The World at the End of Time (56 page)

Viktor stared at him, incredulous. “One little class of kids did that?”

“They’re not just kids, Viktor—they’re as old as I am. Besides, Grimler helped.”

“Grimler? Markety’s wife?”

“Yes, of course. She’s there, too; you’ll see her in a minute. And it wasn’t just my class, anyway,” Balit declared. “All over the habitats there are schools that have Newmanhome projects. You wanted to know what I was doing with all the pictures I took? Half the schools in the orbits have been watching them. All the kids are getting into it, Viktor—and, look, there’s Grimler now!”

Indeed, there she was, slim as ever, looking radiant. “Pelly’s going to bring two tons of the ‘fertilizer’ stuff on his next trip, Balit. And, oh, has Markety told you the good news? He’s a boy,” she said, glowing with pleasure. “Perfectly healthy, and he is going to have Markety’s hair and eyes. Isn’t it
wonderful?”

“Well, I’ll have to congratulate Markety,” Viktor said with warmth. “I’m delighted, only—” He was staring at the woman on the screen. “Had she had the baby already?” he asked, gazing at Grimler’s flat midsection. “I didn’t think there was time—”

“Oh,” Balit said, looking faintly repelled, “it isn’t
born
yet. I mean, honestly, Markety and Grimler certainly wanted to go back to the old ways, up to a point, but not for Grimler to have to
bear
it. No, the reason Grimler went back was so dear Nrina could remove it and check it for defects and so on, and then let it come to term properly; it’ll be a season or two yet before they have it.”

The boy turned off the picture. “Aren’t you pleased about all this, Viktor?” he asked anxiously.

Viktor thought about it. “Of course I am,” he said, when he was sure he meant it. “Only—”

“Only what, Viktor? Is something wrong?” And when Viktor didn’t answer Balit sighed. “Never mind. But, honestly, I think things are going to go a lot better now.”

As a matter of fact, they did. Not well enough to lift Viktor out of the shadowy depression that hung over him; well enough so that there was, actually, progress in the things that mattered to the community.

As soon as the ground was dry enough Viktor and Jeren found a spot that was level enough to suit Viktor’s strictures. It was protected by a rise just above it, which, he thought, would divert any future floods; and the gillies began grading it for planting at once.

Viktor was on the scene every day, prowling around worriedly when he wasn’t manning a shovel himself, trying to remember what things had been like. It was Viktor who decided they needed to heap up a berm of earth around the farm plot, to retain rainfall when it came, but needed also to gate it, so that if the rains were too heavy they could drain standing water off the plots. It was Viktor who demanded a catalogue of every decipherable label of stored genetic materials in the freezer, poring over them to see if he could figure out which might be plants they could use and which would turn out to be merely some peculiar subspecies of cactus or jungle creeper or moss that someone once had thought might sometime be useful, or at least desirable, somewhere—under some conditions—but could do nothing to feed them now.

Viktor kept himself busy. Harshly he told himself that the absence of hope was no reason at all to stop
trying.
Funnily, it seemed to work.

Whenever there was some good development, whenever Viktor found himself tempted to optimism again, he tried his best to quell the feeling. He didn’t want hope. He didn’t want the disappointment that hope would bring. He was often the only dour face in an assembly of smiles. Jeren, Balit, Korelto—even Manett and Markety, in their own very different ways—they were all charged up with the excitement of bringing a whole planet to a new birth. Viktor tried not to be. After all, he knew exactly what that was like, for he had lived through it once already, in those first frontier days, thousands of Newmanhome years before.

“But don’t you see, Viktor?” Balit said reasonably, in a break between work sessions. “That just means that you, of all people, ought to know that everything we’re hoping for can really happen!”

