The World at the End of Time (38 page)

“That’s what you’re about to find out, guys,” Manett said, with the pleasure of an old hand breaking in the new recruits. “It’s time for you to pay for your thawing out.”

“Pay how?” the little thief named Mescro demanded. “And what’s going on, anyway?”

Manett pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Well, I’m willing to clue you in first,” he said, hiking himself up on one of the benches to lecture. “Only don’t interrupt, because you’ve got to earn your pay in a few minutes; Nrina’s waiting for the stuff. Let’s see. My name’s Manett, I told you that, and I’m your boss. That’s the most important thing you have to remember. It means you do everything I tell you, understand that? You’ll be seeing a lot of me for a while. Then, next thing, probably you’ll want to know the date. All right. It’s the forty-fourth of Summer, in the year forty-two hundred and fifty-one A.L.” There were gasps at that—Viktor was only one of the ones gasping—but Manett quelled it with a frown and went on. “Next: What’s going to happen to you? Nothing bad. You’ll be all right. Don’t worry about that. You’ll stay here for a few days, as long as Nrina wants you. You’ll have to start learning the language while you’re here, but that’s pretty easy. You’ll see. Then you’ll go to live in another habitat, probably—I don’t know which one—”

“Hey!” Korelto interrupted. “Hold on a minute! What’s a habitat?”

Manett gave him a mean look. “Didn’t I tell you not to interrupt?
This
is a habitat. What you’re living in now. Anyway, what happens when you leave here I don’t exactly know—I’ve never been on any habitat but this one, but Dekkaduk and Nrina say you’ll be okay. You might as well believe them—you don’t have any other choice, do you? Anyway, right after you do what you’re here for we’ll get something to eat and then I’ll have more time, all right? Now,” he said, standing up, “it’s time to earn your pay. So will you get up, all of you, and go over there and take one of those specimen bottles each? And then, what you do, you each jack off into it, and be sure you don’t spill a drop.”

The fuzziness in Viktor’s brain wasn’t altogether a disadvantage right then, he thought. The thing he was told to do was degrading, and it made him feel ashamed and angry. If he had
 
felt really
sober
he would have been twice as humiliated at what he was made to do.

But he did it. So did all three of the others, as startled as Viktor at the bizarre orders. They grumbled and tried to joke while they did it, but the jokes were resentful and nobody laughed.

Viktor was still trying to sort out the dreamy maze in his mind. There were so many questions! It was hard even to form them, but some stood out. For one: What was “freezer burn”? Viktor knew he’d heard the words before, and he knew they meant something bad. He just didn’t know what. He knew that he could have asked the others, but he wasn’t ready to do that—wasn’t ready to hear the answer, perhaps.

Then there was that other big question. When Manett told them the date, was he joking?

It couldn’t really be nearly
four
thousand years
since he’d last been alive. Could it?

He cursed the fogginess in his brain then. He wanted to
think.
There were things he had forgotten, and he wanted them back! The things he did remember were fragmentary and unsatisfying . . .

They weren’t pleasing, either.

He did remember, cloudily, waking up from a different freezing—had it been in old
Ark?
(He did remember the old interstellar ship
Ark,
though the memory was peculiarly fragmentary. It was almost as though there had been two different ships.) That time it had been a terrible shock. To have learned that everyone he had known was four hundred Newmanhome years dead had been numbing.

But at least then he had recognized the sensation. He had known that he felt numb.

To find out that another four thousand years, nearly, had passed while he lay as a lump of dreamless and unfeeling ice—why, it felt like nothing at all. He didn’t feel pain. He didn’t even feel the numbness. He didn’t
feel
at all.

When they had embarrassedly made their donations of sperm, the trusty named Manett showed them to their quarters. Food was waiting for them, fresh fruits and things like meat patties and things like little cakes—and things Viktor could hardly recognize at all, some cold, some hot, some tasting nasty to his untrained palate.

“You’re on your own time now,” Manett announced. “You have to start learning to talk to these people pretty soon, but right now all you have to do is eat.”

The tall man named Jeren cleared his throat and whispered apologetically, “Do we get paid for this?”

