The World at the End of Time (47 page)

They were. As good as new. It was simply that through Nrina’s quick and expert minor surgery, they were no longer capable of producing live sperm. “It’s what every male does when he gets close to puberty,” Wollet explained heartily, refilling Viktor’s glass. “That way he doesn’t have to worry about, you know, making someone really—what was the word?—yes,
pregnant
.” He gazed fondly at his daughter, who was teasingly stroking the kitten in Balit’s lap—and a little of Balit, too. “It makes the girls a little jealous,” Wollet said. “They have a coming-of-age party, too, of course, but they don’t have the jolly old fighting and the kidnapping and the carrying away, and that’s what makes this kind of party so special. Don’t you agree?”

“Oh, yes,” Viktor said politely. “Uh, Wollet? That mark on the boy’s forehead . . . ”

“The fertility mark, yes. What about it? Oh, I see you’ve got one, too. Well, Balit shouldn’t have intercourse now for a few weeks, you know, until any live sperm in his tract dissipate, then they’ll take the brand off. Hasn’t Nrina told you all this? I guess she would do you, too, if you asked her to—I mean, now that you’re not donating anymore. Oh, here comes Pelly!”

Viktor was not at his best, greeting the bloated-looking space captain; he was not used to the fact that everyone he met seemed to know all about the state of his genital system. All he could say was, in a rush, “Pelly, I really want to talk to you—”

“About Nebo. I know,” the man growled good-naturedly. “Nrina warned me you would. Let’s get out of this noise, though. Suppose we pick up a couple of drinks, and then we can go over there and sit by the edge of the pond.”

It wasn’t just Nebo that Viktor wanted to talk about, but Pelly was easy. He seemed almost to admire Viktor—well, naturally enough, he explained. “You, Viktor—you’ve really
traveled!
All the way from Old Earth—all I’ve ever done is cruise around this little system.”

So it wasn’t just the fizzy, faintly tart, mildly fruity drinks they were putting away that made Viktor feel good. He had become used to being a curiosity, but it had been a long, long time since he had felt himself
admired.
He glanced back at the coming-of-age party, which was increasing and multiplying as random passersby came by and joined in and stayed. Nrina was showing Balit how to feed the kitten out of the improvised bottle she had made; Frit, from the top of the banquet table, was declaiming a poem.

“Nrina said you had some artifacts you’d picked up from Nebo,” Viktor said.

Pelly shook his head. “Oh, no, not me. I mean, I didn’t pick the things up personally—I’ve never landed on Nebo, and I never will. But I do have this thing—I carry it around to show people.” He fumbled in his pouch and handed Viktor a bit of something that was metal-bright, but a pale lavender in color.

Viktor turned the thing over. It was astonishingly light, for metal: a rod about the size of his finger, tapering to round at one end, the other end cracked and jagged. “Is it hollow?” he asked, hefting it.

“No. It’s what you see. And don’t ask me what it’s for, because I don’t know.” Pelly restored it to his pouch, then had a change of mind. “I know, I’ll give it to Balit for a coming-of-age present! There are plenty more of these things—not here, of course, but on Newmanhome.” He peered keenly at Viktor and the moon face split in a smile. “I’m going back there in a few days, you know.”

“Really? to Newmanhome?”

“To tell the truth,” Pelly admitted, “I’m looking forward to it. I’m generally happier on the ship than I am here—maybe because I’m pure, you know. I mean,” he explained, “nobody tinkered with my genes before I was born. Not much, anyway, outside of, you know, getting rid of genetic diseases and that sort of thing. I probably wouldn’t even have needed the muscle builders and things to be on Newmanhome, except for growing up on a habitat—but I was always a lot heavier than the other boys.”

“I didn’t know there were any like you anymore,” Viktor said.

“There aren’t many. Maybe that’s why I like space. Maybe I take after the ones who originally came here, you know. You’ve seen their ships! Can you imagine the courage of them— What’s the matter?”

“I haven’t seen those ships. I wish I could.”

“Oh, but that’s easy enough,” Pelly said, grinning. From his shoulder bag he pulled out a flat board, glassy-topped, like the teaching desks. He touched the tiny keypad. “There it is,” he said ruefully. “Pathetic, isn’t it?”

