The World at the End of Time (48 page)

Then, too, although the message had been stored automatically for examination at his own pace, the poverty of Wan-To’s resources meant that even the basic storage was sketchy. Some sections of the message seemed to be missing. Some of the content was doubtful. Wan-To found it necessary to reactivate large parts of his “mind” from inactive storage to help in puzzling out what the message meant, and that in itself was a considerable drain on his meager strength.

But, in the final analysis, he didn’t need to read it all. The signature alone was enough to tell him nearly all there was to know.

It had come from that long-forgotten idiot, the one he had charged with sending a little flock of stars on a wild-goose chase—Matter-Copy Number Five.

Five’s stars were still alive.

Those long-ago stars had been careening through space so fast that time dilation had frozen them nearly immobile. They had not aged. They hadn’t rotted into decay with the rest of the universe.

In a universe where everything else had decayed into stagnant death, they were still young . . . and bursting with
power!

CHAPTER 26

Moon Mary was a natural moon—well, a formerly natural moon, now terraformed and made lovely. Along with the myriad habitats it orbited around the brown dwarf, Nergal. “Forta needs a moon’s gravity,” Frit explained on the way. “Dancers have to have a lot of muscles, you know! If he can dance here he can dance anywhere—well, not on a
planet,
or anything like
that,
but on any of the other moons or the habitats. The exercise will be good for your leg while it heals, too.”

“Besides, we’ve got a lot of data in our store,” Forta put in hospitably. “I’m sure you’ll find all sorts of interesting things in it.”

And Balit said with excitement, “Look over there, Viktor! That’s Moon Mary. Watch how we come in—oh, Viktor, I do love being in
space!”

Viktor did watch. It was worth watching. They didn’t simply “land.” Moon Mary was not left wide open to the universe; it couldn’t be, since it didn’t have enough gravitation to hold a breathable air. To land, their little ship had to slide through an opening that appeared magically in the atmosphere-holding, radiation-shielding forcefield that kept the people who lived on Moon Mary safe.

As soon as Viktor stood up his bad leg told him he wasn’t in habitat minigravity any more. It hurt when he put his weight on it. He winced.

But this was more like it! It wasn’t a habitat, it was practically a
planet.
The buildings stuck up on the surface, as they ought to; and there was a real
sky.

Actually the sky wasn’t real at all, for if you had subtracted the force shield what remained would have been terrible. The shield diminished the intensity of the ruddy glow of Nergal. It might also, Viktor thought critically at first, have diminished their capacity to extract “solar” energy from Nergal, but it turned out they didn’t need that. Moon Mary was packed with geothermal energy, easily extracted through steam wells. The satellite was so close to its primary, immense Nergal, that it was under constant gravitational flexing and stress from Nergal’s great mass, and so its interior was constantly being heated by friction, compression, and strain.

Of course, experience had taught Viktor that there was a black lining to every silver cloud. He found what the bad side of Moon Mary’s geothermal activity was very quickly. They were hardly out of the spaceport when Viktor felt the ground shudder beneath him. Balit giggled. Forta smiled tolerantly, and Frit explained, “Just an earthquake, Viktor. We have them all the time.”

“But we’re used to them,” Forta added. “Truly, there’s no danger.”

When Viktor saw that his hosts lived in a pencil-thin tower thirty stories high, he swallowed. They took a glass-walled elevator, which slid rapidly up the outside of the tower, letting him see just how far they were soaring above the hard ground. In the elevator he swallowed again, and was glad when it slowed gently to their floor and Forta politely opened the door for him. Once inside their apartment everything was reassuringly stable. They seemed to have the whole floor to themselves. All the rooms except the sanitary facilities were outside rooms—which meant they had curved walls and large windows looking out on the parklike gardens outside, with red Nergal hanging huge over half the sky. He allowed them to point out the room that would be his, and he kept Forta and Balit company as they pulled meals out of their freezer and set the table—until another sudden shiver of the whole structure made him grab for the back of a chair.

