It was a pity that Pal Sorricaine never had any possible chance of meeting Wan-To, because of course Wan-To could have explained it all to him. Wan-To might even have been happy to discuss it, because he was pleased with his work.

After Wan-To, observing through his Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pair, saw the first batch of stars begin to pick up speed, he paused to enjoy the spectacle. It was good work, he thought contentedly. It was also a very smart ruse de guerre. He was sure that if he had seen this happening, without warning, his first reaction would have been to zap every one of those stars. Immediately, without second thought. They were definitely unnatural.

His sibs were bound to do the same. They might try to figure out just what was causing it, but they were very unlikely to have any ERP setups near enough for quick study, and they wouldn’t find his matter doppel. It would make little difference if they did. They would assume one of those stars held a fleeing Wan-To—or somebody—and they would zap them.

It was such a good ploy that he did it again. If it was a good strategy to set up one false target it would be even better to set up several.

That was no problem for him, but it was a somewhat boring prospect. However, he didn’t have to do it himself. Anything that Wan-To had ever done once he never had to do a second time, unless he wanted to for the fun of it—not when he could so easily make a copy of enough of himself to do the job. So he duplicated those parts of himself that were needed for that task, as a small “doppel” inside his own star, and instructed it to repeat the process with a few other groups of stars. The more the better, when it came to confusing his opponents; let them have a lot of things to worry about. Anyway, it was very little trouble. Making such copies of parts of himself was no harder for Wan-To than copying a computer file was for a human being. He didn’t even bother to oversee his copy’s work, so he didn’t notice that one of the groups of stars included the star that held the planets that included the world humans had come to call Newmanhome.

Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered to Wan-To if he had.

Then, for the first time in quite a while, Wan-To felt sufficiently at ease to think about relaxing for a bit. He wondered what was happening with his neighbors, and he was beginning to feel a little lonesome.

Not much had changed in his immediate vicinity. If a human astronomer had been sitting on the surface of Wan-To’s G-3 star and gazing at the heavens—assuming the human could somehow have avoided flashing into a wisp of ions long enough to gaze at anything at all—he would have seen little change. He would have observed that most of the stars in Wan-To’s sky were not perceptibly moving or changing color. For that matter, to the human observer it would have appeared that hardly any of them had flared into “Sorricaine-Mtiga objects,” as so many had in fact been doing for the past few dozen Earth years; the human observer would have been woefully behind the news.

The reason that was so was that the human eye doesn’t see anything but light. And light is bound by its limiting velocity of 186,000 miles a second. That’s pretty slow—far too dreadfully slow for Wan-To’s kind. Things were happening, all right, but a human observer would have had to wait a long time to find out what they were.

Wan-To, with his ERP pairs and his tachyons, was a lot better off, observationally speaking. He knew almost instantly what was happening many hundreds of light-years away. For example, he knew that nearly eighty stars had in fact been zapped by someone. He still didn’t know who the someone was—well, the someones. He knew that more than one someone was involved, if only because he had zapped six of the stars himself, laying down a little probing fire of his own. He also knew that one or two of those random shots had come uncomfortably close to his own G-3, though he was pretty sure that was just an accident. He didn’t guess at that. It was too important; he worked it out carefully. Wan-To had his own equivalent of chi-squared analysis, and the most rigorous interpretation of the positions of the flared stars he could make showed a highly random distribution.

The other thing Wan-To didn’t know was whether anybody had been hit.

Wan-To did care about that, after his fashion. True, at least some of his neighbors seemed to be trying to kill him. But they were the only neighbors he had—not to mention that, in fact, they were in some sense his own flesh and blood.

Then he heard a signal he hadn’t heard in some time. Someone was calling him.

 

When one of Wan-To’s kind wanted to talk to another he simply activated the appropriate Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky cluster and announced his name—that is, he made the sound that passed for a name, among the plasma minds like Wan-To. They didn’t make real sounds, of course. “Sound” is a matter of vibrations in the air, and certainly there was no gaseous atmosphere where any of them lived. But even in the interior of a star there are what are called acoustic phenomena—you might as well call them sounds, though no human ear could have heard them—and each one of Wan-To’s siblings made a characteristic sound. There was Haigh-tik, who was actually (in a sense) Wan-To’s first-born, and took after Wan-To a lot—friendly, deceitful, and very, very smart. There was Gorrrk (it was a sound rather like the cooing of a basso-profundo pigeon), and Hghumm (guttural white noise, like a cold engine finally starting), and poor, defective Wan-Wan-Wan, the dumbest of the lot, whose “name” was a little like the sound of a motorcyclist gunning his motor at a red light. Nobody paid much attention to Wan-Wan-Wan. Wan-To had made him late in his “parenthood,” when he had become very cautious about how much of his own powers he passed on to his progeny, and poor Wan-Wan-Wan was pretty close to an idiot. There were eleven of them, all told, Wan-To himself included, and seven of them had tried to call him while he was busy setting his stars in motion.

Wan-To considered that fact. Very likely one (or more) of the seven was the one who was trying to kill him, calling to see if he was still alive.

But there were the three silent others to think about. They hadn’t called. That might be even more significant. Perhaps they had been zapped; or perhaps they were the ones who were doing the zapping, lying low in the hope that the others would think they were gone.

What a pity it was, Wan-To thought ruefully, that it should always come to this in the end.

Restlessly he checked his sensors. Everything was going as planned. Five separate groups of stars, the smallest with only half a dozen members, the largest with well over a hundred, were already accelerating out of their positions in the sky, in random directions. (Let Haigh-tik try to figure that out, Wan-To thought gleefully.) They would be going pretty fast before long; his constructs tapped the energy of the stars themselves to drive them, converting their interior particles in gravitons to create attractors, even bending the curvature of space around them to isolate them and speed things up.

He wondered if Haigh-tik and the others would really assume that Wan-To himself was in one of those clusters, running away. That would be a useful deception—if it worked—but Haigh-tik in particular was too much like Wan-To himself to be fooled very long.

No, Wan-To thought regretfully, deception wouldn’t work very long between Haigh-tik and himself. Sooner or later one of them would have to destroy the other.

It was a great pity, he told himself soberly. Then, for something to do, he sent out the pulses that would turn three more possible targets into seminovae.

It would have been so nice if they could all have lived together in peace . . .

But, things being as they were, he had to protect himself. Even if it meant blowing up every star in the galaxy but his own.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 8

 

 

When the engineers from the message center came after Pal Sorricaine to see if he could explain what was going wrong with their incoming transmissions from the third interstellar ship, the old man looked at them uncomprehendingly for a moment. Then he slapped his forehead and bugled like a hound. “Holy sanctified Jesus,” he moaned. “I should’ve guessed!”

He hadn’t, though. Neither had anyone else. With all the commotion and speculation and uneasy, scared excitement that the movements of the nearby stars had caused, no one had stopped to think that the arrival of the interstellar ship, New Argosy, might also be affected.

Affected it was.

True, the messages that were still coming in from New Argosy were normal enough, even cheerful. The ship was still in its deceleration phase, still a long way out. Therefore it would be the better part of a year before the comm center on Newmanhome would receive anything the third ship had to say about the sudden decision of a dozen stars and their orbiting bodies to begin running away.

The engineers hadn’t expected to hear anything like that. They had expected that the incomings from Argosy would keep on their frequency lock, as they were supposed to do. The incoming messages didn’t oblige.

They, too, were Doppler-shifted.

Nobody wanted to believe the probable explanation for that, but the mislock was systematic and increasing. They couldn’t doubt it any more.

New Argosy was not a part of the volume of space that was theirs. Newmanhome was on the move. Argosy was not moving with it.

 

The scary part, the part that frizzled the nerves of the colonists, was that New Argosy didn’t yet know what was happening. Their transmissions reported everything on course, no troubles at all, not even any more of those pesky, worrying flare stars— landfall at Newmanhome expected right on time!

But that was now impossible, since Newmanhome had become a moving target.

That was a personal matter for every colonist. New Argosy wasn’t a mere astronomical object. It was something every one of them was waiting for. It was Santa Claus’s bag, laden with gifts. New Argosy held people—more people than either of the first two ships had carried, a passenger list of three thousand more corpsicles, intended to be thawed out to join the first colonists on Newmanhome—many of them friends, colleagues, even relatives of those already there.

It also held supplies.

It was crammed full of things that had not been high enough priority to go into either Ark or Mayflower, but that the colonists wanted very much, all the same. It held grand pianos and violins, tubas and trumpets; it held a thousand new strains of flowering plants and about fifteen hundred species of birds, beasts, and arthropods that Newmanhome would never see without it. It held the wonderful solar-power satellite that was their only chance of making more antimatter to replenish the dwindling stores in orbit. It held the three small spacecraft that they could use to explore their system. Most of all, it held hope. What New Argosy contained was the promise of a future—the promise that the colonists on Newmanhome were not finally, totally, cut off from the Earth that had borne them . . .

And it was lost.

The colonists had to have a town meeting to talk it over. The meeting couldn’t decide anything, of course—there weren’t any useful decisions they could make. The meeting was just so that everyone could hear and say everything that could be said—and then, with the catharsis of getting all that out of their systems, get back to their real world—meaning Newmanhome, the only world they had left.

Although the plague had decimated Newmanhome’s population, there were 3,300 people still alive. The only ones over the age of four not present there were the work crews in orbit, at sea, or in the small parties on South Continent and the other somewhat inhabited parts of the planet. Twenty-six hundred people gathered on the hill outside the town, with the loudspeakers relaying what was said to the fringes of the crowd.

They had set up a committee of twelve to put all the information together and make some kind of a report. Pal Sorricaine was on it, of course. So was Billy Stockbridge, and sick old Frances Mtiga (flown back specially from West Archipelago), and old (but far from sick or feeble) Captain Bu Wengzha. As soon as the committee had finished saying what everyone already knew, hands began to go up.

“If we can see that they’re out of position, why can’t the people on Argosy?” someone asked.

Pal Sorricaine stood up, tottering on his artificial leg; he hadn’t been doing much drinking, in all the excitement, but he was showing signs of wear. “By now they probably can. Remember, they’re still almost a light-year away. The messages we’re getting from them were sent nearly two Newmanhome years ago.”

Another hand, a woman from Delta: “But we notified them about what was going on, didn’t we?”

“Of course we did!” Captain Bu replied. “But they haven’t had time to receive the message yet. The speed of light is the same in all directions.” He turned to the rest of the committee behind him, where Billy Stockbridge had said something. “What is it, Billy?”

Billy pointed. “It’s my brother. He’s busting to ask something.”

There was Freddy Stockbridge in the front row, conspicuous in clerical garb; he had been studying for the priesthood long enough and, for lack of a handy pope or cardinal, had finally appointed himself ordained. He grabbed one of the roving microphones from an usher and shouted into it. “Can you tell us what is going on, really?”

Pal Sorricaine shrugged. “We’ve told you everything we can,” he said. “The data is clear. Relative to the rest of the galaxy, our little local group is moving—and accelerating. It looks like some other groups are beginning to move in a different direction, too, but we’re not as sure of that. As to why all this is happening—God knows.”

And Freddy Stockbridge said strongly, “Yes, that’s right. We don’t know. But He does.”

 

Viktor walked Reesa home from the meeting. She paused outside her house and gazed up at the stars. “They don’t look any different to me,” she said.

Viktor squinted up. “I can’t see colors in stars most of the time anyway,” he confessed. “They all look about alike, just bright spots. Anyway, we couldn’t really tell the difference with the naked eye.”

She shivered, although the night, like almost every Newmanhome night, was muggily warm. “Let’s tuck the kids in,” she said.

It didn’t take long. Viktor found himself attracted in a way that he wasn’t used to by the sight of Reesa cuddling the baby, whispering to him, changing his diaper, and feeding him. The feeling wasn’t sexual. He didn’t think it was sexual, at least, although that was certainly there, too. It was just, well, appealing. “Taking care of kids is a lot of work,” he said sympathetically when they were sitting outside again.

“It is for one person,” she said—rather sharply, he thought. It made him suddenly uncomfortable.

“Well, if you want,” he said awkwardly, “I guess I could take the baby now and then, I mean when I’m in port.”

She shook her head. “That’s no good for him. He needs a home. I think what I need is a husband.”

Now Viktor was definitely ill at ease, not to say alarmed. “Husband? Really? Would you want to, uh, I mean, would you be satisfied to just make love to one guy for the rest of your life?”

“As in marriage?” She thought that over seriously for a moment, then turned and faced him squarely. “Is matrimonial fidelity important to you, Viktor?”

He was beginning to feel trapped. “I—” He hesitated, pondering what he was saying, and what it might mean. “I think so,” he said at last.

“Well, I probably could,” Reesa said. “Yes, I’m just about sure I could—if I were married, I mean.”

 

It was quite true that they couldn’t see any change in the color of the stars, not with the naked eye, but the changes were there nevertheless. In one direction starlight was blue-shifted, in the other red. And the shifts grew, week by week.

Pal Sorricaine had something to do now. He and Billy Stockbridge spent all their time poring over the spectrograms, checking every possible reference to anything that might bear on the subject in the datastores—coming up empty, but still driven to go on trying to figure out what the hell was happening to their little pocket of space.

The spectral shifts didn’t affect the nearest of the stars; they had established that early on. There were about a dozen of those within a volume of space some six light-years across—including the burnt-out cinder of one of the old “Sorricaine-Mtiga” flares. Their spectrograms were unchanged. Newmanhome’s own sun was nowhere near the center of that volume, but nearly on one edge—so Sorricaine was scathing in answering the colonists who (how superstition did feed on the unexpected!) muttered that it was their blasphemous temerity in colonizing across space that had somehow changed things.

No, it just had happened (somehow!) that a volume of space had disengaged itself from the rest of the galaxy. Either their little group of twelve stars and all their associated planets, moons, and orbiting junk was (somehow!) beginning to hurry in the general direction of the Virgo clusters . . . or the rest of the galaxy was (again somehow—no one could think of any mechanism that might make any of this happen) hurrying away from it.

Of course, all this was terrifying.

At least, it was terrifying if you let yourself think about it. It was impossible. Fundamental natural law—law that was rock-solid at the bottom of scientific knowledge, the elements of motion that had been engraved in granite by Isaac Newton and confirmed by everybody since him—was simply being violated.

To think seriously about that was to realize that as a scientist you knew nothing at all. Science was simply wrong.

But how could that be?

The people who lived on Newmanhome couldn’t question science. Science was what had brought them there! They weren’t Third World peasants or stock-herders. They were chemists, engineers, physicists, geneticists, mineralogists, agrotechnicians, mathematicians, doctors, metallurgists—nearly every adult who had boarded either of the two colony ships had had advanced degrees in some scientific field, and every day they were earnestly passing on that knowledge, and that mind-set, to their children.

The result was that there was a burning dichotomy in every head on Newmanhome that simply could not be resolved.

The only way to survive it was not to think about it at all—as long as they could manage that, anyway. After all, the rest of their world was still behaving the way it should. True, there were still those unexplained emissions from the scorched surface of the planet Nebo, but Nebo was a long way away. On the surface of Newmanhome, in the orbiting hulks above it, everything stayed normal. The crops flourished.

And, best news of all, the health teams finally found a microorganism that could flourish in the human system and destroy the spores of the plague. So everyone’s gauze masks came off.

But when the communications from New Argosy turned from shock to panic, through forlorn hope to despairing realization that it never would land on Newmanhome, because Newmanhome was accelerating away from the ship faster than it could possibly hope to catch up—then it all became very personal.

 

When Viktor and Reesa married at last—it was the 43d of Spring in Colony Year 38—the bridal party was loud and happy for the joyous occasion. But that night, out on their balcony for a last sip of wine before they went to bed, Viktor gazed for a long time at the stars. It was a clear night. They could see the spark that was Mayflower sliding across the southern horizon, on its umpty-thousandth orbit.

“Should we volunteer?” Viktor asked his bride.

She didn’t have to ask him what he meant. She knew. The colony had at last considered itself strong enough to spare liquid-gas fuel for a rocket. Finally a new crew of volunteers would soon be going into space to relieve the weary orbiting crew, to let them after all these years come down and set foot on the planet they had crossed twenty-odd light-years of space to inhabit.

“Maybe next time. When the children are a little bigger,” she said, her hand in his as they looked up. “Viktor? Do the stars look any different to you now?”

It was a question they went on asking each other. Viktor squinted thoughtfully at the constellations. He said at last, “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

Behind them little Yan came out on the balcony. His fingers were in his mouth, reaching with his other hand to clutch at Reesa’s dress but with his eyes fixed on Viktor. Behind him his older half sister, Jake Lundy’s daughter Tanya, was quietly playing. Yan wasn’t used to seeing his parents together. He was hardly used to seeing Viktor at all, because, although Viktor had spent an hour or two, at least, with the child every time his ship was in port, Yan had seen more of a good many other men.

Viktor picked the boy up. Yan didn’t resist, but he didn’t let go of Reesa’s skirt, either, rucking it up until, laughing, his mother pulled the little fingers loose.

“Why,” Viktor said wonderingly to his son, “we’re a family now, aren’t we?”

Reesa studied his face. “Do you like being a family?” she asked—a serious question, wanting a trustworthy answer.

“Of course I do,” Viktor said quickly, and then nodded twice to show he really meant it. “We’re a great family. All of us,” he added. “Yours and mine and ours—would you mind if we had Shan with us?”

“I wouldn’t, but I think Alice wouldn’t like it. Still, she’s at sea a lot, and really she shouldn’t be taking the boy along. He needs school.” She stopped there, but in a way that suggested there was a sentence or two unsaid.

“What is it?” Viktor asked, puzzled.

She stroked Yan’s small head. “I guess you aren’t going to stop going to sea yourself,” she said, not looking at him.

“No, why should I? It’s my job, and—” Then a light broke over him. “Reesa, are you worried about me shipping out with Alice?”

“I’m not worried.”

But she was certainly concerned. Viktor could see that clearly enough. “I suppose I could get a different ship,” he offered, thinking that there were a lot of things involved in being a family that were going to take some getting used to.

“If you want to,” she said.

He didn’t say that the question was what she wanted; he had learned that much about being a family already. “That way I could be here when Alice was at sea some of the time, so it would make sense to have Shan with us,” he pointed out.

“That would be good,” she said, gazing at the stars. “Well, if you’ll put Tanny back to bed—I’ve got to be a cow for the baby—I’ll come in in a few minutes. We might as well consummate our marriage, again.”

 

The life of the colony went on. When Viktor Sorricaine, honeymoon over, shipped out again for South Continent, he discovered some of the disadvantages of being a family. The ship’s radio operator was an unattached young woman named Nureddin, and normally he would probably have expected to wind up in bed with her. Now it didn’t seem right. By the time he got back to the colony he was gladder to see his wife than he had expected, even. She hadn’t wasted any time. She was a quarter of a Newmanhome year pregnant by then, with a year and a bit still to go, her belly quite definitely rounded out, her movements a little clumsy—but not in bed.