Viktor bent over to study the picture. “Pathetic” was the right word—a single hydroxy-propelled rocket, tiny in the screen but certainly not very large in any case. It was orbiting with ruddy Nergal huge below it, and as Pelly manipulated the keypad to move the scene forward in time the ship was joined by another, and another—more than a dozen in all, linking together in a sprawling mass of nested spaceships. Viktor could see years of history happening in minutes as the ships deployed solar mirrors and began to reshape themselves. “That was the first habitat,” Pelly told him. “Altogether only eight hundred people made it to Nergal—that was all they could build ships for; the rest, I guess, just stayed there and died. Things got better when they began constructing real habitats out of asteroidal material, but for a long time they damn near starved. Then, once there was some sort of plague, and most of the ones around then died of that.” He swept his arm around the scene about them. “Did you know that all of us are descended from exactly ninety-one people? That’s all that were left after the plague. But then it began to get better.” He flicked off the screen and looked at Viktor, seeming a little abashed. “Does all this bore you?”

“Oh,
no!”
Viktor cried. “Honestly, Pelly, it’s what I’ve been trying to find out ever since Nrina thawed me out! Listen, what about the time-dilation effect?”

Pelly blinked politely. “I beg your pardon?”

“The
basic
question, I mean. The reason all this happened in the first place—the way our little group of stars took off at relativistic speeds. I’ve been trying to figure it out. The only thing I can think is that we were traveling so fast that time dilation took over—for a
long
time, Pelly, I can’t even guess how long—long enough so that all the stars went through their life cycles and died while we were traveling.” Viktor stopped, because Pelly’s eyes were beginning to glaze.

“Oh, yes,” Pelly said, beginning to fidget as he glanced around. “Nrina said you said things like that.”

“But don’t you see? It’s all linked together! The structures on Nebo, the Sorricaine-Mtiga objects, the foreshortening of the optical universe, the absence of all stellar objects but a handful now—”

“Viktor,” Pelly said, his voice good-natured enough but also quite definite, “I’m a space pilot, not a poet. Ask me anything about practical matters and I’m happy to talk as long as you like. But this—this—this sort of, well,
mystical
stuff, it’s just not what I’m interested in. Anyway,” he finished, holding up his empty glass, “we need refills now, don’t we? And they’re beginning to dance again—what say we join them?”

It took two more glasses of the mild, bubbly stuff before Viktor was ready to accept defeat. Ah, well, he told himself, it was too much to hope for real understanding from any of these people. All they cared about, obviously, was having fun.

But halfway through the second glass fun began to seem worth having even to someone on whom, alone, the burden of solving the riddle of the universe seemed to rest. Nrina was leading an open circle of scores of people, dancing around the guest of honor’s throne, laughing. She waved to Viktor to join them.

Why not? He swallowed the rest of the drink. Then he trotted to the line and took over Nrina’s position.

The fizzy drink probably had something to do with that. Viktor wasn’t in the habit of taking over a lead spot among strangers. Especially when, in this thistledown gravity, his steps were balloonlike rather than the macho stomps he liked best. Nevertheless, everyone followed as he led them, patiently but firmly, in a sort of loose, watered-down Hine Ma Tov—leaving out the tricky Yemeni figures, just step-bend and running steps, until everyone in the line had grasped it and was laughing and out of breath.

“That was nice,” Nrina told him breathlessly, throwing her arms around him at the end. “Kiss, Viktor!” And while they were kissing the proud father came up to them, beaming.

“Viktor! I didn’t know you were a dancer.” And before Viktor had a chance to be modest, the man was rushing on. “I’m Frit. I’m so glad Nrina brought you. We haven’t had a chance to meet, but I wanted to thank you for helping with Balit’s party.” He squeezed Viktor’s arm. “Imagine! None of his friends ever had a person from
Earth
carry them away! He’ll be the envy of his whole cohort.”

