The World at the End of Time (43 page)

When Dekkaduk considered Viktor sufficiently sanitary, he turned away, glowering, and started work. He used the desk keypad to set up a large picture on the wall screen. It was a three-D representation of a young woman. She looked something like Nrina, but her hair was cocoa where Nrina’s was butter, and her eyes were closer set. “Who is she?” Viktor asked politely, and Dekkaduk glared at him.

“You must not talk to us while we are working,” he scolded. “But I will answer this question for you. She is no one. She hasn’t been born yet. This is only what her parents want her to look like, and so we will arrange it. Now don’t ask more questions until we are through.”

So Viktor watched the image of the child who was not only not yet born but not even conceived, as Nrina and Dekkaduk matched the DNA strings that would produce that height, that color of eye, that taper of finger and that delicate arch of foot. That part of the process was not interesting for Viktor to watch, simply because he could not follow what was happening. Under the holographic image was a changing display of symbols and numbers—specifications, Viktor supposed, though he couldn’t read them. No doubt they had to do with not only external appearances but nerve structures and disposition and . . . well, who knew what characteristics these people would want in a child?

But whatever the desire was, Nrina could supply it. She had no problem preparing the genetic blueprint that filled the order, and then it was only a matter of cutting and splicing and matching in.

The things they did were not merely a matter of surface appearance. They weren’t even
mostly
surface appearance. The most important thing they built into every new baby was health.

There were all kinds of hereditary traits that had to be added or deleted or simply changed around a little. The effect was vast. The boys who came from Nrina’s laboratory would never lose their virility or develop that benign prostatic hyperplasia called “old men’s disease.” The girls, however long they lived, would never acquire the “widow’s hump” of osteoporosis. Bad genes were repaired on the spot.

Single-gene disorders were the easiest to deal with, of course. They came in three main kinds. There was the kind where a bad gene from either parent made the trouble; the recessive (or homozygous) kind where there wasn’t any trouble unless it came from both parents; and the X-linked recessives that affected only males. All Nrina had to do with such conditions was a little repair work. If there was something wrong with the Apo B, C, and E genes Nrina made it right—and reduced the risk of a future coronary. If the hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyl-transferase gene was defective, a good one was patched in, and the child would not have Lesch-Nyhan disease. Codon 12 of the c-K-
ras
gene could be supplemented with a single nucleotide, and therefore went the risk of most pancreatic carcinomas and a lot of the colorectal ones, too. So Nrina’s handmade children were exempt from many of the ills the flesh was (otherwise) heir to. No child born of their laboratory would ever have Epstein-Barr, or sickle-cell anemia, familial hypercholesterolemia, Huntington’s disease, hemophilia, or any other of the hereditary nasties. Their arteries shrugged cholesterol away. Their digestive tracts contained no appendix; there were no tonsils in their throats.

For that reason Nrina knew very little of surgery. In some ways her grasp of medical science was centuries behind old Earth’s—or even Newmanhome’s. Dealing with Viktor’s freezer-ulcerated leg was about as far as they could go. No one in Nrina’s world was competent to cut out a lung or chop a hole in a side for a colostomy bag. No one ever needed such things. Oh, they did die—sooner or later. But usually later; and usually because they were simply wearing out; and almost always because they knew that death was coming and chose not to stay around for the final decay.

When they had finished with the day’s production Viktor paused as he slipped out of his cloak. “Could you do anything you wanted to to them?” he asked. “I mean, could you give a baby six toes? Or two heads?”

Dekkaduk gave him an unforgiving look. “Thank you,” he said, “for reminding us how primitive you are. Of course we could, but we never would. Who would want it?”

Even Nrina sighed. “Sometimes you are almost
too
odd, Viktor,” she complained.

When Nrina at last pronounced Viktor’s brain as cloudless as it was likely to get (“You will not remember everything, Viktor, and you will seem to remember some things that never really happened . . . but only a little, I think”), he began to think seriously about his future.