If a person managed to put out of his mind some of the gnawing, unsettling questions about what the hell had happened to the outside universe, it was a pretty good time on Newmanhome. There were even some celebrations. Up in the hills over Homeport, in the growing complex by the geothermal power plant and the microwave rectennae, the big new cryonics freezers were completed at last. The first thing that meant was that now there was fuel for the long-idle landing craft, because the same gas-liquefying plants that kept the freezers cold could also manufacture liquid hydrogen and oxygen to fuel the little spacecraft.

That was a big plus—though Viktor had been disappointed to learn that he was not even on the shortlist of space pilots; there were too many others ahead of him. But it was a tempered joy, all the same. The freezers had not just been another job. They were a major philosophical commitment—no, damned near a religious commitment—to the future. They were built to last, and they were built big. They were meant to hold all the frozen specimens and tissue samples that were all the people on Newmanhome had left of horse-chestnut trees and ginkgos and aardvarks and Luna moths and salamanders. They were their best tie with old Earth, fully automatic, with power from the geothermal wells—also fully automatic—built to last a thousand years . . .

And now destined to remain largely empty for most of that time, because the great cargoes of frozen biological materials from New Argosy were never going to get there.

No wonder the celebration was short and not at all raucous.

There was other bad news, too. Ibtissam Khadek died that year, quite unexpectedly, still protesting that the colony should be investigating her grandfather’s prize brown dwarf. Reesa’s mother, Rosalind McGann, was having a bad time with her own health—no one seemed to be able to say what the problem was, exactly, except that it might be the long-delayed consequences of undetected internal “freezer burn.”

And Pal Sorricaine had started drinking again.

Worse than that, Reesa told Viktor, he was making his own brew. There was plenty of native vegetation around, and it certainly fermented into alcohol readily enough, but it was stupid for anyone to drink it.

Viktor was alarmed. “What about the kids?” he asked worriedly.

“They’re fine,” Reesa said. “Edwina’s quite a grown-up little lady now, you know. She and the boys are living with Sam and Sally Broad—they don’t have any children of their own, though God knows they’ve tried hard enough.” She hesitated. “Maybe you ought to go see them,” she offered.

Viktor nodded. “I will,” he said. “But first I’ll talk to the old man. Not that I think he’ll listen to me,” he finished bitterly.

So Viktor went back to his parents’ home early the next morning. His father was just getting up, and he listened to his son’s fatherly advice without much patience. “What’s the matter with you?” Viktor yelled at last. “Do you want to poison yourself? Don’t you have anything to do with your life?”

Pal Sorricaine bent to tie his leg a little tighter. “It isn’t that I don’t have anything to do,” he explained. “It’s just that I don’t know how to do the things I have to do. Nobody does. We’re all stupid, Vik; we don’t know what’s going on. Not just about the fact that we’re moving—Jesus, we don’t even know what’s happening on Nebo!”

“What about Nebo?” Viktor asked, distracted in spite of himself.

“I don’t know what about Nebo! Have you seen any pictures of it lately? All those damned clouds! We can’t see a thing now with the opticals.”

“Well, clouds aren’t so surprising,” Viktor began.

“Don’t you remember anything?” his father demanded angrily. “Nebo used to be bone-dry! Now—now I don’t know where all that water vapor came from, and that’s not the only thing. Something there is emitting a lot of high-energy radiation, and I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know why it’s doing it.”

“Does it have anything to do with, uh, with the fact that we’re moving?”

“I don’t know that, either! And did you see the new Doppler shifts? We’re not only moving, we’re accelerating.” Pal looked wearier and more defeated than Viktor had ever seen him. “We’re going to be getting up to a significant fraction of the speed of light soon, if this goes on. Do you know what that means?” he demanded.

“Why—” Viktor thought, then blinked as an idea came to him. “Are you trying to tell me there might be relativistic effects? Will we be getting into time dilation, like on the Mayflower coming out here?”

“God knows!” his father cried triumphantly. “Certainly I don’t! And I never will, because nobody cares.” He licked his lips, avoiding Viktor’s eyes. Then, defiantly, he got up and limped over to a cupboard to take out a bottle. As he poured himself a drink he said, “I can’t help thinking there’s a connection with Nebo. If I could get the goddamn town meeting to send a probe, we could find out something!” he grated. “But they don’t want to spend the resources.”

“That’s a copout, Dad,” Viktor said sternly. “I don’t want to talk about spaceships, I want to talk about you. You’re going to kill yourself if you don’t leave that stuff alone.”

His father grinned at him, his face gaunt and wolfish. “Get them to send a probe, and I’ll stay sober and go on it,” he promised.

“I can’t do that. You know I can’t.”

“Then,” his father said, “the next best thing you can do is mind your own business.”

 

On Viktor’s next voyage his family came along.

It was an experiment. Reesa was a qualified navigator herself, though somewhat rusty. Though the ship didn’t need two navigators—it hardly needed one—there was always work for extra hands to do in supervising the rotor speed and double-checking the orbital position fixes against star-sighting . . . though, actually, when Reesa or Viktor took a sextant reading on a star they weren’t as much thinking about whether their ship was in its proper place as whether the star was. Some of the parallax shifts were now detectable even with the sextant.

Alice Begstine had proved unexpectedly unwilling to turn Shan over to the newly married couple, so they left without him. They couldn’t ship out together more than once or twice, they knew, because when the new baby came Reesa would want to stay on land for a season or so, at least. But it was worth trying, and as a matter of fact they all enjoyed it. Tanya was a touch seasick at first, but it was more psychological than real—Great Ocean behaved itself, as it usually did. The children roamed the ship. One of the crew was always glad to keep an eye on them and make sure Tanny spent her allotted hours at the ship’s teaching machines. The baby was as happy on shipboard as anywhere else, and Reesa enjoyed the new experience. They basked in the sun; at South Continent they explored the hills and swam in the gentle surf. On the way back Viktor almost wished they could do it forever.

There was, of course, always in the back of their minds the worry about what the hell had happened to the universe.

It bothered even little Tanya, though mostly, of course, because she could see that the grown-ups were bothered by it. And when Viktor took his turn in tucking them in at night he was eager to do for Tanya what Pal had, so often, done for him. The stories he told her were about Earth, and the long voyage to Newmanhome, and the stars. On the last night before they landed he was standing with her on the deck outside the cook house where their dinner was simmering to completion, the rotors grumbling as they turned. Tanya squinted at the sunset they were watching and asked, “What makes the sun burn?”

“Don’t look at it too long, Tanny,” Viktor cautioned. “It’s not good for your eyes. A lot of people had their sight damaged a few years ago, when everybody was—” He hesitated. He didn’t want to finish the sentence: When everybody was looking at the sun every few minutes, wondering if it was going to flare like so many of the other stars nearby, and burn them all up. “When we were first on Newmanhome,” he finished. “Now it’s your bedtime.”

“But what makes it burn anyway?” she persisted.

“It doesn’t really burn, you know,” he said. “Not like a fire burns. That’s a chemical reaction. What the sun does is combine hydrogen atoms to make helium atoms.”

Tanny said proudly, to show she understood. “You mean if I take some hydrogen out of the stove fuel tank, and—and what would I have to do then? To make that helium, I mean?”

“Well, you couldn’t really. Not just like that. It takes a lot of energy to make protons—the proton is the heavy part of the hydrogen atom, the nucleus—to make protons stick together. They’re positively charged, remember? And positive charges?”

“They push each other away,” Tanny said with satisfaction.

“Exactly right, honey! So you need to force them into each other. That’s hard to do. But inside a star like Earthsun, or our own sun—like any star, really—the star is so big that it squeezes and squeezes.”

He hesitated, wondering how far it made sense to go in describing the CNO cycle to Tanya. But, gratifyingly, she seemed to be following every word. “So tell me, Daddy,” she persisted.

He couldn’t resist Jake Lundy’s daughter when she called him that! “Well,” he began, but looked up to see Reesa coming toward them, the baby in her arms, the unborn one making her belly stick out farther every day.

“It’s almost dinnertime,” she warned.

Viktor looked at his watch. “We’ve got a few minutes,” he said. “I just put the vegetables on, but you can call the crew if you want to.”

“Tell me first, Daddy,” Tanya begged.

“Well,” Viktor said, “there are some complications. I don’t think we have time to explain them right now. But if you can make four protons stick together, and turn two of them into neutrons—you remember what a neutron is?”

Tanya said, careful of how she pronounced the hard words, “A neutron is a proton with an electron added.”

“That’s it. Then you have the nucleus of a helium atom. Two protons, two neutrons. Only, as it happens, the mass of the helium nucleus is a little less than the combined mass of four hydrogen nuclei. There’s some mass left over—”

“I know!” Tanny cried. “E equals m c squared! The extra mass turns into energy!”

“Exactly,” Viktor said with pleasure. “And that’s what makes the sun burn. Now help me get dinner on the table.”

As they reached the door she lifted her head. “Daddy? Will it ever stop?”

“You mean will the sun cool down? Not in our lifetimes,” Viktor told her confidently, not knowing that he lied.

 

So the voyage was absolutely perfect, right up until the end of it . . . but the end wasn’t perfect.

It was horrible.

Probably Reesa should not have been trying to guide the grain nozzles into the holds while she had the baby in her arms. The dock operator was a new man; he couldn’t get the nozzle into position; Reesa put the baby down to shove the recalcitrant nozzle.

She shoved too hard.

She lost her footing and tumbled. She only fell two or three meters, and it was onto the yielding grain—but that was enough. When Viktor frantically scrambled down after her she, was moaning, and there was blood soaking into the top layers of grain.

They got her to the hospital in time to save the baby. It was premature, of course, but a healthy young girl for all that; there was every chance the newborn would survive. And so would Reesa, but she would be a long time recovering.

Definitely, she would not be making the next voyage with her husband and the kids. When Reesa’s mother came over, aching and complaining, she seemed to consider it all Viktor’s fault, too. It was the first time he had thought of Roz McGann as a mother-in-law. He accepted all blame. “I shouldn’t have let her do that,” he admitted sadly. “Thank God she’s going to be all right, anyway.”

“God,” Roz McGann sniffed. “What do you know about God?”

Viktor stared at the woman, feeling he had somehow missed the thread of the conversation. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about God,” she said firmly. “Why didn’t you marry Reesa properly? In church? With a priest?”

Viktor blinked, astonished. “You mean with Freddy Stockbridge?

“I mean properly. Why do you think we’re having all these troubles, Viktor? We’ve turned away from religion. Now we’re paying for it!”

Later on, walking away from the hospital in the moonless Newmanhome night, Viktor found himself perplexed. He knew, of course, that there had been a religious revival on Newmanhome—half a dozen of them, in fact. The Sunni Moslems and the Shi’ites hadn’t stopped splintering when they broke into two groups; they schismed again over which way was East, and almost did it again over the calendar. (How could you set the time of that first sighting of the new moon that began Ramadan when there was no moon to sight?) The Baptists had refused to be ecumenical with the Unitarians; the Church of Rome had separated itself from Greek Orthodox and Episcopalian. Even Captain Bu had declared himself a born-again Christian, and every other soul on Newmanhome tragically doomed to eternal hellfire.

By the third year after the spectral shift there were twenty-eight separate religious establishments on Newmanhome, claiming fourteen hundred members—divided in everything, except in their unanimous distaste for the three thousand other colonists who belonged to no church at all.

When Viktor looked in on his father he found the old man sitting by himself in the doorway of his home, gazing at the sky—and drinking.

“Oh, shit,” Viktor said, stopping short and scowling at his father.

His father looked up at him, unconcerned. “Have a drink,” he said. “It isn’t ropy vine, it’s made out of potatoes. It won’t kill you.”

Viktor curtly refused the drink, but he sat down, watching his father with some puzzlement mixed in with the anger. The old man didn’t really seem drunk. He seemed somber. Weary. Most of all he seemed abstracted, as though there were something on his mind that wouldn’t go away. “Reesa’s going to be all right, I think,” Viktor volunteered—angrily, since Pal Sorricaine hadn’t had the decency to ask.

His father nodded. “I know. I was at the hospital until they said she was out of danger. She’s a good strong woman, Vik. You did a good thing when you married her.”

Baffled, slightly mollified, too, Viktor said, “So you decided to come back here and get drunk to celebrate.”

“Trying, anyway,” Pal said cheerfully. “It isn’t seeming to work.”

“What is the matter with everybody?” Viktor exploded. “The whole town’s going queer! I heard people fighting with each other over, for God’s sake, whether there was one God or three! And nobody’s got a smile on his face—”

“Do you know what day it is?”

“Hell, of course I do. It’s the fifteenth of Winter, isn’t it?”

“It’s the day New Argosy was supposed to arrive,” his father told him. “I wasn’t the only one drinking last night. Everybody was feeling pretty lousy about it—only maybe I had more reason than most.”

“Sure,” Viktor said in disgust. “You’ve always got a reason. You can’t figure out why the stars flare, you don’t know what’s happening on Nebo, you’re all bent out of shape because of the spectral shifts—so you get drunk. Any reason’s a good reason to get a load on, isn’t it?”

“So I find it, yes,” his father said comfortably.

“Oh, hell, Dad! What’s the use of worrying about all those far-off things? Why can’t you get yourself straight and live in the life we’ve got, instead of screwing yourself around about things a million kilometers away that really don’t affect us here anyway?”

His father looked at him soberly and then poured himself another drink. “You don’t know everything, Vik,” he observed. “Do you know where Billy Stockbridge is?”

“Don’t have a clue! Don’t care. I’m talking about you.”

“He’s arranging for a town meeting tomorrow. We’ve got something to tell them, and I guess you’d say it really does affect us. We’ve been monitoring the insolation pretty carefully for about a month now, ever since Billy first saw something funny about it.”

“What’s funny?”

“I don’t actually mean ‘funny,’ ” his father said apologetically. “I’m afraid there isn’t any fun in it at all. We decided not to say anything until we were absolutely sure; we didn’t want everybody getting upset unless they absolutely had to—”

“Say anything about what, damn you?”

“About the insolation, Vik. It’s dropping. The sun’s radiating less heat and light every day. Pretty soon people will notice it. Pretty soon—”

He stopped and thought for a moment, then poured himself another drink.

“Pretty soon,” he said, holding the glass up to look at it, “it’s going to be getting cold around here.”

 

 

 

CHAPTER 9

 

 

Although Wan-To was vastly more than any human, he did have some human traits—even some that some humans might have considered endearing. He took the same joys in a job well done as any human hobbyist.

So when he finished putting his star-moving project together, he took a little time to watch it run. It gave him pleasure to see how well his matter analogues had carried out their tasks. The star clusters he had selected were all in motion now, and picking up speed. Each of the stars involved was dimming slightly—naturally enough, as much of each star’s energy was going into the manufacture of graviscalars rather than radiating away as light and heat. Each star carried with it its planets, moons, comets, and asteroids, all caught up in the graviscalar sweep. His five matter analogues were still there. He could talk to them and give them further instructions if he had any to give. But they had slowed to standby mode, waiting out the time until their program called on them to go into action again.

More than that, it was working! He saw with glee that his combative relatives had seen what he had wanted them to see and done just as he had planned for them to do. Of the five star groups Wan-To had sent on their way, two had already been zapped in toto by one or another of his colleagues, each single star torn apart. Two others were under attack. That amused Wan-To. Obviously somebody had come to the desired conclusion that he was in one of those fugitive stars, trying to make a getaway in that unlikely fashion. Well, they would give that up by and by, he was sure. The systems run by Doppels One and Four were now history, and those of Doppels Three and Five were being hit—though not at all with the first enthusiasm—and would no doubt soon be gone, as well.

The trouble was, he found that watching the project operate was not nearly as interesting as making it in the first place—just like any human hobbyist. Wan-To was beginning to feel bored.

And lonely.

 

When Wan-To couldn’t stand the loneliness anymore, the first one he called was Ftt. Ftt was a pretty safe opponent—if he really was an opponent—because he wasn’t all that powerful, or all that smart. Wan-To had created him toward the end of his efforts to make company for himself, by which time he had realized the dangers of making exact copies. Of course, even the handicapped ones might develop in ways he hadn’t planned, but he didn’t really think there was much to fear from Ftt.

It didn’t matter what he thought, in the event. There was no answer from Ftt; not from him, and not from either of the other two silent ones, either.

That gave Wan-To some pause. One of them, Pooketih, was hardly more threatening than little Ftt. But the remaining one of the silent group was Mromm, and he was something quite different. Wan-To had made him second, right after he had made Haigh-tik, and although he had begun to be cautious in how much of himself he copied into his offspring, Mromm still had a lot of shrewdness and powers not much less than Wan-To’s own. Mromm was very capable—almost as capable as Wan-To himself—of maintaining silence until he had a good target to aim at.

Wan-To was beginning to feel uneasy.

When he tried again it was to the dumbest and weakest of the lot, Wan-Wan-Wan, and Wan-Wan-Wan didn’t answer either. In his case, Wan-To considered, it wasn’t likely he was lying in wait. Something had happened to him. Wan-Wan-Wan had tried calling Wan-To, and if he didn’t respond now the chances were very good that Wan-Wan-Wan wasn’t with them anymore. That angered Wan-To; who of his offspring would be mean enough to kill off poor Wan-Wan-Wan?

The answer was, any of them. Given a good reason, he would have done it himself.

Wan-To persevered—cautiously—and by and by he did get some responses.

But when he finished talking to the ones who responded, he knew very little more than before. Merrerret and Hghumm said they were shocked that anyone would do anything like that. So did Floom-eppit, Gorrrk, and Gghoom-ekki, but they added that they suspected Wan-To himself.

Of course, they all put their own individual personalities into what they said. They did have individual personalities. Wan-To had made them that way. He had randomized some of the traits he had given them—a sort of Monte Carlo process, familiar to Earthly mathematicians—and so Floom-eppit was a joker, Hghumm a tedious bore, Gorrrk, an unstoppable talker if you gave him the chance. It took Wan-To a long time to get rid of Gorrrk, and then he faced the one he was most worried about.

Haigh-tik was his first-born, and the one most like himself.

That didn’t mean they were exactly the same. Even identical copies began to vary with time and the “chemistry” of the stars they inhabited; the dichotomy between nature and nurture was strong among Wan-To and his kind, just as on Earth. Wan-To was very cautious talking to Haigh-tik. After they had exchanged remarks on the flare stars (neither exactly accusing the other, but neither excluding the possibility, either), Haigh-tik offered:

“Have you noticed? Several groups of stars are moving.”

“Oh, yes,” Wan-To said smoothly. “I’ve been wondering what was going on.”

“Yes,” Haigh-tik said. There was silence for a moment, then he added, “All these things worry me. I’d hate it if we messed up this galaxy, too. I don’t want to move. I really like it where I am.”

“It’s a nice star, then?” Wan-To asked, not missing a beat. “I know you like the big, hot ones.”

“Why take a dwarf when you can have a giant?” Haigh-tik responded, with the equivalent of a shrug. “They’re much better. You have so much space. And so much power.”

