Reminiscing is a recreation for the elderly. It is what people do when they have outlived all their other occupations—people like Wan-To.

Elderly human beings at least have bodily functions to use up some hours. They have to eat, use the toilet, maybe even hoist themselves into their wheelchairs and complain to those around them. Wan-To didn’t have even those ways of passing the time. Wan-To didn’t just have very little else to do, he had nothing else to do. In the exhausted, depleted, moribund universe that Wan-To lived in he not only didn’t need to do anything to keep on living, he had nothing much in the way of limbs, powers, or effectors to do anything with. His mind still worked—quite clearly, in fact, though at a depressingly slow speed. But everything stayed within his mind. He didn’t have any useful appendages anymore to convert any of his mind’s impulses into action.

All that being so, Wan-To was lucky he had so much to reminisce about.

He certainly did have a lot of memories. If there had been a contest to see which single being, among all the universe’s inhabitants in all the endless eons of its existence, had the most in the way of stored-up memories to take out and chew over, Wan-To would have been the incontestable winner. If your mind remains clear, and Wan-To’s had, you can remember a lot out of a lifetime of ten-to-the-fortieth years.

Ten to the fortieth power years . . . and maybe much more still to come. That was one of the things Wan-To had to think about, for there still was at least one decision he sooner or later would have to make.

 

That was going to be a very hard decision. Because it was so very hard he preferred not to think about it. (There was, after all, positively no hurry at all.) What Wan-To liked to think about—the only thing that could be described as a pleasure that he still had left—was the days when he had had all the power any being could ever have desired.

Ah, those long-gone days! Days when he carelessly deployed the energies of stars on the whim of a moment—without a care for the future, without penalty for his spendthrift ways! When he cruised at will from star to star, from galaxy to galaxy (wistfully he remembered how wonderful it was to enter a virgin galaxy, bright with billions upon billions of unoccupied stars, and all his!) When he lived off copies of himself for companionship and battled joyfully against them for survival when they turned against him! (Even the frights and worries of those days were tenderly recalled now.) Wan-To remembered lolling on the surface of a star, taking his ease in the cool luxury of its six or seven thousand degrees (and he’d thought that cool!) . . . and swimming through the star’s unimaginably dense core . . . and frolicking in the corona, temperature now up to a couple million degrees, soaked with X rays, dashing out as far as ten million miles from the star’s surface to the corona’s fringe and then happily plunging back.

He remembered the fun (and challenges—oh, he relished remembering the challenges!) when he had created those little copies of himself, Haigh-tik and Mromm and poor, silly Wan-Wan-Wan—and Kind and Happy and all the others he had made; he even remembered, though not very well, the terribly stupid matter-copies he had made, like Five. (He didn’t actually remember Five as an individual, to be sure. Five had not been important to him—just then.)

What he remembered was living. And though it gave him a sort of melancholy joy to remember, the knowledge that he would never have such times again made him almost despair.

It was only when he was close to despair that he could force himself to think about that other thing, the one about which he would sooner or later have to make a decision. It concerned the only things in the universe that had ever really frightened Wan-To—because there was so much about them that even he had never been able to understand:

Black holes.

 

There lay the choice that ultimately Wan-To would have to make. Not right away, to be sure—nothing ever had to be “right away” in this dreary eternity—but sooner or later, for the sake of survival.

A black hole might very well give him his best chance for really long-term survival.

Wan-To wasn’t sure he quite wanted to survive on those terms. He did not care for black holes. The locked-in singularities where a star once had been—and then collapsed upon itself and pulled space in around it—were about the only sorts of objects in the universe Wan-To had never investigated in person. He hoped he would never have to. They were scary.

The frightening thing about black holes was that inside them the laws of the universe—the laws that Wan-To understood so well—did not apply, because black holes were no longer really parts of the universe. They had seceded from it.

It was easy enough to get inside a black hole—in fact, the problem sometimes was to avoid falling into one. Once or twice Wan-To had to exert himself to steer away from one’s neighborhood. But getting in was a purely one-way trip. Once inside, you couldn’t get out again. Even light was stuck there.

That wasn’t because the immense gravitational field of the black hole pulled light back down to its surface, as, say, the gravity of a planet like the Earth pulls a thrown ball back down. Wan-To knew better than that. Wan-To was quite aware that light can’t slow down; that’s why c is invariant. The reason even light couldn’t escape was simply because the gravity of the black hole wrapped space around it—bent it—so that the light orbited around it eternally, within the Schwarzschild radius of the black hole, as planets orbit around a sun.