Viktor didn’t answer. There was no point in telling the boy the other things he knew—for example, how great the differences were. When the ships from Earth had landed on Newmanhome the colonists they carried had been chosen people. They had been trained and equipped for the job. They had all of Earth’s technological knowledge base transported with them to fall back on. More than that, they were all
young,
and full of the juices of hope—and, most important of all, the planet they conquered wasn’t a corpse. It was already a fully living world with an existing biota of its own.

And none of that was true now.

So Viktor refused to hope. When Manett, glowing, told him that Dekkaduk was going to bring them a whole revivification system for the remaining corpsicles in the deep freeze, Viktor’s congratulations were perfunctory. When Markety bashfully begged permission to name his forthcoming son after him, Viktor refused to be touched. When Balit announced with delight that a dozen schools had clubbed together to launch a new space telescope—maybe even to settle the question of whether Gold’s planets had any possible inhabitants—Viktor’s heart trembled for a moment, but he quelled it.

But when Balit came shouting his name—

When Balit came shouting for Viktor, what he was saying was, “Come quickly! She’s called! It’s Nrina!” And when Viktor came stumbling out of his workroom, rubbing his eyes, it wasn’t just Balit. Markety was there, face transfigured with excitement, calling, “Go to the communications shack right away, Viktor!” And Jeren was there, blinking back tears, babbling, “I wasn’t
sure,
Viktor! I thought it was her, but I didn’t want to say.” And Balit was saying, “And there was freezer damage, so Nrina wouldn’t let us tell you until she was sure it would be all right—”

But then, when Viktor got to the communications shack, finally daring to hope, his heart in his throat, the face that looked out at him from the screen was the well-remembered one, and what she was saying was, “Hello, dear Viktor. They didn’t like me any better than they liked you, you see, so they popped me in the freezer, too . . . and, oh, Viktor, I’m all right now, and I’m coming
home.”

CHAPTER 29

The eons of stagnation were over for Wan-To. He was not merely busy—busier than he had been for at least some sextillions of sextillions of years—he was in an absolute fury of action.

It might not have seemed that way to a normal Earth human being—if there had been such a person to observe him, if observation of Wan-To had been possible in the first place. Wan-To had no way to move
fast
anymore. A single thought took him weeks. To make a plan required centuries. If the imaginary Earth human could have known what Wan-To was up against, the spectacle might have reminded him of a some Earthly watchmaker, feverishly trying to assemble the most delicate of clockwork in a desperate rush to save his life—and trying to do it, moreover, while he was submerged neck-deep in quicksand. For that was how it was for Wan-To. At every step he was impeded by the thick, suffocating medium of the dead star he inhabited. Actually Wan-To was worse off than even the drowning watchmaker, because at least the watchmaker retained his memories, while the particular skills Wan-To needed now were no longer part of his active consciousness. They had been
“
put away” long before. That was one part of the price Wan-To had had to pay for continued existence in the feeble energies left to him in the dying star, for to save energy he had long ago had to download immense portions of himself and his memories into a kind of standby storage. So first of all he had to find and reawaken those parts; it was as though the watchmaker had to find his instruction manual before he could fit the first gear to its bearing.

It was not enough for Wan-To to make the decision to cut himself loose from the decay of his dying star and go off to revel in the hot energies of those distant, invisible suns. Making the decision was quick enough. The hunt for the “how” of doing it was much longer.

Wan-To knew the starting point, of course. He would have to reconstitute himself as a pattern of tachyons.
Fast
tachyons, which fortunately were low-energy ones. It was a pity, he reflected, that he couldn’t use the extreme minimum-energy tachyons that were the fastest of all. Unfortunately, that was impossible; the minimum-energy tachyons couldn’t carry enough information to encompass all of Wan-To. No matter. The ones that were available would do the job. He would copy himself onto a tachyon stream and make his way to this unexpected oasis of life among the desolation.

There wouldn’t be much difficulty in finding his way to the little cluster of surviving stars. The sensors had not only transcribed the message; they had very accurately recorded the direction it came from. All he had to do was backtrack. Once he got anywhere near that little cluster of living stars they would be easy enough to find, for they would be bright beacons of light, the only light in a dark and entropied-out universe—beacons of hope for Wan-To.

