The World at the End of Time (39 page)

Viktor shook himself. “I—no. Nothing,” he said.

But it hadn’t really been nothing. It had been a quick flare-up of unexpected and quite unjustified hope, quickly blighted. No. There was no point in hoping along those lines.

 
Because that one little corner of his mind had suddenly come clear, like the desk that had showed him Nergal, and he had remembered Reesa.

For the next few days of Viktor’s new life he thought of Reesa almost constantly—while he was falling asleep, while he was just coming awake, while he was donating his sperm samples, while he was eating, while he was trying to learn the new language—all the time. But he could think of her only as you think of the dead. Of the long dead, at that.

He wondered, in an abstracted sort of way, if Reesa had had a happy life after his freezing. He wondered if she had missed him, or if she had reconciled herself sooner or later to his loss and, say, married someone else. Someone like Mirian, perhaps. She would have been a prized sort of wife for a Great Catholic, Viktor thought, because she was quite capable of being sexually active but no longer of complicating his life by becoming pregnant.

He told himself that he hoped she had married. He hoped she’d been happy—as happy as anyone could be in that world, anyway.

He didn’t go so far as to hope she hadn’t missed him. And he did miss her, certainly he did. But it was a sort of remote, somehow well-aged pain. As soon as he had heard the present date he had almost felt the quick, irrevocable shifting of gears in his mind. That history was
ancient.

No one could mourn for four thousand years.

The curtain had come down on the first two acts of his life. He was just beginning Act Three.

It might not be the life he wanted . . . but it was the only life he had left.

Viktor forced himself to plunge into studying the language of these frail, remarkable people who had brought him back to life. It wasn’t easy. The fog around his brain made everything difficult, but there was help for him.

The biggest help was the desks.

They were actually like his old teaching machines, he saw. They provided him with hours on end of conversation with the image of a friendly, helpful, wise teacher talking to him from the desk.

The teacher was certainly not
real.
Viktor knew that; it was a computer-generated, three-dimensional picture, and the fact that it looked like an amiable (if exceptionally skinny) young man did not deceive him. It was real enough to correct his accent, straighten out his grammar, and provide him with the translation of every word and thought he needed.

The others who had been revived with him were, of course, busy at the same thing. Only Jeren, the gentle giant, was finding the process as hard as Viktor. Jeren was not a bright man. It wasn’t freezer burn in Jeren’s case. The man had just been born with a few slow linkages in his brain. Even with the cobwebs that cluttered his own mind, Viktor was far quicker than Jeren.

All the same, it was Jeren who became Viktor’s friend.

The little weasel Mescro was too busy trying to make a friend of Manett to pay attention to anyone who had no power, and he had attached Korelto to himself. It was Jeren who helped Viktor when he stumbled, Jeren who brought Viktor food in those first days when Viktor was too weak, or too dazed, to get up for it. He stood chastely by Viktor, eyes averted, while Viktor performed the rite of masturbation, and helped him back to bed when he was done. And he sat by Viktor, talking when Viktor felt like talking, silently watching while Viktor dozed.

Jeren was a big man—taller than Viktor, far taller than most of the people of Newmanhome’s Ice Age. He was solid, too, a hulking bear of a man, with a voice that was deep but so soft it was almost inaudible. He seemed to try to stay out of everyone’s way. When he spoke to anyone he averted his eyes, so as not to challenge the other person.

With all of Viktor’s own problems, there was something about Jeren that made Viktor feel sorry for him—or feel contemptuous of him. Why would such a big man try so hard to efface himself? Only because he felt somehow small—and if a man thinks himself small, who is anyone else to say he isn’t?

Viktor never succeeded in reconciling himself to what he had to do to earn his keep—most of all, because there was almost always someone there with him while he did it. Usually the person was Manett. The man seemed to enjoy humiliating his crew of sperm donors, and Viktor more than the others, it appeared. If there had ever been anything about sex that Viktor disliked, it was trying to perform in the morning, but Manett was adamant. “Do your job,” he ordered. “Then you eat. Then you get back to studying the language, and don’t argue with me!” So, minutes after awakening every day, Viktor was standing in the sperm-donation cubicle, trying to think erotic.

What made it even more difficult was that sometimes Nrina, the woman who had supervised his thawing, followed him into the chamber. Viktor hated it when she stood behind him, because for some reason she had taken to watching with evident interest. Viktor glared confusedly at her. What he could see through her transparent, open-meshed smock stirred something inside him, all right, but it wasn’t enough. He appealed to Manett. “I don’t like her being here. It makes me—uh—it
interferes.”

Manett guffawed and translated. The woman replied politely. Viktor thought he could almost understand what she was saying now, in her husky, sweet voice, but he was glad when Manett translated anyway.

Manett didn’t seem glad. He spoke sourly, as though he didn’t like what he was saying. “She says she likes watching you, so go ahead.”

“I don’t think I
can.”

“What’s that got to do with it? She—wait a minute.” He listened to Nrina and then, glowering, addressed Viktor again. “She wants to know if you were really born on Old Earth.”

“Of course I was. I told you.” And then, turning to the woman, Viktor said haltingly in her own language, “This is true, yes.”

“Get on with it!” Manett ordered, looking angry. “Or would you rather go back in the freezer?”

But the woman was laughing. She paused to say something to Manett and turned to leave the room. Manett looked annoyed. “Do it and then come out,” he ordered. “And then Nrina says to hurry up and finish learning the language. She wants to talk to you.”