“It was nothing,” Viktor said graciously. Nrina patted his shoulder affectionately and strolled away. Viktor hardly noticed. He was staring in fascination at Frit’s mustaches. At close range they were even more of a marvel; they extended beyond his shoulders on both sides, and although Viktor was sure he had seen one of them bent in the mock scuffle it was now repaired and stood as proudly as before. They did not at all match Frit’s hair, either. At a distance Viktor had thought the man was wearing a white cap, but it was actually close-cropped white kinks, like the standard image of an old Pullman porter, though Frit’s skin was alabaster.

“You must meet Forta,” Frit went on, beckoning to the—well, Viktor thought, I guess you would say to the other father, though how all that worked out he couldn’t imagine. “This is Viktor, dear,” Frit told his mate. “Nrina says he’s very interested in the stars and all.”

“Yes, she told me,” Forta said, demurely offering his shoulder to hug. “Do you know what we should do, Frit? We should ask Viktor to come and stay with us for a while. Balit already asked me if we could; he was just thrilled at being kidnapped by somebody from Old Earth! I know Balit would love to show him off to his friends—”

“Yes, dear,” Frit said tolerantly. “But what would Viktor think of that? We can’t expect him to spend his time with a bunch of kids.”

Viktor blinked, then said, suddenly hopeful, “I’d really like to talk to you about what’s happened to the universe. If I wouldn’t be any burden—”

“Burden?” Forta echoed. “No, certainly you wouldn’t be a burden; we’d love to have you come home with us. And—” He hesitated, then grinned modestly. “—since you’re interested in dancing, shall I dance for you now? Frit’s just finished a new poem in honor of Balit’s coming of age—it’s about growth and maturity—and I’ve done the dance accompaniment.”

“Please do,” Viktor said. He was completely out of it, really. He was wholly confused about what had been going on and what was to come. But he was game. He didn’t, after all, have many other options.

CHAPTER 25

When Wan-To became aware that a fresh burst of tachyons had struck his receptors, he did not respond very quickly. (He didn’t do
anything
very quickly these days.) It took him a while to switch from one mode of activity to another.

Torpidly, almost groaning in protest, he bestirred himself to see what this latest batch of tachyons was like. Naturally, his detectors had recorded them in case he wanted to examine them in detail—though that was probably hardly worth the trouble. Or wouldn’t have been, if he had had anything more worthwhile to do.

Wan-To was not excited about the event. He had lost the habit of excitement, in this dead universe where there was no light, no X rays, no cosmic rays, no anything but the distant purring, popping sound of the protons of his own star as they gave up the ghost. Even so, it wasn’t unusual for batches of stray radiation of one kind or another to reach him. Infrequent, yes—everything was infrequent these days. But not startling. Such things were simply the showers of particles that were the ghosts of some immense stellar catastrophes from long ago—from the time when any immense event could still happen, in this moribund universe.

But this time . . . This time . . .

This time it was the most exciting thing that had happened to Wan-To in a very long time indeed. Although he could hardly believe it at first, he was soon certain that this was no random burst of particles. It was a
message.

It was a wonder that Wan-To could read the message at all. The coded pulses were of the very lowest-energy tachyons—therefore almost the fastest of all—and yet they had taken a long time to reach him (so vast had the always-expanding universe become, in ten to the fortieth years). They had to have been transmitted with considerable power, too. Wan-To knew this to be true not merely because of the distance they had traveled, but because he observed that the tachyons had not been transmitted in a tight, economical beam. They had been
broadcast.

Broadcast! So the sender hadn’t known where he was! But they were definitely meant for Wan-To—the opening pulses said so.

That fact was as much of a thrill to Wan-To as the first ecstatic sight of a sail on the horizon to any shipwrecked mariner. Impossible though it was to believe, even now, in this terminal coma of the universe, there was someone somewhere who had something to
say
to him.

But what was this message?

To find that out was a labor requiring much energy out of Wan-To’s slender store, as well as a great deal of long, hard concentration. The message had come in very fast. The whole burst had taken only a matter of seconds, and it had been many ages since Wan-To had been able to operate at that speed. He had almost forgotten what it was like to do things at the speed of nuclear reactions. In order to interpret the message at all, he had to slow it down by orders of magnitude and ponder its meaning bit by bit.