The World at the End of Time (49 page)

At least he was useful for something, Viktor thought.

After a final glass of wine Frit escorted him to their guest room. “It’s not actually a
guest
room,” Frit explained, showing Viktor where the sanitary facilities were and the drawers to store his clothes. “It’s going to be Balit’s room, now that he’s liberated—but of course he’s happy to have you use it for your stay,” Frit added hastily.

“I don’t like to put him out,” Viktor said politely.

“You aren’t putting anyone out! No, we
want
you here, dear Viktor. In fact, it was Balit’s idea. He’ll stay in his own old room, where he’s quite content. But this one, you see,” Frit added with pride, “is an
adult
room. You’ll have your own desk—you can use it as much as you like, of course. I think you’ll be quite comfortable,” he finished, looking around like any hostess. Then he grinned, a little embarrassed. “Well, I don’t see any harm in telling you. We’re going to be redecorating Balit’s old room. We’ve ordered another baby from Nrina. She’ll be a little girl—we’re going to call her Ginga—and of course she won’t be born for a long time yet, so Balit will be quite all right in that room.”

It wasn’t until Frit was long gone and Viktor had undressed and climbed into the soft, warm bed that it occurred to him that he should have said “Congratulations.”

The ground shook again that night. Viktor woke, startled, to find something warm and soft near his toes. It mewed in protest when he moved.

He got up, grinning, and stroked the kitten back to sleep as he sat on the edge of his bed, thinking. Alone in the bedroom, Viktor admitted to himself that he was a little uncomfortable. He knew why.

He wasn’t really easy in his mind to be moving into a house of gays.

Viktor was quite certain that he was not at all prejudiced against homosexuals. He’d known plenty of them, one time or another. He’d worked with them, shipped with them—they weren’t any different than anybody else, he considered, except in that one particular way. But that way wasn’t anyone’s business but their own, and certainly it didn’t matter in any real sense as long as you didn’t get
involved
with them.

The trouble was,
living
with them seemed to be getting pretty involved.

It reassured Viktor that the household didn’t seem much different than any other. Forta and Frit had their own bedroom. Balit had his; Viktor had the one Balit would graduate into. Nothing was, well,
bizarre
about the household. Not really. If Forta would sometimes kiss the back of Frit’s neck as he passed behind his chair, and if Frit would slip an arm around Forta’s waist while they stood together—well, they did love each other, didn’t they?

What was most important, neither of them showed any indication at all of loving Viktor. Not that way, anyway.

The boy, Balit, almost did. He certainly acted loving, but there wasn’t anything sexual about it. Balit sat next to Viktor when they ate their meals, and kept Viktor company while he fruitlessly hunted for what he never found on the information machines. It was Balit who marked which foods and drinks Viktor seemed to enjoy and made sure there were more of them at the next meal. He always seemed to be there, watching Viktor, whenever he was not asleep or at school.

“It’s a kind of hero worship,” Forta explained. The dancer was working at his bar, stretching those long, slim legs even longer, with one eye on the kitten waking on the floor between them. Viktor realized with surprise that Forta was
being
a cat. “This will work, I think,” Forta said with pleasure, giving it up as the kitten curled up to drowse again. “What were we saying? Oh, yes. Please don’t let Balit bother you. But the thing is that you were the one who actually carried him away for his freeing ceremony; that’s a big thing for a young boy.”

“He’s no trouble at all,” Viktor protested. “I like having him around.”

“Well, it’s obvious he likes you.” Forta sighed. “I mean, he likes you as a person, not just because of what you did. As a matter of fact—” Forta hesitated, then smiled. “Actually, Balit wondered if he could ask you to come to his school. If you wouldn’t mind. He’d like to show you off. I know it wouldn’t be much fun for you, spending an hour or two with a bunch of little kids staring and asking you all kinds of questions—but you can’t blame them, Viktor. You
were
born on Old Earth. They aren’t likely to see anybody like you again.”

“I’d be glad to,” Viktor promised.