Unfortunately, even low-energy tachyons took energy to make. That meant some pretty drastic economies for Wan-To. For quite a long time—some tens of thousands of years, he calculated—he would have to shut most of himself down. He would have to eliminate every possible activity except those barely necessary to keep him alive in a sort of standby state, so that he could hoard that pitiful trickle of energies from dying protons, storing it up to use in one prodigal burst that would send him to his resurrection.

Then even the trip itself would take measurable time. Even with the highest velocity tachyons that could do the job, say those moving at some large exponent of the speed of light, it would surely be a matter of some thousands of years. How many thousands he could not say until he got there; the location he had was only a direction. It gave no hint of distance, but there was no doubt that in this sprawled-out emptiness the distance would be considerable.

But, oh!, at the end of that immense journey . . . Wan-To had never felt such anticipatory joy. It was almost enough—no, he told himself, of course it was far
more
than enough—to make up for the great pain of what he had to do to prepare himself for it. For that was no less than the amputation of large parts of his memory, of his knowledge—of huge sections of everything that made up what was left of Wan-To himself. They were excess baggage. However treasured, they could not be taken along. Like any desperate refugee, Wan-To had to sacrifice everything that was merely dear to him for what was wholly essential.

CHAPTER 30

When Pelly’s ship brought Reesa to her waiting husband on Newmanhome she did not come alone.

Of course, the only person Viktor saw in those first moments was Reesa herself—familiar Reesa, dear Reesa, loved and lost and restored Reesa. When she came out of the lander she was as warm and solid in his arms as she had ever been, in spite of everything. But the ship was heavily laden. Dekkaduk was on the same lander, with all his equipment to revive corpsicles on the spot and heal whatever had happened to them in their icy millennia—those who could be healed at all, anyway. So were Balit’s grandparents, come to visit from their manufacturing habitat, grotesque in their temporary muscles but excited as teenagers at what they were doing.

Pelly’s lander had to make three trips to bring down all the cargo that time. There wasn’t room in his spaceship’s hold for everything. Some of their larger, ruder, sturdier things had made the voyage from Nergal strapped to the outside of Pelly’s ship. It was a slow trip, and cranky piloting for Pelly, with all that added mass. It wasn’t just Dekkaduk’s defrosting clinic. The grandparents had not come empty-handed, but with thirty tons of equipment from their factory habitat, seeds of a machine shop to begin working the treasures the Von Neumanns had patiently brought back to Homeport. Nor did Markety’s wife, Grimler, want their son growing up in a world without conveniences. So she had provided, among other things, three additional wheeled vehicles and small aircraft—now at last the people on Newmanhome could explore more of their reborn world!

For Viktor, falling peacefully asleep that night with Reesa breathing gently on his shoulder as she slept by his side, it was not just another day, it was the start of a new calendar, the beginning of another new life—and maybe, he thought, the best of them all.

In the second year of that private new calendar the human population of Newmanhome passed a thousand—nearly a hundred of the newcomers being people just arrived from the habitats, young ones mostly—and Grimler’s baby was born out of its test tubes and brought to join them, and Jeren found a wife. In the third year Jeren’s son added to the population—now nearly doubled again—and the machines that Balit’s grandparents had brought had built the machines that built the machines that were now building vehicles and pumps, earthmovers and cranes, engines and appliances made on Newmanhome itself. The new farm plots withstood the worst of the drenching spring rains and flourished, and Newmanhome was feeding itself. And in the third year . . .

In the third year Balit went back to his home on Moon Mary— “Only for a short visit, Viktor,” he said earnestly. “Believe me, I’ll be back—” and almost as soon as he had arrived he was sending messages to Viktor. “Come to see us here, please. With Reesa, of course. Everyone’s excited about the idea of seeing you!”