But the exact mechanism that caught and held anything that wandered by in those cosmic traps wasn’t really what mattered to Wan-To. What mattered was that once you were inside, you couldn’t get out again ever—not light, not matter. Not even Wan-To himself.

The things were terrifying.

Nevertheless, they had their virtues, Wan-To told himself. One of those virtues was that a good-sized black hole, say even one of as little as three or four solar masses, would continue its existence for a long time.

That was not just a very long time, like Wan-To’s present age of ten-to-the-fortieth years. It was a long long time: ten-to-the-sixty-sixth years, anyway.

Those are numbers that few human beings can ever grasp. Even Wan-To had trouble working with them. Ordinary arithmetic isn’t meant for such numbers. But what they mean was that if Wan-To were to take the plunge so that he could live as long as one of those fair-sized black holes—

Which is to say, for 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years—

And if you subtracted from that his present lifetime (which was to say, the present age of the universe, because by now they were pretty much the same number)—

Which amounted to 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years—

If, then, he succeeded in living as long as that black hole continued to radiate energy, he had still to look forward to—

Another 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,990,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years of existence. If such numbers meant anything at all, even to Wan-To.

And if, of course, you could call that “existence.”

Because that radiated “energy” from the black hole wasn’t really very energetic at all. Such a black hole didn’t begin to radiate in the first place until the mean temperature of the universe—what was called the “background radiation” when human beings first discovered it in their silly little microwave dishes, back in the twentieth century—had dropped to the very low value of one ten-millionth of one degree above absolute zero. It was only at that temperature that the black hole would begin to radiate.

That was very feeble warmth indeed.

Wan-To knew dismally that he could manage to survive, more or less, even with that sort of input—but he did not like the idea at all.

The only thing was that he didn’t see any better alternative . . .

Until he became aware that the tiny tick his few remaining sensors had registered some time earlier was, strangely enough, a sudden and wholly unidentified flux of tachyons.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 24

 

 

Nrina was flushed and excited as they boarded the bus. “It’s going to be a nice party,” she was saying. She seemed younger than Viktor had ever seen her, happily making sure her packages were stored and that Viktor got a window seat. “Have you got the cat? Please, don’t let go of it. We’ll have a couple of velocity changes, and we don’t want it flying around and hitting some other passenger in the face. You don’t get spacesick, do you?”

Viktor Sorricaine, who was fairly sure he was the oldest living space pilot in the known universe, didn’t dignify that with an answer. “How far are we going?” he asked as he settled himself into the soft webbing of the seat, carefully adjusting the belt so that it didn’t squeeze the restless little kitten on his lap. The dark-haired man across the aisle was staring at the little animal.

“Not far. Frit’s family lives on a fabrication habitat; they make things. It’s two or three levels down, but it’s less than a quarter-orbit away. It’ll take about two hours to get there.”

Two hours! A spaceflight of only two hours? But he had picked up on something else she had said. “Is it a family party? I’m not family,” he objected.

She looked at him in surprise. “That doesn’t matter. I am. Sort of, anyway. They’ll certainly be glad to have you; there are always guests at this kind of party—” She stopped to nod to a young-looking woman who was strolling languidly through the bus, glancing to see that everyone was strapped in. “That’s the driver,” Nrina informed him as the woman passed. “We’ll be leaving in a moment now.” The driver seated herself in the front of the bus, before a broad screen. Casually she pulled a board of pale lights and twinkling colors down into her lap, glancing over it for a moment. Then she touched the control that closed the entrance hatch behind them, and Nrina said, “Here we go, Viktor. Don’t let go of the cat.”

 

Then they were in space. In space!

Viktor was thrilled by the feel of the bus launching itself free of the habitat. It wasn’t violent. The launch was no more than a gentle thrust against the back of the webbing, a quarter-gravity at most. Viktor found himself grinning in pleasure, though he felt Nrina, beside him, shifting uncomfortably in her seat. Absently, Viktor patted her knee with his free hand. (Under his other hand, the kitten didn’t seem to mind the acceleration at all. It was actually purring.)