The language wasn’t as hard as Viktor had first feared. A long time had passed, but there were still English words embedded in their vocabularies, or at least the ghosts of the words. The difference was far less than that between the language of his own day—whatever you took that day to be—and that of Beowulf. The vowel sounds had changed. The words were sometimes clipped and sometimes slurred, and there were many hundreds of wholly new words to learn, words that Viktor had never heard before because the things they referred to had never existed before. But within a week he could understand some of what Nrina was saying to Manett, and before long he could speak to her directly.

The “desk” teaching machines were marvelous tutors—and a good deal more. The desk was not simply for teaching. It did that function very well, but it was also an atlas, and an encyclopedia, and a patient tutor, repeating the same thing over and over again as long as Viktor wanted it, until Viktor’s slowly recovering brain could absorb it.

It was especially fine as a picture book. Even though Viktor’s brain was still fogged part of the time, and his memory sketchy almost always, he could follow what the machines told him about his new world he was living in. The human population of Newmanhome had not only recovered from its ice age (though not on Newmanhome), it had flourished madly. There were three hundred million people alive now, and they lived very well. Most of them were in what an earlier human would have called O’Neill habitats, and those were various but uniformly fine. Some were like an ancient English countryside, with trees and flowering plants and hedgerows; animals like rabbits and foxes lived in the wooded parts; songbirds and hummingbirds flew in their air. Some were like cities a mile through, with ten million people huddled together. Some were quite strange—there was even a wilderness habitat here and there with grizzly bears and tigers, jungles and forests, even great slow waterfalls. Viktor discovered that not everyone lived on the habitats. A few preferred to live on Nergal’s natural moons, now terraformed and quite comfortable. Most people tried to spend a little time on one of them now and then. It was a form of sport for them, moving about in a real gravity field, though a tiny one. They did it to keep their bodies in shape.

Considering how their bodies had stretched out in those scores of generations in micro- or low gravity, they did that very well. As Viktor caught occasional glimpses of other inhabitants of the place, he could easily see that that was true. The people of this place didn’t wear much in the way of clothing—a cache-sex, a simple strip of cloth that covered their sexual organs and the cleft between their buttocks, was good enough for most practical purposes. Sometimes they wore a bit more. When Nrina was busy in her laboratory she wore a smock to keep the messes off her body, and sometimes she wore other things, just for the prettiness of them. Women wore nothing on their breasts, most of the time. They didn’t need to. In the gentle gravity of the habitat the breasts didn’t sag.

The other side of that coin was that the males were less macho than Viktor was used to
—much
less.

The males were not much bigger than the women. Not much stronger, either, Viktor thought; large muscles weren’t needed where they lived. (The man, Dekkaduk, from Nrina’s laboratory turned out to be a puzzling exception.) Particularly since none of them did much physical labor. Compared to them, Viktor was a giant. He was bigger than most of his reawakened colleagues in the sperm banks, for that matter, since the Newmanhome of their time had not provided its children with a generous diet, and certainly never any fresh air.

When Viktor began to explore outside the immediate confines of Nrina’s laboratory he encountered still more strangers. He even tried speaking to some of them now and again, for language practice, but he was wary. When he looked at them, he did not fail to see that they were looking at him as well, and with just as much speculative interest. He thought that the branding on the forehead was probably a useful precaution. Some of the glances from females were frankly sexual, and Viktor appreciated that very much . . . the memory of Reesa slowly fading from his mind.

Some of the sexually charged looks, however, were from people who were definitely male, and about that Viktor was far less pleased.

By the time Viktor could make himself understood to people like Nrina his life had fallen into a routine. He ate when food was offered. He slept when he was tired. He made his required four donations of sperm each day—a little surprised at himself, and not unpleased: after all, he was pretty nearly a middle-aged man now! And between times, all the time, he tried to learn this world he was in.

Of course, Viktor was not the only newcomer in the habitat. Jeren, Mescro, and Korelto were as innocent as himself, and two of them, at least, were curious. (Jeren wasn’t. Jeren took what came without complaint or question. His main interest was in following Viktor around.) But those three had an advantage Viktor didn’t share. All the things they wanted to know Manett, the veteran of more than eight months ahead of them out of the freezer, already knew—and told them. But it seemed that Manett just didn’t like talking to Viktor.

For some reason, Viktor could not guess why, Manett had taken a dislike to him. More than a dislike. Viktor pondered, without resolving, the curious idea he had formed that sometimes, when he caught Manett’s eyes on him, the expression in them looked almost like fear.

Then Nrina called him in for another examination.

When Viktor greeted her, careful with his pronunciation, the woman looked pleased, but she just waved him to a table. There she did all the things she had already done to Viktor—touched his head with various instruments, studied the polychrome readings, and felt the part just above his temple that had hurt so badly, looking satisfied when he said it hurt no more.

“Your leg, then,” she said, speaking slowly so that he could understand. He raised it obediently to the table, and she touched a buzzing rod to the dressing.

The pink sausage fell neatly open. Viktor looked, and smelled, and squinted his eyes shut, trying not to be sick. A big piece of his calf was
gone.
What was left stank of dead meat and decay.

Nrina didn’t seem to mind. She bent close to study it, by eye and with more of the instruments that flashed rainbow colors for her. Then, satisfied, she sprayed it with something that felt like nothing at all, but quickly dissipated the terrible odor and left the exposed raw meat covered with a film of metallic gold. She pressed the two halves of the wrapping back together and sat down facing Viktor, her knees hugged to her breast, regarding him.

When she spoke to Viktor it was slowly, a word at a time. “You have . . . suffered . . . damage . . . from improper freezing. For . . . a long time. Do you understand?” He nodded. “So . . . there are two things. Your leg. It will . . . I think . . . be all right . . . in a season. It will . . . heal completely.”

“That is good,” Viktor said.

She nodded seriously. “The brain . . . I do not know.”