“Paid! Holy Freddy, man! Don’t you think you got paid already, just by being taken out of the freezer?” Then Manett paused to think it over. “Actually, that’s a tough question,” he admitted. “I can’t say I exactly understand the money system here, but there is one, I guess. No, you don’t get paid. Whatever it costs for your food and all that probably gets charged to Nrina’s laboratory somehow. If you want anything else, forget it. You can’t afford it.”

Mescro pricked up his ears. “What can’t we afford?” he asked.

“Different things,” Manett said, scowling. “Don’t bother me with that kind of stuff now. Now, you all look like you’ve got enough jism stored up to squeeze out a sample four or five times a day for Nrina, so we’re going to do you one more time before you go to sleep—but for right now you better get started learning the language.”

“Aw, wait a minute,” Korelto objected. “We haven’t even
 
finished eating yet!”

“Well, snap it up,” Manett growled. But he was enjoying his role as mentor and straw boss, and when they insisted on asking him more questions, endless questions, through mouths stuffed with food, he tolerantly gave them answers.

Viktor wasn’t one of the questioners. He ate in silence, trying to follow what was being said, missing most of it. Could it really be true that his brain had been damaged by “freezer burn”? It was certain that something had happened; the talk rolled over him, too fast to follow, too hard to understand. Then a familiar word caught his attention: the black man, Korelto, asking, “Where are we? It isn’t Newmanhome, is it?”

“Hell, no. I told you that. It’s a habitat.”

“You mean another planet? Maybe Nebo?”

Manett gave him an incredulous stare. “Nebo? Don’t you know what it’s like on Nebo? We never go near Nebo—it’s hot as hell, and people get hurt there!”

Viktor frowned, puzzled. He had been close enough to Nebo to know that it couldn’t be called “hot” anymore—not after the weakening of the sun’s output. Still, he supposed, in comparison with the system’s frozen-over other planets . . .

But Manett wasn’t waiting for the next question. “You want to know where we are?” he asked. “I’ll show you.” And he got up from the table and walked over to one of those glass-topped things that looked like desks. “Come on over,” he called, scowling over a thing like a keypad in one corner of it. “Just a minute . . .”

They were all clustered around it as Manett hit a key. The glass turned misty, then cleared again.

“There’s old Nergal,” Manett said, proud of his success in getting the thing to work.

Viktor yelped. So did the other three. They were looking straight down onto something immense and redly glowing, like a bed of mottled coals.

Viktor couldn’t help himself. He reached out blindly and caught the arm of the big man named Jeren. Jeren was shaking, too, but he held on to Viktor as they all stared down. Viktor felt himself falling into that glowing hell—no, not falling, exactly; what he felt was that ruddy Nergal was swimming up toward him, drowning him.

Manett’s voice came to him from far away. “That’s what they call the brown dwarf. They moved here while the sun was cold, and we’re living in a habitat around it. A habitat is kind of like a big spaceship, you know? Only it doesn’t go anywhere, it just stays in orbit. That’s where everybody’s been living for the last few thousand years, when it was so cold before the old sun came back.”

“The sun came back?” one of the others cried out, astonished, but Viktor hardly heard. He was staring down, transfixed. He knew,
part
of him knew, that he wasn’t really being swallowed by that glowing pyre; it was, he told himself, only part of the “freezer burn,” the numbness in his head that was like a gauze scrim slipped between himself and the world. But he could feel himself swaying.

“Hey,” he heard Jeren’s worried voice say. “Something’s wrong with this guy.”

Manett’s face appeared before Viktor. He looked disgusted. “You’re relapsing,” he accused. “You’d better get to bed.”

Viktor tried to focus on him and failed. “All right, Daddy,” Viktor said.

When he woke again his throat felt less like sandpaper, but his other parts were worse. Nor was his mind much clearer. He had a confused memory of being wakened and ordered to masturbate again into one of the soft, crystalline plastic vials, and of men’s voices around him when he slept, but it was all hopelessly cloudy.

