The World at the End of Time (46 page)

As the little ship swerved Viktor saw what was waiting for them. This new habitat was also cylindrical—no doubt because that was the best shape for an orbiting people container—but along its perimeter were a dozen rosettes of air hatches where odd-looking little ships had attached themselves. “They’re raw-materials gatherers,” Nrina explained when he asked. “This is a manufacturing habitat, didn’t I tell you? That’s what Frit’s family does, manufacturing. Those things—I suppose you’ve never seen them before—they are set loose here. Then they go out to the asteroids and so on to grow and reproduce themselves and bring back metals and things to use—”

Viktor felt a start of recognition. “Like Von Neumann machines?” he asked, remembering the ore-collecting nautiloids that he had encountered so often in the seas of Newmanhome.

“I don’t know what those are, but—oh, look! That must be Pelly’s ship!”

And Viktor forgot the Von Neumanns, because as the habitat rotated under them he saw what Nrina was pointing to. Yes, that was a
ship,
a
real
spaceship, hugged to the shell of the habitat. The ship had to be nearly a thousand feet long by itself, and it in turn had hugged to its own shell a lander larger than their bus. He stared at it longingly. That was more like it! A man could take pride in piloting a ship like that . . .

“Maybe Pelly will be at the party,” Nrina said with pleasure. “Anyway, we’ll be getting out in a minute, Viktor. Do you want to take the cat?” She passed the kitten to him and then, leaning past him, looked with disfavor at the habitat. “It doesn’t look like much, does it? It’s so big. It has to be, I suppose, because they do all sorts of industrial things there. I don’t think anyone would live there if they didn’t have to. Still, it’s quite nice on the inside, anyway. You’ll see.”

What she said was true. On the inside the factory habitat was nice, very much so, but it took Viktor a while to find that out.

Its design was not like the one they had come from. It was almost a reversal of Nrina’s, in fact. Instead of a shell of dwelling places surrounding a core of machinery, this habitat’s machinery was all in the outer shell. The passengers exited the bus into a noisy, steel-walled cavern, with the thumping, grinding sounds of distant industrial production coming from somewhere not far on the other side of the wall. Then Viktor and Nrina and the kitten took a fast little elevator, and when they emerged Viktor saw that the whole heart of the cylinder was a vast open space. Great trees grew along the inside of the rim, all queerly straining up toward the axis of the cylinder. There a glowing rodlike thing stretched from end to end to give them light. The whole place was almost like a vast park, rolled around to join itself.

It was a teetery, vertiginous place to be, for the ground beneath Viktor’s feet curved up past the glowing central rod to become the sky over his head. Nothing fell on him, of course. Viktor knew perfectly well that nothing could, because the rotation of the habitat pasted those distant upside-down trees and people as firmly to their “ground” as he was pasted to his. All the same, he was less uneasy when he avoided looking up. There were plenty of other things to see. There were brooks and ponds. There were beds of flowering plants, and farm patches. There were even herds of what looked like sheep and cattle, grazing on the meadows that bent up to join on the far side of the habitat. There were people, too, many people, going about their business or simply strolling and enjoying the park.

Viktor realized that something was missing from the bizarre scene: buildings. There were none in sight. It seemed that no one lived on the surface of this interior shell; their homes, their offices or workshops or whatever, were all inside the shell, “underground,” so to speak, with only entranceways visible on the surface—like the one they had come out of, rising direct from the bus dock.

“Ah, yes,” Nrina said as she got her bearings. She pointed to a round pond a hundred yards away—just far enough along the curve of the shell to make Viktor uneasy again, because the water looked as though it really ought to be spilling over out of its bed. “Sit there on that bench,” she commanded. The bench was in a trellis of something like grapevines. “Let me have the cat—we don’t want Balit to see it yet. Then you just stay there while I find the others and check the operating room.” She was gone before he could ask her what in the world she wanted an “operating room” for.

