The World at the End of Time (28 page)

It wasn’t getting smaller. Far from it. In fact, the star was entering its red giant phase. It had spent most of its young life turning hydrogen into helium, but now the central core was all helium ash, doing nothing at all but sitting there and waiting for the day when it could fuse into higher elements.

Meanwhile, the remaining hydrogen was in a thick, dense shell around the helium core. It was fusing faster than ever—producing more heat than ever—pressing ever more insistently on the mantle of thinner gases that surrounded it; and the mantle was bloating under the pressure.

Wan-To had never stayed inside a star as it left its main sequence before. He didn’t like it.

To be sure, his physical safety was not in danger. Well, not in much danger, anyway—certainly not as much as risking a hurried flight of his own to another home. But the star had swelled immensely under the thrust of that inner shell of fusing hydrogen. If it had had planets, as Earth’s Sun did, its outer fringes would have been past the orbit of Mars by now. It was a classical red giant, swollen as huge as Betelgeuse or Antares—beginning to decay.

Did that give Wan-To more room? Infuriatingly, it did not. His star’s mass did not increase. There was no more matter to fill that enlarged volume than there had been when it was its proper, normal size. Indeed there was less, because it was beginning to fall apart. The outer reaches of the star were so distant from the core and so tenuous—by Earthly standards, in fact very close to a vacuum—that the radiation pressure from within was actually shoving the farthest gases away from the star entirely. Before long those outer regions would separate completely to form that useless shell of detached gases called a planetary nebula.

And Wan-To knew that then nothing but the core would remain for him to occupy. A miserable little white dwarf, no larger than an ordinary solid-matter planet like the Earth—far too cramped to be a suitable home for anyone like Wan-To!

For that matter, he was too crowded already. He dared not risk any part of his precious self in those wispy outer fringes. He was imprisoned in the remaining habitable parts of his star, and worst of all he was blind. Photon-blind, at least; he could still detect neutrinos and tachyons and a few other particles, because they reached inside the outer shells easily enough. But light couldn’t, and neither could any other part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and his delicate external “eyes” had long since been swallowed up and ruined as his star swelled.

So Wan-To tossed and turned in the home that had become his prison, fretfully ignoring every call that came in. Each one, in fact, was a fresh annoyance, if not simply a trap.

Then a voice on the ERP pair called again, and this time it did not stop with his name. “Wan-To,” it said, “this is Mromm. I am quite sure you are alive. I want to propose a bargain.”

Wan-To paused, suspicious and worried. Mromm! After all these eons!

It was a great temptation to answer. He was tired of being lonely and imprisoned; and it was surely possible, at least
barely
possible, that Mromm’s intentions were friendly.

It was also possible, however, that they were not. Wan-To did not reply.

The voice came again. “Wan-To, please speak to me. The object that Haigh-tik destroyed wasn’t you, was it? You wouldn’t let yourself be caught that way, I’m positive.”

Wan-To thought furiously. So it was Haigh-tik who was the killer! Or, alternatively, Mromm who was hoping to make Wan-To think he was innocent?

Mromm’s voice sighed. “Wan-To, this is foolish. All the others are dead now, or hiding. I think Pooketih, at least, is simply hiding, but that comes to the same thing—he wouldn’t dare to do anything just now, because then you or I might find him. I don’t think there is anybody else. Won’t you please answer me?”

Wan-To forced himself to be still. All of his senses were at maximum alert as he tried to decode Mromm’s hidden meanings—if indeed they were hidden; if it weren’t perhaps true that he was telling the truth?

And then Mromm, sounding dejected, said, “All right, Wan-To, I won’t insist you speak to me. Let me just tell you what I have to say. I’m going to leave this galaxy, Wan-To. It’s getting very unpleasant now. Sooner or later Haigh-tik will come out again, and he’ll be just trying to kill everybody else off all over again—if there are any of us left. So I’m going away. And what I want to say to you, Wan-To is—please let me go!”

To all of that Wan-To was listening with increasing pleasure and even the beginnings of hope. If it were true that Mromm was leaving this used-up galaxy (and that sounded like a good idea, even if it came from Mromm), and that Haigh-tik was holed up and out of action at least for the time being, and all the others were either dead or, like Pooketih, terminally stupid . . .

“I’m going to take the chance, Wan-To,” Mromm decided. “Even if you don’t answer, I’m going. I’ll never bother you again. But please, Wan-To remember! I’m
part of you.
You
made
me! Please be kind . . .”

But by then Wan-To had long stopped listening to Mromm’s foolish babble. He recognized a chance to escape when he saw it—and that meant he had to act
now.

And so Wan-To left another galaxy behind. His objective this time was much farther away. Even as a pattern of tachyons, traveling many times faster than light, it would take a long time to reach it.

But that was all right; he had got away.

While Wan-To was in transit his thoughts were blurry and unclear; he would not be fully himself again until he reached the new galaxy and selected a proper star and used its energies to build the full majesty of himself anew. But, in his cloudy way, he was quite happy.

True, it was too bad that it had been necessary to destroy poor, trusting Mromm as soon as he left the shelter of his star, but Wan-To couldn’t take chances, could he? And it meant he would be lonely for a long time—at least until he assured himself that any future copies of himself he might make for company would never, ever threaten him again.

But at least he would be
safe.

And, countless thousands of light-years away, traveling far faster than Wan-To and in a completely different direction, the
doppel on Nebo at last gave up hope of instructions from its master.

What a tragedy that Wan-To had not anticipated the presence of these strange matter-creatures! It meant that the doppel itself had to make the decision on what to do about them. And the doppel was not, after all, very smart.

