The World at the End of Time (51 page)

There were no answers to those, either. Balit counseled patience. Balit himself was always patient with Viktor, when Viktor was gloomy or stormy; but Viktor’s patience was running out. He spent more and more time with the desk, searching out every scrap of information he could find that bore at all on anything astronomical.

None of it was any help.

There was plenty of data, to be sure, on the universe as it was—nothing on how it came to be that way. For a while Viktor interested himself in the atlas of the skies. There wasn’t much of it: their own planets, just as he had known them in his first years on Newmanhome, the habitats, Nergal itself.

Their paltry group of surrounding stars had been studied, after a fashion—long enough to give them names, not much more. There was one group of four stars usually called “the Quadrangle”—their names were Sapphire, Gold, Steel, and Blood, taken, Viktor supposed, from the way they looked in the sky. There was Solitary—all off by itself in its part of the sky; a natural enough name. There were the binary pair, now called Mother and Father, with a period of about eight hundred years. There was Neighbor, the nearest star at less than three light-years distance, but an uninspiring little K-8.

Then there was Milk. Viktor studied the pale glow of Milk carefully, because it was the corpse of one of the stars that had flared in his own long-ago skies. The desk could tell him little, for no one lately had seemed to care why stars were different in color, and certainly no one had thought much about stellar evolution. But Viktor was nearly sure that what they saw wasn’t the star itself anymore, but the shell of expanding gases it had thrust out of itself, now lit from within.

Then he discovered that someone, sometime in the past, had taken the trouble to look a little more closely at all those stars and had found out that Gold had six detectable planets.

Planets! And yellow Gold was a G-4—close enough to their own stellar type, indeed to the type of Earth’s own sun.

Was it possible that someone had lived on one of Gold’s planets?

By the time he could talk to Balit again he was bubbling with excitement. “It all fits together, Balit!” he cried. “There’s a planetary system, not very distant at all. Suppose there’s life on one of those planets, Balit!”

“You mean people like us?” Balit asked, wide-eyed.

“I don’t know about that, Balit. Probably not very much ‘like’ us, if you mean two arms, two legs, two eyes—I don’t have any idea what they might look like. But like us in that they’ve developed intelligence. And technology! Why not? They might even be a little farther along in science and technology than the human race ever was—it wouldn’t have to be very far to make a big difference!”

“With spaceships, you mean?”

“Exactly! With
interstellar
spaceships. Suppose these Golden aliens, for purposes of their own—and how could we ever guess what their purposes might be? Suppose they decided to move a little furniture around. A dozen stars or so, for instance. Suppose they sent a crew to Nebo to build the machines that would take the energies of our sun, and use them to propel these few stars at high speed across the universe. Don’t you see, Balit? It explains everything!”

“And if we studied the things on Nebo very carefully we might know how to do things like that ourselves? Or at least know
why?”

“Exactly!” Viktor cried in triumph.

But the triumph didn’t last, for a guess was only a guess, and there was no way to test his hypothesis. He spent more and more time in his room, fruitlessly going over the data, wishing for word from Newmanhome. He was gazing at the pale point of light that was the star Gold, when Frit tapped on the door. He was carrying the kitten, and he had an apologetic look. “Balit forgot to feed her, and now he’s in bed,” Frit said. “Can you help?”

“Sure,” Viktor said, not very graciously. The kitten was big enough to eat regular food now. “I’ll come out. You don’t have to carry her,” he added. “Put her down; if she’s hungry she’ll follow us.”

Frit politely set the cat on the floor and led the way. To Viktor’s surprise, Forta was in the “kitchen”—that was the only way Viktor could think of the room—sipping a glass of wine and looking expectant. Viktor found the little container of scraps of food, opened it, and set it on the floor. The kitten strolled over, sniffed at it, and then looked up at him. He smiled. “She’s just being polite,” he said. “That’s what she wanted. See, she’s eating now.”

As he turned to leave, Forta said, “Why don’t you have a glass of wine with us, Viktor?”

Viktor perceived that it wasn’t just a casual invitation. He sat down and let Forta fill a glass for him before he said, “You didn’t really need me to feed the cat, did you?”

Forta dimpled. “Not really. We wanted to talk to you, after Balit was asleep.”

Faint alarm bells sounded in Viktor’s head. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

“Not really wrong, no, Viktor,” Frit said honestly. “It’s just that we’re a little bit concerned about Balit.”

“About Balit’s
future,”
Forta amplified.

Frit nodded. “We’ve always hoped he would want to become an artist of some sort—a dancer, perhaps, like Forta.”

“He wouldn’t have to be a dancer, as long as it was something that used his creative ability. Nrina thinks he has real talent as a gene worker,” Forta added. “That’s a kind of art, too, of course.”

“But lately he’s been so—well, so excited about these stars and things of yours, Viktor,” Frit finished.

Viktor took a sip of his wine, feeling the strain between the obligations of a good guest and that burning need to
know.
“Balit’s a very intelligent boy. He’s really interested in science, too,” Viktor said. “I think he could be good at it.”

“Yes, we’re sure he could, Viktor,” Forta said reasonably. “But what kind of a life would Balit have if he confined his talents to ‘science’? Nobody’s a ‘scientist.’ People will think he’s odd.”

“In my time it was a highly honored profession,” Viktor said defensively—and, he thought, not entirely truthfully; for it depended on which “time” he was talking about. Certainly the icy Newmanhome of the four warring sects had offered few honors to scientists.

“In your time,” Forta repeated. His tone wasn’t exactly disdainful, but the best you could say was that it was forgiving. “Anyway, Viktor, it’s not
creative,
is it? There’s nothing
new
for him to do—you said yourself, all this sort of ‘science’ thing was well known thousands and thousands of years ago.”

