The World at the End of Time (53 page)

CHAPTER 28

Landing on Newmanhome again was a thrill for Viktor Sorincaine. For one thing, it was real spaceflight! The vessel was a real spaceship landing shuttle, and Pelly let him sit in the copilot seat as they brought it in. Just
being
on Newmanhome was an even greater thrill; it was home again. His real home. The place where he belonged—even though, shockingly, the place was no longer anything like the green and promising land he had grown up in. (Nothing green had lived through Newmanhome’s ages of ice. Nothing was alive anywhere at all on Newmanhome, except what the habitat people had put there.) Yet Viktor even had friends there! Jeren was waiting eagerly for him, shy and dumb and devoted; and Korelto. Even surly Manett managed to grumble a greeting as he clasped Viktor’s shoulder. His eyes, though, were fixed on little Balit as the boy was helped out of the lander and onto a carrying chair. “He’s really Frit and Forta’s kid?” Manett whispered. “He actually came with you? Fred! Then maybe something’s really going to happen around here after all!”

“Sure things are going to happen!” Jeren rumbled loyally. “Viktor’s here now!” Then he wheedled, “But leave him alone, you guys, all right? He needs time to get settled in, doesn’t he? Now, look, Viktor, I fixed up a place for you. I can take you there any time. Are you hungry? I could make some rabbit stew—real rabbits, Viktor; we’ve got a whole flock of them breeding now . . .”

Viktor hardly heard any of that. He was gazing around at the planet he had left. It wasn’t all depressing. Although the hills were brown and bare, the bay was clear blue. So was the sky, with cotton-ball clouds dotted out over the ocean. And there was definitely a certain amount of life on Newmanhome again. Human life, anyway. Practically the planet’s whole population—nearly sixty people!—had come to greet the new arrivals, like the citizens of any frontier town gathered at the railroad station to see the train come in.

“I’d better help Balit,” Viktor said—to no one in particular, to all of them. He hurried over to where the boy was painfully levering himself into the sedan chair, with a pair of squat, husky gillies standing ready to take up the carrying rods. Balit looked up at him, trembling—partly with the effort of holding his head straight in Newmanhome’s gravity, to be sure, but also with sheer excitement.

“This is
wonderful,
Viktor,” he breathed. And then he fumbled a metal case from his pouch. “Hold still, please.”

Viktor allowed his picture to be taken, then ordered parentally, “Put your hat on. You don’t know what sunburn can be like; you’re not used to it.” As the boy obeyed, Viktor looked up. Pelly was escorting a lean habitat man over to join them. The man was hobbling on two canes, and he had a blue beret pulled down almost to his eyes. A woman, as tall and thin as himself but almost as pretty as Nrina, limped after them.

“Viktor,” said Pelly, “this is Grimler, and her husband, Markety. They’re the ones who sent you the data you asked for.”

“Tried to anyway,” the woman said, giving Viktor a hug of greeting. “I hope it was some use for you—I admire you so much, you know.”

While Viktor was still blinking in surprise at that, the man was going on. “It’s harder from the actual stores,” Markety apologized. “You’ll see. We can take you there any time you like.”

“Any time,” the woman echoed hospitably. “Do you want to go up there now?”

“Oh,
yes,”
Viktor said.

It was a good thing they had built the datastore and the freezers adjacent to the power plant up in the hills instead of in Homeport itself. There wasn’t any Homeport anymore. At least, there was nothing left of it that was visible. The place where the city of Homeport had once been was now at the bottom of the bay.

The bad thing, however, was that a hill was still a hill. To go up it took
work.

Balit, Grimler, and Markety didn’t even try to climb it themselves; that was what the gillie litter bearers were for. Their squat bodies were solid muscle; Nrina’s arts had seen to that. Viktor envied them. His own muscles, softened by so many months in the soft gravity of habitat and Moon Mary, complained of the task of lifting a human body so far. Halfway up, Viktor had to pause to catch his breath.