Wan-To gave the equivalent of a silent and unseen nod. He knew what Haigh-tik liked, all right. He had liked the same things himself, when he created Haigh-tik—before he had decided that moving to a fresh star every few million years, when the big, bright ones were bound to go unstable, was too much trouble. He offered, “But, tell me, Haigh-tik, are you sure you’ll get out before it collapses? Those O types burn up all their hydrogen so fast, and then—”

“Who said anything about an O?” Haigh-tik sneered.

Wan-To’s “heart” leaped with exultation, but he kept his tone level. “Any of the big, hot young ones—they can all trap you.”

“Not this one,” Haigh-tik boasted. “I’ve just moved into it; it’s got a good long time yet. Longer,” he added, in a tone that fell just short of being menacing, “than a lot of us are going to have, if all this sniping at each other doesn’t stop.”

 

As soon as they had “hung up,” Wan-To, highly pleased, began a search of his star catalogue. What he was looking for was a star of the kind human astronomers called a “Wolf-Rayet”—even hotter and younger than an O—and the newest of that kind he could find.

Then, with a certain sentimental regret, he summoned his clouds of graviphotons and graviscalars and sent them swarming to the likeliest candidate. Poor Haigh-tik! But Wan-To was only doing what had to be done, he reassured himself.

If there was one thing that could frighten Wan-To it was the thought of his own extinction. Stars, galaxies, even the universe itself—they all had fixed lifetimes, and he could accept the loss of any of them with equanimity. If all of his comrades were blown up he could stand that, too—he could always hive off new sections of himself for company (being very careful about what powers the new ones had, this time).

He thought hard for a time about that unpleasant subject. Wan-To was a great student of astrophysics and cosmology. It wasn’t an abstract science to him. It was the stuff his life was made of. He understood the physics of the great and small . . .

And he could foresee a time when things could begin to get quite unpleasant for him, even if he survived the present squabbles.

 

When that particular Wolf-Rayet star was history, Wan-To (metaphorically crossing his nonexistent “fingers”) called Haigh-tik on the ERP communicator again. And was very disappointed when Haigh-tik answered.

Haigh-tik had lied to him about his star!

But Wan-To saw the humor of it, and was amused—yes, and a little proud of his first-born offspring, too.

And Pal Sorricaine got his wish. Earthly astronomers did, in fact, adopt the term “Sorricaine-Mtiga stars” to describe that class of anomalous objects . . . right up to the time when their own Sun became one.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 10

 

 

Quinn Sorricaine-Mcgann was not only the first “legitimate” child of Viktor and Reesa—they nicknamed her “Nab,” for “Not a Bastard”—she was also the last. Most of Reesa made a complete recovery, but she could never have another child. But considering Newmanhome’s prospective future as little Quinn was growing up, neither Reesa nor Viktor was sure they wanted another.

Newmanhome wasn’t a paradise anymore. It was getting definitely colder. The growing season on South Continent had shortened, and that was the end of spring wheat and long-ripening soy. The uniform of the day had changed, even in the settlement: no more shorts and shirts all year around. It was sweaters and shoes, and if it had not been for the flood of hot geothermal water that came from the wells—more and more of them every year, as the colonists foresaw the increasing need for power as well as heat—their homes would have been chilly.

The skies at night were woefully changed. The stars had slid about the sky and changed color: In one direction they were definitely blue-white, in the other yellowish red, and in between there was a growing band of no stars at all, except for the handful that were traveling with them.

 

On Quinn’s thirteenth birthday—she was then the equivalent of a healthy Earthly seven-year-old—her father was just returning from Christmas Island with a shipload of evacuees; the Archipelago wasn’t fit for human beings anymore. He was anxious to be there for the birthday, but storms had delayed them. It was a nasty trip: high waves, three hundred refugees in space that really wasn’t meant to hold more than a quarter of that, and most of them seasick most of the way. As he entered the harbor at Homeport snow was falling, and the whole city was covered in white.

He hurried to his house and found Quinn happily making a snowman, while the little girl’s aunt, Edwina, stood by. Edwina was a grown-up young woman now, with a family of her own. They kissed, but Viktor was frowning. “I didn’t expect to see you here,” he said. After Edwina had married Billy Stockbridge, Pal’s disciple, the two of them had emigrated to South Continent, where there was a need for workers in drilling geothermal wells.

“They closed the project down,” Edwina said. “The way the weather’s going, it wouldn’t have been producing power in time to save any of the crops.”

Viktor nodded soberly. South Continent had been the first part of Newmanhome’s inhabited areas to feel the effects of the cooling sun. Winter came early. The vast farmlands were fertile as always, but when a killing frost came the farms died. “Where’s Reesa?”

“Don’t get too cold,” Edwina called to Quinn and her own children, who nodded without looking up from their work.

“Reesa? Oh, Jake came by for her a couple of hours ago. They’re taking Father’s refresher course; I expect Billy’s there, too.”

Viktor frowned. Of course, Jake Lundy had to be accorded some sort of status—would you call him a friend of the family? Well, of some parts of the family, since he was the father of one of Edwina’s children, too. (The man was really excessively active, Viktor thought.) It was quite normal for him to come around to see his daughter, but Viktor hadn’t known he was spending time with his daughter’s mother again. “What refresher course?” he asked.

“Dad’s course. The one he’s giving on space piloting. No, not astrophysics this time; I said piloting. They’re using the old trainers.”

“For what?” Viktor demanded, astonished.

“What else could you use them for but practicing space piloting?” his sister asked witheringly. “Don’t ask me, anyway. You’d know more about that sort of thing than I would, and it’s just an idea of Dad’s.”

Her contemptuous tone made Viktor blink in surprise. Edwina had always been Daddy’s girl. She had consistently taken Pal Sorricaine’s side against Viktor—probably, Viktor believed, because she had been too little to be aware of what was going on when their mother died. He said, as tactfully as he could, “I thought you liked Dad’s ideas—whatever this one is.”

“It’s not my business, is it?” she replied with a shrug. “I think the kids ought to come in now,” she fretted. “Vik? We’re going to have a birthday party for Quinn right at sundown—they ought to be back by then. But I’d really appreciate it if you could take the kids out of the way until then, so I can get things ready.”

“Sure,” Viktor said, still looking at her with that inquiring gaze.

She flushed and then said angrily, “Oh, what the hell. They can do what they want, but I don’t have to like it. What’s the point? What’s happening is obviously Divine will!”

 

What Viktor really wanted to do was to find out what his father’s “refresher course” was all about, but since it was Quinn’s birthday, after all, that would have to wait. As a good father/uncle, he took Quinn and Edwina’s three littler ones on a tour of his ship as she lay at dockside.

It was one of his better ideas. The children were thrilled. There were serious stinks in the passenger holds, where the work crews were doing their best to sluice them clean after the nasty voyage and only beginning to make a dent in the filth, but the bad smells only made the children giggle and complain. Then he took them down into the engine room, where the hydrogen turbines provided the force to spin the ship’s rotors against the wind. That was a different kind of stink, oil and hot metal, and the big machines were very satisfying to look at for young children.

Viktor was having as good a time as the children were, but when he stopped to think he wasn’t quite at ease. It wasn’t so much that Reesa seemed to be getting unexpectedly friendly again with Jake Lundy—that was a minor irritation, sure, but Viktor wasn’t really jealous. It wasn’t even that the outlook for the colony was grim and getting worse; they had all had to factor that prospect into their lives long since. What was mostly on Viktor’s mind was his younger sister, Edwina. It was getting obvious that Edwina was attracted to a new sort of cult that had grown up on Newmanhome. The cult wasn’t exactly a religion. It wasn’t any sort of conventional one, anyhow; it cut across the various sects. As far as Viktor could tell it was more mystical than religious: Its adherents seemed to believe that whatever had made the stars flare and then some of them move, and their own sun begin to dim, was, if not God, at least a supernatural power; and perhaps they shouldn’t thwart it. Viktor knew it had made some stormy scenes in Edwina’s marriage. Billy’s point of view was that if they didn’t thwart—whatever it was—they would all die; Edwina’s seemed to be that if that was what the Divine wanted them to do, then that was all right, too.

It was not only the weather that was turning bad on Newmanhome. Everything else seemed to be going sour, too.

When he brought the kids back to Edwina’s home Reesa was there before him, helping to set the table with paper favors. She wasn’t alone. Billy, Pal Sorricaine, and Jake Lundy were in one corner of the living room, having a private drink. Reesa looked up and nodded to Viktor as he came in, but her attention went mostly to the children. “You go in and get cleaned up,” she scolded her daughter. “You shouldn’t be seeing any of this until it’s ready, anyway.” And then she lifted her lips to Viktor for a kiss.

It wasn’t much of a kiss. He was aware of Jake Lundy gazing benignly at them and it made him uncomfortable. “Can I help?” he asked, as much to reproach the other men as to make a genuine offer of service.

“You already did by taking the kids off our hands,” Reesa said absently, gazing around. “Oh, the presents!” she said, remembering. “I’ll go home to get them. Take your coat off, Viktor. Bily’ll give you a drink if you want it.”

The drink was applejack with apple juice. When Viktor had one he looked challengingly at his father. Pal Sorricaine shook his head. “Just the juice, Vik,” he said, holding up his glass. “Taste it if you want to, but I can’t afford to drink now. There’s too much to do.”

“What, exactly?” Viktor asked. “What’s this about giving refresher courses in space navigation? Do you still think they’ll let you take a ship to Nebo?”

“They should,” his father told him seriously. “There’s still anomalous radiation coming from there, and I’m positive it has something to do with what’s happened—it started when everything else started, and that’s no coincidence.”

He paused to light a thin cigar. “But they won’t, of course,” he finished. He didn’t have to say why; the subject had been debated at length. Most of the colonists thought it was a waste of scarce resources—New Mayflower couldn’t be used, because it was their source of microwave energy, and even New Ark might be needed for something else, sometime. And a lot of the rest were filled with that silly antiscience feeling that had been growing—the “Divine will” people, like Edwina.

“What’s going to happen,” Billy Stockbridge said, “is that we’re going to get some new fuel for the microwave generators. Mayflower’s antimatter is running out. We can’t get along without the microwave power.

“But we’re digging more geothermal shafts,” Viktor objected.

Billy shrugged. “Maybe when all the shafts are down and the generators are installed we won’t need microwave anymore, but that’s years away. So we’re going to cannibalize Ark.” Viktor blinked at him uncomprehendingly. “For fuel,” Billy explained. “New Ark still has some residual antimatter left over from its trip. We can tow Ark to meet Mayflower in orbit and transfer its fuel to add to Mayflower’s.”

“Holy shit,” Viktor said, his glass forgotten in his hand. But when he thought about it, it made sense, if one didn’t mind taking risks. Certainly transferring the reserve fuel would be hard, dangerous work. They would be handling Ark’s highly lethal, extraordinarily touchy remaining antimatter store in ways that had never been intended—but if the project worked it would give Homeport extra years of life, even if the sun continued to cool.

He stared at his father. “Is that really going to happen?”

Pal Sorricaine nodded. “The project has already been approved. We’re making more oxy-hydrogen fuel for the old shuttle right now, and the ship’s still operational. Of course, it hasn’t been used for years, since the last crew rotation—”

Viktor didn’t let him finish. “I want to go along,” he declared.

“I thought you would,” his father said mildly. “So do Captain Bu and Captain Rodericks—” New Ark’s original commander on the long-ago voyage from Earth “—and, naturally, Billy and Jake and Reesa. But we’ll need at least twenty volunteers. We’ll be there at least six months, and then—”

“And then what?” Viktor demanded.

His father looked at him speculatively. Jake and Billy kept their eyes carefully averted. “And then,” his father said, “maybe we can get around to other important things. Now here comes Reesa, so let’s get this party started. Billy? Can you play “Happy Birthday” on your guitar?”

 

The launch was scary and bruising, but it got them there. Then the hard work started.

It was the first time in more than thirty Newmanhome years that Viktor had been inside New Mayflower. Muscles used to planet living had forgotten the skills of operating in microgravity. He bashed himself a dozen times against walls and ceilings before he learned to control his movements.

In the rush of landing, the colonists had not left a tidy ship, and the skeleton crews that had remained aboard to care for the MHD generators hadn’t bothered to waste much time in cleaning up. Trash was everywhere outside the tiny space the crews had occupied. Broken bits of furnishings, discarded papers. Spoiled food. Even, in the freezer section, a dead horse, long mummified but still direly stinking if you came too close. The shuttle left a dozen of its crew there to start preparing Mayflower’s fuel systems for replenishing. Then Viktor and fourteen others pushed off for the slow orbital drift around to Ark.

Down below, Newmanhome was spread out for them to see. It wasn’t blue anymore. Most of it was white, and not all the white was cloud tops. The oceans nearest the pole had already begun to freeze over. Some mountain lakes were now glaciers, and there were immense storms over most of Great Ocean. Viktor and Reesa gazed down at the cloud tops where Homeport seemed to be in the process of being battered by another winter storm. The town had already begun digging in—it was easier to keep warm underground than in the vicious winds of the surface.

“I hope Edwina’s keeping the kids covered up,” Reesa murmured.

From behind them, Jake Lundy said comfortingly, “She’s a good mother, Reesa, even if she’s getting some strange ideas. And anyway, once we get this done there’ll be plenty of energy—for a while, anyway.”

When they entered New Ark it was even worse than Mayflower had been. Its crews had had no reason to leave a livable ship at all. The internal power generators still worked, supplied with the mere trickle of energy they needed from the tiny fraction of Ark’s store of antimatter that remained in the engines. So, for all those abandoned years, the ship had been kept—well, not warm, but at least above the freezing point. Ark’s freezers, with their untouched reserve supplies of organisms and cell cultures, were still in good shape. What was mostly missing was light. Ark’s colonists had thriftily removed nearly all the light tubes, along with everything else that could be cannibalized from the ship, for a more immediate use down below on Newmanhome. Even the station-keeping thrusters were still operational—everyone sighed with relief at that, because otherwise their task of transferring fuel would have been much harder.

Indeed, there was enough energy left in the main-drive fuel chamber and station-keepers to send Ark completely around its solar system—if anyone had wanted to do that.

When they fired up the drive for the rendezvous with Mayflower it didn’t protest. It began pouring out its floods of plasma as though its engines had been last used only days before. Ark crept toward Mayflower in its orbit, and the work crews began the hard work of cutting up the interior bulkheads and carefully—oh, very carefully—beginning to dismantle the restraining magnets that held its antimatter fuel in place.

There was no room for error in that. If the antimatter had been allowed to brush against normal matter, even for a moment, even the barest touch, the resulting blast would have scattered all of it—and people on Newmanhome would have seen a major flare star in their sky, just before they were scorched blind in the blast.

So Captains Bu and Rodericks and the three surviving Engineer Officers from the two ships—Wilma Granczek had died giving birth to her fourth child on the Archipelago—began the precarious work of shifting the fuel.

It wasn’t easy. When Ark was designed, no provision had been made for such a project. Of course, it wasn’t only the fuel that had to be moved, it was the magnetic restraints that held it free of contact with anything else, and the steel shell that surrounded the captor fields, and the power source that kept the fields fed and working.

There was no way to move that sort of awkward mass through the ship’s ports. They had to cut a hole in the side of Ark, to get the stuff out, while the other crew was cutting another just as big in the hull of Mayflower to insert it there.

 

Outside the ship, secured by cables, Viktor wielded the great plasma torch, Jake Lundy at his side.

He hadn’t planned it that way. He didn’t seek out Lundy’s company. It was, he thought in an abstract way, just considering the possibilities, better to have Lundy out there with him than inside with, possibly, Reesa—though what they could have been doing, in the cramped confines of the livable part of Ark would hardly have been much, anyway. But he was getting really tired of Jake Lundy’s company. It even crossed Viktor’s mind for a moment that it wouldn’t be awful, really, if Lundy’s cables had somehow broken and the man had drifted helplessly away into space, never to return. He even thought, though not seriously—he told himself that of course it wasn’t a serious thought—how easy it would be to misaim the plasma torch, now eating through the tough steel of the hull, to burn away Lundy’s cables .

He didn’t mean that, of course. He reassured himself that that was so. His marriage to Reesa was comfortable; they were used to each other; they shared a love for the kids, and the habits of a dozen years. In any case, he was never jealous concerning Reesa—as he had been, for instance, of the incomparable Marie-Claude Stockbridge.

To take his mind off such matters he gazed around. From outside the ship Viktor could see Newmanhome spread out below them. He didn’t like to look there; the spreading white at the poles was ice—something that Newmanhome had never seen before. Looking at the fearsome skies was even worse. The sun was still the brightest object around, but woefully dimmer than before. The cherry coal of the brown dwarf, Nergal, was almost as bright, but the sun’s other planets had dimmed with their primary. The eleven normal stars still shone as bright as ever. But there were so few of them! And the rest of the universe, separating itself into great colored clusters, red and blue, had changed into something wonderful and weird and worrying.

He was glad when their shift ended and they were back inside, though there wasn’t much there to take comfort in, either. The shuttle had been too full of people to leave room for amenities—even for food; though fortunately Ark’s freezers still had their stocks of frozen spare animals. But one did get tired of eating armadillo, or bat, or goat . . .

When they had raped the side of Ark there was little to do until Ark completed its slow crawl toward its younger sister ship.

“We could have used the main drives,” Captain Bu fretted.

“Don’t need them!” Captain Rodericks said sharply. “There’s plenty of power in the auxiliary thrusters. Anyway, this is my ship, Bu, and we’ll do it my way.”

“The slow way,” Bu sneered.

“The safe way,” Rodericks said resolutely. “Talk about something else!”

But the other things they had to talk about were not cheering. Word from Homeport was that the community was making progress in digging itself underground, where the soil would be their best insulation against the cooling winds; the clothing factories were doing their best to turn out parkas and gloves and wool hats, things that had never been needed on Newmanhome before.

They were cold inside the hulk of Ark, too. Bu wanted to cut off power to the freezer sections to use it to warm their little living quarters, but Captain Rodericks refused. His grounds were simple: “Some day we may need what’s in those freezers. Anyway, it’s my ship.” So they huddled together, usually in the old control room, and spent their time watching Mayflower drift nearer and gazing, through screens and fiber-optic tubes, at the scary skies.

It was Furhet Gaza, the welding expert, who said, “Everybody! Look at those stars.”

“What stars?” Reesa asked.

“Our own stars! The ones that aren’t shifting. They aren’t any dimmer, are they?”

“They don’t look that way,” Billy Stockbridge said cautiously. “What about it?”

“Well,” Gaza said earnestly, “maybe we’re making a big mistake. Maybe we shouldn’t wreck our ships! Maybe we should get everybody back on board and head for one of them.”

Billy Stockbridge gave him a look of disdain, but it was Captain Rodericks who said angrily, “That’s stupid talk, Gaza! What you say is impossible. In the first place, there are too many people on Newmanhome now; we wouldn’t all fit in what’s left of this old ship. In the second place, how would we get everybody up here? We don’t have a fleet of a thousand shuttles to carry them.”