“Not all of it, no. No one really understood what happened to our stars! Even the parts that were understood then—the basic astrophysics and cosmology—nobody seems to know anything about them now. They need to be rediscovered.”

Frit said earnestly, “But don’t you see the difference? Rediscovery, Viktor dear, is not the same as
creation,
is it? You can’t blame us for wanting something grander for our boy.”

“Oh, Frit,” Viktor said, despairing, “how can I make you understand? What could be grander than answering the question of what happened to the entire universe? Maybe Balit can discover that! He’s interested. He’s smart. He simply doesn’t have the education. First he needs a grasp of cosmology and nuclear decay and—”

“No one knows those things anymore, Viktor. Truly. They simply aren’t interesting to us.”

“But they must be on record somewhere,” Viktor said, clutching at straws. “I know the data banks in
Ark
and
Mayflower
had all that material—”

“They don’t exist anymore, Viktor. What was left of them must have been salvaged for structural materials thousands of years ago.”

“But they were copied onto the files on Newmanhome.”

Frit gave Forta a meaningful look. “Yes, Newmanhome,” he said.

Forta sighed. For some reason the thought of the files on Newmanhome seemed to make him uncomfortable. “Well,” he said, “we’ll see what we can do.”

“I hope I can repay you,” Viktor said.

Forta gave him a strange look. “That’s all right,” he said, sounding insincere. Then, “Do you know a lot of stories like the Big Bang one you were telling Balit?”

“Oh, dozens,” Viktor told him, aware for the first time that the parents had been listening in. In fact he did. In fact he had all the stories his father had told him still well in mind—the story of the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle that fueled the stars, the story of the death of massive stars in supernovae and the birth of pulsars and black holes, the stories of Kepler’s Laws of Motion and of Newton’s, and of Einstein’s superseding laws, and of the rules of quantum mechanics that went beyond even Einstein.

“Yes, of course,” Forta said, yawning. “Those are very interesting. I know Balit loves to hear about them—”

“But not all the time, please, Viktor,” Frit finished. “If you don’t mind.”

Then the long-awaited transmission came in from Newmanhome, and it was not at all what Viktor had expected.

To begin with, of course it wasn’t Pelly calling—the space captain had to be halfway back to Nergal by now. The face on the screen was a man wearing a sort of floppy beret, pulled down almost to his eyebrows; he was a habitat person, all right, but he was actually wearing clothes. “Viktor,” he began without preamble, “I’m Markety. I’m just here for a short time, but I’ve managed to collect some of the material for you. Give my respects to Forta, please—he is one of my heroes, as I am sure he knows. Here’s the material.”

Eagerly Viktor watched the screen on the desk as new pictures began to appear. Puzzledly he stared at them. After months he knew what sort of thing the desk produced when interrogated; these were quite different. They were simply a series of—well, photographs! The first batch was pictures of bits and pieces of machinery, some of it the same shiny lavender metal as the keepsake Balit proudly kept by his bedside, some of unidentifiable materials that could have been steel or glass or ceramic. It dawned on Viktor that they were the odds and ends that had been salvaged from the surface of the planet Nebo—but there was no explanation for any of them, no hint of what they might be for, or what studies might have been made of them.

The next batch was more puzzling still.

It had to do with astrophysics, all right, but it was not data displayed from a computer file. It was pictures—pictures of pages of manuscript, or log books, or even a few pages from a book here and there. They seemed to have been taken from the freezers.

They were all fragmentary—a couple of pages of something, without beginning or end; the pages themselves as like as not torn or frayed or spotted into illegibility. Some of them made Viktor blink. Some of it went so far back that his father’s own observations were there.

For a while at least, someone had been faithful at keeping records. (Billy Stockbridge, perhaps, loyal to Pal Sorricaine to the last?) There were spectrograms of the sun as it cooled; of the star burst as it grew; of the dozen stars that still remained in their sky—dimmer than before, but not swallowed into the star burst.

None of them were anything like the spectrograms Pal Sorricaine had so doggedly gleaned of the stars that had flared and died all about them. The Sorricaine-Mtiga objects were still unique.

None of the spectrograms made any sense to Viktor, either. The dead observers had left their own speculations, but none of them was convincing. None of them explained what it was that had stolen most of the stars out of the sky. And they were all so very old that there was nothing at all about the fireball that had dominated the sky for so long.

When Balit came back from school Viktor was still puzzling over the transmission. He displayed it all over again for Balit, but repetition didn’t make it clearer. Balit didn’t do any homework that night. He and Viktor ate quickly and returned to the desk. It was the objects from Nebo that seemed most fascinating to the boy. “But what can they be?” he asked, not for the first time, and, not for the first time, Viktor shook his head.

“The only way to find out is to investigate them. Somebody made them, after all—somebody from Gold, or somewhere else, but still some
person.
They can be opened up.”

Balit shivered. “People did try, Viktor. More than twenty of them were
killed.”

“People die for a lot less important reasons,” Viktor said roughly. “Naturally it would have to be done with a lot of precautions. Systematically. The way people used to defuse bombs in wars.

“What are ‘wars,’ Viktor?”

But Viktor refused to be sidetracked. They pored over the material until it was late and Balit, yawning, said, “I don’t know if I understand, Viktor. Are our stars the only ones still alive, anywhere?”

“That’s the way it looks, Balit.”

“But stars live
forever,
Viktor,” the boy said drowsily.

“Not forever. For a long time—” Viktor stopped, remembering a joke. He laughed as he got ready to tell it. “There used to be a story about that, Balit. A student is asking his astronomy teacher a question: ‘Pardon me, professor, but when did you say the sun would turn into a red giant and burn us all up?’

“The professor says, ‘In about five billion years.’

“So the student says, ‘Oh, thank God! I thought you said five
million.’
”