When he looked around for familiar landmarks there weren’t any. “I don’t see the power plant buildings,” he protested.

From beside him, Korelto said reasonably, “Of course you don’t
see
them, Viktor. They got buried.” He wasn’t out of breath at all—of course, Viktor reflected, he’d had more time to get in shape on Newmanhome.

“But the plant’s still running,” Jeren assured him. “You can hear it if you listen, and the buildings are still there. And lots of the things in them are still okay. Come on, it’s just another twenty minutes or so.”

“Just give me a minute,” Viktor said. He turned as the gillies brought Balit up next to him and set the chair down. The boy looked up at him, weary but grinning and game.

“Are we there yet, Viktor?” he asked. And then, without waiting for an answer, he pulled his camera out again in excitement. “Look up there! Aren’t those things
clouds?”

Viktor nodded, without answering. He was listening. Apart from the occasional sounds of the climbing party, the silence was almost absolute. A faint sigh of wind. Some distant machine noises from the little cluster of buildings at the foot of the hill, where Pelly’s ship was being unloaded.

And—yes—a high-pitched, almost inaudible whisper from farther up on the hillside. The sound was familiar to Viktor, even after all the time that had passed. “Is that the power plant turbines I hear?” he asked.

From his own sedan chair, now coming up even with them, the man named Markety said, “Yes, of course it’s the turbines. Are we going to stand here and talk or go on? I thought you people were used to this kind of drag. You two,” he ordered Balit’s gullies. “Pick the chair up and let’s move.”

“Do you want me to give you a hand, Viktor?” Jeren asked anxiously. “I know how I felt when I got back here, the first few days. Weak! I never felt like that before. But it’ll pass, honest it will, Viktor.”

“Of course it will,” Viktor growled, panting hard, waving off the offer to help. The other thing about Newmanhome he had almost forgotten was that it could be
hot.
He was not only fatigued but sweating profusely when the trail turned. A shaft entrance lay ahead—something new; something dug recently to get down to something else long buried beneath the surface. Pairs of gillies were coming out of it, carrying freezer capsules.

“Let them pass,” Markety called from behind. “They’ve got cargo to take down to the ship.”

Viktor was glad to oblige. He gazed around, wondering. There was a time—oh, a long time ago, a
terribly
long time ago—when all this hillside had been green and sweet, and people had gathered around to picnic and dance and listen to old Captain Bu’s speeches. This had to be the same place. But how sadly it had changed. He remembered that he had been there with Reesa and Tanya and the baby, before they married . . .

He had to look away, for his eyes were stinging. He saw Jeren looking at him worriedly and pulled himself together as the gillies lumbered past on their way downhill.

The turbine scream was louder now, unmistakable. There was another throbbing sound that was harder to identify, until Viktor saw a stream of muddy water gushing down alongside the trail.

Jeren saw what he was looking at. “That’s from the pumps,” he explained. “They have to keep pumping the water out, of course.”

“Pumping?” Viktor repeated, and his heart sank.

For it had never occurred to him that freezing meant ice, and melting meant flooding.

Viktor turned to Markety, whose chair was just coming up behind him. “Is that why you had so much trouble retrieving the data?” he demanded. “Because the datastores were all under water?”

Markety looked astonished, then, as understanding dawned, the expression turned to compassion. “Oh,” he said. “I thought you knew that.”

Viktor had not forgotten what homesteading a new world was like, not entirely, anyway. What he had forgotten was how much
work
it was.

Annoyingly, everyone he saw seemed to think that he had come there for no other reason than to take part in the work—if not in fact to oversee it. They did need overseeing. When Viktor explained what a well was, and a septic tank, and why the former always had to be dug uphill from the latter, Markety was almost pathetically grateful. “How did you get along without me?” Viktor asked, half-amused, half-aghast at these inept pioneers.

“Very badly, I’m afraid,” Markety said at once. “We need you. After all, you’re the only person who’s ever seen Newmanhome the way it ought to be.”

