody face of the brown dwarf, Nergal. The planet was less than a hundred thousand miles below them, almost hurting his eyes until Nrina indulgently leaned over him and darkened the polarization. Nergal-light wasn’t like bright sunshine, it looked
hot
—though only visible light came through the polarization, with the infrared frequencies screened out.

The word for it was “baleful.”

As the ship rotated Nergal slid away, and Viktor got a look at the habitat they had just left: A length of sewer pipe, half a mile long, spinning in stately slow motion, with odds and ends of junk hanging from it. Some of the appendages were the great mirrors that caught Nergal’s hot radiation and funneled it into the magnetohydrodynamic generators that gave them the power they needed to run the habitat. Some were probably communications gear; more were things Viktor could not even guess at.

Then that was gone, too, and Viktor turned to find Nrina looking at him with interest. “You’re excited, aren’t you?” she asked, placing her hand over his.

“I guess I am,” he admitted. “Oh, Nrina, it’s so good to be in space again! That’s what I dreamed about when I was a boy— Look, there’s another ship!” he cried as something the size of a family car slid rapidly past, only a mile or two away.

Nrina glanced briefly at the thing. “It’s just a cargo drone, probably nobody on it.” Then, reassuringly, she said, “This is quite safe, you know, Viktor.”

But it wasn’t safety that was on his mind, it was the glandular excitement of being
in space.
Viktor stared longingly at the nearly empty black sky.

It was so terribly
black.
So very little was left of the familiar sky. Without Nergal or the distant sun, there was nothing to see but an occasional glint—a distant habitat, perhaps, or another ship—and one or two more distant things: the surviving stars.

That was it.

The familiar spread of constellations that had always been there—
always
—simply did not exist anymore.

Viktor shivered. He had never felt so alone.

Chatter beside him reminded him that he wasn’t alone at all. Nrina had taken the kitten from him and was feeding it with a little object like a baby bottle, while half a dozen other passengers were clustered around in admiration, braced awkwardly against the mild thrust of the ship. “Yes, it is called a ‘cat,’ ” Nrina was explaining. “No, they’ve been extinct for ages. Yes, it’s the only one of its kind now—I just finished it—but if it lives I think I’ll make a mate for it. No, they aren’t wild animals. People used to have them in their houses all the time. Didn’t they, Viktor?” she appealed.

 
“What? Oh, yes, they make great pets,” Viktor confirmed, recalled to reality. “They do have claws, though. And they needed to be housebroken.”

That led to more questions (What were “claws”? What was “housebroken”? Could they be trained to do useful things, like gillies?) until the driver broke up the party. “Everyone get back to his seat, please,” she called. ‘We’ll be matching orbit with the target in a moment.”