The World at the End of Time (16 page)

Marie-Claude nodded in that weary, absent way, as though she were thinking about something else entirely—though with the antifungal mask covering most of her face there wasn’t much he could tell about what she was thinking, anyway. “Billy is very fond of your father,” she mentioned.

Viktor gaped at her. “For God’s sake, why?”

She didn’t seem surprised at the question. “Why shouldn’t he be? Pal is a good man, Viktor. You’re too hard on him. He’s had trouble adjusting, and there’s his leg, and then your mother’s sickness . . .” She said it all flatly, like a comment on the weather. Her voice was as pallid as what he could see of her face.

There was something wrong with Marie-Claude. For a moment the natural fear flashed though his mind—
the
sickness?—
but no, he reassured himself, it couldn’t be that. The sick ones were unmistakable, the gasping struggle for air, the cyanosed complexion. None of that applied to Marie-Claude. Still, Viktor looked at her with concern.

“Are you all right?” he demanded.

She looked at him questioningly and then seemed to shake herself. She poured more tea for him, thoughtfully. “Nobody’s all right now, are they? But I’ll be fine.” Then, without warning. she said. “Viktor. Why don’t you marry Theresa McGann?”

There was a swallow of tea halfway down Viktor’s throat. He gagged. “You talk like my mother,” he got out, strangling.

“Then your mother talks sense to you. I’ll speak for her, since she can’t anymore. You ought to have a real family, not just leave a puppy here and there. Marry Theresa. Or somebody. Why not?”

“Because,” he said—boldly, bitterly, “the only woman I want to marry will go to bed with anybody on Newmanhome, except me.”

She looked at him in puzzlement.

Then, for the first time, he saw a crinkling at the corners of the eyes, just visible above the mask. She was almost smiling. She put her hand on his. “Dear, dear Viktor,” she said with affection. “Do you have any idea how grand you’ve been for my morale, all these years?”

He snatched his hand away. “Damn you, don’t
patronize
me!” he grated.

“I don’t mean to,” she said apologetically. She studied him thoughtfully for a moment. Then she closed her eyes, as though in resignation. When she opened them again she said, “Have you finished your tea? Then let’s close the windows and lock the door. I’m a lot too old to marry you, Viktor. I’m too old for an affair with you, too, I mean for any long time. But if you really want us to make love—once—well, why not?”

Viktor didn’t see Marie-Claude after that, not for a long time. For the whole next day he went around grinning to himself. He was just about the only person in the colony smiling that day. People looked at him with surprise and sometimes with anger. He was reliving every moment and touch of that wonderful copulation. Marie-Claude in bed was what he had been dreaming of since before even puberty, and the reality was not in any way a letdown. They had been careful with each other’s gauze masks, kissing through them, with all their foul smell and taste, and in every other way they had been wild. She had responded to him with gasped and choked cries, and at the end, when she sobbed and cried out, she had dissolved into shaking tears.

Viktor was startled and worried and did not, just then, know why.

She didn’t show up at the mass funerals when his mother, with forty-two others, was being put under the ground. (Even there Viktor could hardly help an invisible smile now and then, even while he cried.) That was just as well. There was a nasty—and completely unexpected—quarrel at the grave site. It concerned religion, of all things. The Moslems didn’t want to have their dead buried with the unbelievers, and once the Moslems made that clear, some of the other sects began muttering, too. It took all of Captain Bu’s bellowing to restore order. Then a rancorous emergency town meeting was called that night, people shouting at each other through tears and gauze masks, before it was decided that future burials could be segregated by religion.

It was there that Freddy Stockbridge, coming up to offer a prayer for his mother for him, filled in the missing piece in the puzzle of Marie-Claude. Yes, she had been strangely abstracted that day. Her own husband, that forgotten man, the man who, when Viktor remembered his existence at all, he had thought of with the contemptuous pity of the seducer for the cuckold—that man had himself died only hours before Amelia Sorricaine-Memel.

