The World at the End of Time (7 page)

Long before he finished his recital Viktor was asleep.

He slept very soundly. He almost woke, half woke, to find he was being carried somewhere; and almost realized where he was being carried. But the pill had done its work, and he never opened his eyes . . . for sixteen more years.

When Viktor Sorricaine woke up again he was still twelve (or, you might say, very nearly a hundred and fifty), and the first feeling that flooded through him as he gazed up at the face of his father was joy, purest joy, for he had beaten the odds one more time.

The second feeling was not as good. The Pal Sorricaine who beamed down on him was graying and much thinner than the one who had stood by as he went to sleep. “You didn’t get frozen at all,” Viktor said to his father, accusingly, and his father looked surprised.

“Well, no, Viktor,” he said. “I couldn’t. We had to watch that star, and—well, anyway, we’re all together again, aren’t we? And we’re there! We’re landing! The first parties have already dropped down to the surface, and we’ll be going as soon as our chutes are ready!”

“I see,” Viktor said, not actually seeing. And then he remembered something. “I have to give Wanda’s books back.”

His father looked startled, then saddened. Before he even spoke Viktor understood that Wanda wasn’t going to want them back, because she wasn’t alive anymore. A chill ran through him, but he didn’t really have time to think about it. The ship was incredibly noisy now. Not just the chattering of two or three hundred people, the ones already revived, the ones working to revive more, and the ones checking them over and getting them ready for the drop, but loud sounds of crashing and crunching and battering of metal to metal. The interior of the ship was being gutted, as it had been designed to be; the interior cubicles were being wrenched loose from their neighbors, since each one would be a capsule in which eight or ten human beings, or several tons of parts, machines, supplies, or other cargo would drop to the surface of the new planet. Viktor caught a glimpse of a surveillance camera, keeping an eye on crews outside the ship. He could see that the immense stretches of the light sail were deployed in a different way now. It was not one single vast expanse of film anymore, it was a dozen smaller segments, long narrow strips like the sails of a windmill, stiffened by the dynamics of rotation around the main body of the ship. That, he knew, was for greater efficiency in the orbit-insertion maneuver; but that phase was over. Now the sails were being furled and stowed, to shape into the four hundred parachutes that would slow the fall of the paradrop capsules that would carry everything useful on
New Mayflower
to the ground.

When he caught a glimpse of Marie-Claude Stockbridge he saw that she was weeping. Even weeping she looked desirable, but he could not bear the thought of her being in sorrow. “What is it?” Viktor asked his mother.

“Oh, it’s Werner,” his mother told him sadly. “Poor Marie-Claude! Werner didn’t come out of the freezer. He’s dead.”

CHAPTER 3

Pal Sorricaine was not the only observer who had been thinking hard about that anomalously flaring K-5 star. So had Wan-To, with a good deal more urgency.

The mere fact that one of his misbehaving relatives had blown up a star didn’t bother Wan-To very much. There were plenty of stars to spare. The universe was littered with the things. If the idiots exploded a million of them it would make very little difference to Wan-To—there would still be hundreds of billions left in just this one little galaxy—provided, of course, that the star he lived in wasn’t one of them. (Still it would be a pity to wreck them all and have to move on to another galaxy, so soon after having had to get out of the last.)

It was the motives behind it that made this unnatural flaring of stars so distasteful to Wan-To. It was an unsettling development, and one for which, justice would have forced him to admit, he had mostly himself to blame.

He excused himself, though. He couldn’t help the fact that he had been lonely.

The game Wan-To’s “family” was playing with him had its counterpart on Earth. Artillery officers called it “probing fire,” meaning that you pulled the lanyard and wondered if you’d hit anything. The fact that they hadn’t, this time, didn’t mean anything very reassuring. If they kept it up, in the long run they were sure to score a bull’s-eye . . . and when Wan-To thought about anything, it was always the long run he thought about.

Wan-To
liked
his star. It was big, but not too big, and it was comfortable. Its diameter was just under a million miles, its surface temperature was between six and seven thousand Kelvin—it varied a little, because Wan-To’s star was just a touch variable. Well, that was what you got when you chose a medium-sized star. But you also got a lot of energy to play with, and, anyway, he had made sure that it was prudently below the “Chandrasekhar limit” beyond which the damned thing might go supernova. Its actual mass was about 2.4 times 10
²⁷
tons. Getting a little bit smaller all the time, of course. It was, like any star of its class, turning more than four million tons of hydrogen mass into energy every second, but that wasn’t worrisome. Wan-To knew well that it had some twenty-four sextillion of those 4,000,000-ton masses to spend. So it had a good long life expectancy to begin with. It should still have at least a few billion years to go before it began to swell unpleasantly toward the red-giant stage.

Of course, it had used up quite a lot of that life expectancy already. It had not been new when Wan-To moved into it. Wan-To knew that. Like any suburban householder aware of doors that were beginning to stick as his house settled and damp spots where the roof was almost beginning to leak, Wan-To understood that some day or other he would want to move into something newer and less likely to give trouble . . . but not for a while yet.

For now he was perfectly happy in his snug little house. He wanted to stay there—if he could.

Thinking along these lines, Wan-To restlessly extended himself into the convection zone of his star. It was like a worried human getting up and pacing about his room. It also cheered him up, because that was one of his best places for play. There was pure pleasure in twisting the convective cells so that rising and falling ones hit each other head-on. Besides being fun in itself, like playing with Silly Putty or stroking a textured worry stick, he knew that it made pretty patterns on the surface of his star. He could stop heat transport in an area a thousand miles across that way, and so that part of the star’s surface would be what human astronomers called a “sunspot.” In that place a little patch of the star would cool a little. Not much. Only by a couple of thousand Kelvin, say, but enough so that to humans those areas looked dark by comparison. They weren’t really dark, of course. They were infinitely brighter than any human illumination, but everything around them was very much brighter even than that.

