The World at the End of Time (13 page)

She wasn’t home. Freddy Stockbridge was sitting in her front room, reading his prayer book, while Reesa’s two children napped.

Viktor looked at him with suspicion, but all he said was, “Hello, Freddy.” Viktor wasn’t sure how to take Freddy Stockbridge, who had decided, of all things, that what he wanted to be was a priest. “What are you doing here?”

The question was really “Why aren’t you working?” and Freddy answered it that way. “They made today a secular holiday,” he said, sounding aggrieved. “They call it First Power Day. They’re having some kind of an anniversary celebration up at the power plant.”

“Another damn holiday,” Viktor said, trying to make friendly conversation. Landing Day,
Mayflower
Day—every major event in the colony’s history had to be commemorated, it seemed, though Viktor rather liked the thought of his own birthday being a planetwide day off.

“Another darned
secular
holiday,” Freddy corrected him. “It isn’t really fair, you know. Would you believe they won’t let us have Good Friday off? Or even All Saints’ Day, although they close the schools the day before for Dress-Up Night?”

“I’ll sign your petition,” Viktor promised, lying. “Is Reesa up there?”

Freddy shrugged, already back in his prayer book. “I guess so,” he said, not looking up.

“Thank you very much,” Viktor said, snapping the words off because Freddy was irritating him. Viktor thought of looking in on his parents, who at least would remember that it was his birthday, but he was curious about what Reesa was doing, and why she had left his child to a baby-sitter—Freddy Stockbridge, at that!

The only way to settle that was to ask her, so, still irritated, he trudged up the hill.

There was a crowd there, all right, five or six hundred people at least. Captain Bu Wengzha was up on a flag-bedecked platform, making a speech, though most of the people were picnicking on the grass and hardly listening to the captain at all. What the speech seemed to be about was electrical power, and Reesa was nowhere in sight.

“. . . this wonderful geothermal power plant,” Captain Bu was saying, “has delivered energy for us for one year now without interruption and, God willing, will go on doing it for a thousand years to come. That is God’s gift to us, my friends, limitless energy from the geothermal heat under our feet. Let us praise His name! And let us thank, too, the skills and painstaking labor of our comrades who have given so unstintingly of themselves to create this wholly automatic technological marvel, which supplements the flood of energy being beamed down to us by that sturdy ship,
New Mayflower . . .
”

Viktor listened for only a second—not very interested, though a little surprised to hear the old ship’s captain sounding so godly—then turned off his ears. He spotted a young woman holding a baby, listening patiently to the captain. He nudged her. “Valerie? Have you seen Reesa?”

The young woman glanced at him. “Oh, hi, Vik. No, not lately. Is she helping them get ready for the dancing over there?”

She was looking toward a group setting up a plank dance floor on the grass. Viktor nodded thanks. “I’ll go look.”

Captain Bu’s amplified voice followed him as he stepped among the picnickers to the dance committee. “. . . and by this time next year, they promise, all of our cryonic facilities will be complete on this very spot, along with liquid-gas generators to refuel our shuttles so that our heroic friends in orbit above us can have the regular relief they rightfully . . .”

She wasn’t hammering down the flat boards for the dancing, either. Viktor buttonholed the nearest worker he recognized. “Wen, have you seen Reesa?”

The young man blinked at him. “Oh, she’s not here,” he assured Viktor. “I think she’s up at the observatory.”

“The
observatory,”
Viktor said, not meaning to sound disparaging. He had always thought of the “observatory” as a rather pointless hobby of his father’s. “What does she think she can see in broad daylight?”

“No, they’re not looking through the telescope. It’s the space course. You know, the astrophysics course they’re having for space pilots—it was on the bulletin boards weeks ago.”

“For
space
pilots?” Viktor was suddenly alert. “I wasn’t here weeks ago!”

“Oh, have you been away?” Wen asked. “I thought you’d know. After all, it’s your father that’s giving it.”