Viktor had bedded the widow before the man’s corpse was cold.

But Marie-Claude was true to her word. She didn’t turn to Viktor to take her dead husband’s place. She boarded a ship for Archipelago West as soon as one sailed. Months later Viktor heard that she was marrying a molecular biologist bereft at the same time as herself.

When Pal Sorricaine got out of the hospital he was shaky and, beyond the gauze face mask, pale. He confronted his son steadily enough, though. “I just couldn’t handle it, Viktor,” he said.

Viktor turned away from cleaning the house—the smaller children were back in their home again, and he had been the only one to take care of them. He said to his father, just as steadily, “That’s crap. You’ve been a drunk for years. You’ve just been getting worse, that’s all.”

His father flinched. “That’s what I meant, Viktor. Your mother dying was just the last straw. I haven’t been able to handle my life for a long time now. Being here—missing a leg—so much to do, and not much that I’m able to do to help. Vik, I just don’t feel like I’ve got a
place
here.”

Viktor studied his father. He had never seen him look so—was the right word “defeated”? No, the word that fit best was pointless.” Pal Sorricaine did not seem to have any point or purpose to his life.

Viktor lifted the lid of the stewpot and sniffed. Dinner could be served when Edwina came back with the littler kids; it was ready now. “Eat something,” he growled, putting a plate in front of his father. The man accepted instruction obediently, pushing his mask aside for each spoonful of broth and meat and potatoes. Pal Sorricaine didn’t seem to want to prolong the conversation. He simply did as he was told, without comment.

To his son, that was scary. “But you’ve got your class,” Viktor said abruptly.

Pal shook his head, going on eating. “There’s nothing left for me to teach them, Vik.”

“But your observatory—”

“Viktor,” his father said patiently, “every one of those kids can run the telescope as well as I can. Billy can run it better. He’s been the one who’s been commanding the
Mayflower
instruments for months.” He began to look interested for the first time. “Billy’s done a series of observations of Nebo that would make a doctoral dissertation for him back on Earth, Viktor. There are some pretty funny levels of high-energy radiation coming from around there—nothing I would have expected. Nothing I can account for, and, Viktor, I don’t even know where to begin to look anymore. But Bill keeps working at it. He’s very bright. You’d be interested in that, Vik; I’ll ask Bill to show you. He’s always eager to oblige. You know, he sort of took care of me when I was, well, under the weather.”

“Eat your dinner,” Viktor commanded sourly. He didn’t want, for a whole complex of reasons, to hear any more about the virtues of Billy Stockbridge.

Because of the epidemic everything was delayed, disorganized, generally screwed up. Viktor’s ship had unloaded in record time, but the cargo of machines and chemicals for the return trip was late. The ship’s sailing was put off.

The day before it finally sailed Viktor looked up Reesa McGann. She had their son with them, as well as her toddler by Jake Lundy. As a matter of fact, there were twenty-two infants under her care, because she was trying her luck with a day-care job. “What happened to space piloting?” he asked.

She didn’t even smile. It wasn’t much of a joke; she didn’t have to say that obviously there weren’t going to be any space-piloting jobs around now because the epidemic had pushed everything back to the edge of bare survival.

Then, without at all planning it, he found himself saying, “Reesa, my mother told me just before she died that I ought to marry you. So did—someone else.”

“Who else?” she asked curiously. When he didn’t answer, she said, “They’re right, of course. You ought to.”

He blinked at her, surprised and amused. “Do you want me to?”

She thought that over for a moment while she propped a bottle for one of the younger ones under her care. Then she said, “Yes, no, and maybe. Yes, first: Screwing at random and making babies with different people is kind of kid stuff. There’s a time to settle down, and both you and I are right about at that time. Then, no: You’ve been horny for Marie-Claude Petkin since you were in diapers yourself. There’s no point thinking about marrying you until you get her off your mind.”

Viktor flushed, half angry, half laughing. She stopped there. “You didn’t tell me what the maybe was,” he protested.