“You’ll get used to it, Viktor,” Balit said, trying not to show amusement. “We’re quite safe here.”

“All our buildings are designed for this sort of thing,” Forta added.

It took a while for Viktor to believe it, but it was true enough. Of course, he knew that the problem of earthquakes had even been solved back on Earth itself, in the pre-Toyota Japan of the nineteenth century and earlier. Since earthquakes could knock buildings down, you didn’t want any building that might fall on you and crush you to death. Those early Japanese found a satisfactory solution for their time: Build everything out of the flimsiest material you can find—and don’t smoke in bed.

But when the twentieth century came along those lessons didn’t apply anymore. Technological man had possessions. A home needed to be a place to store the possessions, as well as a place to sleep and eat. Preindustrial Japan had handled that by having as few possessions as possible, and those light and sturdy. Their grandchildren, however, lived in Toyota-, Sony-, Nissan-Japan, and they wanted more. They wanted to own a large number of tangible things, even if they were large and heavy. They wanted homes that could house their washer-dryers, stereos, Jacuzzis, king-sized beds with innerspring mattresses, radar ovens, food processors, and VCRs. They wanted flush toilets. They wanted built-in garages and electronic stoves.

All those new wants made hard work for the architects. Plumbing? Well, yes, but water intakes and sewage outlets meant underground networks of pipes and conduits that could rupture in even a moderate quake. They wanted high rises, which meant elevators and some very heavy structural members that could fall on the inhabitants unless built with sophisticated skill and attention to the harmonics of the natural frequencies of earthquake shocks. Paper and bamboo went out. Sprung, flexible steel, prestressed concrete, and curtain walls came in.

By the time the people on Moon Mary began to build in earnest, all those old lessons were learned over again.

To be sure, those latter-day architects were helped a great deal by Mary’s light gravity. There simply didn’t have to be that much mass involved in support columns. They were helped even more by high technology. Chips replaced tangles of wire. Transformable walls served as windows or temperature control devices. Water recycling saved a lot of plumbing, and what couldn’t be avoided was flexible and tough. When, during Viktor’s first night on Moon Mary, he woke to find the whole building swaying, he was the only one in it who jumped out of bed. Everyone else slept right through, even young Balit, and the next morning they laughed at him for his fears.

They laughed quite politely, though. They were always polite. “Helpful” was another thing—they did their best, but to Viktor’s crushed surprise they had little help to give.

These people, whom Nrina had touted to him as the most knowledgeable alive, didn’t even know the
vocabulary
of astrophysical research! “Spectroscopy,” Frit said, sounding the word out. “Spec—
tross
—k’pee. That’s a really pretty word, Viktor! I must use it in a poem. And it means something about finding out what a star is like?”

“It means measuring the bands of light and dark in a spectrum from a star, so that you can identify all the elements and ions present,” Viktor said darkly, gazing at the man who had been advertised to know all these things.

“Ions! Spectrum! Oh, Viktor,” Frit said with delight, “you’re just
full
of wonderful words I can use. Forta? Come in here, please. We’re going to find some ‘spectroscopy’ in our files for dear Viktor!”

But, as it turned out, they didn’t.

They couldn’t, or not in any easy way, at least. Between the two of them, Frit and Forta managed to get their data-retrieval desks to turn up several hundred references to one astronomical term or another. But “spectroscope” was not among them. Neither was “spectroscopy,” nor even the field terms “cosmology” or “astrophysics.” True, there were long lists of citations under such promising words as “nova” and “supernova” and “black hole” and even “Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.” But, when tracked down, all the references were to plays, paintings, musical compositions, poems (some by Frit himself), and dances, frequently by Forta.

“It’s only programmed for the things we’re really interested in,” Forta apologized.

Viktor couldn’t believe their failure. He was the only disappointed person, though. Frit and Forta were enthralled.

