The World at the End of Time (11 page)

He stopped, on the verge of another unexpected precipice. He carefully avoided looking at his wife. She regarded him thoughtfully but didn’t speak.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” his son said severely.

Viktor had never spoken to his father that way before. He stood up, testing for dizziness, and headed with precise, careful steps for the door. He left Pal Sorricaine biting his lip behind him. His son’s glare had looked pretty nearly like hatred, and Pal Sorricaine had never expected that sort of emotion from the son he had always loved and cherished, and thought loved him back.

Outside Viktor paused, leaning against the door.

Because they had been one of the lucky families in the lottery they had two rooms now, two cubicles together, in the long row that lined the muddy street, joined like ancient American tourist cabins. Behind him, through the thin film windows—last and longest use for the remaining scraps of light-sail/parachutes—he could hear his parents muttering to each other.

But, queerly, there were people muttering to each other in the street, too. They were standing in clumps, faces uplifted to the summery Newmanhome sky. Viktor instinctively glanced up himself. In the starlight he could make out that there were patches of warm-weather convection clouds obscuring much of the moonless heavens, but there were hundreds of stars shining through the gaps, too.

Well, there always were clouds and stars, weren’t there? Why were these people staring so? True, one star, all by itself, seemed quite bright, almost as bright (Viktor dimly remembered) as the planet Venus from Earth, brighter than any Newmanhome star had ever seemed . . .

With a shock he saw that the star was getting brighter.

How strange! And it kept on getting brighter still, almost Moon bright, bright enough to throw a shadow; and Viktor realized that it had been that incredibly bright all along. What had deceived him was that he had seen it only through a clump of cloud at first. When the last fringe of cloud had rolled away it was a blue-white beacon in the sky, brighter, Viktor was sure, than any possible star should be—

And he went running back into the house, stumbling but now suddenly cold sober, to shout to his parents that another nearby star had gone flare.

After that, there was no objection to Pal Sorricaine becoming a full-time astronomer again. Pressed though the colony was for able-bodied workers, everyone agreed that this second Sorricaine-Mtiga object definitely needed to be studied. Pal was released from his scavenging duties, Frances Mtiga from her school, Jahanjur Singh from his work as an accountant for the stores comptroller, and Ibtissam Khadek from the guidance systems for the rectenna.

The difficulty came when the four of them asked, no,
demanded,
that the colony instruct the orbiting crews to put aside other work in order to make the observations only they could make, with the ship’s sensors that were the only eyes the colony had for investigating what was going on in space.

It took a full-scale colony meeting to decide—more than three thousand people crowding around the open-air platform where the speakers urged their cases.

When Pal Sorricaine heard that the decision would go to a meeting he swore and poured himself a drink. That meant it would go by majority vote, and Pal Sorricaine, like a lot of
Mayflower
people, thought the majority was unfair. The second shipload had begun by outumbering the first, 1,115 to 854—but then the first colonists had had six Earth years to make more babies, so the combination of the colonists from
New Ark
and their Home-born offspring now totaled 1,918, while
Mayflower’s
total had only reached a little over 1,300. Of course the newborns weren’t old enough to vote, but who was, exactly? At what age did the franchise begin? And by what sort of calculation?

Sorricaine went to the meeting grimly determined to battle out the voting age question. But this time the line wasn’t drawn between the two ships’ people. The question split both factions almost down the middle. There was one side—headed by Pal Sorricaine and his little group, along with Captain Rodericks from the first ship and Marie-Claude Stockbridge—who insisted that the star had to be studied with all the resources possible. There was another side that included Reesa McGann’s parents, but also Sam and Sally Broad from
Mayflower
and a lot of others from both ships, who were even more emphatic that the orbiting crews had all they could handle to finish converting the drive engines to MHD microwave generation, and didn’t the others understand the colony
needed
that power?

They all settled in for a long town-meeting argument. Even allowing only three minutes to each speaker meant long hours of debate. Worse, they were unproductive hours. Men and women debating policy were not planting crops or putting up houses or exploring the planet.

It took them an hour just to decide, by raucous voice vote, how many could be allowed to speak. The decision was a hundred—three hundred minutes—five hours of talk; and, even though some of the lottery winners immediately turned their times over to allies more articulate and convincing than themselves, a lot of those three-minute talks amounted only to saying, over and over, “The safety of the colony is threatened!”

What they couldn’t agree on was which threat—whether the threat from the sky was more dangerous than the threat of postponing the arrival of beamed power from the ship.

It ended badly for Pal Sorricaine. He and his colleagues got their observing time, but with a bad condition. The allotment of ship time was to become effective only after the ten Newmanhome days of additional work it would take for the microwave installation to be completed.

By then the flare was still bright, but not as bright; the vital first spectra had been missed. Sorricaine, Mtiga, and the others did what they could with the data that began to flood down on them, but they learned nothing they hadn’t known before. The star had somehow pulled itself apart, and no one could guess why.

The star continued to dominate the night sky for more than a hundred Newmanhome days. Then Pal Sorricaine filed his last report to the distant Earthly astronomers, gave up his privileges, and went resentfully back to laboring, mourning the lost chance.

At least he wasn’t reclaiming lost pods any more. The last of them had been found and brought in; someone else had done that for him. He found other jobs. He drove a tractor on the farms; he sailed to an island a hundred miles south of the colony, to seed it with earthworms and Earthly clover to prepare it, one day, for crops; he shifted goods in the storehouses with a forklift . . . and that was the job that did him in, for one day he stacked the sacks of seed potatoes too high, and the lift overturned.

There was not enough of Pal Sorricaine’s right leg left to save when they got him to the hospital.