So, willy-nilly, Viktor was drafted into every project. The good thing about hard, demanding work was that it kept one too busy to dwell on defeats. Well, it almost did; but nothing could quite wipe out of Viktor’s mind the thoughts of those ruined stacks of magnetic fiches that had once held the sum of human knowledge. Meltwater had done what time alone could not. All the chambers that had held the datastores had been under water. And even the parts that had now been pumped dry were a soggy ruin; steel was rust, silicon was cracked and crazed; everything was caked in mud. To restore any of the lost information would be something like burning a book in a crucible and trying to read its contents in the smoke.

Meanwhile, there was the work.

The most important job on the reborn planet was providing enough food to keep the people alive. Naturally, Pelly’s ship brought tons of food on every trip, and the first habitat visitors had installed gillie-manned hothouses to grow the kinds of things they were used to eating. It wasn’t enough. The revived corpsicles, who were by far the greater part of Newmanhome’s tiny population, had to find ways to feed themselves.

It was Manett who led Viktor to the scratched-out plot of hillside ground that was their first attempt at a farm. It was fortunate that Jeren’s promise had been kept: Viktor’s muscles had accustomed themselves to carry his full weight around again—there were aches, but they did their job. Even Balit was getting used to the demands on his artificial muscles, though on the trip to the farm plots Jeren carried the boy on his back.

As soon as they had reached the plot Jeren set the boy down and turned to Viktor, his face grinning with pride. “What do you think?” he asked modestly, waving at the irregular rows of green. “I didn’t do all of it. Markety let us use the gillies for some of the work. And Manett helped, and some of the others.”

Viktor studied the spindly shoots. The mere sight of growing things was a lift to the spirits, among so much bare desolation, but there was nothing there that grew higher than his knee, and nothing resembling fruit on any of it. He asked apologetically, “What are they?”

Jeren looked surprised. “Potatoes,” he said, pointing. “All those right there. And there’s carrots, and cabbage—you had some of that last night, remember? And we tried tomatoes and peppers, but they didn’t come out real well.”

“They came out
terrible,”
Manett growled. “The carrots get all squashed and funny-looking, too.”

“The rabbits like the green stuff, even if we can’t eat it. Besides, the carrots taste all right,” Jeren said defensively.

“They taste like carrots, sure,” Manett agreed, “but even in the caves we used to grow carrots that were four times as long as those. What’s the matter with them, Viktor?”

Viktor was conscious of Balit’s eyes on him. “I wasn’t ever a farmer, really,” he apologized. No one said anything. They were waiting for him to go on. He said uncomfortably, “Has anybody tested the soil?” Blank looks gave him the answer. “They might need some kind of fertilizer,” he explained. “Minerals or something. I wish we could get at the data-stores. I’m sure they’d have all kinds of agricultural information.’’

“You know we can’t do that, Viktor,” Manett snapped.

Jeren pointed out, pacifically, “See, Viktor, none of us ever tried to grow anything out in the open, like this.”

Viktor nodded in silence. He knew they were waiting for him to speak. He knew, too, that the most honest thing he could tell these people would be that he didn’t know how to help them. He even opened his mouth to say as much, but Balit was speaking ahead of him. The boy said confidently, “Viktor will take care of it. Back on Moon Mary he told me lots of stories about when people were growing things on farms. Didn’t you, Viktor? I remember you talked about irrigating the fields. And what was the other thing, something about seeding the ground with earthworms?”

“Well, yes,” Viktor said unwillingly, “I saw all that kind of stuff done. But I never—”

He stopped there, looking around at the way they were hanging on his words. Even surly Manett was gazing at him with hope.

“But,” Viktor corrected himself, “I, uh, I—” He looked around the field for inspiration, then finished, “I don’t see any way of watering these crops. Some of the plants look pretty dry.”

“It
rains
on them, doesn’t it?” Manett growled.

“It only rained once in the last three weeks,” Jeren corrected him. “Maybe Viktor’s right. Look, there’s plenty of water down there in the bay. We could take some of the pumps from the freezer—”