The big question, of course, was what future did he have in this place?

Reason told Viktor that the fact that he had any future at all was a great, big plus. He took some comfort from that. Anyway, he didn’t need a lot of comforting, for making love to Nrina was a grand aspirin for all aches of the soul. Sometimes his trick memory would throw up a sudden misplaced image. Then he found himself thinking of lost Reesa, with a kind of melancholy ache that nothing was ever going to heal. That didn’t last, and meanwhile Nrina was there. She was willing and adventurous in bed, and when they were not making love she was—well, much of the time—affectionate, kind, and friendly.

It was true that she was simply not
interested
in some of the things that mattered to Viktor. The mystery of what had happened to the universe, for instance. Of course, she pointed out, there should be plenty of material on just about everything somewhere in the teaching files, if Viktor wanted to use them. He could even use her own desk, she added—when she wasn’t using it herself, of course. When Viktor complained that the mentor didn’t seem able to turn up the really interesting stuff, Nrina even took time to try to instruct him in some of the desk’s refinements.

The desk really was a desk—sort of. At least, it looked like a kind of old-fashioned draftsman’s table. It was a broad, flat rectangle, tipped at an angle, with a kneeling stool before it and a kind of keypad in the lower left-hand corner. The symbols on the keys meant nothing at all to Viktor, but Nrina, leaning gently over his shoulder and smelling sweetly of her unusual perfume and herself, showed him how to work the pads. “Can you read the letters, at least?” she asked.

“No. Well, maybe. I think so,” he said, squinting. “Some of them, anyway.” The written language had not changed a great deal, but it had become phonetic; the alphabet had eleven new letters. Nrina rapidly scrolled down to “cosmology,” after getting Viktor to try spelling it in the new alphabet.

Nothing appeared in the screen.

“That is quite strange,” she said. “Perhaps we’re spelling it wrong.” But though they tried half a dozen different ways, the desk obstinately refused them all. Nor was it any more help with “time dilation” or “relativistic effects” or even “quantum mechanics.”

“What a pity,” Nrina sighed. “We must be doing something wrong.”

“Thanks,” Viktor said glumly.

“Oh, don’t be unhappy,” she said, cajoling. Then she brightened. “There are other things you can do,” she said. “Have you ever tried calling anyone? A person, I mean? I have to call Pelly anyway. Here, let me show you how to call.”

“You mean like a telephone?”

“What is ‘telephone’? Never mind, I’ll show you.” She tapped the keypad, got a scroll, stopped it at that name, and tapped the name. As Viktor opened his mouth she said quickly, “This is my personal directory—there’s also a general one which I will show you how to use, but I don’t use the big one when I don’t have to. Would you? Wait a minute, here he is.”

The desk went pale and opaque; on the black space on the wall behind it the face of a man formed pumpkin fat, with a pumpkin smile. “Pelly?” Nrina said. “Yes, of course, it’s Nrina. This is my friend Viktor—you saw him before, of course.”

“Of course, but he was frozen then,” the pumpkin grinned. “Hello, Viktor.”

“Hello,” Viktor said, since it seemed to be expected of him.

Nrina went right on. “Your gillies are ready,” she told the man. “And a couple of the donors want to go back. When will you leave?”

“Six days,” the man said. “How many gillies?”

“Twenty-two, fourteen of them female. I hope I’ll see you before you go?”

“I hope so. Nice meeting you—I mean alive, Viktor,” Pelly said, and was gone.

“You see how it works? You can call anyone that way. Anyone in our orbits, anyway—it’s harder when they’re in space or on Newmanhome. Then you have to allow for transmission time, you see.”

But Viktor had no one to call. “What did he mean when he said he saw me when I was frozen?” he asked.

“That’s
Pelly,”
she explained. “He pilots spaceships. He’s the one who brought you and the others back from Newmanhome.” Then she said, remembering, “Oh, yes. He’s been to Nebo, too. If you’re so interested in it, you can ask him about it if we see him.”

