The World at the End of Time (5 page)

They defrosted a mathematician named Jahanjur Singh to help them out, but Viktor could tell from the way his father kept staring into space that it wasn’t helping enough. Still, Viktor found with pleasure that his parents had time to relax with their son. Amelia kept as busy as Pal—her own specialty of thermodynamic engineering wasn’t very relevant, but at least she could run a computer for the astrophysical team—but still there were times when they all played tag together in the centrifuge; they watched tapes of Earthly TV together; they even cooked fudge together, one night, and Viktor’s mother didn’t stop him however much he ate.

Viktor was no fool. He could tell that there was something on his parents’ minds that went beyond the astrophysical problem and the navigation of the ship, but he expected they would tell him about it when they were ready. Meanwhile he had the ship to explore. With so few humans awake, he had a lot of freedom to do it in. Even Captain Bu tolerated his exploration.

Before he was frozen Viktor had been pretty much afraid of Captain Bu Wengzha. It took him a while after defrosting to get over the feeling, too, because Captain Bu wasn’t happy about the jawbone course corrections he had to make when he was thawed out himself.
New Mayflower
was, after all,
his ship.

Captain Bu was the oldest man aboard
Mayflower
—well, to be accurate, he wasn’t anymore; he’d spent more than eighty years frozen, daring the odds to be thawed out for a while every decade to make sure the ship was shipshape in all its myriad parts. People like Wanda Mei had had their biological clocks running much longer than he. Bu was still biologically fifty-two, with a wide, strong-toothed mouth in a wide, plump face the color of the beach sand at Malibu. He had no hair on his head at all, but he had carefully cultivated a wispy beard. Most of the time he didn’t smile. He didn’t smile when things were going smoothly, because that was simply the way they were supposed to go, and he certainly didn’t smile when Fifth Officer Sorricaine came apologetically to the bridge to tell him that that day’s sail-setting order, still in the process of being carried out, had to be revised because the flare’s light pressure hadn’t fallen off quite the way the model predicted.

Peering over the captain’s shoulder in one of those discussions, trying to be invisible so as not to be sent off the bridge, Viktor looked wonderingly at the sail. It spread out in an untidy sprawl at the bow of the ship—which was now, of course, its stern—like a drop cloth for untidy house painters. Only it was not meant to catch spilled paint, but photons. The sail was almost more nuisance than it was worth, except that, of course, everything on
New Mayflower
was designed to serve at least two purposes and some of the sail’s later purposes made it, in sum, very worthwhile. The trouble with it now was that at stellar distances there weren’t very many photons for it to catch.

The film of the sail was tough, tricky stuff. It was “one-way” plastic, and it weighed very little. But to keep it spread at all, with the dynamic force of the ship’s engines tearing at it, it needed a lot of structural support; nearly a quarter of its mass went into the struts and cables that spread it at the right orientation (complex to figure, because the thrust on the sail varied with the square of the cosine of the angle it made with the source, doubly complex because there were many sources), and the motors that changed the orientation as needed. Even so, the sail’s contribution to
Mayflower’s
acceleration and deceleration could be measured only in tiny fractions of one millimeter per second squared.

But those tiny delta-Vs all added up, when you had to bring a vast ship from near relativistic velocities to relative rest in just the place you wanted to insert it into orbit. So the varying flux from the flare star mattered a lot to Captain Bu, and to everyone on the ship.

Captain Bu wasn’t always fierce. He turned out to have a weakness for kids—at least, as long as there weren’t very
many
of them to get in the way. He not only didn’t chase Viktor from the bridge, he actually encouraged him to visit there. He even tolerated the Stockbridge boys there—for brief periods, until they began acting up, and always with Viktor clearly understanding that his life was held hostage if the kids got in trouble.

Captain Bu even joined Viktor and the two boys in the gravity drum, laughing and shouting, his wispy beard flying about—and then afterward, when they were all cleaned up and hungry, he shared almond-flavored bean-curd sweets with them out of his private stock. Viktor didn’t like the bean curd much, but he did like the captain. Captain Bu was a lot better than the teaching machines (though not really, Viktor was loyal enough to believe, as good as his own father) at explaining things.