“It’s worse than that, Captain,” Billy Stockbridge put in.

He got a hostile look from Furhet Gaza. “Worse how?” Gaza demanded.

“We don’t even know if those other stars have planets,” Viktor offered, but Billy was shaking his head.

“That’s not it, either. It doesn’t matter if they do have planets; they wouldn’t be any use to us. I’ve checked those stars. They’re dimming, too. It’s just that what we’re seeing is the way they were up to six years ago, so they don’t look much different—but they’re different now, Gaza. And anyway—”

He stopped there. It was Captain Rodericks who said, “Anyway what, Stockbridge?”

Billy shrugged. “Anyway,” he said, “we’ve got a better use for whatever fuel is left in the drive.”

“You mean try to take the fuel out of the drive unit, too? But that’s hard, Stockbridge; we’ve agreed that we’ll just shift the reserves. That’s where most of it is, anyway—enough to power Ark’s generators for another five or ten years, with a little luck. We don’t need to make our job any harder than it is already.”

Billy pursed his lips. “That’s true.” And that was all he said.

 

Outside of the endless work of cutting metal and preparing the fuel for the move, the biggest job was staying alive—which meant scavenging for food in Ark’s freezers. Viktor went with Jake Lundy as his partner when it was his turn. He didn’t think about reasons why; he simply volunteered his services, certainly not to forestall Reesa doing the same.

He still felt a certain tension in Lundy’s presence, but Lundy seemed quite at ease. He had done the food-scavenging bit before, and was friendly and forgiving when Viktor tried to pull one of the freezer drawers out and couldn’t work the catch, not at all like the ones he had seen on Mayflower. “Here, let an expert do it,” Lundy said amiably, showing what he meant with a quick twist and pull.

“That’s fine,” Viktor said sourly as the drawer slid easily out. It did take an expert to handle Ark’s freezers, because in Viktor’s opinion they had been badly designed in the first place. Mayflower’s had been a generation later, and a generation better. Mayflower had sensibly kept the entire freezer section at temperatures between ambient and liquid gas, while Ark simply clustered drawers of freezer compartments in chambers that looked like an Earthly morgue.

Viktor stood uselessly by while Lundy unsealed the drawer. Clouds of white vapor came off the contents as he poked around with the thick gloves. “Oh, shit, Viktor,” he said in disgust. “Didn’t you check the labels? This stuff’s no good, unless you expect us to eat sperm samples from the small mammals.”

“What labels?” Viktor demanded.

Lundy just gave him a patient look, then resealed the drawer again. He ran his finger over the plaques on a couple of adjacent drawers to rub the frost off, then said, “Here. This one might do. It’s got turtle eggs and, let’s see, what’s this? Some kind of fish, I guess. Hold the sack for me while I pull them out.”

Carefully he lifted out the plastic-sealed objects, unidentifiable under the coating of frost already forming on them, and placed them in the tote bag. “That’ll do for now, I guess,” he said when the sack was half-full. He resealed the remaining contents of the drawer and turned, ready to leave, when he saw the way Viktor was looking at him. “Is something the matter?” he inquired politely.

Viktor hesitated. Then, without knowing in advance he was going to say it, he said, “Do you mind telling me what’s going on?”

 

Lundy looked at him thoughtfully, then turned and absently rubbed the plaque on the door clean. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“The hell you don’t! I’ve asked Reesa, and she won’t tell me a thing. Neither will Billy. But I know damn well there’s some kind of secret! At first I thought—”

Viktor paused. He was unwilling to say that his first thought when he saw Reesa and Lundy whispering together had been the—well, not the jealous feeling that something was cooking between them, but certainly a lot of curiosity about just what it was they whispered about. He finished, “I thought all sorts of things, but none of them make sense.”

“What sorts of things?”

“I don’t know! That’s why I’m asking!” And then he took a wild plunge into speculation. “Is it Nebo, by any chance? I know Billy’s always had this idea that we had to go there. He got it from my father, of course. But it’s crazy.”

“Why do you think it’s crazy?” Lundy asked, sounding interested and not at all defensive.

“Well—it just is. What could we do if we got there?”

“We could try to find out about those anomalous radiation readings, for one thing,” Lundy said seriously.

“Why?”

“That,” Lundy told him, for the first time looking strained, “is what people might want to go to Nebo to find out. I don’t know what. I only know that something’s going on there, and it might be important.”

“But—” Viktor shook his head. “What would be the point? Even if the others would let you take Ark there, I mean? You can’t see anything through the cloud cover.”

“There’s radar,” Lundy pointed out. “And if that didn’t settle anything, we could—” He hesitated, then finished, “We could always drop a party onto the surface of Nebo to find out.”

“But—but—but our job is to transfer fuel to Mayflower, not go gallivanting off to satisfy somebody’s curiosity!”

“We’re doing that part of the job,” Lundy pointed out. “Then, when it’s done, we’ll still have drive fuel in Ark. We can’t transfer that! Once it’s in the drive itself it’s too dangerous. So when we’ve finished what we came for—then we can take a vote.”

“On what? On taking Ark to Nebo?”

Lundy shrugged.

“And you’ve been planning this for—how long?” Viktor demanded.

“Since Reesa first suggested it,” Lundy said simply. Reesa! Viktor stared at him with his mouth open. Lundy went on: “Now, the question is, are you going to keep your mouth shut about it until we’ve finished the fuel transfer?”

“I don’t know,” Viktor said wretchedly.

 

But, in the event, he did keep his mouth shut. He didn’t say a word. He ate the food they had brought back—the fish turned out to be almost too bony to eat, but the turtle eggs, roasted, were delicious—and all the time he was watching his wife and wondering what other surprises were hidden inside that familiar head.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 11

 

 

The fifth of Wan-To’s doppels did not have a real name. It wasn’t important enough. When Wan-To addressed it at all it was simply as Matter Copy Number Five. Still, Five was fairly important to the remnants of the human race on Newmanhome, because it happened to be the one that had set up shop on the scorched little planet the people of Newmanhome called Nebo.

Although Five was certainly very tiny, primitive and stupid by Wan-To’s standards, it was quite capable of doing everything Wan-To ordered it to do. It was even capable of figuring out how to do things Wan-To himself had never gone to the trouble of figuring out before.

There’s a human story that describes that situation pretty well. Problem: A human army lieutenant has the task of erecting a thirty-foot flagpole when he only has a twenty-foot length of rope and no hoisting machines. How does he do it? Answer: He calls over his highest-ranking noncom and says, “Sergeant, put up that flagpole.”

So when Five received its orders it exercised its built-in ingenuity to carry them out.

It had to start pretty much from scratch. It had no experience of this bizarre kind of environment (it had no experience at all, of course, except what Wan-To had implanted in its memories). It was not deterred by the odd qualities of this “planet” (solid matter! And an “atmosphere”! Five understood the concept of a gas well enough, but these particular gases were so incredibly cold—hardly more than eight or nine hundred Kelvin). Then, the task of manipulating matter all by itself was not really easy. There were so many kinds of matter. There were all those things called “elements” and all their molecular combinations and isotopic variations and interacting relationships. It was definitely a nasty job. But someone had to do it—Wan-To had so decreed.

The first thing Five had to do, starting with its control of magnetic and electrostatic forces, and its limited (but adequate) supply of gravitational particles, was simple excavation. It had to wrench out large quantities of matter—ill assorted, full of things Five didn’t want at all—from the surface of the planet (and from some sources pretty far below the surface) for separation into the basic building blocks it needed; call them ores. To separate the various kinds of useful things out of the ores, it invented what humans might have called a sort of mass spectrometer: vaporized matter passed through a sieve of forces that pulled out each separate atom, according to its weight and characteristics, and deposited them one at a time (but very rapidly!) in “storage bins” until such time as Five was ready to put them together in the combinations and shapes it needed. And it needed so many different shapes of matter! It needed antennae to locate and lock onto the various nearby stars it was meant to carry along. It needed chambers to contain the forces that would move them; it needed sensors to make sure they were moving properly; it needed a separate kind of antenna, just to keep in communication with its master, Wan-To.

And it needed them all in a hurry, because Wan-To was not patient. Wan-To took for granted that the doppel, Five, was moving as rapidly as possible. Five slaved to do so. It wasn’t that it was afraid of punishment. The heart of an animal doesn’t pump because it is afraid its master will be angry if it stops; it pumps because that is what it does.

When, rarely, Wan-To bothered to call up to check on progress Five was not fearful. It was only happy to report that it was doing its job.

When you came right down to it, all Five had to do, on a planet that had nothing, was to create an entire industrial complex. It took Five several weeks, but before the castings had quite cooled on the last of its guidance antennae it had already begun reaching out to all of its chosen eleven stars. It wasn’t hard for Five—not for a near (if severely abridged) copy of Wan-To himself.

Five didn’t like to question Wan-To. (Wan-To hadn’t instructed it to ask questions, only to get the work done.) So Five had to make a number of decisions on its own. Wan-To’s orders had been to accelerate this little group of stars. Well, that certainly meant to accelerate at least one planet with them—namely, the one he was on. But what about the other planets, satellites, and lesser things?

Five pondered that for a long time, then decided to play it safe and take everything. Of course, that made its job a little harder. Now there weren’t just a dozen bodies to move. There were roughly half a million, it counted, including all the asteroids and comets big enough to bother with.

It was a daunting job, but Five was not daunted. Five was quite capable of doing all sorts of intricate and difficult things, only not very smart about what things to do.

 

From time to time Wan-To did communicate with his one surviving matter analogue. Five wasn’t much company, but there were some good things about carrying on a conversation with it. The most important of them was that that kind of conversation was perfectly safe, because the thing was a dolt. It could never threaten Wan-To.

The bad side of that coin was that talking to the matter analogue was terribly boring. To begin with, it was boringly slow. The matter thing took forever to get a simple sentence out. Anyway, what could such a sluggish, rudimentary thing possibly have to say?

The answer to that was, “Not much.”

At first, Wan-To had been mildly interested by the matter-copy’s reports, especially the ones that were transmitted as “pictures.” Wan-To wasn’t much good at pictures. His perceptions operated in nine spatial dimensions (though, true, six of them were only vestiges), and a flat representation wasn’t much good to him. Also, things with definite boundaries of any kind were scarce in Wan-To’s experience, especially when they didn’t flow or fluctuate. (How stagnant matter was!) It had been an interesting bit of puzzle solving for Wan-To to attach any meaning at all to the pictorial data the matter-copy turned in. Then, when he had gotten used to the ideas of “shapes” and “edges,” the next question was, “What are all these ‘solid’ things good for?” Why were those great shiny arrays Five was building that swayed from horizon to horizon as the planet turned always pointing toward its little star? (“Energy accumulators,” the matter-analogue informed its master—but how odd to be tapping energy from outside the star!) Why those spiraling shapes whose aims converged at a point far beyond the star’s farthest planets? (They were the guides for the graviscalar flow that was pulling the whole group along.) Why the long square structure? or the domed ones? or the ones deep underground? (But you had to have them, Five humbly protested. They sheltered the matter machines that contained the forces that did the job. It was the way it was able to fulfill its mission.)

Of course, Wan-To had left the details of how to do the mission up to the matter-doppel’s own judgment. Wan-To couldn’t be bothered with such details. The matter-copy had been instructed to create a pit of gravitation for that star and its attendant bodies to fall into—endlessly—and it hadn’t been told specifically how. The commissioned officer’s instructions were just to do it, and do it the sergeant had.

That sort of entertainment palled quickly. After a few questions Wan-To began to tire of the answers. Just before Wan-To decided on cutting off communication with the doppel and looking for something more interesting, he asked the important question. “And the stars in your group? Have any survived?”

“Almost all,” Five reported. “Two were damaged some time ago, but there have been no attacks since.”

Wan-To didn’t respond. That was as he had expected. He was just about to cut off, without of course bothering with any such politenesses as a good-bye, when the matter-copy gave its equivalent of a deferential cough. Humbly it told him that it had come across one little phenomenon it hadn’t expected. Nothing in the datastores Wan-To had transferred to him had suggested that small bits of matter might organize themselves into aggregates that seemed to be—well, what else could you call it?—more or less alive.

 

For a long time after he had finished wringing out of the doppel every scrap of information it possessed about this new kind of “life,” Wan-To lay in his plasma core, restlessly writhing, marveling at this interesting new thing. How very odd! From all the matter-copy had observed, these “living” things were quite small, quite rudimentary (human taxonomists would have called them mosses, bacteria, invertebrates, and a few flowering plants), and certainly quite trivial in any large sense.

So, of course, the relevant word was only “interesting.” It certainly was not in any way important. There was surely no way that these things could possibly affect the lives of Wan-To or his like, ever.

Yet it was strange that in all his billions of years of life Wan-To had never come across such a thing before.

True, he rarely bothered with anything concerned with matter—what was the point? And true, he told himself justly, even Wan-To himself was fairly young, as far as his probable life expectancy went. It wasn’t his fault. The universe itself was only about twice as old as Wan-To, though he had already determined that it would survive for a highly exponential number of times that long (and, if he was lucky, he would survive with it). Matter-life was naturally quite transitory. It was also rather new on the scene, he decided, for some quick “ball-park” (not that Wan-To knew anything of ball parks) calculations had suggested to him that it would take quite a while for this matter-life to arise by chance.

He saw how such a thing could happen, though. All it would take was some random combinations of particles that, purely by chance, turned out to have organizing and reproductive capacities.

It was probably not unlike the same random events that, he knew, had brought his own life into being.

 

Actually it had not been Wan-To himself that had been brought into being by those events, but his predecessors. That was an unimportant distinction, though. Wan-To’s predecessor (being so solitary he hadn’t bothered giving himself a name) had made a nearly exact copy of himself when he made Wan-To, and Wan-To had as many memories as his “father” did.

Which, in this case, was not very many. Apart from any other consideration, the proto-Wan-To hadn’t been very smart then—well, he had been an infant, after all! His entire network had hardly amounted to more than two or three hundred billion particles altogether, and none of them fully integrated with the others as yet. But as he had grown over the eons to be very smart indeed, and, quite curious, he had spent a lot of thought in deducing how that event had had to be.

As his galaxy (the old one, the one Wan-To had left when it became uninhabitable) turned on its axis, the leading edge of one of its spiral arms passed through a “density wave,” and a patch of ionized gases was compressed by the shock of contact.

That was just the beginning. It didn’t create Wan-To’s predecessor. It only made it possible for the next nearby event to do so.

That event came when a particular star of a rather rare kind came to the end of its hydrogen-burning life. It had been a very large star, so it used up its hydrogen quite quickly. Then, with most of its hydrogen turned into helium, it was running out of its best fusion fuel and destined for trouble.

The star could, to be sure, go on burning the helium into heavier elements still. But it took four hydrogen nuclei to make one helium, so when you got down to helium there was only a quarter as much fuel to begin with. Worse than that, helium burning doesn’t yield as much energy. Energy was what that old star was beginning to run out of. Energy was what it needed to keep its shape, because it was only the pressure of the terrible heat from within that kept the immense pressure of its outer layers from collapsing into its core.

When the energy from the hydrogen at last ran out, it did collapse.

All that vast mass dropped—“like a stone,” a human being might say, but much faster, and with far vaster impact, than any stone ever dropped on Earth. It struck the core, squeezing it from all directions at once. The core rebounded. Four-fifths of the mass of the star blasted itself into space in that great bursting, with floods of X rays and gammas and neutrinos, as well as ten-million-million-degree heat and blinding light; and as that furiously energetic mass raced through space it struck the already compacted mass of gas that was the womb that held the not-yet-existent precursor of Wan-To.

That was what Earthly astronomers would have called a “supernova.” The humans, too, had wondered about how things began, and they had worked out that their own sun and most others had been born in that way. They rarely saw a real super nova, of course—especially not one in their own galaxy—because human beings didn’t live long enough for that. But they knew that such events happened, over and over, hundreds of millions of times in each galaxy.

They did not, however, ordinarily give rise to anything like a Wan-To.

The supernova that gave birth to Wan-To’s forebear was not any ordinary Type I or Type II. It was of the rare kind Earthly astronomers had named an “Urtrobin supernova,” after the Soviet astronomer who had found the first of its kind in an obscure galaxy in the constellation Perseus. Urtrobin supernovae don’t start with any ordinary supergiant star, a mere twenty or a hundred times as massive as the Earth’s sun. What is required for an Urtrobin supernova is that very rare celestial object, a star that masses as much as two thousand suns put together.

There aren’t many stars like that. A lot of Earthly astronomers refused to believe that any such overbloated body could ever form—at least, they refused until they began to calculate in the relativistic effects and saw that those did in fact make it possible. But when such a supermassive star collapses its explosion does not last for a mere matter of months. It takes as much as a year for it to reach peak brightness. Then it declines to obscurity only over a period of decades.

It was in just such a godlike hammer blow that Wan-To’s ancestor’s wisp of gas was squeezed and drenched. It was enough. The ancestor was born.

Such an event, affecting such a scarce collection of ionized gases, was very rare indeed in the universe. There could not have been very many such beings formed, not in all the dozen billion years since the Big Bang.

Indeed, Wan-To would have thought his unfortunate parent had been very likely the only one . . . if he had not observed the wreck of some distant galaxies and realized that creatures like himself must have done the wrecking.

He did not want his present galaxy wrecked. It was such a chore to move.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 12

 

 

It was a long trip to Nebo, a hundred and twenty hard days, tough times for any small group of people locked into each other’s company. For Viktor the trip was grim.

Black worry began creeping over him as soon as they pulled out of Low Newmanhome Orbit. It got worse. First it was the radio; the surprised, then frantic, then furious calls began to come in from the surface. It got worse still when his sister Edwina got on to plead with him, worst of all when she turned the microphone over to little Tanya. That was pretty close to heartbreaking, the sweet, worried little voice, begging. “Mommy? Daddy Jake? Daddy Viktor? Won’t you please come home?” It sent Reesa fleeing into a dark and empty cargo compartment, and when Viktor found her she was weeping uncontrollably. Then she closed up, would hardly talk at all. Not just Reesa, either. Everyone was having second thoughts; everyone was in a touchy, grouchy mood. By the time Captain Rodericks had inserted Ark into its parking orbit around Nebo and the lander was stocked and ready to take a crew down to the surface, hardly anyone was speaking to anyone else.

In Viktor’s black cloud of worry he kept turning their decision over and over in his mind, asking himself the same nagging questions. Did the kids really need them at home? Well, of course they did, but . . . And did the people need them there, for that matter? Wasn’t it, maybe, their duty to be there, sharing whatever came of this unexpected, this unexplained new calamity that was (maybe) threatening the colony’s very survival? Well, maybe that was so, but still . . .

But still what they were doing was necessary! They had to find out what was happening on Nebo! Didn’t they?

And even if they didn’t, if the whole thing was criminal folly, it was long too late to be asking any of those questions. They were committed.