With the clues Nrina had given him, Viktor managed to work the directory himself. The desk gave more than a “phone number.” It told him about Pelly: space captain; resident, generally, of Moon Gautama, but most of the time somewhere between the orbiting habitats and the other planets of the system.

He was poring over the views of Nebo again when Nrina came back, surprised to see him still bent over the desk. “Still at it, Viktor? But I’m tired; I’d like to rest now.” And she glanced toward the bed.

“There are a lot of things I still want to know, Nrina,” he said obstinately. “About Pelly, for instance. Why is he so fat?”

“So he can get around on Newmanhome, of course,” Nrina explained. “He has to have supplements to build up his muscles—”

“Steroids?” Viktor guessed.

Nrina looked pleased. “Well, something like that, yes. And calcium binders so his bones won’t break too easily, and all sorts of other things. You’ve seen how Dekkaduk looks? And he’s only been to Newmanhome a few times, collecting specimens—” She looked embarrassed. “Bringing back people for me, I mean.”

“Like me.”

“Well, yes, of course like you. Anyway, Pelly goes there all the time. It makes him look
gross,
of course, which is why I would never— Oh, Viktor, I didn’t mean it that way. After all, you were
born
like that.”

He let that pass. “And did Pelly really land on Nebo?”

“You mean in person? Certainly not. No one has done that for many years.”

“But people
have
landed there?”

Nrina sighed. “Yes, certainly. Several times.”

“But not anymore?”

“Viktor,” she said sensibly, “of course not. What would be the point? There’s air, but it’s foul; the heat is awful. And the gravity crushes you to walk there, Viktor—well, not you, no, but any normal person. It’s much stronger than on a Moon. It’s almost as bad as Newmanhome, but at least Newmanhome has a decent
climate.”

“But Nrina! There may be people on Nebo. Some of my own friends landed there—”

“Yes, and never came back. I know. You told me,” Nrina said. “Isn’t that a good enough reason to stay away?”

“But somebody made those machines. Not human, no.”

“There’s no one there. We’ve looked. Just the old machines.”

“And have the machines been investigated scientifically?”

She frowned. “I don’t know what you mean by ‘scientifically.’ Some people were interested in them, yes. They even brought some small things back to study—I remember Pelly had a piece of metal he showed me once.”

Viktor inhaled sharply. “Can I see the things? Are they in a museum?”

But Nrina only laughed when he tried to explain what a museum was like, from his fading memories of the Los Angeles Art Museum and the La Brea Tar Pits. “Keep all those dirty things around? But why, Viktor? No one should keep trash. We’d just be choking on our own old worn-out things! No, I’m sure they were studied at the time. No doubt there are assay reports and probably pictures of them somewhere—you can use the desk to see what they look like, and I think a few people like Pelly might have a few little bits for curios. But we certainly don’t have a place where we keep such things, and besides—”

She looked suddenly harsh, almost as though both frightened and angry. “Besides,” she finished, “those hideous metal things are
dangerous.
That’s why no one lands there anymore. People got
killed
there!”

And then, reluctantly, she went to the desk and showed him what had happened, more than a century before. A ship landing on Nebo. People coming out of it, grotesque in metallized film suits to keep out the heat and helmets to give them air to breathe; they approached one of the mauve pyramids, half-buried in the shifting sands of Nebo. They were trying to drill a way in—

And then it exploded.

Of the pyramid itself nothing at all was left; it simply was vaporized. No more of the people. A few fragments of nearby objects, blasted in the explosion, littered the sands.

When he looked up he saw that Nrina had averted her eyes. “Turn it off,” she ordered. “Those people were
killed.”

He surrendered. She came closer, smiling down at him. “That’s better,” she said softly, leaning against his shoulder.

He didn’t resist. He didn’t encourage her either. “All right, Nrina, I see what happened, but it doesn’t tell me anything. What
are
those machines?”