When the bean curd was finished and the boys made less sticky, he showed Viktor and the Stockbridge kids just where everything was. “This is my ship,” he said, putting a spoon on the table before him, “and Freddy’s plate there is the star we’re heading for, six point eight light-years away. It has an astronomical name, but we just call it Sun. Like the one we left.” He made a fist and held it in the air over the table. “And my hand is the flare star, about five light-years from us, about four point six from the destination, and here”—another spoon—“is the
Ark,
maybe a tenth of a light-year from landing. They’ve already felt the radiation. It comes at a bad time for them, velocities are getting critical, but it won’t bother them much, I think. They’re a lot farther from the flare than from the new Sun.”

“Where’s home?” Freddy Stockbridge piped.

“Shut up,” Viktor said, but Captain Bu shook his head forgivingly.

He bared those big white teeth at the boy.
“That
is home, boy,” he said, tapping Freddy’s plate. “The place we’re going to. I know when you said that you meant Earth, though—well, that’s back somewhere by the door.”

And as Freddy turned to look at the door he saw his mother standing there, hesitant to invade the captain’s quarters until Bu nodded to her to come in.

“Captain,” Marie-Claude Stockbridge said, nodding. She looked very beautiful—as always, Viktor told himself yearningly. “Viktor dear, how are you? Are my little wretches giving you any trouble today, Captain?”

“Not a bit, Dr. Stockbridge,” Captain Bu told her stiffly. Now in the presence of an adult the smile was gone. “I do have to go back to the bridge, though,” he mentioned, and nodded them out of his room. Marie-Claude looked wryly back at the closed door.

“Doesn’t he like you?” one of her sons asked.

“Captain Fu Manchu doesn’t let himself like grown-ups. He puts up with a lot from you two, though,” Marie-Claude told her sons, and then had to explain who Fu Manchu was.

“He was showing us where all the stars and ships and things were,” Freddy volunteered. “Viktor said he was going to tell us why messages take so long, but he didn’t.”

“Oh,” Marie-Claude said, “that’s easy enough. See, the star flared about five years ago, and the light reached the ship just a week or so ago, that’s when they started reviving us. And then—”

“Excuse me,” Viktor interrupted. “I have to go home now.”

Of course, he didn’t, really. His reasons were quite different. He just didn’t want Marie-Claude explaining things to him as though he were a
child.

Not even the hope of an ultimate fleshly reward—well, another kiss, anyway—could make Viktor Sorricaine tend to the Stockbridge boys in all of his free time. True, his main hope was so faint and improbable that he hardly dared admit even to himself, but that wasn’t what made him hide from them. The boys caused that all by themselves. They were simply unbearable. Viktor was amazed at the troubles they could get into, and even more amazed at the energy stored up in those small bodies to do it with. No twelve-year-old has ever remembered what he himself was like at five.

So, with the boys at least temporarily in the custody of their mother, Viktor arranged to keep it that way by getting out of sight. After a little thought he headed for the most remote habitable part of the ship, the freezatorium.

“Habitable” was almost too strong a word. The narrow aisles between the frost-clouded crystal coffins were freezing cold. The crystal was a good thermal insulator, but the liquid-gas cold inside each casket had had a hundred years to chill through it. Each casket was rimed with hoarfrost. The air was deliberately kept dryer than comfort would suggest in that section of the ship—Viktor could feel his throat getting raw as he breathed it—but even those faint residual traces of water vapor had condensed out on the crystal.

Although Viktor had had the forethought to borrow a long-sleeved sweater of his mother’s, it wasn’t enough. He had no clothes warm enough for that place. As he tiptoed along the corridors he was shivering violently.

He rubbed some of the frost off one of the caskets with the sleeve of the sweater. Inside was a woman alone, dark-skinned, her eyes closed but her mouth open, looking as though she were trying to scream. The card in the holder at the corner of the casket said
Accardo, Elisavetta (Agronomist—plant breeder),
but Viktor had never seen that woman before, or heard that name. Likely enough she was one of the ones already in the freezer by the time his parents joined the ship.

