The World at the End of Time (41 page)

Time was when Wan-To had hurled stars about in all the vigor of his mighty youth—had even made stars, out of clouds of dust—had even made himself a new galaxy or two, when all the ones in sight were beginning to dim toward extinction. He remembered that much, at least, because it gave him pleasure to mull over in his mind the wonderful, primordial, galaxy-sized clouds that he had caused to collapse and to begin to spin and to twinkle with billions of stars coming to life. Nothing in the universe was more powerful than Wan-To had been then, creator and destroyer of galaxies!

That had been a brave time!

But that time was long gone. In ten-to-the-fortieth-power years, most things are long gone.

What had happened in that long, long stretch of years?

The answer to that is simple.

Everything
had happened.

The last of the galaxies had formed and evaporated and died. The last of the new stars had formed eternities before, as the last huge gas cloud shuddered into motion as a compressibility wave jolted it and caused it to crash together to form a new star. There couldn’t be any new stars anymore. There might still be a vagrant wisp of dust here and there, but gravitational attraction wasn’t strong enough to make it coalesce. That wasn’t because anything had happened to gravity itself. It was just a matter of the law of inverse squares—after all, the universe was still expanding. It could not make more matter of energy, but it kept right on making more space. As the universe expanded, it cooled—there was more and more of it every second, and so the remnant heat was diluted more and more. And so everything was farther and farther away from everything else, so far that the distances were quite meaningless.

The last of the big, bright stars had long since gone supernova; the last of the Sol types had gone supergiant and turned into a white dwarf; all of those profligate wastrels of energy had long since burned themselves out. The red dwarfs had a somewhat longer run for their money. They were the smallest and longest-lived of those furnaces of nuclear fusion that were called stars, but then they had gone, too. The last of them had long before burned itself to a lump of iron, warmed by the only energy source that was left, the terminally slow decay of the protons themselves.

Proton decay! It hurt Wan-To’s pride to have to live by so feeble an energy source as proton decay.

The only good thing about it was that it lasted a long time. When a proton decays, two up quarks and one down quark turn into a positron (which goes off and annihilates the first electron it comes across) and a quark-antiquark pair (which is to say a meson). The meson doesn’t matter to anyone after that. The positron-electron annihilation produces heat—a
little
heat.

And all this happened very slowly. If the average life span of a proton was—well, let’s not play the big number game anymore; let’s just say it’s a kazillion years—that didn’t mean every proton in the universe would expire on the tick of that moment. That was
average.
Mathematics showed that the “half-life” of the proton should then be about seven-tenths of a kazillion.

By then Wan-To would be in even more straitened circumstances, with half the protons gone. In another such period half the remainder would be gone, and then half of that remainder.

The time was in sight, Wan-To saw with gloom, when there would just not be enough whole protons in any one cadaver of a star to keep him warm.

The word “warm” is an exaggeration. No human would have thought one of those hard, dead lumps very warm; the highest temperature proton decay could attain for it was less than a dozen degrees above absolute zero.

And that was when, after everything had happened, everything
stopped
happening, because there wasn’t enough energy anywhere to drive events.

A few degrees above absolute zero wasn’t what Wan-To considered warm, either, but it was all there was left for him. The solid matter he had once despised—the iron corpse that was all that was left of his last star—was the only home he could find.

It had not been easy for Wan-To to adapt to such a horrid environment. It had only been possible at all by resigning himself to the loss of most of his functions, and the slowing down of all there were left. Now the milliseconds of Wan-To’s life dragged for thousands of years.

That was quite fast enough, in one way, for there wasn’t much left for Wan-To to do—except to contemplate the fact that his future had no future except eternity. He wasn’t even good at contemplating anymore, for his mind was fuzzy from deprivation. (Fuzzier even than that of the person who was almost as old as he was, Viktor Sorricaine.) That was just as well, because in his moments of clarity Wan-To realized that nothing was ever going to get better for him. All that would happen would be that the clinker he lived in would slowly, slowly cool even further, until there was no energy at all left to keep him alive.