“Great Transporter!” Forta cried in delight. “I didn’t know we had this sort of material here! Perhaps it’s from Balit’s school files—but see here, Frit! Isn’t this
beautiful?”
He was looking at a five-hundred-year-old painting of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. “I can’t think why people have let this be forgotten! What do you think, Frit? All these star colors! For a new dance! Don’t you think they’d look marvelous in my costume?”

Frit patted his mate’s arm fondly, but he was peering at the diagram on the desk. “I don’t think I know what it means,” he admitted.

“It shows the slope of the mass-luminosity relation,” Viktor explained. “You can see how stars develop, and their color depends on the temperature of the photosphere, anywhere from red through yellow and white to blue.”

“Exactly!” Forta cried, hardly listening. “I will dance the aging of a star. See, I’ll start out
big—”
He mimicked being
big,
lifting his shoulder, puffing his cheeks, arcing his arms up and before him. “And then the lighting will be blue, then greenish, then yellow and smaller, for a long time—is that right, Viktor?—then
big
again, and red!”

“You’ll be lovely,” Frit said with pride. He smiled at their son, politely silent as the grown-ups talked. “Don’t you think Forta could make a lovely star dance?”

“He always does,” Balit said loyally, but keeping his eyes on Viktor.

Forta sighed. “But I’m afraid we’re not giving our friend Viktor what he wants. There just isn’t much of that sort of thing in the current files.”

Viktor pricked up his ears. “Are there others?”

“Of course there’s always the old data banks on Newmanhome,” Frit said, looking surprised. “Only they aren’t very convenient, you know. Because they’re
old.
And they aren’t
here.”

“Can I access them?” Viktor demanded.

Frit looked at him with the expression of a host whose guest has just requested a bigger bedroom, or a rare brand of tea. “I’m not sure if I know how you could do that,” he said, thoughtfully. “Forta?”

“I suppose it’s
possible,
Viktor,” Forta said doubtfully. “They go back a long time, though, all the way back to when everybody still lived on Newmanhome. When we built the habitats, thousands of years ago, everything was shiny new, you know, and the data-retrieval systems were all redesigned. The ones we use now aren’t really compatible with the ones on Newmanhome, and besides, there’s hardly anyone there.”

“On Newmanhome?” Viktor repeated.

Forta nodded. “It’s a nasty place to live, with everything weighing so much. People don’t like to go there—except funny ones like Pelly,” he added laughingly. “So the old records might as well not exist, don’t you see?”

Balit, watching their guest with concern, squirmed away from his parent’s fondly patting hand. “We do have the paintings, Viktor,” the boy piped up.

And when Viktor looked inquiringly at Balit’s parents, Forta said with pride, “Yes, of course. There are some wonderful paintings of the star burst, for instance. It was still in the sky, oh, up to six or eight hundred years ago. Then it just gradually began to fade, and then the sun came back.”

“That must have been an exciting time,” Frit said wistfully. “Of course, we weren’t born then.”

Forta thought that over. “I don’t know if I’d say ‘exciting,’ exactly. I know people did talk about it, quite a lot, once they noticed it. And there was the art. I remember my mother taking me to—whose performance was it? I think it was Danglord’s—yes, that’s what it was. It was a dance play about the sun returning. I was just a child, hadn’t even had my coming-of-age party yet, but—” He smiled bashfully at Viktor. “It was certainly important to
me.
I think Danglord’s play was what made up my mind to be a dancer myself.”

As the family’s guest expert on the care and feeding of primitive organisms, it was Viktor who had to show them how to thaw out a little of the frozen cat-milk substitute Nrina had made for them, and how to hold a bottle so the kitten could drink out of it. “She’ll be eating solid food soon,” he promised. “Then she won’t be so much trouble. Meanwhile, what have you done about a cat box?”

Then he had to explain what a cat box was for, and help them improvise one out of a tray from the cooking room, and fill it with soil from the garden, and show them how to put the little animal in it and stroke her and encourage her until she finally did what she was put there to do.