As Viktor sat, the quivers in his stomach began to settle down. The air was warm enough to be friendly but not oppressive; there was a gentle, steady breeze, perhaps from the rotation of the cylinder. A fair number of people were in sight, though none close enough to Viktor to talk to. Near the round pond there was a grassy meadow, where twelve or fourteen adults and children were flying huge bright, many-colored kites, laughing and shouting as they played the fluttery things in the steady breeze.

Of course, like everyone else Viktor encountered these days, they were just about naked—breechclouts, yes, they all had those, and a few wore gauzy cloaks, or even hats; but that was it. And they were having fun. They weren’t just flying the kites for the sake of watching them dart and wheel in the sky. They were in a contest. The kite flyers were fighting one kite against another. Some of the players were children, most were fully grown, and all of them were screaming in excitement as they tried to use the sharp edges of their own kite tails and cords to cut someone else’s down.

Between Viktor and the kite flyers was a sort of garden. Some pale, long fruit was being harvested—maybe a kind of cucumber? Viktor thought. And a crew of dwarfish, hairy “gillies” was moving along the rows to pick the ripe fruit. They seemed to Viktor larger, or at least squatter, than the ones he had seen before. As Viktor watched, one of them glanced around, then crammed one of the fruits into its own mouth. When it saw Viktor watching, it winked at him in embarrassment.

So even the gillies had privileges here. He found the thought reassuring. It emboldened him to pick a few grapes off the vines he was sitting under. They were not very sweet, but they were deliciously cool on his tongue.

When Nrina came back she was not alone.

Half a dozen or more other men and women came milling out of the entranceway with her, all next door to naked, of course, and all chuckling to each other and looking anticipatory. They were all strangers to Viktor—almost all, anyway, though one exceptionally stocky, round-faced man looked vaguely familiar. Viktor was surprised to see that all of them were carrying things that looked like baseball bats, for what reason he could not guess.

Nrina introduced him all around. “This is Viktor,” she said proudly. “He was actually born on
Earth!
And this is Wollet, Viktor, and this is his daughter Gren. This is Velota and this Mangry—Frit’s father and mother, you know—and Forta’s sisters, Wilp and Mrust; this is Pallik over here; and do you remember Pelly?”

Recognition dawned. “I do,” he said. “I saw your ship as we were coming in. How are you, Pelly?”

The man looked agreeable but surprised. “I’m very well, of course. Why do you ask?”

Nrina laughed and interrupted, sparing Viktor the trouble of finding an answer. “That’s how they used to talk on Old Earth,” she explained. “Viktor’s really quite civilized, though. Not like some of the others.”

They didn’t shake hands, either, Viktor discovered, although several of them did hug in greeting, and one of the men kissed his cheek. Which one, Viktor could not have said. Of all the dozen names Viktor had been given he retained none, though the other party guests all seemed to know each other.

Then Nrina handed him one of the clubs. He almost dropped it—not because it was heavy, but for the opposite reason. The bat was made of a sort of rigid foam, strong and soft to the touch, that weighed almost nothing.

A soft
thwack
across his own back made him jump and whirl: It was the little girl—Gren?—giggling as she swung at him again. He fended the attack off with his own club, careful not to hit the girl—the blow hadn’t hurt at all, but he was very unsure of just what was going on. Her father—Wollet?—nodded approvingly, grinning as he took practice swings with his own club. “We’ll give it to them, all right,” he exulted. “Where are they, Nrina? Let’s go!”

“Hold the club behind your back, you ass,” she commanded, laughing at him. “You too, Viktor. We don’t want them to see what we’re doing, do we? Frit said they’d be watching the kite battles—yes, there they are! Oh, and look at Balit—isn’t he a perfect little doll?”

It was Wollet’s turn. “If you don’t shut up they’ll hear us,” he warned, and led the way to where two men and a young boy were watching the battling kites, their backs to the group with the clubs. The boy certainly was nice-looking—slim, pale-haired; the equivalent of an Earthly ten-year-old, with the promise of good adult looks in the bones of his face. Viktor frowned. Another puzzle! On the boy’s pretty young forehead there was exactly the same blue tattoo as Viktor wore himself. But he had no opportunity to ask about it, for the others were all shushing each other as they moved closer. Although the boy was doggedly staring at the bobbing kites, he was also stealing glances around in every direction, as though suspecting something, until one of the men with him leaned down and, smiling, whispered in his ear. Then Balit stopped looking around. Still, the body language of the way he stood showed that he was tensed up for—what?