The school was no more than a hundred yards from Balit’s home, in the middle of a grove of broad-leafed trees that hung with fruit and blossoms interchangeably. (There weren’t any seasons on Moon Mary. Plants grew and bloomed when they felt like it, not when the weather changed. The weather never changed.) Red Nergal hung in the eastern sky, where it always hung in their position on Moon Mary’s surface. At their distance it loomed no larger than Earth’s moon, but Viktor could feel the heat from it. And in the west was one bright star. “There used to be thousands and thousands of stars,” Viktor told the boy, who nodded in solemn appreciation.

“Things must have been so much nicer then,” he sighed. “We go in there, Viktor. That’s the door to my class.”

It wasn’t much of a door—Moon Mary’s buildings did not have very strong walls, since they didn’t need them to keep out cold or heat; it was light, pierced wood, as might have been in Earth’s old tropics, and it opened to Balit’s touch.

It wasn’t much of a class, either—eight kids, mostly girls—and it didn’t seem to be exactly a classroom. It looked rather like the guest lounge of a small motel at first, a bedroom-sized chamber with hassocks and couches strewn before a collection of child-sized teaching desks, but as Balit led Viktor in the room darkened.

“We’ll have to wait a minute,” Balit apologized. “They’re starting a viewing. I don’t know what it is, though—” And then, all around the children, a scene sprang into life, three-dimensional, seeming natural size, full color. “Oh, look, Viktor! They’re doing it specially for you! They’re showing Old Earth!”

If it was really Earth, it was not an Earth Viktor recognized. He seemed to be standing on a sort of traffic island in the middle of a large street, and it was by no means empty. Thousands, literally
thousands,
of people were riding bicycles toward him in a dense swarm that spilt in two just before they reached him, and came together again on the other side. They wore almost uniform costumes—white shirts, dark blue trousers—and they were almost all male. And
Oriental.
There was no sound, but to one side was a huge marble building set in a sort of park, and on the other what looked like a hotel and office buildings.

“I don’t know where this is supposed to be,” Viktor apologized.

Balit looked embarrassed. “But they
said
it was Earth,” he complained. “Wait a minute.” He bent to whisper to the little girl nearest him. “Yes, this is Earth, all right. It is a place called Beijing, around the year one thousand nine hundred sixty, old style.”

“I was never in Beijing,” Viktor said. “And anyway—” He stopped there. What was the use of telling these children that they were not off by a mere few thousand miles, but by several centuries? He settled for, “It’s very nice, though. But can we turn it off?”

Then Viktor had the floor. The teacher sat there smiling, leaving it all to the children to ask questions, and that they did. About Old Earth. (People rode
horses?
If they made love did they really have babies out of their
bodies?
And what, for heaven’s sake, was a “storm”?) About the Sorricaine-Mtiga objects (Oh, they must have been exciting to see!), and about his near-death in orbit around Nebo (Something tried to
kill
you? Really take away your
life?),
and about Newmanhome and the Big Bang and the reasons why there were so few stars anymore anywhere in the sky.

That was where Viktor began to wax really eloquent, until Balit, speaking for all of them, said gravely, “Yes, we see, Viktor. The stars that blew up, the sun going dim, the changes on Nebo, the disappearance of all the other stars—we see that as they all happened at the same time, or close enough, they must be connected. But how?”

And all Viktor could say was, “I wish I knew.”

That night Balit was telling his parents excitedly about the hit Viktor had made with his classmates. “Viktor was almost
killed
by those things on Nebo,” the boy said, thrilled. “Frit? Can I go to Nebo sometime?”

“What, and get killed?” Frit teased.

Forta was stretching and bending at his bar, but he panted, “No one goes to Nebo, Balit, dear. It’s worse than Newmanhome! You couldn’t even stand up there.”

“Pelly can,” the boy objected. “He gets injections, and then he’s almost as strong as Viktor.”