The voices were still going on. He lay trying to follow what they were talking about, with his eyes closed. Manett’s voice drowned out the others. He was saying smugly, “You know what they want. They want you to jerk off into bottles. That’s why they brought you up here, for sperm. It’s like cross-breeding animals, you know? They’ve been out here for thousands of years and they want to get some lost genes back into the pool. Oh, it isn’t just you guys. There are a couple of dozen of us real men around in one habitat or another that they’ve thawed out already. Not counting the stiffs—there’s maybe a hundred of those stashed away in Nrina’s cryonics place, waiting until she needs them.”

“Is that where we were?” somebody asked.

“In the freezer? Of course that’s where you were, where else? Nrina thaws out a few guys at a time for samples, then mostly they get sent away when she’s through with them. But I stay here. I’m the only one on this habitat permanently. Nrina kept me to help her out, you know?”

 
Viktor heard a leering, sycophantic chuckle from one of the others. It sounded like Mescro. Then Manett’s voice picked up again. “They collect a batch of corpsicles from the freezers on Newmanhome and bring them here. Nrina takes cell samples from each, then she thaws out the ones that look interesting. You know that jab on your asses?” Viktor remembered the bandage clearly enough. “Well, that’s where she gouged out a piece to get a DNA sample.”

“I don’t remember that part,” one of the others objected—Jeren, Viktor thought.

“ ’Course not. How could you? You were frozen—that’s why it made such a big hole.” Manett pulled down the waistband of his skirt to display the spot on his own hip where only a puckered little dimple still showed. “Don’t worry, it heals up. Then after she checks the sample out, if your genes look interesting, she thaws you out and turns you over to me.”

“Is that why they tattooed us, to show we’re like gene donors?” Korelto asked.

Manett laughed. “You think they need a tattoo to show that? Don’t you see what they look like—skinny as skeletons? No, they can tell that much just by looking at us. That mark,” he said, sounding prideful, “is kind of a like a
warning,
you know? It tells all the women that we’re still potent sperm donors. All the other males around here have that stuff turned off as soon as their balls start working. They can make love, all right—believe me, it’s one of their favorite things! But they don’t produce sperm. The women don’t want to get pregnant, you know.”

“But if they don’t get pregnant, then how—”

“You mean babies? Sure they have babies, only they do it in a test tube, like. That’s what Nrina does in her laboratory. They match up the sperm and the ovum in a kind of an incubator and they carry it to term, and when the baby’s ready they pull it out and put it in a nursery. Listen, these people don’t do
anything
that hurts. Or even makes them sweat—except for fun,” he added, grinning. “Don’t worry about it. If they ever decide they’ve got enough of your DNA they’ll fix you, too, and then they’ll take the mark off your forehead and you can plow right in.”

Jeren, who was somewhat slow of thought, had just gotten to the question that interested him. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Are you saying that, you know, some of these women might want to . . .”

Manett looked smug. “Has happened,” he announced.

“Even the cute one that thawed us out?”

Manett scowled. “Never mind about her,” he said darkly. “Change the subject.”

“Sure, Manett,” Mescro said, grinning. “Only I notice you don’t have the tattoo any more, and I was just wondering—”

“I said change the subject!” Manett roared. And then, as he saw Viktor trying to sit up, he said, “Oh, look, sleeping beauty’s awake. What do you want, Viktor?”

“Well,” Viktor said, trying to get the words out in spite of the sudden, almost breathless feeling that had hit him, “is it all men? I mean, if these people are so hungry for different genetic traits, don’t they thaw out women, too?”

“Hell, no. Why would they do that? They don’t really use the sperm, you know. It’s just easy for them to work with, so they just extract the gene fragments they want, and then they mix them up with other strains to get the kind of genes they need for—for whatever they need them for, anyway. That’s not my department. Nrina’s told me all about that, but I guess I didn’t listen. Anyway, that,” he said, preening himself, “is one way we have an advantage over the women. We guys can produce a million sperms a day. Women can maybe do one ovum a month, if they’re lucky, so if they want genes from a female they just do it the hard way, from tissue samples.” He peered in a friendly manner at Viktor, who wasn’t smiling. “What’s the matter, you afraid you can’t make your million a day?”