The other part of Viktor’s black cloud was the unhappy state of his relations with Reesa. Something had gone very wrong. In all those hundred and twenty days they did not make love once. True, there wasn’t any privacy to speak of in the stripped-down ship. True, Captain Rodericks (who took as an article of faith that only a busy crew could possibly be a happy crew—however laughable it was to use the word “happy” in the present circumstances) had set up an elaborate routine of drills and practice emergencies, Captain Bu backing him up all the way, and everybody was exhausted most of the time. But Reesa hardly even talked to Viktor any more.

What made that particularly hard to accept was that there were people she did talk to, and one of them was Jake Lundy. So to all Viktor’s doubts and discomforts there was added the thing he had never wanted to believe himself capable of. He was jealous.

Four people were to go down to the surface of Nebo in the ship’s lander. No one volunteered. No one refused, either; they drew lots.

When Jake Lundy turned out to be one of the chosen ones—and Viktor and Reesa were not—Viktor didn’t rejoice, exactly, but it certainly did not break his heart.

 

“We’re going to be ready for anything,” Captain Rodericks had decreed, and so they pretty nearly were. Contingency plans were made for everything anyone could imagine. Emergencies were invented. Ways of dealing with them were devised. Every day, sometimes more than once a day, without warning, there was a ship’s drill. Over and over the crew rehearsed what to do in case of sudden air loss (helmets on, suits already in place), or power outage (standby batteries kept constantly recharged), or the sudden death or incapacitation of any crew member—backups for every job, everyone trained to do everything.

“Just what the hell do you think is going to happen?” Viktor demanded, tired past the point of tolerance.

Rodericks only shook his head and ordered, “Get on with it! Run that leak-patch drill again! The way you deal with emergencies is to plan ahead for them—then you can survive.”

When they weren’t doing make-work drills, they were stocking the lander for its indispensable job. That wasn’t easy, because there was little left on old Ark to scavenge, but they stripped themselves bare to give the lander everything they could. Communications equipment. Recording equipment—Captain Bu even dismantled Ark’s old log, and made them stow it aboard the lander. Hot-weather clothing, cold-weather clothing—they could not be sure what they would find. Dried foods from the ship’s ancient emergency rations. Fresh (well, recently unfrozen) food from the capsules on the cryonics deck. That was one of Viktor’s principal tasks, salvaging everything that seemed edible from the old capsules (how quaint they were, and how unlike Mayflower’s! They were no more than pods, stacked on aisles that were no colder than any of the rest of the spaceship—what a wasteful way to design them!). Then they added plastic sacks of water, and flashlights, and Geiger counters, and infrared viewers, and cameras—everything anyone could think of that the resources of the old ship and the personal possessions of the crew could produce. It all went in. And, at the very end, even four rifles, too. Captain Rodericks himself had produced them out of a long-forgotten hoard—not because anyone on Ark really expected anything to shoot at, but because Captain Rodericks insisted.

 

And then they were there. The lander was stocked. There was nothing left to do but the launch.

For all that long voyage Ark’s sensors had been fixed on one target only, the planet they were about to invade. What the people aboard Ark saw of the surface of the mystery planet depended on how they looked at it. Through the fiber-optic links to the external telescopes there was very little to see. The cloud cover was in the way—featureless white by day, emptily black when they were in the nightside portion of their orbit around the planet—except for a few spots, where something bright beneath the clouds lighted them ruddily from below.

The instruments told them a lot more. They had long been detecting definite, large-scale emissions from the surface—gamma rays, X rays, radio static. The infrared sensors showed the clear-cut heat sources under the clouds. And radar was the most useful of all. The radar plot had grown more detailed with every day. The radar images were displayed as holograms, and they showed a variety of hard-edged structures. There were flat, broad things that looked almost like buildings. There were tulip-shaped things, like the horn on an old acoustic phonograph, all apparently oriented toward the dimming sun. There were ribbed metal shells like the carapace of a turtle, and those came in two varieties. Some had things like horn antennae nearby; others were surrounded by great spiky clusters of spiral metal, like Art Deco lightning rods.

None of the sensors detected anything moving. Nothing seemed to be in any physical action anywhere on the surface of Nebo. Captain Rodericks, defending his gift of weapons, argued that there had to be life of some kind there—how else to explain the machines? Could they have built themselves? But there was no sign of the kind of movement that one associated with life, especially of civilized, technological life—nothing like trucks, planes, trains—nothing like anything that might have held whoever it was who built the metal structures. For that matter, there was no sign of any living, moving thing at all.

All the same, when Viktor studied the radar he said, “Even if we don’t see them, I guess you were right, Captain Rodericks. It stands to reason there’s somebody down there.” And then he added, “My father was right.”

Captain Rodericks barked at him, “Your father was right about what? Do you know what those things are?”

Viktor looked up from the scan. “I don’t know what they are,” he said, keeping his temper, “but I can see what they’re doing. My father always thought that Nebo and the astronomical events were connected. Obviously they are! Look at those antennae; They’re all pointed right at the sun!”

Jake Lundy stood up. He glanced at Viktor, then walked over and studied the plot.

When he turned around he was smiling—not a happy smile, the small smile of relief of someone who has had his mind made up on a tough question. “I’d say that settles the first landing place. We check those things out.”

 

On the next to the last orbit, they had a farewell dinner for the chosen four. It wasn’t gourmet food. It all came out of the ancient cryonics stores of Ark, and it had been put there in the first place for its value as biological specimens, not for epicures. But they managed a sort of stew out of seed corn and a kind of hard, flat peas, and the main course was the last of a small breeding stock of dwarf sheep, roasted.

Captain Bu said a short, reverential grace. There was no wine. There was not much conversation, either. Once Bu looked up from stirring the stew around his plate and said, to no one in particular, “You know, the lander has to come back. Otherwise there won’t be any way for us to get down to the surface of Newmanhome again.”

Jake Lundy laughed. “What’s the matter, Captain? Do you think they’ll maroon you in Ark, for taking the ship?” But that was obviously what Bu did think. Jake shrugged and changed the subject. “It’s a pity,” he said deliberately, gnawing at a tiny chop, “that none of these strains will ever live on Newmanhome now.”

And little Luo Fah, who also had drawn one of the four slips in the lottery, stood up. “I’m not hungry,” she declared. “Do we have to wait for another whole orbit? Can’t we launch the lander now?”

Then, all of a sudden, it was happening. The four got up. Some stretched. Some yawned. Some rubbed their chins, or shook hands with one or more of the others. Lundy, after a quick and noncommittal glance at Viktor, pulled Reesa to him and kissed her. (She wasn’t the one who had started it—but she didn’t resist at all, Viktor observed.) Then they filed slowly into the lander and sealed it down. Viktor and two others closed the inner seals and retreated to the control room, where Captain Rodericks was on the radio to the ship, his eyes glued to the course plot. The little dot that was Ark was creeping across the face of the planet Nebo. Captain Bu cleared his throat, looking around, and then began to pray aloud. “Dear Almighty God Who is all-seeing judge and eternal master of us all, I pray You care for these, our friends, who embark on this dangerous mission in Your service—”

“Launch!” Captain Rodericks cried. And the ship shook slightly, and the lander was gone.

 

On the radio speaker, Jake Lundy’s voice unemotionally reported distance, altitude, and speed every few moments. On the navigation radar, the lander was a blip of bright red, paralleling their course but falling behind. As it passed out of the shadow of Nebo the optics picked it up, too, a glimmer of metal, dropping away into Nebo’s air. Everyone was watching, Captain Rodericks hunched over his controls, Captain Bu with his eyes glued to the fiber-optic tubes, everyone else staring at the wall displays.

And as they stood there, Viktor felt Reesa’s hand creep into his.

He didn’t respond. He didn’t pull away, but he left his hand limp and uncooperative in hers.

She removed it and turned to look at him. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

He was stubbornly mute. He didn’t even look at her. He kept his eyes on the screen.

“Come on, Viktor,” she said, her tone unfriendly. “Are you pissed because I kissed Jake Lundy good-bye?” She was scowling now. “He’s going into real danger, damn it! I would’ve kissed Rodericks if it’d been him!”

Viktor allowed his gaze to turn to her. “Would you have been off in a corner whispering with Rodericks all this time, too?”

“Viktor! What the hell are you talking about? Are you jealous?”

“I thought you were my wife, not his,” he said stiffly.

“I am your wife, damn you! I’m not your possession. But I’m your wife, all right!”

“A wife is supposed to be true to her husband,” he pointed out. “You agreed to that.”

“Viktor!” she blazed, flushed with anger. “What do you think we were doing? He wanted someone to talk to—who better than me? Oh, Viktor,” she said, her voice thick, “you’re a dirty, suspicious man. I don’t want to talk about it now. I don’t want to talk to you at all! We’ll have to settle this later.”

“We certainly will,” Viktor said grimly. But he didn’t know, neither of them knew, how much longer “later” was going to be . . .

A shout of shock and anger from Bu took their minds off the quarrel. “The lander! It’s been hit!” he cried; and the others watching the wall screens were shouting, too—and then everything went bad at once.

The radio communications from the lander stopped in the middle of a sentence, and a vast warbling sound filled the speakers.

On the phosphor screen Viktor and Reesa watched in horror as, from the surface of the planet, an intolerably bright orange-red light winked at them—brighter than they had ever seen on a screen—so bright that the screen shut down in automatic self-defense.

And a shock shook the Ark as though it had been rammed by a truck.

Captain Bu, at the fiber-optic periscope, screamed in pain, as that intolerable brightness, unfiltered by electronics, struck his eyes. The metallic voice of the ship’s warning system spoke up from behind Viktor: Sensor lock lost. Sensor lock lost. Sensor . . . At the same time, another machine voice, deeper and calmer, announced Thruster controls inoperative over and over, while still a third cried, Systems malfunction!

It seemed that every emergency system in Ark was announcing trouble at once. The crunching came again—then once more; and this time Ark itself jerked under them, sending them flying, while the last of the damage reporters cried, Air pressure dropping!

There was no doubt that was true. Viktor could hear the scream of escaping air from somewhere. His ears were popping. His lungs hurt until he exhaled, and then as he tried to breathe in he was gasping. There was a faint, frightening pressure behind his eyes.

Reesa turned from trying to help the moaning, blinded Captain Bu. “Something’s shooting at us!” she gasped. “Oh, God! Those poor people down there! Jake’ll never get back now!”

And even in the shock and terror of that moment Viktor heard her use his name.

“We ought to get into space suits,” Viktor bawled, and then cursed himself. What space suits? They had all gone down to the surface with the landing party.

It was Captain Bu who best kept his head, in spite of terrible pain. He cupped his hands over his blasted eyes and shouted orders, instructions, and demands to be told what was going on.

There was a well-ordered drill for air-loss incidents. True, the drill assumed that the full ship’s company would be present to slap on the sticky patches and trigger the airtight door closings. Also true, the drill had been set up for a wholly different Ark, one that had not existed for decades, an Ark with all its pieces still intact. In the shedding of so much of the ship, to burn in the antimatter reactors or simply to be paradropped to the surface of Newmanhome, many storage spaces had been lost, or shifted around, and misplaced, and the unexpected strike from Nebo had completed the damage. The compartments where the sticktight patches were kept no longer existed.

And it no longer mattered, really. Patches wouldn’t do the job. Ark had not merely been holed, it had been gouged through by the laserlike blasts from the surface of Nebo. The part of the hull where the optics had been mounted was gone, burned away entirely; the ship was as blind as Captain Bu himself. Thruster fuel had exploded in another place. The whole center keel of the ship was bent; airtight doors weren’t airtight anymore. The only part that still maintained integrity—almost maintained it—was what was left of the old freezer compartment. Gasping in the rapidly thinning atmosphere, Reesa and Viktor tugged the blinded, moaning captain through the bulkhead hatch to the cryonics deck and dogged it shut.

“Wait!” Viktor cried. “What about Rodericks and the others?”

“Didn’t you see? They’re dead! Close that hatch!” Reesa shouted. And, when Viktor had it clamped, it was just in time. The air in the cryonics deck was thin, but at least its pressure remained steady.

“If those shots ever hit the antimatter . . .” Reesa whispered, and didn’t finish.

She didn’t have to. If whatever it was that was firing on them from the surface fired again, and if that shot were to strike the antimatter containment—then nothing else would count. There wasn’t much antimatter left in Ark’s fuel chamber, but if what was there got loose Ark would become a mere haze of ions.

She turned to the blinded Bu, while Viktor prowled restlessly around the freezer compartment, looking for he knew not what. A weapon? But there was no one nearer than the surface of Nebo to fight. No one had dreamed that Ark might ever need long-range weapons.

And no one had dreamed, either, that anything on the surface of Nebo might try to kill them. Viktor wondered if anyone in the lander had survived. More likely, they were dead already—as he and Reesa and Bu were likely to be, at any moment.

Then a thought struck him. Ark did have one serious weapon, of course . . .

He bounded back to where Reesa was trying to find something to bind Bu Wangzha’s burned-out eye sockets. “We could blow up the antimatter ourselves!” he cried.

Reesa turned and stared at him. “The radiation,” he explained. “If we set the antimatter off, the radiation would burn half the planet clean!”

She was staring at him unbelievingly. But she didn’t have to answer. Captain Bu spoke for her. “Let go of me, Reesa,” he said, sounding quite normal. He sat up, his hands over his destroyed eyes. He breathed hard for a moment, and then said, “Viktor, don’t be a fool. In the first place, we’re cut off from the controls. There isn’t any air there. And we shouldn’t blow up the planet anyway.”

Viktor averted his gaze from the horrible eye sockets. “At least we’d hurt them!” he said savagely.

Bu shook his sightless head. “We couldn’t destroy the whole planet. The most we could do is prove that we’re dangerous—and what if they then decide that the people on Newmanhome have to pay for our act? What chance would they have against something like those lasers?”

“What chance do they have now?” Viktor snarled.

“Not much,” Bu said calmly, “but better than we have up here. The air won’t last forever, and there’s no way we can get out of here.”

“So we’re dead!” Viktor snapped.

Bu gazed at him with the sightless eyes. Viktor averted his gaze, but the captain’s face was almost smiling. “If you’re dead,” he said, “you might as well be frozen.”

“What?”

“The freezers are still working, aren’t they? And even blind, I think I can get the two of you stowed away.”

“Captain!” Reesa gasped. “No! What would happen to you?”

“Exactly what will happen to all of us if we do nothing,” Captain Bu said comfortably. “Frozen, you have a chance to survive until—” He shrugged. “To survive for a while, anyway. Don’t worry about me. It’s a captain’s job to be the last to leave— and anyway, I have faith, you see. The Lord promised salvation and eternal bliss in heaven. I know He was telling the truth.” He grimaced against the pain, and then said in a businesslike way, “Now! You two get out the preparation boxes and the rest of the freezer equipment, and show me where everything is. If you start it, I think I can finish the job by touch.”

“Are you sure?” Reesa began doubtfully, but Viktor caught her arm.

“If he can’t, how are we worse off?” he demanded. “Here, Bu. This is the perfusor, these are the gas outlets . . .”

And he let the blind man do his job, fumblingly as he did, even while the hulk of the old ship shook every now and then with some new blow or some fresh excursion of the control rockets. It was the only chance they had—but he knew it was a forlorn hope. It was being done wrong, all wrong . . .

 

And it was wrong, a lot wronger still, when he opened his caked, sore eyes and looked up into the eyes of a red-haired woman in a black cowl. It wasn’t until she said, “All right, Vik, can you stand up now?” that he realized she was his wife.

“You aren’t Captain Bu,” he told her.

“Of course not,” she said, sobbing. “Oh, Viktor, wake up! Captain Bu’s been dead for ages. Everybody has! It’s been four hundred years.”

 

 

 

CHAPTER 13

 

 

The slow approach of old Ark didn’t frighten the matter-copy on Nebo. Still, caution was built into Five, and it watched the thing very carefully.

Five had plenty of time for watching. Once its little fleet of stars was well launched on its aimless flight—really aimless, because it was not to anywhere, simply away—Five had very little to do.

That wasn’t a problem. Five didn’t become bored. It was very good at doing nothing. It simply waited there on its slowly cooling little planet, observing the dimming of its star as the stellar energies were drained away into the gravitational particles that drove the cluster along. Five didn’t have much in the way of “feelings,” but what it did have was a sort of general sense of satisfaction in having accomplished the first part of its mission. It did, sometimes, wonder if there was meant to be a second part. For Five the act of “wondering” did not imply worry or speculation or fretting over possibilities; it was more like a self-regulating thermostat constantly checking the temperature of its process batch, or a stockbroker glancing over his stack of orders before leaving for the day, to make sure none remained unexecuted. Five was quite confident that if Wan-To wanted anything else from it, Wan-To would surely let it know.

All the same, it was, well, not “startled,” but at least “alerted to action,” when it detected the presence of an alien artifact approaching its planet.

Five knew what to do about it, of course. Its orders included the instruction to protect itself against any threat; so when the thing fired a piece of itself toward the planet’s surface, Five simply readjusted some of its forces and fired high-temperature blasts of plasma at both the object in orbit and the smaller one entering the atmosphere. When it was sure neither was functioning any longer, Five deployed a small batch of graviphotons to move the larger object away from its presence—not far; just in a sort of elliptical orbit that would keep it out at arm’s length.

That left the part that was already in Nebo’s atmosphere.

It was obviously too small and too primitive to be dangerous anymore. Five caught the falling thing in a web of graviscalars and lowered it to the surface of Nebo for examination.

That was when Five discovered that the object was hollow—and that it contained several queer things that moved about on their own. They weren’t metallic. They were composed of soft, wet compounds of carbon, and they made acoustic sounds to each other.

They seemed almost to be alive.

That was a bit of a problem for the little homunculus called Five. Its instructions had never foreseen any such bizarre situation as this. It almost wished it dared contact Wan-To for instructions.

 

That contact was a while in coming, because Five was not very frequently on Wan-To’s mind.

Wan-To’s mind was rather troubled, in fact. He didn’t like to speak to his sibling/rivals, because there was always the risk of giving away some bit of strategic information to the wrong one. But he wanted something interesting to do.

His billions of years of boredom had caused him to produce a lot of entertainments, and one of them was just to wonder. In that way too he was very like the human beings he had never heard of: he was insatiably curious.

One of the things he wondered about (like the humans) was the universe he lived in. Wan-To was more fortunate than the humans in that way. He could see better than they, and he could see a lot farther.

Of course, Wan-To himself couldn’t “see” diddly-squat outside his own star, because the close-packed ions and nuclear fragments of his core certainly didn’t admit any light from outside. It would have been far easier to peek through sheets of lead than to see through that dense plasma.

When you think of it, though, human astronomers aren’t much better off. The part of them that wonders is the human brain, and the brain can’t see anything at all. It needs external organs—eyes—to trap the photons of light. Even the eyes don’t really “see,” any more than the antenna on your TV set “sees” Johnny Carson flipping his pencil at your screen. All the human eye does is record the presence or absence of photons on each of its rods and cones and pass on that information, by way of neurons and their synapses, to the part of the human brain called the visual cortex. That’s where the images from the rods and cones are reconstituted into patterns, point by point. The “seeing” is a joint effort between the photon gatherers, the pattern recognizers—and, finally, the cognitive parts of that wet lump of flabby cells the human being thinks with. So, in his own way, it was with Wan-To.