There were other spectators, who glanced from Balit to the approaching group, with expressions of amused tolerance. The two men with Balit kept their eyes steadfastly on the kites in the sky. As they approached, Viktor saw that one of the men was as tall as himself, though as slightly built as all these people; he had both mustaches and a beard, all waxed or sprayed or some-other-how swept out in majestic and improbable long curves. The other man, smaller and even more delicately built, had one hand on the boy’s head and the other tucked into the hand of his companion. His beard was far shorter and less conspicuous—but, all the same, it was definitely a beard.

Suddenly confused, Viktor whispered to Nrina, “Who are those two guys?”

“Frit and Forta, of course. Balit’s parents.”

“Oh. For a minute I thought they were both men.”

“They
are
both men, Viktor. Do be quiet!”

“Oh,” Viktor said again, feeling his eyes beginning to bulge. One more surprise! He could have expected almost anything of these people, but what he had not expected at all was that Balit’s parents should both be male.

Then things got even more surprising. “Now we attack! Show no quarter!” Nrina shouted joyously, and her whole band began to run toward the little family, waving their clubs. “Don’t you dare try to resist!” Nrina ordered ferociously, thwacking the taller man happily across his shoulder with the harmless bat. “We’ve come to steal your child and you dare not try to stop us!”

But both the men, laughing, were already resisting. They whirled around, pulling soft clubs of their own out of the waistbands of their breechclouts and defending themselves vigorously against the combined attack of Nrina’s band of marauders. A couple of blows hit Viktor, who was blinking in confusion as he was thrust into the middle of the fracas. Of course, the clubs didn’t hurt. It was almost like being hit with a helium-filled balloon; the foam-light clubs were incapable of hurting anyone; and there was no doubt of the outcome—it was two against a dozen, after all. The bystanders were cheering and egging both sides on, as the outnumbered parents slowly fell back, leaving the boy standing tense and smiling anxiously behind them.

“Pick him up, Viktor,” Nrina commanded, laughing breathlessly in pursuit. “Go on, do it! You’re much stronger than any of us, so you can be the one to carry him away!”

What made Viktor follow her order was that the boy seemed to acquiesce. He moved toward Viktor, smiling tentatively and holding out his arms.

And so Viktor Sorricaine, four thousand years out of his time, found himself in the act of kidnapping a child on a manmade habitat that circled the brown dwarf, Nergal. Well, why not? he thought wryly. Nothing else made sense! Why should this?

The band of kidnappers broke off their battle and flocked after Viktor, shouting in triumph while the despoiled parents watched proudly after them. The whole abducting mob hurried into one of the entranceways. Then Nrina told Viktor to put the boy down. “I’ll take care of him from now on,” she said indulgently. “Did you meet Viktor, Balit? He was frozen for a long time, you know. He was actually on Old Earth—imagine! He’ll tell you all about it at the party, I’m sure.”

“Hello, Viktor,” the boy said politely, and then looked plaintively at Nrina. “Is it going to hurt, Aunt Nrina?”

“Hurt? Of
course
it won’t hurt, Balit,” she scolded indulgently. “It’ll take five minutes, that’s all. Then it will all be over. And besides, you’ll be asleep while I’m doing it. Now, come to the operating room—and, oh, I’ve got the most wonderful coming-of-age present for you!”

An hour later the party was in full swing. Balit was sitting on a kind of throne on top of the buffet table, a glass of wine in his hand, Nrina’s gift purring gently in his lap, and a garland of flowers on his head, while his captors and his parents and several dozen other people who had shown up from nowhere drank and ate and joked and sang and congratulated Balit on his new status as a man.

Viktor had never seen a young boy look more pleased, though he noticed that Balit did from time to time surreptitiously reach down to touch his genitals, as though to make sure they were still there.