“Well, isn’t that obvious? If you ever get over having the hots for Marie-Claude, then maybe I’ll still be around. Give me a call if you do, okay?”

He grinned at her—unwilling to take the discussion seriously, trying to keep it light and jocular. “I have to be the one who calls? You won’t call me?”

“Viktor,” she said earnestly, “I’ve
been
calling you since we were both school kids. I just keep getting a busy signal.”

It turned out Viktor was going to another funeral—Alice’s older child had died, along with all those thousands, and so had her mother—and so, as it also turned out, he wasn’t going to have a ready-made bunkmate that trip. Alice was going to stay home with Shan for a while.

The funeral was worse than the one the day before. The town meeting had settled very little when it had authorized separate burials for Moslems. Kittamur Haradi was a Moslem, all right, but he was a
Sunni.
He didn’t want his late wife buried with the Shi’ites. So a separate, smaller ditch was dug for the second Moslem sect.

And then the community’s chief working rabbi (there were only two) got the segregationist fever, declaring that Jewish burials should be in a place of their own, where a star of David could be erected.

Viktor couldn’t see the sense of it. When the bodies were laid into their great, shallow pits they all looked much the same. At least, he thought, with what remained of his identification as a Christian who hadn’t been to a service since the landing, the Catholics and all the Protestants, even the Quakers and Unitarians, had all raised no objection to a common grave for their dead.

Not then, anyway.

That night he let his father persuade him to come and see what Billy Stockbridge had been doing. It wasn’t just that he thought it might be interesting, although he did; it was a way of keeping some sort of contact with the old man. Not making up, exactly. But not building the wall between them any higher, at least.

They didn’t go to the observatory, they went to the little cubicle under the radio dish that Pal Sorricaine had begged for an astronomy center. But Billy wasn’t there. “I don’t know where he could have got to,” Pal Sorricaine said, frowning. “Everything’s so mixed up with all the deaths—I haven’t really talked to him for weeks. Well, let’s see what he’s got. I think that’s his current program that he left up. Let me take a look . . .”

He stumped over to the console and sat down to study the screen, first cursorily, then frowning.

“But this isn’t Nebo,” he said, scratching absently at his gauze mask with one hand, rubbing his stump with the other. “Look at this. Bill’s been doing stellar spectrometry—lots of it. See here, he’s been taking observations on a bunch of bright stars; here’s Betelgeuse, here’s Fomalhaut, here’s— Wait a minute,” he said suddenly. He scowled at the screen. “Look at that.”

Viktor looked obediently, trying to remember what he knew about stellar spectra. What he mostly remembered was that you couldn’t tell much just by glancing at them; you needed careful comparisons against standards to see anything meaningful. “Look at what?” he asked.

“The absorption lines are all mixed up,” Pal Sorricaine complained. “Look at the hydrogen alphas! See, Bill’s got two sets of spectra for each star, one’s recent, the other’s a year or two ago. Their frequency shifted! Not much; it could even be an instrument screwup . . .” He stared at the screen, gnawing his lip under the mask. Then he said, “No. Bill’s a better observer than that. He wouldn’t get them all wrong. Something systematic is going on.”

Viktor said, not quite understanding, “Are all the stars screwed up?”

“No! Look at this nearby bunch—stars within five or six light-years. They haven’t changed. But these more distant ones— But that’s impossible!” he cried angrily.

“What’s impossible?”

“Look,
damn it! Here, everything in this direction is red-shifted—all these others are blued. And that couldn’t happen, Viktor, not possibly. Unless—”

“Come on, Dad! Unless what?” Viktor demanded, angry and uneasy.

Pal Sorricaine shook his head. “Let’s find Billy,” he growled, and Viktor heard with alarm the worry in his father’s voice.

They didn’t find Billy Stockbridge. Billy found them. He was coming up the hill, very fast, when he saw them coming down. When Pal Sorricaine started his angry questioning, Billy just shook his head. “Come into the observatory,” he said. “Let me show you.”