And he wasn’t much interested in thinking about her, either. The cold was getting
serious.
It would be better even to face the Stockbridge boys again than to stay here, he thought.

As he turned to hurry back through the double thermal doors, he heard his name called. “Viktor! What are you doing here, dressed like that? Are you crazy?”

It was Wanda Mei, furred and gauntleted, her old eyes peering out at him over a thick scarf that wound over her head and across the lower part of her face. Viktor greeted her uneasily. He didn’t particularly want to see Wanda Mei; he had been making a point of avoiding her, because it gave him an uneasy feeling in his stomach to know that this decrepit human wreck had once been his bouncy playmate. “Well,” she said, “as long as you’re here you can give me a hand. We’ll have to put some more clothes on you, though.” And she tugged him down to a bend in the corridor where it widened out to a little workshop. From a locker she pulled out a furred jacket like her own and furred overshoes and a soft, warmly lined helmet that came down over his ears, and then she set him to work.

Her job had been tugging some of the huge crystal caskets out of their wall racks, setting them in place at the workshop. Empty, they weren’t heavy, but Viktor’s help was welcome. “Why are we doing this?” he asked.

“For the people that are going into the freezer again, of course,” she said crossly. “What, are you too weak to help me? I was doing it myself until you came along, an old woman like me.” And indeed the work was mostly just awkward. “That one,” she said, pointing to one already stacked, “that one was yours, Viktor. For you and your family. How did you like it, all those years you slept there?”

He swallowed, looking at it without joy. “Are we going to be frozen again?”

“Not right away, no, not you; that’s why yours is on the bottom. But before long, I think. This one here, this is for the Stockbridges; they go back in about three days, I think.”

“In three
days?”

She sighed. “It is my hearing that should be weakening, not yours. Can’t you understand me? The emergency is over, they say, so the extra people can be corpsicles again.” She looked at him, then softened. “Ah, are you worrying?”

“You told me to worry!”

She smiled, then apologized. “If I am frightened, that is my business. I didn’t mean to scare you. You’ve already been frozen once, and survived. Was it so bad?”

“I don’t remember,” Viktor said truthfully. All he remembered was being given a tiny shot that caused him to fall asleep, with the freezer technicians hovering reassuringly around him; and then waking up again. Whatever had happened in between had happened without his consciousness present to observe.

He worked silently with ancient Wanda Mei for a while, doing as he was told but thinking about Marie-Claude going back into the freezer. A thought had occurred to him. He would, he calculated, be sure to gain at least a few days on her by staying unfrozen longer than she. If only there were some way of prolonging that time— If he could stay thawed and living on the ship until it landed— Why, then he would be almost her own age, even old enough to be taken seriously by her!

That thought, however, still left the problem of her husband unsolved. “Hell,” he said, softly but aloud, and Wanda looked at him.

“You’re tired,” she said, which wasn’t true, “and you’re cold—” which certainly was. “Well, we’ve done enough; thank you for your help, Viktor.” And then, back in the warm part of the ship, she thought for a moment and then said: “Do you like books, Viktor? I have some in my room.”

“There are plenty of books in the library,” he pointed out.

“These are
my
books. Kid’s books,” she amplified. “From when I was your age. I’ve just kept them. You can borrow them if you want.”

“Maybe some time,” Viktor said vaguely.

She looked cross. “Why not this time? Come on, you haven’t seen my room.”

Indeed he hadn’t. Actually, he didn’t much want to now. There wasn’t any real reason for that, only the kind of queasy, uneasy feeling that Wanda gave him. It wasn’t just that she was old. He’d seen plenty of old people—well, not usually as old as Wanda, of course; but for a twelve-year-old anyone past thirty is pretty much in the same general age cohort anyway. Wanda was different. She was both old and his own age, and seeing her reminded Viktor, in terms he could not ignore, that one day he, too, would have wrinkles and age spots on the backs of his hands and graying hair. She was his future displayed for him, and unwelcome. It shattered his child’s confidence that he would remain a child.