The World at the End of Time (12 page)

The limitations of the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pair made it all harder, of course. The ERP effect was a probabilistic, quantumlike event.

That meant that there was no guarantee that the message received at one end would be identical to the one that had been transmitted at the other. In fact, it almost certainly wouldn’t be.

Naturally Wan-To and his brethren knew how to deal with that problem. Parity checks and redundancy: If the parity check showed nothing wrong, then the message was
possibly
intact. Then it was compared with the same message transmitted three times. Majority ruled.

All that meant in the long run was that it took longer than it should to carry on a conversation—not because of travel time, but because of processing.

But Wan-To didn’t have an alternative.

He didn’t want to construct another plasma intelligence. That could well attract attention. Matter would not; beings like Wan-To didn’t pay much attention to matter, and there was little chance that any of his feuding relatives would see what was going on on this little satellite of the stellar system he had chosen. He had plans for that system and its neighbors. To make the plans work, he needed some very potent particle-generators.

It would have been possible to create the particle-generators directly, but Wan-To was cleverer than that. What he was constructing wasn’t the generators, it was a sort of little Wan-To, a matter analogue of himself, which when completed would do the job of constructing the generators and running them as long as necessary, in just the ways that Wan-To desired.

That little matter Wan-To wasn’t anything like an exact copy of himself, of course, and it certainly didn’t have all of his powers. What Wan-To was building was only a kind of servomechanism. It had exactly as much intelligence as it needed to do what Wan-To wanted it to do, and no more. It would do what Wan-To himself would have done—up to the limits of its powers, anyway. But by human standards those powers were vast.

Working with solid-phase matter was even a kind of intellectual challenge. So he was pleasantly occupied at his task, like a human terrorist whistling as he puts together his time bomb, and happily contemplating the success of his plans, when a signal reached him.

It was wholly unexpected, and it came through one of his ERP complexes. It wasn’t an alarm, this time. He experienced it as a sound—in fact, as the sound of a name—
Haigh-tik.

That was Wan-To’s “eldest son”—which was to say, the copy of himself he had made first and most completely. As a natural consequence, that was the relative who gave Wan-To the most concern; if any of the eight intelligences he had produced was capable of doing their creator in, Haigh-tik was the one.

So Wan-To paused in the labor of creating his matter analogue and thought for a moment. He knew Haigh-tik very well. He didn’t want to talk to him at that moment. It was tempting to start a conversation, in the hope that Haigh-tik would inadvertently say something that would give away his location. The trouble with having a little chat was that Haigh-tik was as likely as Wan-To himself to learn something. But there was a better possibility, Wan-To reflected. He knew quite a lot about Haigh-tik’s habits—including what sort of star he preferred to inhabit.

So Wan-To took time to study some of the fairly nearby stars.

Of course, he had done that before—many times, over all the billions of years he had existed, because looking at the outside universe was one of his principal recreations. He saw them quite clearly. In fact, he saw
everything
quite clearly for, though Wan-To’s eyes were no more than patches of sensitive gas, they worked extremely well. What they looked at, they
saw.
They could trap a single photon, and remember it, and add it to the next photon that came in from that source. And it didn’t matter how long the next photon took to arrive.

A human astronomer on, say, Mount Palomar would have been wild with jealousy. A Palomar astronomer might take an interest in a particular star, or a particular remote galaxy, and turn his 200-inch mirror on it for a whole night’s observation. If the night sky were really cloudless—and if the cars and filling stations down the hill and the streetlights of San Diego didn’t pollute the seeing with too much extraneous light—he might get twelve whole hours on a single charge-coupled plate. He wouldn’t do that very often, of course, because there were too many other astronomers clamoring for time to gaze at their own precious objects.

Twelve hours!

But Wan-To’s eyes could soak up photons from the faintest object for a thousand
years.
And if a thousand years wasn’t long enough, why, then those eyes would stay unwinking on that single object for a million.

Nor were they limited to the so-called visible frequencies. All the frequencies were visible to Wan-To. He could “hear” a lot at radio frequencies, particularly when studying the great gas clouds, some of them a thousand light-years across, up to hundreds of thousands of solar masses. In the clouds, atomic hydrogen shouts at 1.4 gigahertz; molecular hydrogen is mute. But there are other compounds in the molecular clouds that speak right up: Carbon monoxide is noisy; so is formaldehyde; so is ammonia. He could easily pick out, in the clouds, the things that dirtied them with single molecules and clumps of silicates (rock) and carbon (graphite, charcoal, diamonds) all frozen over with water ice. If radio and optical studies weren’t good enough, he had high-energy X rays and gammas that went right through dust.

He saw
everything.

On Earth, the early stargazers named the bright points of light they saw overhead at night. The Arabs of the Dark Ages did it best. They had dry air and thus clear night skies, and no power plants or oil refineries to dirty the air, or illuminated highways or shopping malls to fill it with unwanted glow. Before Galileo invented the telescope they could see as many as three thousand stars, and they gave most of them names.

Wan-To could see many more stars than that. One way or another, he could see just about every star in his own galaxy (which at that time was also Earth’s)—roughly two hundred and thirty-eight billion of them, depending on which giants had just gone supernova and collapsed into black holes and which new ones were just beginning to shine. He didn’t bother to give them names. Type, distance, and direction were good enough for him—but he
knew
them all, and most of those in the Magellanic Clouds and quite a few in M-31 in Andromeda as well. And he also “knew” just about all the external galaxies this side of the optical limit, too, right down to the “blue fuzzies.” He was himself a catalogue far better than Harvard or Draper or the Palomar Sky Survey.

So to survey just the nearest stars didn’t take Wan-To long at all. After all, there were only about twenty thousand of them.