It should not be surprising that Wan-To’s immensely greater brain could see immensely more.

Wan-To’s eyes didn’t look like any human’s baby blues. They didn’t look like anything much at all; they were simply the clouds of particles, sensitive to radiation of any kind, that floated outside the photosphere of his star.

Sometimes he worried about having them out there, because it was possible that a risk could be involved. The detector clouds were not a natural part of any star and it was just barely possible that one of his colleagues might find some way of detecting their presence . . . and thus of locating precious him. But the “eyes” were so frail and tenuous that they were not at all easy to spot. Anyway, Wan-To didn’t have any choice, because he had to have the eyes—needed them for survival; after all, he had always to be watchful, for defense and for potential gain. So the small risk was worth taking. It brought the great gain of helping to ease his permanent itch of curiosity.

So Wan-To was quite happily employed, for long stretches of time, peering out at the great cosmic expanse all around him and trying to figure out what it all meant—very like those never-encountered humans.

Wan-To was not at all color-blind—not even as much so as all human beings are, by the physical limitations of their cells as well as by their habit of living at the bottom of a well of murky air. That is to say, he wasn’t limited to the optical frequencies. His eyes saw all the electromagnetic radiation there was. The difference between X rays and heat was less to him than the difference humans perceive between orange and blue. As long as energy came in photons of any kind, Wan-To saw it.

That was particularly useful to his inquiring mind because of the phenomenon of the redshift; because in the long run it was only the redshift that told him how far away, and how long ago, what he was seeing was.

Wan-To had realized that the universe was expanding long before Henrietta Leavitt and Arthur Eddington figured it out. He did it in the same way. He observed that the bright and dark lines in the light produced by ionizing elements in distant galaxies did not quite match the lines in the light from those nearer by.

Humans called those “Fraunhofer lines,” and they moved downward with distance. Wan-To didn’t call them that, of course, but he knew what they were. They were the light that a given element always produced at a given frequency when one of its electrons leaped to another orbit around the atomic nucleus. And he knew what the redshift meant. It was the Doppler effect (though he did not give it that name), caused by the fact that that particular object was moving away from him. The more it shifted, the faster the object was running away.

It had taken Wan-To very little time (oh, maybe a couple of million years—just the wink of an eye, really) to fill in all the gaps in his understanding and realize that the faster the objects moved the farther away they were; and thus that the universe was expanding! Everything was running away from everything else—everywhere!

And, as Wan-To also was aware that every time he looked at an object a billion light-years away he was also looking a billion years into the past, he understood that he was looking at a history of the universe.

The whole thing was arranged in shells layered around him, separated by time as well as space. What Wan-To saw nearby was galaxies more or less like his own. They contained billions of stars, and they had recognizable structures. Mostly they whirled slowly around their centers of gravity, like the spirals of M-31 in Andromeda. Some of them had fierce radiation sources at their cores, no doubt immense black holes. Some were relatively placid. But they were all, basically, pretty much alike.

But that was only true of the “recent” shell. Farther out it got different.

Around a redshift of 1 (say, at a time perhaps six billion years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only half its present size—about when Wan-To himself had been born, in fact) most galaxies seemed to have pretty well finished their burst of star formation. Farther and earlier, their gas clouds were still collapsing into the clumps that squeezed themselves into nuclear fusion and became stars.

At redshifts up to 3 lay quasars. That was where the galaxies themselves were being born. By redshift 3 all the objects were running away from him at nearly nine-tenths the speed of light, and it was getting to the point where nothing further was ever going to be seen because they were nearing the “optical limit”—the limit of distance and velocity at which the object was receding so fast that its light could never reach Wan-To at all. And the time he was seeing was getting close to the era of the Big Bang itself.

That was a very interesting region to Wan-To. It was there, in that farthest of the concentric shells of the universe, that he found the domain of the blue fuzzies—the tiny, faint, blue objects that must be newborn galaxies, tens of billions of them, so far away that even Wan-To’s patient eyes could not resolve them into distinct shapes.

The blue fuzzies propounded any number of riddles to Wan-To’s curious mind. The first, and the easiest to solve, was why the blue fuzzies were blue. Wan-To came up with the answer. The blue light he was seeing came from the brightest line produced by the hydrogen atom when it gets excited. (Sometimes this line was called the Lyman-alpha line, in honor of the human scientist who first studied it in detail—but not by Wan-To.) At its source, that line wasn’t visible to human eyes at all; it was in the far ultraviolet. But at a redshift of 3 or 4 it wound up looking blue.

The biggest question was what lay beyond the blue fuzzies. And that, Wan-To recognized with annoyance, was something he could never discover by seeing it. Not just because of their distance, pushing right up against the optical limit. Most of all because there wouldn’t be anything to see. Until the gas clouds that formed galaxies began to collapse they simply didn’t radiate at all.

Wan-To writhed about in his warm, cozy core, very dissatisfied with the fact that natural law kept him from knowing everything. There should be some way! If not to see, then at least to deduce. There were all sorts of clues, he told himself, if only he had the wit to understand them—

The call that came in then broke his concentration.

What an annoyance! Especially as he certainly didn’t want to talk to any of his siblings just then.

But then he realized, astonished, that the call wasn’t from a sibling at all. It was from that contemptible, low-level intelligence, his Matter-Copy Number Five, which had had the incredible presumption to dare to call him.

 

It took even Wan-To’s vast intellect a while to understand what Five was trying to tell him. No, Five insisted, the object it had destroyed was not one of those quaint, inanimate matter things like comets or asteroids. It was an artifact. It was propelled. It had its own energy source—which, Five had determined, came from something that was very rare indeed in the inanimate universe.

The artifact’s energies were definitely derived from antimatter.

Antimatter! Wan-To was astonished. Even Wan-To had never personally experienced the presence of antimatter, though of course he had long since understood that it might exist and sometimes, rarely, did exist in small, very temporary quantities. But even that wasn’t quite the most astonishing thing. Stranger still was Five’s report that small, independent entities—made of matter—had come floating down to the surface of its planet in a container that the large artifact had launched. And they were still there.

Wan-To had long since forgotten any resentment he had had at Five’s impudence in disturbing him. This new development was too interesting.

Of course, it wasn’t important. There was no way such tiny, limited creatures could affect anything Wan-To was interested in. Not to mention that there was something about them that Wan-To found repellent, queer, repulsive. It was not easy for him to understand how they could be alive at all.

To be sure, humans would have had just as much trouble understanding Wan-To. The reasons would have been much the same, but reversed in sign. The perceptual universe of matter creatures like human beings was Newtonian; Wan-To’s was relativistic and quantum-mechanical. The Newtonian world view was as instinctively alien to Wan-To as quantum mechanics was to a human, because he himself was a quantum-mechanical phenomenon. Not even the spookiest particles were strange to him, because they were what he was made up of and lived among. He could examine them all as easily as a human baby examines its fingers and toes—and in much the same way, with all of his senses, as an infant peers at them, and touches them, and flexes them, and does its best to put them into its mouth.

But when those same particles slowed down and bound their energies into quiescence—when they congealed into solid “matter”—he found them very distasteful indeed.

It struck him as quite odd that his matter-copy on Nebo didn’t seem to share his distaste for those repellently solid things it had discovered there. Worse than that. There were the small, active ones that had presented themselves without warning on the surface of the planet, and the doppel admitted humbly that it was not actually destroying them, but was indeed apparently helping them survive.

“But you just told me that you damaged the object they came from,” Wan-To said incredulously.

“Yes, that is so, and pushed it away from me, too,” the doppel confirmed. “But that was because it contained antimatter, it generated forces which could have imperiled my assignment. These smaller ones are quite harmless.”

“They are quite useless,” Wan-To snapped. The doppel was deferentially silent. Wan-To mused for a moment, then said, “You are quite sure the object with the antimatter does not present any problem?”

“Oh, yes. It is now in an orbit which will keep it from this planet, and it has no capacity to change that orbit anymore.” The doppel hesitated, then said humbly, “You have taught me to be curious. These ‘living matter’ things are of interest. Shall I continue to observe them?”

“Why not?” Wan-To said testily, and discontinued the conversation. The doppel was basically so stupid. Wan-To resolved never again to make a matter-copy of himself; they simply were no fun to talk to.

He wondered briefly why the doppel bothered with the things, then dismissed it.

It never occurred to Wan-To that even the doppel could be as hungry for some sort of companionship as himself. Wan-To had never heard of “pets.”

 

But Wan-To’s loneliness did not end, and when his core reverberated with the call of one of his least threatening “relatives,” Pooketih, Wan-To answered. He said at once, “Tell me, Pooketih, have you ever encountered living beings made of matter?”

“No, never, Wan-To,” Pooketih replied, but then, to Wan-To’s surprise, he added, “But Floom-eppit has, I think. You could ask him.”

Wan-To was silent for a moment. He knew that he couldn’t ask Floom-eppit anything, because Floom-eppit had failed to respond to anyone’s calls for some time—one of the early casualties, no doubt. “You tell me what Floom-eppit said,” he ordered.

“I will try, Wan-To. It was only a mention, when we were discussing what was causing so many stars to explode. He said he had encountered living things made of matter in one of the solid objects around a star he had inhabited for a while. He said they made him uncomfortable, so he moved.”

“Just moved?”

“Well,” Pooketih said, “he then, of course, zapped that star. He thought them an annoyance, and it was easy to end that problem.” Pooketih hesitated. “Wan-To,” he said, “I have had a thought. Is it possible that when Floom-eppit zapped that star one of us thought it was a hostile act?”

“Who would be so silly?” Wan-To demanded, but he knew the answer.

So did Pooketih. “You made some of us quite silly, Wan-To,” he pointed out. “Perhaps one of us thought some other of us was trying to kill him. Why should any of us think that, Wan-To?”

Wan-To considered how to answer that. It sounded like a serious question. Was there guile behind it?

He was not quite sure how much guile Pooketih possessed. Pooketih was certainly not one of the cleverest of Wan-To’s tribe. By the time he created Pooketih, Wan-To had already noticed worrying signs of insolence from Haigh-tik and Gorrrk and Mromm. And insolence was the first stage of insurrection.

It was quite likely, Wan-To had decided even then, that one of these ages he would have to take measures against them. So when he made Pooketih and the later ones he cautiously withheld from them a good quarter of his knowledge and at least half of his competitive drive. (But maybe even half was still dangerously much?)

“There is nothing in the universe that can harm any of us, except each other,” Wan-To said cautiously. “I suppose that the knowledge that you can be destroyed by somebody is likely to make you think of destroying him first—for a certain type of mind, I mean.”

“Do I have that type of mind, Wan-To?”

“Not on purpose,” Wan-To said glumly.

“Do you?”

Wan-To hesitated, almost considering telling Pooketih the truth. But caution vetoed that impulse. “I made you,” he pointed out. “I made all of you, because I wanted your companionship. I would miss you if you were gone.”

“You can make others,” Pooketih said sadly.

That was too true to deny. Wan-To was silent. Pooketih went on unhappily, “It was so nice when you first generated my patterns. I knew so little! Everything you told me was a wonderful surprise. I remember your telling me what your own star was like, and how it differed from mine.”

Wan-To was suddenly uneasy. “That was a different star,” he said quickly. “I have moved since.”

“Oh, yes, so have I, several times. But that was so interesting, Wan-To! I wish you could tell me again.”

Now Wan-To was definitely uncomfortable. “I don’t want to do that now,” he said shortly.

“Then tell me something different,” Pooketih pleaded. “Tell me—for instance, tell me why it is that some groups of stars have suddenly changed their courses and moved away from us.”

Wan-To wasn’t uneasy anymore. Now he was quite convinced that Pooketih was trying, in his silly, innocent way, to probe for information he should not have. Wan-To said deceitfully, “Ah, but wouldn’t that be interesting to know, Pooketih? Perhaps you can find out. Try to do that, Pooketih, then you tell me!”

And then Wan-To terminated the conversation and paused to consider.

Was it possible that Pooketih was not wholly without guile after all?

 

It was with regret that Wan-To decided Pooketih must be slain. As it turned out, though, that wasn’t easy to do, because Wan-To himself was not safe. When five consecutive stars of his own type flared, each with a stellar mass between .94 and 1.12, Wan-To began for the first time in his long life to be afraid.

The resemblance between those stars and his own could not be an accident. Some one of his copies had deduced enough of what Wan-To’s home star was like to start a systematic campaign of destruction. Someone’s searching fire was specifically directed at him.

The option of flight was always open to him. He could quit this star and move to another. He could choose an unlikely one, he thought; maybe a little red dwarf, or one of those short-lived Wolf-Rayet kind of things. Neither was attractive as a permanent home—the dwarf star too confining, the huge infant star too unstable. But that was exactly the reason why no one would look for him there.

But—getting there! That was the problem! It meant abandoning the concealment of his star and launching himself as a pure pattern of energy, as naked and unprotected as any molting Earthly crustacean, across the interstellar void. The danger would not last for long. He would not be easy to spot. There was a good chance that he could make the journey and be safely hidden before one of his sibs detected his presence. He calculated the odds on survival as at least a hundred to one.

That one chance in a hundred was too much to take. Especially, Wan-To thought with pleasure, as he had a few tricks still up his sleeve.

 

So for some little time Wan-To was quite busy. He was making another copy of himself.

Practice, Wan-To was sure, made perfect. This time he was going to make the exact person he intended, without any possibly dangerous traits. Also, he schemed, with certain memories carefully excised; this copy would never cause him any trouble.

In order to do all that, Wan-To had to scan every part of his memory stores. Copy a pattern here, strike one out there; it was a lot like an earthly computer expert trying to adapt a program for, say, air traffic control to become one for, perhaps, ballistic missile defense. It took a long time, for there were billions of years of memories in Wan-To’s store, and during all that time Wan-To could not permit himself any interruptions at all. So he turned off most of his scanning systems, muted the attention calls from his relations, even shut down his communication with the doppel on the planet Nebo. (As it happened, this was too bad in some ways, but Wan-To didn’t know that.) He devoted himself entirely to the construction of the new being, and when its patterns had been completed he activated it with pride and hope.

The new being stirred and looked around. “Who are you?” it asked. And, almost in the same moment, “More important, who am I?”

“I am Wan-To, whom you love and wish well,” Wan-To told it. “Your name is also Wan-To.”

“But we can’t both have the same name! Can we?”

“We do, though,” Wan-To informed him. “Of course, just between the two of us you should have a different name, otherwise it would be very confusing, wouldn’t it? So, just for the two of us—let me see—yes, I think we will call you ‘Traveler.’ ”

“That isn’t a proper name,” Traveler complained. “Does it mean I am going to go somewhere?”

“How clever you are,” Wan-To said with pride. “Yes. You are going to leave this star and take up residence in another one, far away.”

“Why?”

“Because no star is big enough for two like us,” Wan-To explained. “Don’t you feel cramped? I do. We’ll be much happier when you have a star of your own.

Traveler thought that over for a time. “I don’t feel happy at all,” he said. “I feel very confused. Why is that, Wan-To? Why don’t I remember why you made me?”

“You’re still very young,” Wan-To said promptly. “Naturally you are still learning. But to develop properly you will have to go to a star of your own, and you are going to do that right away.”

“I am?” the copy wailed. “But, Wan-To, I’ll be lonely!”

“Not at all!” Wan-To cried. “That’s the best part, Traveler! See, as soon as you leave here you will activate your communications systems—do you know where they are?”

“Yes,” the copy confirmed after a moment. “I’ve found them. Shall I do that now?”

“No, no!” Wan-To said hastily. “Not now! When you’re on your way. You will call all your new friends, who are waiting to meet you—Haigh-tik and Pooketih and Mromm. You will simply say to them, ‘Hello, this is Wan-To calling.’ ”

“Is that all I say?” the copy asked doubtfully.

“No,” Wan-To said judiciously. ‘‘You will also want to tell them exactly where you are. That information you will also find in your stores if you look. And then—and this is the most important part, Traveler—then you will forget that I exist. You will be Wan-To.”

“I don’t know how to do that,” the copy wailed.

“You don’t have to,” Wan-To assured him comfortably. “You’ll find that I’ve already arranged that; once you leave this star you won’t remember anything about it, or me. And then,” he promised grandly, “your new friends will tell you everything you need to know. They will answer all your questions. Now go, Traveler. And I wish you a happy journey.”

 

When Wan-To’s last remaining sensor informed him of a vector boson blast a few light-years away, he began to feel more at ease. They had taken the decoy. The zapping of G-3 stars would stop.

Now all he had to do was wait until the others had wiped themselves out . . . perhaps, he thought, for quite a long time.

Like Viktor and Reesa, in another place and time, he did not then know just how long that time would be.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 14

 

 

By the time Viktor got his eyes well open he almost wanted to close them again. Even the long, still sleep of the freezers was better than this madhouse! First it was Reesa, shaky, fearful, trying to explain things to him—

“We’re about to land on Newmanhome. These people found us and thawed us out . . .”

And then it was a man in a kilt, bearded and belligerent. “If you want him landed, get him awake, do you hear me? There’s no time to waste!”

And then there were “these people” themselves. He managed to pry his sticky eyelids apart far enough to see “these people” for himself. None were familiar. Every one was a stranger, and strange to look at. There was the tall, olive-skinned man who wore the kilt, bare-chested and bare-legged in spite of the chill. There was another man, beardless, with a page-boy bob of sparse blond hair, who wore a ragged red pullover that came down to his knees, showing something like red tights underneath. Reesa herself wore an all-black outfit, like jogging sweats—cottony-flannelly pants and blouse, with a cowl covering most of her face. Another woman had the same outfit, except that instead of being black her sweatsuit was striped gray and white, like a prison uniform. “Who are ‘these people’?” Viktor croaked.

His wife’s face disappeared, and the angry, hostile countenance of a bearded man in the same all-black took her place. “I’m Mirian,” the man said savagely, “and we’ve saved your worthless life. You’ve been frozen here for hundreds of years.”

“I warned you we should have left them that way,” called the woman in the prisoner stripes.

Mirian disregarded her. “You’re awake,” he told Viktor, “and you’re coming down with us.”

“Down?” Viktor murmured dazedly. “Down where?” But nobody was answering him. There were eight or ten people in the old cryonics deck, and they were all busily rigging one of the pods for a drop. Reesa came over to him, wobbly and worried, holding out a set of the black sweats.

“Put these on,” she begged. “If you’re not ready I think they’ll just leave us here!”

“Leave us here?” Viktor blinked. “Then why did they bother to come to save us?”

There was a sudden bark of unfriendly laughter from the man who called himself Mirian. “Oh, we didn’t come to get you. We need this ship. We didn’t even know you were here till we opened this pod up, looking for something to eat.”

“And we should’ve left them frozen,” the woman in red insisted. “Now what are we going to do?”

