The World at the End of Time (8 page)

Wan-To could imagine that happening to his own comfortable home very easily, and the thought gave him the creeps.

Finally, Wan-To could use that slow, gross, clumsy stuff—matter.

It was easy enough for Wan-To to make things out of ordinary matter, but he mistrusted the stuff. It was completely foreign to his everyday life. He used it only when there was no alternative. And yet, when he thought over his options, it began to look as though this were one of the times when no good alternative could be found.

Although his mind—you wouldn’t really want to say his “brain,” because there wasn’t much of Wan-To
but
brain—although his mind, that is to say, was very widely dispersed about the fabric of the star he lived in, the messenger neutrinos flashed their signals about as fast as any animal dendrites in a human skull. It didn’t take him long to decide that, this time, the employment of a certain amount of matter was his best strategy.

What helped him to that decision quickly was a sudden urgent signal—his “senses” perceived it as something between the ringing of a loud alarm bell and the sting of a wasp—from one of his ERP pairs.

The signal told him that another nearby star had just gone flaring to its death.

That meant that his siblings were still shooting at him with their probing fire. Sooner or later those random shots would find him . . . and so it was time for Wan-To to act. It was war!

It is civilians who get the worst part of wars. Wan-to can’t be blamed for what happened to the innocent bystanders in this one, though, since he had no idea there were any.

CHAPTER 4

The innocent bystander named Pal Sorricaine was now (biologically) in his sixties. That was a lot, compared to his wife’s biological thirty-eight, but he still had youth enough to do his duty by the colony. Accordingly, when Viktor was (again biologically, anyway) fourteen, his mother provided him with a sibling.

Viktor had some trouble welcoming the thing. It was female. It was also tiny and noisy at all hours of the day and night; and, in Viktor’s view, it was very ugly.

For reasons Viktor could not understand, the wretched look of the thing didn’t seem to worry his mother. It didn’t put his father off it, either. They held it and fondled it and fed it, just as though it were beautiful. They didn’t even appear to mind the bad smells it made when it fouled itself, as it did often.

Its name was Edwina. “Don’t call her an ‘it,’ either,” Viktor’s mother commanded. “Call her by her name.”

“I don’t like her name. Why couldn’t you call her Marie or something?”

“Because we picked Edwina. Why are you so crazy about the name Marie?”

“I’m not
crazy
about it. I just
like
it.”

Amelia Sorricaine-Memel gave her son a thoughtful look but decided not to press the matter. “Marie’s a pretty name,” she conceded, “but it isn’t hers.”

“Ed-
wee-
na,”
Viktor sneered.

His mother grinned at him. She rumpled his hair fondly and offered a compromise. “You can call her Weeny if you want to, because she is kind of weeny. Now let me show you how to change her diaper.”

Viktor gazed at his mother with teenage horror and despair. “Oh,
God,”
he moaned. “As if I didn’t have enough to do already!”

In fact he had plenty to do. Everybody did. Building a new colony wasn’t just a challenge. It was
work,
and every colonist had to face the facts of frontier life.

The first fact of Viktor’s new life had been the dwelling he and his parents were given to live in. It was a long, long way from the beach house in Malibu. It was bigger than the cubicle on
Mayflower,
but that was all you could say for it. It wasn’t even a cubicle. It was a tent. More accurately it was three tents run together, each made out of several plies of the light-sail/parachute material, and all they had to furnish it with was a couple of beds—pallets, really; they had no springs—and some metal cupboards brought down from
Mayflower.
(Even those they would have to give up, they were warned, as soon as wood equivalents could be carpentered from the native vegetation. Until the new mines and smelters were fully operational, metal was precious.)

The second fact was time, also in short supply. In fact, there wasn’t any of it. Every one of the skimpy daylight hours was filled—if not with work (farmhand, construction helper, general laborer; the kids who landed from
Mayflower
were at once put to work at whatever they could do), then with school. School wasn’t any fun, either. Viktor was shoved into a class with thirty-two other kids of about his age, but they weren’t a congenial lot. Half of them were from the first ship, seasoned and superior in the ways of the new planet, and very aware of their superiority, and the other half were greenhorns like himself. The two kinds didn’t get along.

That situation the teacher would not tolerate. He was a tall, one-armed man named Martin Feldhouse, chronically short of breath. Short of patience, too. “There won’t be any fighting in this school,” he decreed, coughing. “You have to live together for the rest of your lives, so start out doing it. Line up in size places for your buddies.”

The students stood up and reluctantly milled into order. Viktor wasn’t sure how to take Martin Feldhouse; he had never seen a human being who was missing an arm before. The thing about Feldhouse was that he had gotten himself crushed under a truck of gravel out at the pit. Back on Earth, or even on the ship, he would have been patched up in no time. Not here. In this primitive place, at that early time, he had been too far from the medical facilities for immediate attention, and so when he got to the clinic the arm was too far gone to be saved, though the injuries to his chest and internal organs had been repaired. More or less repaired. Except for the persistent cough, anyway. When all his disabilities were added up the total pointed to the only job he was still fit for, so now he was a schoolteacher.

“Now count off,” Feldhouse decreed. “When I point to you, say where you come from—Ship, or Home. You first!” And he pointed to the tallest boy, who promptly announced that he was Home, and so was the girl next behind him, but the one after that was from
Mayflower
and so she was paired with the first boy.

When they got down to Viktor his “buddy” was a girl named Theresa McGann. They looked at each other with speculative hostility, but took their seats together as instructed, while Feldhouse looked on the four unpaired planet-born children. “You four belong to me,” he declared. “The rest of you are going to work together. You from the Ship, you teach your buddies as much as you can remember from what you got out of the teaching machines. You from Home, you teach geography and what the farms are like and everything else about what it’s like here—what is it, what’s your name?’’