And the horrible part of that was that it would go on for
ever .
. . or close enough . . . for so long that even his present age would seem only a moment, before the last proton expired and he was finally dead.

Nothing but a miracle could change his hopeless certain destiny.

Wan-To didn’t believe in miracles.

A miracle had to come from
somewhere,
and Wan-To could see no place in the doddering, dying universe where a miracle might still be born. Of course, he had long since forgotten the dozen stars he had hurled out of that ancient galaxy at so vast a speed that time, for that little system, had almost stopped.

CHAPTER 22

If it were not for the odd, bleak flashes of memory that sometimes cut through the fog in Viktor’s brain—memories of Reesa that came and went, painful while they were there; memories of the children long dust, which left a dismal sense of hopeless loss—if it weren’t for those things, Viktor might easily have thought this third act of his life close to the best.

To be sure, it was just a
touch
humiliating. Never once had Viktor imagined that his main career would be in sexually servicing a skinny, seven-foot woman with huge eyes. Yet it had its compensations. As the recognized lover of Nrina, Viktor became a privileged person.

He wasn’t a “husband,” of course. The only “rights” he had over Nrina were to share her bed—sometimes, her company—when she wasn’t working; when she wasn’t doing something else that she didn’t wish to share with him. The basic job he had been thawed out for in the first place, as donator of sperm for her collection of useful genetic materials, no longer existed for him. Nrina explained that she had all the samples she needed for future genetic engineering. She now had better employment for that particular function. His only present responsibility was to give her pleasure. All of which added up to the fact that he was—

He didn’t like to say it explicitly, but there was an old and unflattering expression for what he was. He was
kept.

When Manett told him, with all that surly resentment, that Nrina had decreed Viktor was to take over his job, Viktor had thought it meant supervising the next batch of thawed-out sperm donors. But when, tentatively, Viktor asked Nrina when they were going to do the thawing she looked at him in surprise. “Oh, not
now,
Viktor,” she said, stroking his shoulder affectionately. “First Dekkaduk and I must run the DNA assays on them, to see which are worth the trouble of thawing, don’t you see? And we have much other work to do. Important work. Orders to fill, with deadlines which we must meet. No, it will be weeks at least, perhaps a whole season, before we are ready to acquire more material. But now—are you hungry? No? Then why don’t we go to my bed again?” And he understood that what had once been Manett’s main job was indeed now his.

Nrina’s life wasn’t his, though. Even her home wasn’t really his; Viktor was surprised (and, on reflection, not very pleased) to find that the private chamber she had first taken him to was only a sort of guest room. Nrina’s own home was far larger, and very much more complex and beautiful. It had one big room with a “transparent” ceiling—well, it wasn’t always transparent, because Nrina could turn it off when she chose, and then it was only a sort of pattern of shifting, nebulous, luminous, multicolored pastel clouds. (And it wasn’t
really
transparent, being only a sort of huge TV screen that showed the outside universe.) In the center of the room a cloudy sphere, as tall as Viktor’s head, showed shapes in milky pastel light, though most of the room’s illumination came from the gently glowing walls. (Nrina’s people didn’t seem to like harsh lighting.)

Then there was another room, quite small, but large enough for their needs. It held her own bed. That one looked terribly flimsy to Viktor; it was cantilevered out from the wall, and it did not look to Viktor as though it was built to stand very vigorous activity in it. (He was wrong about that, he discovered. The habitat’s low gravity helped.) There wasn’t any kitchen, exactly. There was a room with a cupboard that was a sort of a freezer and fridge, and another that was a sort of a microwave oven. (That was all they needed. These people, Viktor found, didn’t ever fry or broil anything—especially not hunks of dead animal flesh.) That was where Viktor ate most of the time—Nrina sometimes, too, though often enough she was off somewhere else, with whom Viktor never knew. That was not a problem in any practical way. There was always plenty to eat. Once Viktor learned how to handle the heating apparatus he always found stews and porridges and soups and hashes ready in the fridge, and sherberts in the freezer, and any number of different kinds of fresh fruits—always fresh, always perfect, too; though some of them were wholly unfamiliar to Viktor, and a few were perfectly foul to his taste. He wondered who replenished them. Certainly not Nrina!