Considered as a spaceship, the bus was—a bus. Even the old Newmanhome lander shuttles had been twice its size, but then they necessarily had to be; they had to carry the fuel and rockets capable of fighting a planet’s gravity. The bus had no such needs. All it needed were air and room for its dozen or so passengers, and engines enough to push it along through inter-orbital space.

Just outside Viktor’s window, it seemed, was the smoldering, bloody face of the brown dwarf, Nergal. The planet was less than a hundred thousand miles below them, almost hurting his eyes until Nrina indulgently leaned over him and darkened the polarization. Nergal-light wasn’t like bright sunshine, it looked hot—though only visible light came through the polarization, with the infrared frequencies screened out.

The word for it was “baleful.”

As the ship rotated Nergal slid away, and Viktor got a look at the habitat they had just left: A length of sewer pipe, half a mile long, spinning in stately slow motion, with odds and ends of junk hanging from it. Some of the appendages were the great mirrors that caught Nergal’s hot radiation and funneled it into the magnetohydrodynamic generators that gave them the power they needed to run the habitat. Some were probably communications gear; more were things Viktor could not even guess at.

Then that was gone, too, and Viktor turned to find Nrina looking at him with interest. “You’re excited, aren’t you?” she asked, placing her hand over his.

“I guess I am,” he admitted. “Oh, Nrina, it’s so good to be in space again! That’s what I dreamed about when I was a boy— Look, there’s another ship!” he cried as something the size of a family car slid rapidly past, only a mile or two away.

Nrina glanced briefly at the thing. “It’s just a cargo drone, probably nobody on it.” Then, reassuringly, she said, “This is quite safe, you know, Viktor.”

But it wasn’t safety that was on his mind, it was the glandular excitement of being in space. Viktor stared longingly at the nearly empty black sky.

It was so terribly black. So very little was left of the familiar sky. Without Nergal or the distant sun, there was nothing to see but an occasional glint—a distant habitat, perhaps, or another ship—and one or two more distant things: the surviving stars.

That was it.

The familiar spread of constellations that had always been there—always—simply did not exist anymore.

Viktor shivered. He had never felt so alone.

Chatter beside him reminded him that he wasn’t alone at all. Nrina had taken the kitten from him and was feeding it with a little object like a baby bottle, while half a dozen other passengers were clustered around in admiration, braced awkwardly against the mild thrust of the ship. “Yes, it is called a ‘cat,’ ” Nrina was explaining. “No, they’ve been extinct for ages. Yes, it’s the only one of its kind now—I just finished it—but if it lives I think I’ll make a mate for it. No, they aren’t wild animals. People used to have them in their houses all the time. Didn’t they, Viktor?” she appealed.

 “What? Oh, yes, they make great pets,” Viktor confirmed, recalled to reality. “They do have claws, though. And they needed to be housebroken.”

That led to more questions (What were “claws”? What was “housebroken”? Could they be trained to do useful things, like gillies?) until the driver broke up the party. “Everyone get back to his seat, please,” she called. ‘We’ll be matching orbit with the target in a moment.”

As the little ship swerved Viktor saw what was waiting for them. This new habitat was also cylindrical—no doubt because that was the best shape for an orbiting people container—but along its perimeter were a dozen rosettes of air hatches where odd-looking little ships had attached themselves. “They’re raw-materials gatherers,” Nrina explained when he asked. “This is a manufacturing habitat, didn’t I tell you? That’s what Frit’s family does, manufacturing. Those things—I suppose you’ve never seen them before—they are set loose here. Then they go out to the asteroids and so on to grow and reproduce themselves and bring back metals and things to use—”

Viktor felt a start of recognition. “Like Von Neumann machines?” he asked, remembering the ore-collecting nautiloids that he had encountered so often in the seas of Newmanhome.

“I don’t know what those are, but—oh, look! That must be Pelly’s ship!”

And Viktor forgot the Von Neumanns, because as the habitat rotated under them he saw what Nrina was pointing to. Yes, that was a ship, a real spaceship, hugged to the shell of the habitat. The ship had to be nearly a thousand feet long by itself, and it in turn had hugged to its own shell a lander larger than their bus. He stared at it longingly. That was more like it! A man could take pride in piloting a ship like that . . .