CHAPTER 16

Having a new life, even on the icy and starveling Newmanhome of 432 A.L., was purely wonderful—or should have been. It did have certain lacks.

The lack Viktor most felt was of Reesa, kept away from him except for the odd fugitive glimpse. He missed her. He thought of all the things he would like to talk over with her. He had imaginary conversations with her, which mostly had to do with his complaints about the food, the housing, most of all the job they had assigned him to. (It did not occur to him, even in his fantasies, to tell her simply that he loved her.) And it was almost like talking to her really, because he was easily able to imagine her responses to his complaints:

“Quit bitching, Viktor. We were
dead.
Everything after that is a big plus.”

And when he pointed out that they hadn’t really been
dead
dead, just frozen dead:

“That’s dead enough for me. Dead for
four hundred years.
Remember that, Viktor. Maybe things will get better later. Maybe we’ll even get a room to have for our own.”

“Maybe they’ll even take me off the shit detail,” Viktor muttered bitterly to himself, “but I wouldn’t bet on when.”

But it wasn’t really as good as talking to the real Reesa would have been, and besides the words that stuck in his mind were
four hundred years.
Even though they were Newmanhome years—no matter how you calculated it, it was two Earthly centuries. Half a dozen human generations—several human
lifetimes!
Except for Reesa herself, everyone he had ever known was long since dead, gone, moldered, and forgotten. He would never come back to friends, for every friend was dead—the ones he would miss, the ones he had loved, even the ones he was quite willing to spare—like Jake Lundy, now presumably a pinch of dust somewhere on the surface of the planet Nebo. It didn’t matter who: they were absent. Every relationship he had ever had was over. Every conversation he had ever intended would have to be left forever unsaid. Everyone who had made up the furnishings of his life was—history.

He could never go back to them—least of all, to his family.

That thought was the worst of all. It brought Viktor a sharp interior pain that made him grunt. (The others working on the shit detail looked at him curiously.) He would never see Yan or Shan again, or Tanya. Or little Quinn. They had all grown and aged and died hundreds of years before. They were
gone,
and nowhere in the universe was there anyone to fill the empty space their loss had left in his life.

To be alive when everyone who mattered to you was dead, Viktor realized morosely, was not unlike being dead yourself.

With all that to weigh on him, the inconveniences of his present existence should have seemed quite trivial. They didn’t, though.

Viktor knew, of course, that he hadn’t been singled out, particularly, for a hard life. Everyone had a hard life now. There weren’t any easy ones. Newmanhome was completely frozen over; the few thousand surviving human beings struggled for a threadbare existence in tunnels in the ground;
everyone’s
life was a struggle and a hopeless yearning for something better.

But these people certainly hadn’t singled Viktor and Reesa out for any favors, either. The two unplanned and undesired new mouths to feed got the worst of housing, food—and, most of all, employment.

In other times it would have been different; weren’t they
special?

As Viktor worked crankily on his aptly named shit detail he reflected on the injustice of it all. They should have been celebrities. When the early European sea explorers had brought savages home to show off to their crowned heads and dabblers in science—people like Hawaiians and Tongans, bushmen and Amerindians from the Virginia coast—at least the bewildered aboriginals had had the pleasure of being the centers of fascinated attention. They were sources of entertainment for their hosts. Everyone crowded to see them.

That kind of life wasn’t all pleasure, of course. The savages had to get used to being poked and prodded, gawked at and questioned. They had no more privacy than zoo creatures. But then, if they were lucky, months or years later, stuffed with foods that made them sick, taught the civilized vices of gambling and getting drunk, and, luckiest of all, if they hadn’t acquired tuberculosis or the pox along the way—then, perhaps, they were allowed to return to their homes a world away.

Viktor and Reesa were not that lucky. There was nothing amiable in the greetings they received; and, of course, they had no home to return to.

More accurately, they
were
home. The tunnels and caves their captors lived in were on the same site as the town of Homeport they had left. Most of them were, anyway. The central common halls, the power plant with its endless trickle of geothermal heat, the freezers it fed—they were all on the hillside that had been just beginning to be covered with houses when Newmanhome’s sun had begun to dim. The largest of the underground “towns”—the one belonging to the sect they called the Holy Apocalyptic Catholic Church of the Great Transporter—was under what had once been downtown Homeport. The Great Transporters weren’t the only more or less independent tribe (or nation, or religion—anyway, a separate enclave that these paltry few had insisted on subdividing themselves into). Allahabad and the Reformers were along the shore, due west of the old town. The Peeps (actually they called themselves the People’s Republic, and what their religion was exactly Viktor could not really tell) had even dug their warrens out under what had once been the bay, though now it was solid ice from bottom to top.

It wasn’t the geography that had changed for Reesa and Viktor. It was their home itself, the world they had lived in, that was gone.

The tunnel dwellers didn’t waste light on the mushroom farm—that was one of the big reasons for raising mushrooms—and when Viktor reported for work he stumbled around in the stinking dark until his eyes adjusted.

He hated the job. He had every reason to, but he had no choice about it. No one on (or under) Newmanhome was unemployed. Everyone had work, for long hours of every day—well, every day but one. They did get days off now and then. The Greats would not work on Sundays, the Reforms on Saturdays, the people from Allahabad on Fridays—these because their religions forbade it; and the Peeps had elected to consider Tuesday their day off because, although they had no comprehensible religion of their own, they had an obsessive need to make sure none of the others had any privileges they could not share.

Viktor and Reesa were special cases. As soon as it was determined that they not only were not members of any of the four sects (and, indeed, had never heard of them before their freezing), they were put in the newly invented category of stateless persons who were entitled to no days off at all. And the jobs they got were the jobs no adult wanted.