It was a torment to him that, in the next year, there were two new flare stars, two months apart. “I think we didn’t pick a good part of the galaxy to colonize,” he told his son, wincing as he tried to find a comfortable position for the stump of his right leg. “Pieces of it keep blowing up.” And then he asked his teenage son, please, to save his liquor allotment for him—to help, he said, with the unremitting pain.

CHAPTER 5

Wan-To’s interest in the Sorricaine-Mtiga objects (which, of course, he never called by that name) was becoming pretty nearly frantic. He saw a lot more of them than Pal Sorricaine did, because he saw them a lot faster. He didn’t have to wait for creeping visible light to bring him the information. His Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pairs relayed the images instantly. The things were popping up all over.

However, he was beginning to have hope. The results from his blue-light studies were beginning to come in.

Blue light was particularly good for looking for starspots. Although the spots seemed relatively dark, they were quite bright enough to be seen by Wan-To’s great and sensitive “eyes”—particularly if you looked in the blue. Because the spots were cooler than the areas around them, their gases were ionized in a somewhat different way; and it was the spectral lines of the singly ionized calcium atoms—the ones that had lost just one electron—that stood out in blue.

When Wan-To found blue-light images that were not natural he knew just what to do. He summoned up the necessary graviphotons and graviscalars and hurled them in a carefully designed pattern at that star.

That would have been quite a wonder to human physicists, if they could have known what Wan-To was doing. It would have been a marvel for them if they could even have detected any of those particles, though they had sought them as long, and as unsuccessfully, as any medieval knight had sought the Holy Grail.

It was in the early twentieth century that Theodor Kaluza and Oskar Klein formulated the human race’s first decent model of how gravity worked. It wasn’t a wholly successful model. There was still a lot to learn. But it managed to relate electromagnetism and gravity as manifestations of a higher-dimension space-time in ways that seemed to fit together pretty well—in ways, in fact, that Wan-To had understood for many billion years. His own understanding of gravitation was more or less a Kaluza-Klein model, though with considerable important amendments. He understood that the three basic mediating particles of the gravitational interaction between masses were what human scientists of the Kaluza-Klein faith would call the vector bosons—the graviton, the graviphoton, and the graviscalar. His command of them was perfect. With the resources of his star to draw on, he could generate any or all of those particles at will. He often did—in copious amounts. He found them all very useful.

He didn’t bother much with the simple graviton. That was the uncomplicated spin-2 particle that seemed to pull masses together at even infinite distances—the only one that Isaac Newton, for instance, would have understood. Of course, the graviton was highly important in holding stars together and keeping galaxies rotating around their common center, but you couldn’t
do
much with it. The others were rarer, and more fun, especially when you wanted to attack a colleague’s star. A dose of graviphotons, the spin-l repellers, would churn up the star’s insides in a hurry; no organized system of Wan-To’s kind could survive inside a star that was tearing itself apart that way. Alternatively, or better still, in addition, he could pull at the star from outside with one of the other particles. The more useful of those was the spin-0 graviscalar, which pulled matter and energy toward it just as the humble graviton did, but only over finite distances. The graviscalar was a very
local
kind of particle.

The great virtue of the graviscalar, in other words, was that it couldn’t be detected by Wan-To’s enemies unless they were right on the spot—and then they wouldn’t be in any position to do anything about it.

When Wan-To saw his target star erupt—very satisfyingly—he began to relax.

Nothing could have survived in that utter holocaust, of course. Wan-To was pleased. He wondered which of his competitors he had killed.

It would, he thought, surely have been one of the dumber ones. The others—the ones he had first made, the ones who were almost as smart as Wan-To himself—would, like Wan-To, have figured out that they shouldn’t give their locations away by playing in the convection zones. But at least one was gone—one possible threat, but also, of course, one possible promise of companionship.

Philosophically, Wan-To turned his mind to his next step.

There was no help for it. It would be matter. He was going to have to work with nasty
matter.

Wan-To had made copies of himself before. That was why he was having his current problems, in fact—if he hadn’t wanted company he would have been alone and, therefore, safe. There was no particular problem in preparing a pattern of himself for occupying another star. He knew exactly how to organize inanimate plasma into a living, reasoning being like himself, because he had himself always at hand as a model.

Working with cold, dead, tangible
matter
—that was another problem entirely. He had done that, too—well, there wasn’t much Wan-To
hadn’t
tried, in the ten or so billion years he had been alive. Once he had made a nonplasmoid copy of himself to live in a cold, diffuse cloud of interstellar gas, once even out of solid matter, on an asteroidal body orbiting the star he had occupied at the time. Both were disgusting failures. The gas-cloud doppel was terminally
slow
—it
simply had too little energy to work with to be any kind of real company. The one made of matter was just matter, and thus repellent to Wan-To; he had obliterated it after a mere century or two.

But at least he knew how to do the job.

The distance of the star system he was working on didn’t present any problem. He had long ago planted an Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky set in each of the places where he now wanted them to be. (Wan-To always planned ahead.) The problem was that matter was no fun to manipulate. In Wan-To’s opinion it was slow, it was unfamiliar, and it was pretty nasty stuff all around. What made the work even harder was that he wasn’t there, so he had to perform all the complicated operations involved through the limited signals that could be carried through an ERP pair. In human terms, it was like a paraplegic trying to play a Space Invaders video game with the kind of controller that responded to puffs of his breath, or like a cardiac surgeon trying to snip and stitch and ream a dammed-up ventricle into shape with a flexible probe that snaked up through the blood vessels from the femoral artery in the patient’s crotch.