Abruptly Wan-To halted his play as a fresh fright struck him. The sunspots! If he played about in the convection zone, the sunspots he made would be
visible!
The patterns would not be the same as natural ones, and anyone looking at his star could see that someone was doing that to its surface!

Hurriedly, worriedly, Wan-To released his magnetic grasp on the pockets of hot gas. Delicately, fearfully, he extricated himself from the convection zone entirely. He could only hope that none of his competitors had happened to have a close-in optical surveillance of his star just then, and enough intelligence to figure out what he had revealed.

Then, when (a few dozen years later) enough time had passed for even a fairly distant colleague to have seen it and reacted to it if he were going to—and nothing dire had happened—Wan-To began to relax.

It was true that he couldn’t play in the convection zone anymore. That was a pity. It had been fun. But, on the other hand, a very satisfying thought had occurred to him:

Perhaps some of his competitors still did.

Wan-To then set certain observational procedures into operation, with particular emphasis on the optical frequency human beings called the color blue. While he was waiting for results, he paused to think seriously for a bit.

It had been a long time since Wan-To had seen his “parent”—the one who, like Wan-To, had created some copies of himself for company and, like Wan-To, then regretted it very much. Wan-To couldn’t even see the galaxy where he had been born anymore. It was on the far side of the core of the galaxy humans lived in, the one they called the Milky Way, and observation through the masses of gas clouds and dust and stars and other highly obscurant things was almost as difficult for Wan-To as it was for human beings. Earthly astronomers knew it was there, though. They had observed it, though sparsely, by radio, and deduced it, though uncertainly, by its effects on the motions of the bodies near it; they called it “Maffei 2.” Wan-To didn’t much want to see it. He had a pretty good idea of what it would look like if he did, for when he left it it was getting too hot to live in (in the vernacular, not the cosmological, sense), because the squabbling among his various relations had erupted into veritable cascades of stars wrenched open, spilling their guts into space.

He saw with regret that the same thing was beginning to happen here.

The fact that he didn’t want to see Maffei 2 didn’t mean he was incurious about the rest of the universe. Indeed, he was intensely curious; in fact, he had plans for a lot of it. He wanted to know what was happening, and he wanted to make sure that things happened his way.

For the two tasks of satisfying his curiosity and making things happen, Wan-To had four major tools at his disposal. In increasing order of importance, they were matter, photons, tachyons, and packets of twinned particles that performed according to what human beings had called “the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky Separability Phenomenon.”

The twinned Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky packets—call them “ERPS” for short—were the best. For one thing, they were the fastest. As humans had discovered, under certain conditions pairs of particles, however far apart in space, are somehow so sensitive to each other that an action performed on one of the particles, anywhere, will instantaneously be reflected in its twin, anywhere else.
Instantaneously.
That generally universal speed limit, the velocity of light, just doesn’t come into it when you’re talking about ERP pairs. It doesn’t apply. Knowing these facts, it was easy enough for Wan-To and his colleagues to devise complex particle pairs and gave them what amounted to instant sending and receiving stations. One of Wan-To’s sets was kept at home with him, the other was deployed anywhere in the universe he chose to plant it.

Wan-To had planted plenty of them. He liked them very much, not least because there was no “directionality” about them. There was no way of telling, from one of his distant ERP packets, where its twin was—and therefore, where
he
was. Since Wan-To definitely didn’t want just anyone to know where he was, he used the twinned ERP packets for talking to his worrying colleagues. They were his equivalent of an unlisted telephone number.

His other tools were also good, in different ways.

Tachyons, for instance, were almost as fast, and in some ways better. You could carry a lot more information a lot easier on tachyons—particles whose existence had been surmised, but not detected, on Earth. More than information could be carried. You could, for instance, hit someone pretty hard with a tachyon blast, if you wanted to do him harm. (From time to time Wan-To did want to do someone harm, if only to keep that one from doing the same to him.) A tachyon was a quite legitimate particle, even within the ancient confines of relativity theory. It obeyed the law of the limitation of the speed of light. The only thing that distinguished tachyons from less exotic particles was that for tachyons the velocity of light was the lower speed limit, not the upper. They could never go as
slowly
as
c.
Speed wasn’t much of a problem when you used tachyons. Indeed, since the lowest-energy tachyons were the fastest ones, for any
normal
purpose—say, at distances of up to a few hundred light-years—they were
almost
as speedy as the ERP pairs.

The objection to using tachyons wasn’t technical, it was tactical. Tachyons were noisy. They moved
through
space (instead of simply ignoring space, as the twinned pairs did), and so a person at the receiving end could rather easily figure out the direction they had come from.

Wan-To definitely did not want that done.

Then, of course, for lesser tasks he had the whole spectrum of photons at his disposal, too—radio, heat, visible light, gamma rays, X rays, even gravitons. All of these were useful, for different things, but they were all so terribly
slow.
None of them could move faster than that old 186,000 miles a second.

Still, they could be very handy when used in the right way, especially the range of particles that mediated the force of gravitation. With them, it wasn’t hard for Wan-To (or his brethren) to zap a star. Even human beings could have done it, if they had had access to the necessary gravitons, graviphotons, and grayiscalars, and in all those supplies Wan-To was immensely rich. If you flooded a target star with the right particles you could pull it right out of shape. All that held any star together was gravitational force. When stretched on the particle rack, the core bubbled and fountained like a geyser, and no structure inside it could survive.