The World at the End of Time (57 page)

And, of course, on Pelly’s next trip back to Nergal Viktor and Reesa went with him.

For Reesa, of course, it was all a wonderful new thrill. She had never seen the spindly, graceful homes of Moon Mary—had hardly seen even the habitat where Nrina had coaxed her back to life, for as soon as she had been well enough she had been on her way to Newmanhome and Viktor.

It was more than a tour. It was very close to a Grand Procession. They were met on Moon Mary by more than a thousand people. Frit and Forta were in the very foreground, of course, taking turns to hug Viktor and Reesa when Balit left either long enough to give them a chance. Nrina was there, too—as she pressed herself fondly against Viktor he glanced worriedly at Reesa’s face; but Reesa only put her own arms around the slim woman, and if there was any jealousy there, or resentment, it never came to the surface. Some of the others Viktor recognized, or almost recognized—Balit’s old schoolmates, some of the friends and family members from Balit’s coming-of-age party—but there were hundreds,
many
hundreds, more he did not know at all. “I have some surprises for you, Viktor,” Balit said proudly, pulling a slim young woman out of the throng. “This is Kiffena. Do you remember her? She was in my class when you visited, and we’re going to be married.”

She came willingly enough to Viktor, who naturally put his arms around her. He did not remember her out of the gaggle he had met at Balit’s school, but she was certainly a pretty little thing. As he hugged her in greeting he was surprised to feel the corded muscles in her lean body—preparing for Newmanhome? Yes, of course, that would be it, he thought; Balit had promised he would be back, and certainly it would not be alone. Grinning, Viktor slapped the boy—no, the
man
now, certainly—on the back. To the girl he said, “You’ll be a wonderful couple.”

“We know you’ll be very happy,” Reesa said.

Then the girl moved her lips for a moment and said, “We know we will be happy, too.”

Viktor blinked at her in astonishment, for she hadn’t spoken in the tongue of the habitats, but in old English. She grinned. “I had to learn it for my work,” she said, half-apologetically.

“Well, she really is a surprise, Balit,” Viktor said. “And a very nice one, too. Congratulations.”

Balit looked astonished. “Oh, no, Viktor. Kiffena isn’t the surprise. Kiffena is the one who’s going to
tell
you the surprise—one of the surprises, anyway. But let’s go home now, please? After dinner we can talk in peace.”

Frit and Forta had prepared a handsome meal. “Nothing elaborate,” Frit said modestly, handing around grapes the size of a baby’s fist, “for it’s just family, you know.”

“I’m really honored to be a member of this family,” Reesa said, and took Frit’s hand to kiss it before she let him go on with the grapes. “Balit’s been a really good friend to us on Newmanhome, and—” Suddenly she was startled, almost panicked, as the room swayed under her. “Dear God! What’s
that?”

Viktor, after a moment’s shock of his own, laughed at her. “I forgot to tell you about earthquakes. Moon Mary does this kind of thing every once in a while.”

“But we’re perfectly safe here,” Forta said reassuringly. When he was sure that Reesa was over her startlement, and everyone had had everything they wanted from the meal, he stood up again. “I’ve got to practice,” he sighed. “I’m going to perform a new dance—I hope you’ll enjoy it, Viktor and Reesa, because it’s partly for you. But I won’t dance it properly if I don’t rehearse it again, so, Frit, will you come and count for me while I work at the bar? You’ll forgive us, won’t you, Reesa?”

“Of course,” Reesa said politely. But her eyes were amused, and when Balit’s parents were gone she turned to him. “They’re leaving us alone on purpose, aren’t they?” she asked. “Does this have anything to do with those surprises you were talking about?”

Balit leaned back, his eyes twinkling. “You are very clever,” he said. “You are also correct. Let me begin by telling you about Kiffena. She is a specialist in datamachine architecture.”

“I didn’t know,” Viktor said, smiling across the table at the pretty young woman. “In fact, I didn’t know there were any people like that at all.”

“I began the study when Balit was sending all those exciting stories back to us,” the girl said, smiling back. “It seemed such a pity for all that information to be lost.”