Frit looked shocked. “Balit!
No.
Those injections
destroy
your figure. Do you want to bloat those pretty legs so they look like
balloons?
No offense,” he added hastily, catching Viktor’s eye. “But, Balit, you couldn’t ever really dance that way, you know.”

“I might not want to be a dancer, Frit,” his son told him.

Forta straightened up abruptly in the middle of a long stretch. He blinked worriedly at his son. “Well, of course,” he began, “what you do in your adult life is entirely up to you. Neither Frit nor I would think of trying to prevent you from anything you really wanted to do, once you were grown—”

“But I am grown,” Balit told him seriously. “It’s almost time for me to have the mark off my forehead. Then I could even marry if I wanted to.”

Frit cleared his throat. “Yes, of course,” he said, tugging at one of his mustaches. “However—”

He paused there, looking at Viktor in a way Viktor understood at once. A guest must not involve himself in family affairs.

“I think I’ll go back to my desk,” he said.

But what he wanted was not there. Viktor began to think that nothing he found was going to scratch his itch of curiosity. The more he found, the more he realized there was not much to find on the subjects he cared about.

There was plenty in the files on the history of the human race after the Reforms had put him back in the freezer. They had had a war about the destruction of
Ark,
of course—each sect blaming the other. They had (as Viktor counted them up) a war every two or three years anyway, on one pretext or another. It was easy enough to see why they were so combative. Viktor could imagine the lives of the bare few thousand of them, near starving in their icy caves, wounded by events that they had never expected and that they could not explain—there was no future for them. Of all the things they lacked, the one in shortest supply was hope.

It was astonishing to Viktor that they had somehow found the resources and the will to dispatch a handful of rickety, improvised ships to Nergal. That was heroic. It was very nearly superhuman; it meant long years of savage discipline, starving themselves and denying themselves for that one last, supreme effort. He marveled at their progress since then—now so many teeming millions, living in such luxury! It wasn’t the numbers that made him wonder, of course. The increase was not surprising, since they’d had several thousand years to do it in. You only have to double a population ten times—ten generations will do it easily, if there’s plenty of food and no saber-toothed tigers to keep the surplus down—to multiply it by a thousand.

Nor was it surprising that in the course of that mighty effort they threw some unneeded junk overboard—junk with names like astronomy and astrophyics and cosmology.

And their descendants, the soft, pretty Nrinas and Fortas and Frits, had never seen any reason to revive them.

Except for little Balit. Balit wanted to hear everything Viktor had to say—about the universe itself (especially about the way it had been, in the old days, when there really was a whole universe outside their own little group), about Old Earth, about Newmanhome in the days of its burgeoning glory. It was Balit who came to Viktor with the news that Pelly had landed on Newmanhome. “Maybe he can help you access the old files, Viktor,” Balit said helpfully, glancing at his fathers—who, for some reason, were politely saying nothing at all.

“Could he really do that?”

“We can call him to ask,” Balit said, now not looking at his fathers at all. “I know how much you want to get that data.”

Forta cleared his throat. “Yes, we all know that,” he observed.

“But it would be interesting to me, too,” Balit protested. “I like it when Viktor talks about those old things.”

Forta said, loving but firm, “It’s your bedtime, Balit.”

“Then Viktor could tell me a
bedtime
story,” Balit pleaded. Viktor surrendered. He followed the boy to his bath and sat with him as, damply clean, Balit rolled himself into the soft, gauzy bedclothes and looked up at him expectantly.

Viktor found himself moved by the situation, so familiar, so different. It made him think of telling stories to his own children long ago on Newmanhome, and before that hearing his father tell them to him ages past on the ship. He reached out to stroke Balit’s warm, fuzzy head.

“Shall I tell you about the beginning of the universe?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, Viktor! Please!”

Obediently Viktor began. “Once upon a time there was nothing, not anything anywhere, except for one little point of matter and energy and space. There weren’t any stars. There weren’t any galaxies. There wasn’t even any space yet, really, because space hadn’t been invented.”