A course for
space
pilots! And given by his own father! Viktor was more irritated than ever as he climbed swiftly toward the little plastic dome on the peak of the hill. If there was any hope of anybody getting into space again, why hadn’t he been
told?

Viktor knew, of course, that his father still had a few people interested in astronomy hanging around him. Not very many. There wasn’t any reason for anyone to be very interested, for the most exciting things in the Newmanhome sky, the flare stars, had stopped coming. There had been eight of them over a dozen Newmanhome years, then the flares had stopped.

That had left Pal Sorricaine high and dry, because the whole team of investigators into the “Sorricaine-Mtiga objects” had been disbanded. There was no longer anything for them to do. Jahanjur Singh had been co-opted by the power teams to help design transmission facilities to the new colonies on Christmas Island and the South Continent, and Fanny Mtiga had emigrated to South, with her family, to start a new career in farming. “Don’t go!” Pal had pleaded. “You’re wasting your skills! Stay here, help me.”

“Help you do what, Pal?” she asked, patiently enough. “If there’s another flare I’ll see it on South, won’t I? And I’ll get the same reading from the
Mayflower
instruments. And anyway, they’ve all been about the same—”

“We owe it to our profession! Back on Earth—”

“Pal,” she said gently, “back on Earth they’re seeing it all for themselves now, aren’t they? Some of those flares were closer to them than to us, and they’ve got a lot better instruments.”

“But we were the first to report!”

She shook her head. “If they elect us to the Royal Society we’ll hear. Meanwhile what the colony really needs is food. Give me a call if anything comes up—to the South Continent.”

So she had gone; and Pal Sorricaine had stayed and driven the half-dozen people who constituted his group of disciples to help him with such projects as cataloguing the nearby stars so they could have better names than they had ever been given on Earth.

Then Pal had an inspiration. He wheedled the council into letting them divert a little effort into casting some low-expansion glass blanks, then set his acolytes to grinding a mirror. It took forever to finish, but when it was done and silvered and mounted in a tube Pal Sorricaine and his class had a real telescope, right there on the surface, with which to look at their new neighbors in space: the six other planets, their dozens of moons, and the largest of the asteroids.

Of course, it was all pretty pointless in any
serious
astronomical sense. Any real astronomy would be done by the optics on the orbiting hulks, which still worked perfectly. The few crew members still up there, desultorily running the microwave generators and going slowly ape from loneliness, didn’t bother to tend the sensors, but they didn’t need tending. Even back on Earth, astronomers in Herstmonceux, England, had routinely operated instruments in the Canary Islands or Hawaii by remote radio control; telescopes didn’t need a human hand on the controls. But Pal was determined to force his students to
look
at the skies. Though the 30-centimeter was far from perfectly curved, and the sky over the hill it was mounted on was frequently obscured by clouds, at least his students could step out of the little dome and, with their naked eyes, see the stars and planets they had just seen huger or brighter inside.

And there were some pretty things to see. Sullen, red Nergal was always fascinating: it leered at you in the sky and awed you in the telescope. Three of the asteroids were naked-eye objects, once you knew where to look for them—if you had good eyes. The corpses of the former flare stars were always worth looking at, just to remind you to ponder about their mysteries. There were double stars, a fair number of comets, a gas nebula lighted from within by newborn stars—Pal Sorricaine loved to look at all of them and communicated his feeling to his students.

Nobody was using the little mirror when Viktor came puffing up to the observatory—not in broad daylight. The class wasn’t even inside the little dome. There was a teaching machine, its screen hooded against the sunlight, and a dozen or so people were gathered around it, looking at the rainbow colors of a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of stellar types.

Viktor saw Reesa sitting there cross-legged on the spiky Newmanhome grass, sharing a blanket with Billy Stockbridge. That was displeasing; he hadn’t really taken his mother’s remarks seriously. He was no more pleased to see Jake Lundy in the class. Viktor didn’t really like Jake Lundy—hadn’t since they had first met, in the long-ago school days when Lundy was the older kid sometimes stuck with supervising the young ones, and something of a bully. It didn’t help that Jake, a little older than Viktor, had managed to land one of the coveted jobs as
aircraft
pilot, instead of being stuck with a surface ship. It also happened to be true (as Viktor knew) that Jake Lundy was the father of Reesa’s older child—not that that had anything to do with Viktor’s feelings about the man, of course.