“We’re going to drop them,” the man in the kilt said belligerently. “Mirian, too. He woke them up; he takes them away, before they get in our way anymore.”

“Not me!” Mirian shouted. “I’m part of this team, Dorro!”

“You’re dropping with them,” the kilted man snapped, “because I say so, and I’m the captain.”

“You Greats are all alike,” the woman sneered, but she turned to finish rigging slings in the pod.

Viktor turned helplessly to his wife. She shook her head, helping him knot the drawstrings of his sweats. “They only woke me half an hour ago, Vik. I don’t know much more than you do. They wanted Ark—I’m not sure if it’s for the antimatter fuel, so they can replenish the generators on Mayflower, or maybe to use it to explore the rest of the solar system—”

“We of the People’s Republic do not waste time in ‘exploring,’ ” the man in the kilt said frostily.

“Well, whatever. And things aren’t so good on Newmanhome anymore, they say—”

Viktor held up a hand, imploring. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“Oh, Viktor,” his wife groaned. “Well, try this much, anyway. We’re alive.”

That at least could not be argued. As Viktor finished dressing he told himself that simply to be alive, against all odds, was wonderful in itself. Wonderful? No, close to miraculous—thawed without microwave, without the oxygenating perfusion liquid, only raw heat. But his parts seemed to work. He thought for a moment of dying, blinded Captain Bu, who had gladly given them a chance for life on the expectation of his own reward in heaven. Thank God for Bu’s born-again Christianity, Viktor thought. Without that conviction of a heavenly reward he might not have been nearly so willing to be the one who died.

Then Viktor thought of a question. “What about Earth?” he asked fuzzily. “Haven’t they sent more ships?”

Mirian turned around to gape at him. Then he laughed. “Earth!” he said, and the others were laughing, too.

Viktor looked at them in puzzlement. “Did I say something funny?” he asked plaintively.

Mirian tugged at his pale, fine beard, glancing around to see if anyone else would answer. Then he said gruffly, “We have heard nothing from Earth for hundreds of years. Come, get into the pod; it’s time to launch. And forget Earth.”

 

Forget Earth!

But that was impossible. As Viktor was trying to urge his creaking muscles into the contortions necessary to climb into the capsule, twist himself into his harness, and strap himself in, he was not only not forgetting, he was actually remembering again all the scenes that had stored themselves away in the back of his childhood memories. The waves breaking on the Pacific shore, the white clouds in the blue sky, the heat of the high desert, the redwoods—

The world. Could all that be gone?

Then he couldn’t think for a moment, because the hatches were grinding closed and he felt the quick nudge as the capsule fell free from its mother ship. He saw there was a window. It was tiny, and in a poor position for him to look out of it. But he did catch a quick glimpse of what had to be the proud planet of Newmanhome . . .

But it was different, terribly different! There were a few clouds, but they were hard to see, because almost everything was white. Great Ocean was a wide blue sea no longer. It was as icy as Earth’s Arctic Ocean, and, as with the Arctic, there was no clear line between sea and shore. Everything, everything, was ice.

“Hold on for retrofire!” Mirian shouted.

The sudden hammer blow of the rockets bruised Viktor’s unpracticed body. That was only the beginning. The buffeting of atmospheric reentry seemed to go on forever. Then it ended; and then they were just falling, swaying on their sail-film parachutes.

Viktor shut his eyes. They no longer stuck together when he blinked, but he could feel the incrustations at their edges, and the flakes of dirt and dead skin on his body. Everything was happening too fast. He hadn’t quite gotten used to being fired at by—whatever it was—on the planet Nebo; this unexpected new situation was more than he could take in.

Something very bright penetrated even his closed lids.

He opened them just in time to see a spot of incandescent light swing around the interior of the capsule as it rocked. Everyone was averting their eyes. The very bright something had peered in, for just a second.

“My God,” Viktor said wonderingly. “Was that the sun?”

Mirian turned to him fiercely. “The sun? No, of course not. Are you crazy?”

“Then what was it?” Viktor persisted.

Mirian stared at him for a moment. Then he shook his head. “I keep forgetting—you don’t know anything at all, do you? It wasn’t always there, they say.” He swayed as the capsule bobbed in a strong gust of wind, nearing the ground. “Brace yourself for landing!” he yelled; and then, to Viktor, he said, “That bright thing—it was what they call the ‘universe.’ ”

 

 

 

CHAPTER 15

 

 

As it turned out, the time before Wan-To felt secure again was a very long time indeed. An appallingly long time, when you consider that through all of it Wan-To did not dare speak to any of his colleagues.

It wasn’t because he wasn’t hungry for conversation. He was very nearly desperate. So desperate that he had split himself into fractions once or twice, for convenience in talking to himself. It wasn’t satisfying, but he had gone on trying to pretend that the echo he was hearing was really intelligent talk—until he thought that was making him almost irrational. He stopped that. He would have tried almost anything by then, though. He even began to wish that he could at least still talk to the harmless, stupid Matter-Copy Number Five. But that had long ago stopped being possible. It wasn’t the distance. Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pairs ignored distance. It was the relativistic effects of the speed the doppel’s plunging flight had begun to attain. At Five’s velocity, so close now to c, the pair was no longer identical. Even if the ERP had worked, the conversation would have been hopeless, because time dilation had come into play—a moment of Doppel Five’s time was tedious millennia for Wan-To and the rest of the universe—but that problem didn’t arise, because the ERP was no longer operational at all, and that was the end of that. Wan-To did not expect ever to hear from that doppel again.

Then he began to have problems of another kind.

He observed that the core of his star was filling with ash.

That was something to worry about. The stuff wasn’t really “ash” in the sense of the oxidized residue of a chemical combustion, naturally; it was a slurry of helium ions, the stuff that was left over when hydrogen fused. He regretted a little that he had picked a mainstream star slightly larger than the norm. Yes, you got more energy to play with when your home star was large, but it didn’t last as long, either.

Still, who could have guessed that he would be stuck in the thing, a prisoner, afraid to venture out?

 

Now and then the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky communicators called Wan-To’s name. He never replied.

Wan-To hadn’t replied to anyone for a long time. He was far too suspicious. He was convinced that any call was almost certainly a trick, just one of his adversaries hoping to find out if he was really dead. Wan-To was too wise a bunny to fall for Brer Fox’s wiles.

He was also far from happy. For the first time in his life Wan-To began to feel trapped. His jolly little stellar home had become a prison, and his cell became less comfortable every day.

It wasn’t getting smaller. Far from it. In fact, the star was entering its red giant phase. It had spent most of its young life turning hydrogen into helium, but now the central core was all helium ash, doing nothing at all but sitting there and waiting for the day when it could fuse into higher elements.

Meanwhile, the remaining hydrogen was in a thick, dense shell around the helium core. It was fusing faster than ever—producing more heat than ever—pressing ever more insistently on the mantle of thinner gases that surrounded it; and the mantle was bloating under the pressure.

Wan-To had never stayed inside a star as it left its main sequence before. He didn’t like it.

To be sure, his physical safety was not in danger. Well, not in much danger, anyway—certainly not as much as risking a hurried flight of his own to another home. But the star had swelled immensely under the thrust of that inner shell of fusing hydrogen. If it had had planets, as Earth’s Sun did, its outer fringes would have been past the orbit of Mars by now. It was a classical red giant, swollen as huge as Betelgeuse or Antares—beginning to decay.

Did that give Wan-To more room? Infuriatingly, it did not. His star’s mass did not increase. There was no more matter to fill that enlarged volume than there had been when it was its proper, normal size. Indeed there was less, because it was beginning to fall apart. The outer reaches of the star were so distant from the core and so tenuous—by Earthly standards, in fact very close to a vacuum—that the radiation pressure from within was actually shoving the farthest gases away from the star entirely. Before long those outer regions would separate completely to form that useless shell of detached gases called a planetary nebula.

And Wan-To knew that then nothing but the core would remain for him to occupy. A miserable little white dwarf, no larger than an ordinary solid-matter planet like the Earth—far too cramped to be a suitable home for anyone like Wan-To!

For that matter, he was too crowded already. He dared not risk any part of his precious self in those wispy outer fringes. He was imprisoned in the remaining habitable parts of his star, and worst of all he was blind. Photon-blind, at least; he could still detect neutrinos and tachyons and a few other particles, because they reached inside the outer shells easily enough. But light couldn’t, and neither could any other part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and his delicate external “eyes” had long since been swallowed up and ruined as his star swelled.

So Wan-To tossed and turned in the home that had become his prison, fretfully ignoring every call that came in. Each one, in fact, was a fresh annoyance, if not simply a trap.

Then a voice on the ERP pair called again, and this time it did not stop with his name. “Wan-To,” it said, “this is Mromm. I am quite sure you are alive. I want to propose a bargain.”

 

Wan-To paused, suspicious and worried. Mromm! After all these eons!

It was a great temptation to answer. He was tired of being lonely and imprisoned; and it was surely possible, at least barely possible, that Mromm’s intentions were friendly.

It was also possible, however, that they were not. Wan-To did not reply.

The voice came again. “Wan-To, please speak to me. The object that Haigh-tik destroyed wasn’t you, was it? You wouldn’t let yourself be caught that way, I’m positive.”

Wan-To thought furiously. So it was Haigh-tik who was the killer! Or, alternatively, Mromm who was hoping to make Wan-To think he was innocent?

Mromm’s voice sighed. “Wan-To, this is foolish. All the others are dead now, or hiding. I think Pooketih, at least, is simply hiding, but that comes to the same thing—he wouldn’t dare to do anything just now, because then you or I might find him. I don’t think there is anybody else. Won’t you please answer me?”

Wan-To forced himself to be still. All of his senses were at maximum alert as he tried to decode Mromm’s hidden meanings—if indeed they were hidden; if it weren’t perhaps true that he was telling the truth?

And then Mromm, sounding dejected, said, “All right, Wan-To, I won’t insist you speak to me. Let me just tell you what I have to say. I’m going to leave this galaxy, Wan-To. It’s getting very unpleasant now. Sooner or later Haigh-tik will come out again, and he’ll be just trying to kill everybody else off all over again—if there are any of us left. So I’m going away. And what I want to say to you, Wan-To is—please let me go!”

To all of that Wan-To was listening with increasing pleasure and even the beginnings of hope. If it were true that Mromm was leaving this used-up galaxy (and that sounded like a good idea, even if it came from Mromm), and that Haigh-tik was holed up and out of action at least for the time being, and all the others were either dead or, like Pooketih, terminally stupid . . .

“I’m going to take the chance, Wan-To,” Mromm decided. “Even if you don’t answer, I’m going. I’ll never bother you again. But please, Wan-To remember! I’m part of you. You made me! Please be kind . . .”

But by then Wan-To had long stopped listening to Mromm’s foolish babble. He recognized a chance to escape when he saw it—and that meant he had to act now.

 

And so Wan-To left another galaxy behind. His objective this time was much farther away. Even as a pattern of tachyons, traveling many times faster than light, it would take a long time to reach it.

But that was all right; he had got away.

While Wan-To was in transit his thoughts were blurry and unclear; he would not be fully himself again until he reached the new galaxy and selected a proper star and used its energies to build the full majesty of himself anew. But, in his cloudy way, he was quite happy.

True, it was too bad that it had been necessary to destroy poor, trusting Mromm as soon as he left the shelter of his star, but Wan-To couldn’t take chances, could he? And it meant he would be lonely for a long time—at least until he assured himself that any future copies of himself he might make for company would never, ever threaten him again.

But at least he would be safe.

 

And, countless thousands of light-years away, traveling far faster than Wan-To and in a completely different direction, the doppel on Nebo at last gave up hope of instructions from its master.

What a tragedy that Wan-To had not anticipated the presence of these strange matter-creatures! It meant that the doppel itself had to make the decision on what to do about them. And the doppel was not, after all, very smart.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 16

 

 

Having a new life, even on the icy and starveling Newmanhome of 432 A.L., was purely wonderful—or should have been. It did have certain lacks.

The lack Viktor most felt was of Reesa, kept away from him except for the odd fugitive glimpse. He missed her. He thought of all the things he would like to talk over with her. He had imaginary conversations with her, which mostly had to do with his complaints about the food, the housing, most of all the job they had assigned him to. (It did not occur to him, even in his fantasies, to tell her simply that he loved her.) And it was almost like talking to her really, because he was easily able to imagine her responses to his complaints:

“Quit bitching, Viktor. We were dead. Everything after that is a big plus.”

And when he pointed out that they hadn’t really been dead dead, just frozen dead:

“That’s dead enough for me. Dead for four hundred years. Remember that, Viktor. Maybe things will get better later. Maybe we’ll even get a room to have for our own.”

“Maybe they’ll even take me off the shit detail,” Viktor muttered bitterly to himself, “but I wouldn’t bet on when.”

But it wasn’t really as good as talking to the real Reesa would have been, and besides the words that stuck in his mind were four hundred years. Even though they were Newmanhome years—no matter how you calculated it, it was two Earthly centuries. Half a dozen human generations—several human lifetimes! Except for Reesa herself, everyone he had ever known was long since dead, gone, moldered, and forgotten. He would never come back to friends, for every friend was dead—the ones he would miss, the ones he had loved, even the ones he was quite willing to spare—like Jake Lundy, now presumably a pinch of dust somewhere on the surface of the planet Nebo. It didn’t matter who: they were absent. Every relationship he had ever had was over. Every conversation he had ever intended would have to be left forever unsaid. Everyone who had made up the furnishings of his life was—history.

He could never go back to them—least of all, to his family.

That thought was the worst of all. It brought Viktor a sharp interior pain that made him grunt. (The others working on the shit detail looked at him curiously.) He would never see Yan or Shan again, or Tanya. Or little Quinn. They had all grown and aged and died hundreds of years before. They were gone, and nowhere in the universe was there anyone to fill the empty space their loss had left in his life.

To be alive when everyone who mattered to you was dead, Viktor realized morosely, was not unlike being dead yourself.

With all that to weigh on him, the inconveniences of his present existence should have seemed quite trivial. They didn’t, though.

Viktor knew, of course, that he hadn’t been singled out, particularly, for a hard life. Everyone had a hard life now. There weren’t any easy ones. Newmanhome was completely frozen over; the few thousand surviving human beings struggled for a threadbare existence in tunnels in the ground; everyone’s life was a struggle and a hopeless yearning for something better.

But these people certainly hadn’t singled Viktor and Reesa out for any favors, either. The two unplanned and undesired new mouths to feed got the worst of housing, food—and, most of all, employment.

In other times it would have been different; weren’t they special?

As Viktor worked crankily on his aptly named shit detail he reflected on the injustice of it all. They should have been celebrities. When the early European sea explorers had brought savages home to show off to their crowned heads and dabblers in science—people like Hawaiians and Tongans, bushmen and Amerindians from the Virginia coast—at least the bewildered aboriginals had had the pleasure of being the centers of fascinated attention. They were sources of entertainment for their hosts. Everyone crowded to see them.

That kind of life wasn’t all pleasure, of course. The savages had to get used to being poked and prodded, gawked at and questioned. They had no more privacy than zoo creatures. But then, if they were lucky, months or years later, stuffed with foods that made them sick, taught the civilized vices of gambling and getting drunk, and, luckiest of all, if they hadn’t acquired tuberculosis or the pox along the way—then, perhaps, they were allowed to return to their homes a world away.

Viktor and Reesa were not that lucky. There was nothing amiable in the greetings they received; and, of course, they had no home to return to.

More accurately, they were home. The tunnels and caves their captors lived in were on the same site as the town of Homeport they had left. Most of them were, anyway. The central common halls, the power plant with its endless trickle of geothermal heat, the freezers it fed—they were all on the hillside that had been just beginning to be covered with houses when Newmanhome’s sun had begun to dim. The largest of the underground “towns”—the one belonging to the sect they called the Holy Apocalyptic Catholic Church of the Great Transporter—was under what had once been downtown Homeport. The Great Transporters weren’t the only more or less independent tribe (or nation, or religion—anyway, a separate enclave that these paltry few had insisted on subdividing themselves into). Allahabad and the Reformers were along the shore, due west of the old town. The Peeps (actually they called themselves the People’s Republic, and what their religion was exactly Viktor could not really tell) had even dug their warrens out under what had once been the bay, though now it was solid ice from bottom to top.

It wasn’t the geography that had changed for Reesa and Viktor. It was their home itself, the world they had lived in, that was gone.

 

The tunnel dwellers didn’t waste light on the mushroom farm—that was one of the big reasons for raising mushrooms—and when Viktor reported for work he stumbled around in the stinking dark until his eyes adjusted.

He hated the job. He had every reason to, but he had no choice about it. No one on (or under) Newmanhome was unemployed. Everyone had work, for long hours of every day—well, every day but one. They did get days off now and then. The Greats would not work on Sundays, the Reforms on Saturdays, the people from Allahabad on Fridays—these because their religions forbade it; and the Peeps had elected to consider Tuesday their day off because, although they had no comprehensible religion of their own, they had an obsessive need to make sure none of the others had any privileges they could not share.

Viktor and Reesa were special cases. As soon as it was determined that they not only were not members of any of the four sects (and, indeed, had never heard of them before their freezing), they were put in the newly invented category of stateless persons who were entitled to no days off at all. And the jobs they got were the jobs no adult wanted.

Viktor had thought his boredom on Ark’s long flight to Nebo was pretty close to intolerable. Now he looked back on it almost with longing, for his job on the “shit detail” was a good deal worse.

It wasn’t only labor that wasn’t wasted on Newmanhome. Nothing else was, either, not even excrement. When any person in the settlement had to relieve himself he followed strict procedures: Urine went into one vat, feces into another. The urine was processed to use its urea for nitrogen fertilizer for the underground crops. The feces became the most important constituent of the soil the crops were grown on.

Viktor got in on the ground floor. He was assigned to the unlovely task of spreading the fresh dung in a dark, unbearably malodorous cavern, where mushrooms grew on its surface and worms and dung beetles mined it for their nourishment. He wasn’t alone in the job. Reesa wasn’t with him, of course—they were kept mostly separate until such time as the Four-Power Council should decide their fate—but there were four other laborers assigned, one from each of the sects . . . and none of them older than Newmanhome twenty-two. Mooni-bet and Al-car, respectively Moslem from Allahabad and Reformer from the quarrelsome, allegedly Protestant-Christian sect, harvested worms and beetles to feed the chickens in the breeder pens—it meant scurrying around on top of the peatlike layers of excrement and scooping the little living things up with slitted spoon-like tools. Mordi, the Great Transporter girl, and Vandot, the boy from the People’s Republic, harvested mushrooms, which was easier still. And that left Viktor the hard labor of shoveling. The fresh loads of dung had to be spread onto the fields for the mushrooms to grow on. When they had produced a few crops and had aged enough to be fit for fertilizing other things, those sections had to be shoveled into wheeled vats, to be taken and mixed with soil for the lighted grain-growing caverns.