“I’m Viktor Sorricaine,” Viktor announced, putting his hand down. “Why do you call this place ‘Home’?”

“Because that’s what it is,” the teacher explained. “That’s the first thing you all have to learn. This planet’s name is Enki, according to the astronomers, but its right name is Newmanhome. We call it Home for short. From now on you only have one home, and this is it.”

It had taken eight months for the last of the corpsicles in
New Mayflower
to be thawed, oriented, and paradropped to Newmanhome’s surface. Most of that time was spent tearing the crew and cargo sections of the ship apart to make them into the modules that would carry everybody and everything down, and assembling the light-sail-parachutes and streamers that would keep the landing from being a catastrophe. The colonists already there welcomed the new arrivals, to be sure. They welcomed the cargoes each brought down even more. For that matter, the empty modules themselves were fallen upon with joy; each one, when emptied, contributed nearly half a ton of precious steel.

In all this work everybody had to lend a hand, kids included. Kids also had to go to Mr. Feldhouse’s school (if they were twelve to fourteen biological Earth years; there were other schools for younger and older ones). For three hours a day they used the teaching machines and drilled each other in grammar and trigonometry and Earth history and music and drawing, under Feldhouse’s short-tempered and sketchy supervision. The good part of the school was that Viktor had other children of his own age for company, even if one of them was the bratty Reesa McGann the teacher had forced on him the first day. The bad part was that almost all of the kids were strangers. And a lot of them—the children from the first ship, that was—were really stuck up.

Because he and Reesa were “buddies” they shared a seat in the crowded school hut, and she was the one who had the privilege of pointing out to him how little he knew about how to live on Newmanhome. Every time he complained about shared books or heavy labor, she was sure to tell him how very much worse it had been six years before, when
they
landed. Their Ark hadn’t been designed for disassembly, like the
Mayflower.
All the first colonists could do was strip it of its cargo and most of its moveables. Then, reluctantly, they abandoned it. It was still up there in orbit, drive almost dead except for the trickle of power that fed its freezer units, otherwise just a hulk. With all its precious steel.

“If you’d been a little smarter,” Viktor told the girl in a superior tone as he was trying to make a fire in the fireplace outside their tent, “you’d at least have fixed the drive so it could beam power down, like our ship.”

“If we were smarter,” she answered, “we’d have come in the second ship like you, so somebody else would have done all the hard work for us before we got here.” And then she added, “Pull out all that wood and start over. You’ve got the heavy chunks on the bottom and all the kindling on top. Don’t you know
anything?”
And then she pushed him out of the way and did it herself. The girl was so
physical.

If Viktor had really looked at Theresa McGann he would have discovered that she wasn’t such a bad girl after all. True, she kept reminding him of his immense areas of ignorance (but he was grimly repairing them as fast as he could). True, she had scabby knees. True, she was several centimeters taller than he, but that was only because fourteen-year-old girls are generally taller than fourteen-year-old boys. He didn’t look at her that way, though. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested in the opposite sex, even such a touchy-squeezy physical specimen of it as Reesa McGann. He was often
obsessed
with the opposite sex, like any healthy, horny male teenager, but the focus of his interest hadn’t changed. It remained the beautiful (and now widowed) Marie-Claude Stockbridge.

Marie-Claude remained widowed, too. Suffering, Viktor observed that she often “saw” other men, but he took some comfort in noting that she seemed to have no intention of marrying one of them.

Apart from his schoolwork Viktor’s contribution to the community was officially defined as “scutwork”—meaning the kinds of low-skilled jobs other people didn’t have time for. When he possibly could, he tried to get into a work party with Marie-Claude, but most of the time he possibly couldn’t. There was too much work, of too many kinds. Up on the rapidly emptying
Mayflower
the cleanup crews were emptying the cargo holds and launching the contents to the surface. The most precious and fragile of the new supplies came down in one or another of the three-winged, rocket-driven landing craft
Mayflower
had carried in its hold, but there wasn’t enough fuel made yet to use them for more than one trip each. Sturdier shipments, including passengers, came down in the big pods.

There were all kinds of things in those pods—tractors, stills, hand tools, lathes, stores, drilling equipment, rifles, flashlights, cooking utensils, plates, surgical instruments, coils of copper wire, coils of fencing, coils of light-conducting tube, coils of flexible pipe; then there were cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, dogs, cats, carp, tilapia, trout, bees, dung beetles, earthworms, kelp, algae, catfish—each fresh out of the freezer, wrapped in protective foam or immobilized in a plastic bag. The living things didn’t all come down at first; many of them (and many, many tubes of ova and sperm and seeds and spores) stayed frozen on the ship against a future need.

The pods kept coming. Almost every time
Mayflower
came around in orbit in the right position—only about one orbit in twenty was right, because of the planet’s rotation—the orbital crews launched clusters of twelve or fourteen separate loads, linked until the retrofire rockets slowed them, then shaking apart, popping their light-sail-parachutes, coming down in fleets of bright gold film canopies, with the gray metal pods hanging underneath. Those were smart parachutes. Each one had sensors that kept it posted on where it was drifting and shroud controls that could maneuver it toward its planned drop point—fairly well, anyway—at least, well enough, provided the linked pods had been ejected at just the right moment and the retrofire burn had been precise.

But even with everything going right, the chutes could land anywhere within a ten-kilometer radius of the drop point, inshore of the colony on the shore of what they were calling Great Ocean.

It would have been nice if the drop point could have been right on the little town itself. But that would have meant that half the pods would surely have fallen into Great Ocean, and that meant a whole different order of difficulty in getting them back. It was easier to send people like Viktor out to drag them back on tractor-drawn sledges. So that was what he did—half a dozen times a week.