When Viktor approached the group his father paused in his lecture long enough to give him a combination of a welcoming nod and a peremptory gesture to take a seat. Viktor sat near enough to Reesa so that she could talk to him if she wanted to, yet far enough away that he wasn’t obviously seeking conversation. She gave him a quick, absent smile and returned to the lesson.

Viktor’s father wasn’t looking well. Though his artificial limb was a high-tech device as close to the real thing as any machine could be, he limped as he moved around the teaching machine, and his voice was hoarse as he explained the natural sequence of star types Hertzsprung and Russell had described centuries earlier. It seemed to Viktor that the old man’s hands were shaking, too. But he paid attention to the lecture, and when it was finished and Pal Sorricaine asked for questions, Viktor’s hand shot up.

“What’s this about space piloting?” he demanded.

The dozen students grinned tolerantly at him.

“If you’d stay around Homeport you’d know these things, Viktor,” Pal said. “We’ll have rocket fuel soon, from the gas-liquefying plants they’re building for the freezers. The council decided weeks ago that as soon as
New Argosy
arrives we’ll start space exploration again. So I volunteered to give a refresher course on astrophysics, for anyone who wants to try for astronaut training.”

“Why astrophysics, though?” Viktor asked his father. “I mean, why not something useful, like navigation?” It seemed to him a natural and harmless question, but his father scowled.

Pal rubbed his lips. “It’s my course, Viktor,” he said, his voice hostile. “If you don’t want to take it, go away.”

Unexpectedly, a female voice spoke up. “But I think your son is right, Pal,” the woman said, and stood up on the far side of the crowd. It was Ibtissam Khadek, looking older than Victor remembered her, and quite determined. “We know that your personal interest is in such things as theoretical cosmology and your so-called Sorricaine-Mtiga objects,” she went on, looking around for support, “but for most of us here, what we want is to
go into space.
To explore this whole solar system, of which we know so little—and to do it now, please. In my case, before I am too old to be accepted for a ship’s crew.”

Pal Sorricaine looked astonished, and then resentful, and then surly. “There’s nothing to keep you from starting a course of your own, Tiss,” he pointed out.

The astronomer shook her head. “We shouldn’t be competing,” she said sweetly. “We should be working together, don’t you think? For instance! When my grandfather first described this system, he of course marked Enki”—how like the woman, Viktor thought, to insist on calling familiar Newmanhome by its Babylonian name!—“as the most habitable planet, but he specifically listed the brown dwarf, Nergal, as the one most important to observe. It’s our plain duty to take a good look at it, for the sake of science!”

“We’re looking at Nergal all the time,” Pal Sorricaine protested. “We’ve got millions of pictures.
Ark’s
instruments are covering it routinely.”

“I am not speaking of
routine,”
Khadek cried. “I am speaking of a dedicated
mission.”

“But why Nergal?” Jake Lundy put in. “For that matter, why don’t we look at Nebo? I think that’s even more interesting, because we all know it’s been changing! Your grandfather said it had almost no water vapor in its atmosphere, but now it’s so clouded we can hardly see the surface—why is that?”

“You are right,” Tiss Khadek conceded graciously. “Of course we should do both. But, I think, Nergal first—after all, it is the first brown dwarf anyone has had the chance to observe.”

Viktor started to open his mouth to get into the discussion, but Reesa’s warm hand pulled him toward her. “Look what you’ve started!” she whispered, while the argument raged around them. “Why did you come here?”

“I’ve got as much right to be here as you do,” he whispered hotly back, and then was compelled to add, “Anyway, I was looking for you. I, uh, I thought I’d spend a little time with Yan today. I mean, it’s my birthday.”