The important thing was that he had a piece of useful information about Haigh-tik. Haigh-tik was known to prefer young stars, probably of the kind Earthly astronomers called T-Tauri objects. Therefore Wan-To sought ordinary-looking stars with a strong lithium emission at 660.7 nanometers.

He found three that were close enough to be possible residences for his undutiful son.

Giving his equivalent of a humorous shrug, Wan-To zapped them all. In one sense, he thought, that was a waste of two stars, at least. Still, there were plenty of stars, and anyway, in just a little while—no more than a million years or so—they would have settled down from being wrung out and so be habitable again if wanted.

After he had sent the instructions on their way he went back to his other project, feeling more cheerful. A dozen other stars had flared up and died while he was working. If Haigh-tik had been the one directing that probing fire, maybe he was now out of the game.

But whoever it was, Wan-To did not want him to know he had missed.

CHAPTER 6

On Viktor Sorricaine’s forty-first birthday— Well, it probably wasn’t
exactly
his birthday, although it was the 38th of Spring, and Viktor, carefully calculating back in Newmanhome years, had long before chosen that date as a base point for his age—Anyway, when he reached that birthday he was the equivalent of twenty, in Earth years. A man grown. Old enough to vote. On Newmanhome he was also definitely a man grown and old enough for any adult activity at all. He had fathered two small babies to prove it.

He didn’t have a wife to go along with the two children, but that wasn’t anything special on Newmanhome. Almost everybody past puberty was producing kids for the colony, whether they were married or not. Even his own father had helped the baby boom along again. By the time little Edwina Sorricaine was fourteen (Newmanhome years; Earth equivalent, about seven) she had two younger brothers and was beginning to learn how to change a diaper on her own. The human population of Newmanhome stood at more than six thousand. Two thirds of them were younger than Viktor, which was probably why Viktor had seniority enough to have risen to be the pilot of an oceangoing cargo ship. Where he really wanted to be was in space, of course, but there weren’t any of those jobs open. Nor was he quite senior enough to be an airman. But ship’s pilot was still pretty good.

He was certainly grown up enough to be married, if he had been inclined that way. His mother frequently reminded him of that fact. “Reesa’s a nice girl,” she would say, sometime during the days he spent at home, between his voyages to the farms on South Continent or the new tree plantations on the islands in Archipelago West. Or in her letters she would tell him how young Billy Stockbridge—now, would you believe it, twenty-six (Newmanhome) years old and pretty nearly grown up himself—had begun playing his guitar to accompany Reesa McGann’s flute in duets and, although there was that great difference in their ages, people didn’t take those things as seriously in the new world, and wasn’t it about time that he, Viktor,
made up his mind?

He had made it up, long ago.

Viktor had never stopped dreaming of Marie-Claude Stockbridge. In spite of the fact that she laughed at him when, once, he tried to kiss her. In spite of the fact that he was despondently aware that she had become pregnant four times in thirteen Newmanhome years, by three different men. In spite of the fact that, although all that was bad enough, she had just made it worse still by marrying the father of her latest two.

The name of the cur she married was Alex Petkin. It infuriated Viktor that Petkin was at least eight Newmanhome years younger than his bride—or, as Viktor saw it, not all that much older than himself, for God’s sake, and if Marie-Claude had wanted to rob the cradle why the hell couldn’t she have robbed
his?

In Viktor’s view, his own two children were beside the point. He was only doing what everybody else was. On Newmanhome, kids were supposed to experiment before they settled down. Naturally, such kids’ experiments frequently produced more kids.

Getting laid now and then was one thing. Getting married was another matter entirely. To marry, in Viktor’s lexicon, necessarily meant to
love.
He did not feel he had been in love with either of the mothers of his children. Certainly he was quite fond of Alice Begstine, the mother of his four-year-old. Alice was a ship’s navigator who was also frequently not only his bedmate but his shipmate on the long voyages across the Great Ocean. Undoubtedly, he was very used to Reesa McGann, who had borne him his newest one, still an infant. But he had never associated either Alice or Reesa with the word “love.”

That word was reserved for Marie-Claude—ah—Petkin. In spite of the fact that she had gone and married a stripling still in his fifties, who was quite unlikely to become enfeebled with age in time to do Viktor Sorricaine any good.

Since Viktor was not an idiot, he no longer really expected that was ever going to happen. His own father, crippled as he was, much older than the cur, Petkin, was a permanent testimonial to middle-aged male vigor. At least, the toddler Jonas and little Tomas, sucking his knuckles in his crib, surely were.

None of that mattered to Viktor. Marie-Claude was still the woman Viktor made love to, tenderly and copiously, in every night’s drowsy imagining just before he drifted off to sleep in his bed—no matter whom he happened to be sharing the bed with.

Crossing Great Ocean took four or five weeks each way, depending on the winds, plus a week or two loading and unloading at each end. It came to more than a quarter of a Newmanhome year for each round trip. Things happened fast on Newmanhome, and every time Viktor came back to the growing city they called Homeport everything was changed.

As Viktor’s ship sailed into Homeport on the morning of that 38th of Spring the broad bay glistened in the sunlight. Fleecy clouds drifted overhead. The breeze was warm, and Viktor saw lots of progress in the colony. The new grain elevator for the docks had been completed since he had sailed away, and up on the hill the two microwave rectennae loomed behind the new geothermal power plant, the second antenna already half covered with its wire net. That was good; the colony was getting plenty of electrical power at last.

It was Alice Begstine’s turn to supervise the unloading of the ship. So as soon as they were docked Viktor leaped off, waved farewell to Alice and headed toward the new houses on the edge of town. He was looking forward to spending his birthday with his youngest child, Yan—and maybe with Reesa, the little boy’s mother, if she seemed to be in a friendly mood.