It wasn’t the work that Viktor minded most, not even the stink and the hostility of the children he worked with. It was not knowing—not knowing so many things! He didn’t know where Reesa was, he didn’t know what the blindingly bright thing they called the “universe” was. (Though he was beginning to have some very strange suspicions about that; relativistic effects were at work.) On a more immediate level, he didn’t even know what was being decided about his and Reesa’s future, and none of his co-workers wanted to talk.

It wasn’t just him. They didn’t even speak to each other very often. The hostility among the adults of the four sects was shared by the children, who worked in silent, disagreeable concentration. But children are children, and can’t stay silent forever.

The worms and dung beetles and mushrooms they harvested had to be carried out to the chicken farms or the food depots. One day when three of the children were away from the excrement chamber, dragging their hoppers of harvest to their destinations, the young girl from Allahabad ventured close to Viktor, looking up into his face.

“Hello,” he said, forcing a smile. “I’m Viktor. Which one are you?”

“I’m Mooni-bet,” she said, glancing fearfully at the doorway. Then she whispered, “Is it true? Were you really on old Earth? Did you actually see Mecca?”

Viktor stared at her, startled. “Mecca? No, of course not. I remember California pretty well, and maybe even a little of Poland—but I was as young as you when I left. And, until we left Earth, I didn’t get to do much traveling.”

She stared at him, wide-eyed. “You saw California? Where the movie stars and the oil sheikhs lived?”

“I don’t remember any sheikhs or movie stars,” Viktor said, amused, almost touched by the girl’s naïveté. “I mean, except on television—but I suppose you have the old tapes of that kind of thing, anyway.”

“We do not look at graven images,” the girl said sadly. “Not counting sometimes when we’re working in the bean fields, anyway—the Greats have screens there, but we’re supposed to turn away from them.”

She had stopped her bug catching and was just standing there, gazing curiously at him. Viktor rested on his spade, aware of a chance that might not come again. “Tell me, Mooni-bet, do you know where my wife is working?” She shook her head. “Or whether they are going to give us a room of our own?”

“That is in the hands of the Four-Power Council,” she explained. “You must ask your supervisor.”

“I’ve asked him,” Viktor said grumpily. His supervisor was the Great Transporter named Mirian. Mirian was not a communicative man, and he seemed to resent Viktor, probably as one more nasty chore added to his burden. “He just tells me to wait.”

“Of course he does. That is right. The Four-Power Council will perhaps discuss your situation when they meet.”

“And when will that be?”

“Oh, they meet all the time,” she informed him. “Except holidays, I mean—they meet on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. But when they will come to your case I do not know. They have much to discuss about important questions, for both the Peeps and the Reforms are now on overload.” She lowered her voice to a whisper as she spoke, looking around as though she were discussing something naughty. “I do not understand about that, but all is in the hands of Allah.”

“Oh, sure,” Viktor agreed. Then, as she started to turn away, he tried to prolong the contact. “Mooni-bet? Tell me one other thing, if you will. That very bright thing in the sky—”

“The universe, yes,” she said, nodding encouragingly.

“That’s what I mean. Why do you call it the universe?”

“It’s its name, isn’t it? The muezzins call it that,” she told him. “I don’t know why. I thought the universe was all around us, but they say that is no longer true.”

He blinked at her. “No longer true?”

The girl shook her head. “I don’t know what that means, only it is what we bow to in devotions. They say old Earth is there, along with everything else.” She paused, then added helpfully, “My father said when he was a boy it was much brighter. I don’t know what that means, either, only—” She broke off, then turned away. Over her shoulder she whispered, “They’re coming back! Don’t talk to me anymore, please!”

“Why not?” he demanded. “Can’t we talk while we work?”

“We don’t,” she whispered, looking agonizedly toward the returning workers.

“But I do,” he said, smiling.

The three returning children stopped in the doorway, scandalized. The boy in the kilts of the People’s Republic called menacingly, “I will report this!”

Viktor shrugged. “What is there to report, Vandot? I am simply talking; I have not been ordered to be silent, after all. If you don’t want to listen, then don’t listen. But I’ve been on Earth, and I am going to talk about what Earth was like, long ago, when I was young . . .”

And he did, shoveling the dung, while the mushroom cutters and beetle collectors lingered near him at their work. They glanced at each other diffidently, conscious that they were certainly bending the rules, if not breaking them outright; Mordi, the Great Transporter girl, was particularly uneasy, because she was the one from Viktor’s own commune. But they were listening, all right. How could they help it? For Viktor was telling them about the traffic jams in the cities, the surf at Malibu, about flying in supersonic jets that crossed oceans in an hour. And about the experience of flying from star to star, when Mayflower was whole and mighty. And about life on the colony when Mayflower landed, and sailing across Great Ocean in warm sunshine, and walking in the sun on a green meadow . . .

And by and by they began to talk, too. After all, they were only children.

 

Even slaves have to eat, and finally Vandot announced that the workday was done. Because Mordi had an errand to run Viktor followed the little girl, Mooni-bet, back through the tunnels to the caverns of the Great Transporters. She was nervous there, among the hostile black-shrouded enemies of her people. She was glad to abandon him at the entrance to the grown-up dining hall, disappearing to hurry to her own tunnels; and when Viktor entered he found his supervisor, Mirian, just coming in. The man looked glum. That didn’t discourage Viktor; it seemed to be Mirian’s normal expression. Viktor turned to face him. “I’ve been asking about that bright spot you called the universe,” he said, “but the kids I work with don’t seem to know much about it. Can I ask—”

He didn’t finish, because Mirian gave him an unfriendly look. “No,” Mirian said, crossing himself.

“No what?” Viktor asked plaintively.

“No, we do not discuss that subject here. I know nothing about it. I wish to know nothing about it.”

“All right,” Viktor said, suddenly angry, “then tell me what you do know about. When can my wife and I have a room of our own?”

Mirian stared at him belligerently. “A room of your own!” he repeated, raising his voice sarcastically so others could hear. “He wants a room of his own!”

“But I have a right to that much!” Viktor protested. “I don’t even know where Reesa is—”

“She is housed with the Moslems in Allahabad, since they are not on overload just now,” Mirian informed him.

“Of course, I know that, but what I want to know—”

“What you want to know is none of your business! In any case, I don’t want to talk to you about it—not until the Four-Power Council issues its orders, certainly.”

“Why do you have to be so nasty?”

“What right do you have to complain?” Mirian snapped angrily. “You owe us your life! And I am paying for my charity in reviving you!”

Viktor was puzzled. “Paying how?” he asked.

“I should be up on that ship, doing my proper work! But because they blame me for reviving you, they sent me back down to this miserable—” He stopped there, looking around to see if anyone had heard his complaints. Then he closed his mouth with a snap and turned away. He squeezed between two others on a bench, conspicuously leaving no room for Viktor to join him.

When Viktor sat down at another table the strangers next to him were equally unwilling to talk. Viktor sighed and devoted himself to his stew of corn and beans. At least, he reflected, the children had given him a pretty good idea of the polity and customs of this new Newmanhome. The four sects did work together on common needs. The chambers of the Four-Power Council were common and kept separate from the living quarters of the sects. So were the food-producing caves, or most of them—Allahabad insisted on growing its chickens and gerbils separately, for dietary reasons, and the People’s Republic chose not to share the grain and bean fields of the others. (They weren’t really “fields,” of course. They were stretches of tunnels where artificial light fed plants that were hydroponically grown; and the austere diet of the Peeps was even less varied, and even less tasty, than the meals of the other three communities.) The freezer caves, where they had long before stored the animals they could no longer afford to keep alive, were also common, though there wasn’t much food in them anymore. (The children didn’t want to talk about the freezers, for reasons Viktor didn’t at first understand.) The geothermal power plant was common, along with the datastores. All four communities shared their benefits and their responsibilities—though there weren’t many responsibilities, since the original builders had done good work. The four factions had no choice about maintaining their common possessions, of course; if the power plant failed they would all be dead in a day.

But for most of their lives the sects stayed firmly apart. Great Transporters married Great Transporters, Moslems Moslems. The citizens of the People’s Republic married no one, because they didn’t believe in marriage, but they made love (on occasions directed by their leaders) only with their own. And all four communities tried their best not to have too many babies, all in their own ways, because there was barely food enough and heat enough and living space enough for the twenty-two hundred human beings already alive on (or, rather, under the surface of) Newmanhome.

Of course, their ways of keeping the population down differed from community to community. When Viktor found out about them he was startled, not to say repelled. The Reformers and the Moslems practiced nonprocreative sex—frequently homosex. The People’s Republic did their best at abstinence, with males and females housed firmly apart except on designated nights, when a couple who had deserved well of the state were allowed to dwell with each other. And the Great Transporters, so to speak, attacked the problem from the other end. Their religion forbade them to take life—well, except in war, of course. For that reason they didn’t use contraception, nor did they practice abortion; they had babies, lots of babies, and when they pruned their populations it was among the adults—at least, mostly among the near adults, anyway; if a Great Transporter child managed to survive his rebellious adolescence he had a fair chance of a natural death, sixty or seventy Newmanhome years later.

What the Great Transporters did was dispose of their criminals, and they had a lot of criminals. In their community there were two hundred and eighty statutory crimes punishable by their supreme penalty—it came to about one crime for every two persons in the community, and the sentence was passed frequently.

Of course, the sentence wasn’t death. Not exactly, anyway. Execution was another of the life-taking sins that was prohibited. They had a better way. They put their criminals in the freezer.

It was fortunate for the Great Transporters that there was so much unused freezer space. The freezers had been big to begin with. Then they had been further enlarged when Newmanhome began to get too cold to support outside life, and tens of thousands of cattle and other livestock were slaughtered and frozen. The freezers had their own independent, long-lasting lines to the geothermal power plant; they were fully automatic and would last for the ages.

But that was one more of the many sources of friction among the communities, because the Greats were rapidly filling them up.

The four communities rubbed abrasively against each other in plenty of other ways. The Great Transporters hated to see even unbelievers profane their Sabbath. The Moslems lost their tempers when they saw anyone drinking alcohol; the Peeps were constantly irate about the wasteful, sinful “luxuries” of the other three groups, while the Reformers simply hated everyone else.

That was where the work of the Four-Power Council came in. They usually made sure that the frictions were kept minor. The system worked pretty well. They had not fought a real war for nearly eighteen years.

 

Viktor slept badly that night, in his barracks with forty other unattached male Greats sniffling and snoring and muttering in their sleep all around him, and the next day at his loathsome job was no better than the last.

Even the children seemed to have second thoughts about their undisciplined behavior of the day before. When Viktor asked Mooni-bet if she had seen Reesa the girl hung her head. She looked worriedly to see if anyone was listening, then whispered,

“We are on overload now, Viktor. She has been moved to the Peeps.”

And then, when Viktor tried to ask Vandot, the boy from the People’s Republic snapped at him. “We are here to work, not to chatter like religious fanatics.”

“Watch your mouth!” the girl from the Reformers snarled at him.

“I only say what is true,” Vandot muttered. “In any case, I know nothing of your wife, Viktor. It is not my business. Nor is it yours; because your duty is to pay us all back for reviving you from—” He hesitated, not willing to say the word. “For reviving you,” he finished. “Now get to work.”

Viktor didn’t answer that. It wasn’t because he had been ordered by a child. He hadn’t quite figured out what an answer to that sort of remark ought to be. It was true that he was alive. That is to say, his heart pumped, his eyes saw, his bowels moved. Even his genital organs were still in working condition, at least he thought they would be if he were allowed to be with Reesa long enough, in enough privacy, to test them out.

But was that really a “life”?

It was certainly a kind of life, but Viktor could not believe that it was the only life he was ever going to have again. It was not at all his life.

His life had been on a very different Newmanhome, with very different friends, family, and job. Especially job. Viktor Sorricaine’s job had never been simply the thing he put hours into in order to keep himself fed. Viktor’s job had been his profession. His position. His skills. It was the thing he could organize his life around, the thing he was. And Viktor Sorricaine could not recognize himself as a shoveler of human dung. He was a trained pilot! More than that, he was at least an amateur, thanks to his father’s endless lecturing, of such things as astrophysics—the very person these people needed to investigate this eerie ghost in the sky that they called the universe. That was what Viktor Sorricaine was . . .

From which it followed that this chilly, weary dung shoveler wasn’t the real Viktor Sorricaine, and this life was not his.

And when Mooni-bet came near him again in her gathering of dung beetles, he spoke to her, not keeping his voice down. “I do have a complaint, Mooni-bet,” he told her. “I’m being wasted here. I have skills that ought to be used.”

The girl looked at him desperately. “Please,” she whispered, looking over her shoulder.

“But it’s important,” Viktor insisted. “That thing they call the universe. It needs to be understood, and I have scientific training—”

“Be still!” the Peeps boy cried, coming up to them. “You are interfering with the work!”

“Anyone can do this work,” Viktor said reasonably, refraining from pointing out that it was a task that even silly children could handle. Obviously.

“We all must work,” Vandot cried, his shrill boy’s voice almost cracking. He rubbed his hands nervously on his smeared kilt, staring around at the others in the gloom. Mordi, the Great Transporter girl, averted her eyes, but when she glanced toward Viktor her look was almost guilty. Vandot asserted his righteous young masculinity. “The most important thing is survival,” the boy declared. “And the most important part of that is food. Shut up and get those beds prepared!”

 

Survival, Viktor thought bleakly. True enough. That seemed to be the central rule of the game.

It was natural enough that the social structure for these people had to bend to conform. Their rigid ways were a pattern for survival. Earth’s Eskimos, in their far milder climate, had developed unusual social institutions of their own to deal with the brutal facts of their lives. True, the Eskimos had solved the problem in a different way—without rigid laws and stern central government, without punishment (and these people were absolutely devoted to punishment)—but then the Eskimos had started from a different position. They hadn’t had long-ingrained traditions of certain kinds of governments and religions to try to preserve. They came into their harsh new environment without the baggage of any real government or religion at all.

The people of this new Newmanhome, in Viktor’s eyes, were both authoritarian in government and fanatic in religion. So they lived their dreary, deprived, regimented lives in the caverns under the ice crags that had once been the city of Newmanhome. They had a few things going for them—fortunately, because otherwise they could not have survived at all. The most important one was that, although their sun had gone pale, the fires inside the planet still burned as hot as ever. The geothermal wells produced heat to keep their warrens livable, and even power enough to run their little factories (not to mention their freezers). The supply was not at all lavish. There certainly wasn’t enough energy to be had to keep Newmanhome’s tens of thousands of people alive . . .

But then there weren’t that many people left alive anymore. Not on Newmanhome. Not anywhere.

 

When, grudgingly, Vandot allowed that work was through for the day, Viktor tried to scrape some of the filth off his hands. He looked around for Mordi, expecting to walk back to the Greats residence together, but she had already left the growing cavern.

What a drag, Viktor thought irritably. He was fairly sure he could find his way by himself, but there was no reason she couldn’t have waited for him . . .

She had.

She was standing outside the cavern, looking both frightened and resolute, and next to her was his supervisor, Mirian.

“You simply won’t cooperate, will you?” Mirian said angrily. “What Mordi reported was true. You not only don’t do your own job, you interfere with the others.”

Viktor gave the girl a reproachful look. She shrugged disdainfully and turned to leave. “All right,” Viktor said, “you’ve made your point. Now let’s get something to eat.”

“Eat!” the supervisor growled. “We’ll be lucky if we eat at all this night, you’ve seen to that. I’ve got to bring you to the Four-Power Council for a hearing. Come on!”

There wasn’t any use questioning Mirian when the man didn’t want to talk. Viktor tried anyway, of course. He wasn’t surprised when Mirian simply shook his head and pointed toward a rack of parkas.

That was the first Viktor had known that they were going outside.

And then, as they battled their way across the hummocks in the teeth of a freezing gale, he looked up and saw the thing that had puzzled him most: the “universe.” It was like a sun, but it was immensely brighter than any sun, a pure, blue-white point in the sky that seared his eyes.

He tried to imagine how their little group of stars could possibly have been flung so fast, so far, that they were catching up with the light from every body in the universe. They had to be moving almost at the velocity of light itself! If only there were someone to ask, someone to talk to . . .

But while they were in the open it was too cold to talk, and then, when they were in the separate cavern that housed the meetings of the Four-Power Council, Viktor almost forgot his questions about the strange thing. For an unexpected joy was waiting for him.

Reesa was there.

It was the first time they had been together in the two weeks since landing, and as Viktor saw her sitting there, in the bare, cramped waiting room, with her People’s Republic “hosts” watchful on either side, he felt a sudden, unanticipated rush of longing, pleasure and—what was it? He thought it over, as he held her in his arms, while the Peeps grumbled menacingly, and decided it was simply love.

He understood that with wonder. It was a novel thought for him. Reesa had been his wife, of course. She had been a comfort, a pleasure, a partner—she had been a useful adjunct to his life in many ways; but he had never before realized that he had somehow grown to center his life around her in the classical tradition of monogamous love. That sort of romantic fixation had been reserved for Marie-Claude Stockbridge.

It was a surprise to Viktor to realize that he had not even thought of Marie-Claude since they had come back to life in this icy hell.

“Are you all right?” he whispered into his wife’s fine, warm-smelling hair.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’ve been tending the gerbils and the chickens—you wouldn’t believe what they feed them! Bugs and worms and—”

“Oh, I believe, all right,” Victor assured her, hesitating at the choice: tell her about his own work, or tell her about the startling new truth he was bursting to share? He released her, looking at her consideringly. She didn’t look fine. She looked careworn.

Nevertheless, the impulse to tell the truth won out. “That bright spot we saw—the universe? Do you know what it means? It means that somehow—God! I can’t imagine how!—our whole solar system and some of the others nearby are rushing through space at relativistic speeds! We’re traveling so fast we’re actually sort of catching up with the light ahead of us! And—” He paused, blinking at the expression on her face. “What’s the matter?” he demanded.

“Go on, Viktor,” she said encouragingly. “You were saying about the stars that are moving at nearly light speed—ours and eleven others, right?”

He stared at her. “You knew that?”

“The Peeps told me, yes,” she said. “They say it’s been like that for three hundred years, almost, except that it used to be brighter than it is now.”

“Well, shit,” he said angrily. “If these people knew that, why wouldn’t the Greats tell me?”

She looked at him absently for a moment. Then she nodded. “I forgot you were with the Greats,” she said. “They don’t believe in it. I mean, they don’t believe in asking questions about why. They go by their Bible. If there’s anything that isn’t in the Third Testament, they don’t want to discuss it at all.”

“But—” he began, and then stopped. What was there to say? He was fuming inside, but there was no point in burdening Reesa with his anger against these people and their folly, especially when she herself was staring unhappily into space.

It took that long for Viktor to realize there was something else on his wife’s mind.

“What is it?” he demanded. “Are the Peeps giving you a hard time?”

She looked at him in surprise. “No harder than anyone else, really.”

“Then what’s the matter with you?”

She looked at him blankly, then shook her head. “It’s just—” She hesitated. Then, looking away, she finished. “It’s just that I keep—wondering, Viktor.”

“Wondering about what?”

“I wonder if Quinn had a happy life,” she said, and would say no more.