“She’s been studying the datastore, Viktor,” Balit said with excitement. “It may be that not everything was lost.”

That stopped Viktor. “What are you talking about?” he demanded.

Kiffena said with pride, “Balit sent me some of the data fiches from the store. I’ve managed to reclaim most of one fiche and part of three others, Viktor. They were magnetically stored, you see. Most of the magnetism was lost because of flooding, but there is a little residual—sometimes too little to make out, but sometimes not.”

“It’s not about astrophysics, though,” Balit apologized.

“No,” the girl said, shaking her head. “I’m not sure what the main fiche is about, Viktor. We tried to have it translated, but some of the words just don’t make sense. Look.”

And she keyed Balit’s desk and displayed some sections of what looked like a printed book.

“Oh, I know what that is,” Reesa said suddenly. “It’s case law. I mean, it’s what judges decided in some lawsuit or criminal trial, long and long ago. People used to worry about those things a lot, back on Earth.”

“But that’s wonderful, Kiffena!” Viktor said. “If you can get anything at all out of that mess, maybe we can get some of the good stuff. You said you unscrambled parts of three others?”

“I don’t know if they’re much better,” she admitted ruefully. “One was something about history. Have you ever heard of a man named Artvasdes? He was what they called the ‘king’ of something called ‘Armenia’ on Earth, long ago, and he had a war with someone named ‘Cleopatra.’ ”

“I’ve heard of Cleopatra,” Viktor said. “Not the other fellow, no.”

“And then there’s a story about some people that, really, Viktor, seemed to spend an awful lot of time worrying about things that didn’t really matter—it’s called
Remembering Bygone Times—”

“Remembrance of Things Past.
Marcel Proust,” Reesa said, laughing. “I read that once.”

“You said there was more?” Viktor asked.

“Yes,” said Balit ruefully. “That really looked good for a while, Viktor. It had a lot of data about Jupiter, Venus, the Sun, the Moon—the Old Earth Solar system—and about a number of asterisms—”

“The fiche called them ‘constellations,’ ” Kiffena corrected him.

“Constellations, then. Groups of stars as seen from Earth. They were called things like Libra and Sagittarius and Aries. We thought it might be something like a child’s primer on astronomy.”

“But what it was,” Kiffena said ruefully, “was some sort of magical system for forecasting events.”

“I think it’s called ‘astrology,’ ” Viktor said.

“I would have liked to try it out,” Kiffena said, “but of course we don’t have any of those planets or constellations any more.”

“But that’s wonderful,” Viktor cried, suddenly realizing what all this meant. “Do you think you can restore much of the store?”

Balit looked downcast. “Not much, Viktor,” he said regretfully. “I picked out some of the best-preserved fiches to send Kiffena. Most of it is just—well, pulverized.”

“But a lot of it, yes, Viktor,” Kiffena said encouragingly.

“The thing is, it’s not organized anymore, so we can’t pick out one section—say, astronomy—and work on that part. There’s no way to know what any particular fiche holds until we start to restore it.”

Viktor shook his head wonderingly. “I had no idea,” he said. “How did all this happen?”

“Balit,” Kiffena said, hugging the young man proudly. “Balit made it happen. Didn’t you know he was sending back reports every day?”

“I knew he was taking a lot of pictures, yes.”

“Pictures of everything that happened, Viktor! It was so exciting for us in the school to see—well—
thunderstorms!
And rainbows, and swimming in the ocean, and clouds, and—everything. And then, of course,” she said happily, “we all got interested. That’s when I began studying datastore architecture, Viktor. We all began things like that, and in the other schools—”

Viktor blinked at her. “What other schools? I only went to yours.”

“But of course we didn’t keep Balit’s reports to ourselves, Viktor,” she said patiently. “No, not at all. Half the schools in the world were getting them—all over the habitat system and on all four moons. Different groups took on different projects, and even some of the grown-ups got interested.”

“Newmanhome,” Balit said sincerely, “was the most interesting thing that ever happened to us, Viktor. And, of course, with all those people taking it up, a lot got done.”