Nor was Viktor idle. Not
really
idle, he told himself, he was in fact very busy learning about this new life he had been given. He had the freedom to roam where he would on the habitat. He used that freedom, too, except when his leg was hurting too badly. That wasn’t often anymore, but there were days when the pain was acute all day long. Then it hurt all the time, when it wasn’t itching; sometimes it both itched, like a bad sunburn, and hurt, like a new scald.

Those days weren’t a total waste, because he could spend them hunched over the communicator desk, learning all he could. But when the leg was no more than mildly annoying, he preferred to walk around.

You couldn’t see much of the habitat at any one time, because everything was
inside.
There weren’t many large open spaces. There certainly wasn’t ever any sky, for a ceiling was never very far overhead. Strangely, much of the place was
bent.
The longest corridors were straight as laser beams, but the ones at right angles to them had perceptible upward curves.

The place was like a rolled-up version of—well, of Homeport, say. Of any city spread out on its land, except that this one had been rolled around and joined in a kind of tube. Everything Viktor saw was in the outer skin of that tube. That was why those transverse hallways were always curved. Viktor discovered that if he went all the way around one—it wasn’t really far, a twenty-minute walk at most when his leg wasn’t bothering him—he would come right back to his starting point.

What was in the middle? Machinery, Nrina told him when he asked her. They were lying together in her cantilevered bed, nibbling on sweet little plums, both quite relaxed. The machinery, she said, was all different kinds. The core of the habitat was where they kept the air cleaners (to filter out the wastes and replenish the oxygen), and the temperature regulators, and the generators for electrical energy, and the communications equipment, and the data machine files—and, in short, everything that was needed to make the habitat comfortably habitable. All tidily out of sight. She yawned, pitching a plum pit on the floor and nestling cozily close to him.

But Viktor was wide awake. It was all a wonder to him. Technologically wonderful, of course, but also wonderful to think of starved, poverty-stricken refugees from old Newmanhome building all these things—enough of them to hold three hundred million people!

“Well, they didn’t build them all at once, Viktor,” Nrina pointed out reasonably, stretching her long, slim legs (“slim” now to Viktor’s mind—no longer “skinny”) and yawning again. “Once they got a good start it was easy enough. There were plenty of asteroids to mine for materials, and Nergal gave off a lot of heat, as long as you got close enough to it. Of course, now that the sun’s back in business we wouldn’t need to stay around Nergal anymore—but why would we bother to move?”

“Well, to a planet,” Viktor began. “Newmanhome, for instance. They say it’s warmed up now—”

“Planets!” she scoffed. “Planets are
nasty.
Certainly, now that Newmanhome is pretty well thawed out people can
survive
there, but who would want to?”

I would, Viktor thought, but he wasn’t sure he meant it, so all he said was, “Some people might.”

“Some silly people do,” she admitted. “There are a few odd ones who seem to enjoy poking through the old records, and of course we need someone to pick over the freezers to find whatever organisms are left that might supply useful DNA. I don’t call that living, Viktor.” And she went on to explain why it certainly wasn’t any kind of life she could stand for herself. The
gravity!
Why, on Newmanhome they had to move around in wheelchairs most of the time, even if they’d taken the muscle-building and calcium-binding treatments that would let them stand it at all. (As, it turned out, Dekkaduk had—thus those incongruous knots of muscle.) That much gravity certainly wasn’t good for anybody. Not to mention the
discomfort.
No, it wasn’t at all the kind of life she personally could tolerate.