Viktor looked at the boy. “I see that,” he said. “Well, do you have any more surprises?”

Balit grinned at him. “A few,” he said. He keyed the desk again, and a big torpedo-shaped object appeared. “This,” Balit said, “is sort of like what you call our Von Neumaun machines, only bigger. It’s going to go to Gold.”

Reesa blinked at him. “The star?”

“That’s right, Reesa, the star—the one that we think has planets. Viktor thinks maybe the machines on Nebo came from Gold, so we’re sending this automatic spaceship out to survey it and come back to report. Of course,” Balit added ruefully, “it will take a while. Gold’s nearly eleven light-years away, and this ship can’t even get up to the speed of light.”

“But really, Viktor,” Kiffena said, “those planets don’t seem inhabited anyway.”

“So this ship is just to make
sure.
And then there are a couple smaller ones—” He keyed the desk again, and three smaller torpedos appeared. “—which will orbit Nebo, keeping a watch on it before someone lands again.”

“Lands again!”

“Oh, yes, Viktor,” Kiffena said comfortably. “I think I will, if nobody else does. After all, those machines seemed to operate automatically, didn’t they? So they had to have some sort of data storage and control systems. And decoding their architecture shouldn’t be that much harder than trying to restore your Newmanhome store.”

Viktor stared at her, then at Balit. He was almost in a daze. “I had no idea,” he said. “I can hardly believe it.”

“Believe it, Viktor,” Reesa advised him. “When a few million bright young people get excited about something, a lot can happen.”

Balit grinned at them, his arm around Kiffena. “And most of it,” he said, “is still
going
to happen.”

They didn’t stay for Forta’s new dance. They couldn’t. The messages from Newmanhome were too urgent and too imploring—for, although there were a couple of thousand people now alive on the planet and busy about the work of bringing it back to life, Viktor and Reesa were the only two who knew what it should be.

They didn’t return empty-handed, either. In the cargo hold of Pelly’s ship were forty new artificial wombs for Dekkaduk’s laboratory, to speed up new births; and genetically improved strains of kelp to seed the empty seas; and a dozen species of tailor-made fish to feed on the kelp when it had had a chance to grow. One of the school groups had taken on the problem of seeding the bare South Continent, and so in the cargo hold of Pelly’s ship were two new little airplanes specially designed for dropping pelleted seeds of specially designed ground-cover grasses. Kiffena’s group had given her a ton and a half of instruments to go on with the work of trying to recapture lost data from the files. Balit had persuaded a dozen youngsters, from his school and others, to come to study the fascinating and unprecedented subject of Newmanhome’s weather, and naturally they had a ton or two of meteorological instruments of their own. Once again Pelly’s ship was grotesquely deformed, with odds and ends of gear stuck to it all through the flight from Nergal, and it took four trips in the landing shuttle to get it all to the surface. And then, somehow, time had to be found to get all those things started . . . and to plow new farmland to feed the growing population . . . and to find new geothermal sources away from Homeport so that more power plants could be built so that other little communities could be launched elsewhere on the barren world . . . and to do—to do
everything,
really, and to do it all at once.

Everyone else was almost as busy, of course—with the work of resuscitating the planet, and with their own affairs, too. Every week a dozen or so newly awakened people came wonderingly out of Dekkaduk’s thawing pens to join in the great task, and of course the pressure was intense to ensure that many of them were female. Families began to happen again on Newmanhome. Jeren’s tall wife was bulging at the belly—neither Jeren nor she had been willing to wait for a turn at the artificial wombs. Markety’s baby was walking sturdily where his parents still sometimes tottered. The freezers were still nowhere near emptied; each trip of Pelly’s ship brought more people from the habitats, then went back; and yet the principal element in the population growth was already beginning to be newborns.

And then Reesa sprang her bombshell.

As they lay spooned together in bed, at the end of one long, wearying day, she whispered to the back of his neck, “Viktor? Are you asleep?” And then she went on quickly. “There’s something on my mind.”