“Maybe Pelly will be at the party,” Nrina said with pleasure. “Anyway, we’ll be getting out in a minute, Viktor. Do you want to take the cat?” She passed the kitten to him and then, leaning past him, looked with disfavor at the habitat. “It doesn’t look like much, does it? It’s so big. It has to be, I suppose, because they do all sorts of industrial things there. I don’t think anyone would live there if they didn’t have to. Still, it’s quite nice on the inside, anyway. You’ll see.”

 

What she said was true. On the inside the factory habitat was nice, very much so, but it took Viktor a while to find that out.

Its design was not like the one they had come from. It was almost a reversal of Nrina’s, in fact. Instead of a shell of dwelling places surrounding a core of machinery, this habitat’s machinery was all in the outer shell. The passengers exited the bus into a noisy, steel-walled cavern, with the thumping, grinding sounds of distant industrial production coming from somewhere not far on the other side of the wall. Then Viktor and Nrina and the kitten took a fast little elevator, and when they emerged Viktor saw that the whole heart of the cylinder was a vast open space. Great trees grew along the inside of the rim, all queerly straining up toward the axis of the cylinder. There a glowing rodlike thing stretched from end to end to give them light. The whole place was almost like a vast park, rolled around to join itself.

It was a teetery, vertiginous place to be, for the ground beneath Viktor’s feet curved up past the glowing central rod to become the sky over his head. Nothing fell on him, of course. Viktor knew perfectly well that nothing could, because the rotation of the habitat pasted those distant upside-down trees and people as firmly to their “ground” as he was pasted to his. All the same, he was less uneasy when he avoided looking up. There were plenty of other things to see. There were brooks and ponds. There were beds of flowering plants, and farm patches. There were even herds of what looked like sheep and cattle, grazing on the meadows that bent up to join on the far side of the habitat. There were people, too, many people, going about their business or simply strolling and enjoying the park.

Viktor realized that something was missing from the bizarre scene: buildings. There were none in sight. It seemed that no one lived on the surface of this interior shell; their homes, their offices or workshops or whatever, were all inside the shell, “underground,” so to speak, with only entranceways visible on the surface—like the one they had come out of, rising direct from the bus dock.

“Ah, yes,” Nrina said as she got her bearings. She pointed to a round pond a hundred yards away—just far enough along the curve of the shell to make Viktor uneasy again, because the water looked as though it really ought to be spilling over out of its bed. “Sit there on that bench,” she commanded. The bench was in a trellis of something like grapevines. “Let me have the cat—we don’t want Balit to see it yet. Then you just stay there while I find the others and check the operating room.” She was gone before he could ask her what in the world she wanted an “operating room” for.

As Viktor sat, the quivers in his stomach began to settle down. The air was warm enough to be friendly but not oppressive; there was a gentle, steady breeze, perhaps from the rotation of the cylinder. A fair number of people were in sight, though none close enough to Viktor to talk to. Near the round pond there was a grassy meadow, where twelve or fourteen adults and children were flying huge bright, many-colored kites, laughing and shouting as they played the fluttery things in the steady breeze.

Of course, like everyone else Viktor encountered these days, they were just about naked—breechclouts, yes, they all had those, and a few wore gauzy cloaks, or even hats; but that was it. And they were having fun. They weren’t just flying the kites for the sake of watching them dart and wheel in the sky. They were in a contest. The kite flyers were fighting one kite against another. Some of the players were children, most were fully grown, and all of them were screaming in excitement as they tried to use the sharp edges of their own kite tails and cords to cut someone else’s down.

Between Viktor and the kite flyers was a sort of garden. Some pale, long fruit was being harvested—maybe a kind of cucumber? Viktor thought. And a crew of dwarfish, hairy “gillies” was moving along the rows to pick the ripe fruit. They seemed to Viktor larger, or at least squatter, than the ones he had seen before. As Viktor watched, one of them glanced around, then crammed one of the fruits into its own mouth. When it saw Viktor watching, it winked at him in embarrassment.

So even the gillies had privileges here. He found the thought reassuring. It emboldened him to pick a few grapes off the vines he was sitting under. They were not very sweet, but they were deliciously cool on his tongue.

When Nrina came back she was not alone.

Half a dozen or more other men and women came milling out of the entranceway with her, all next door to naked, of course, and all chuckling to each other and looking anticipatory. They were all strangers to Viktor—almost all, anyway, though one exceptionally stocky, round-faced man looked vaguely familiar. Viktor was surprised to see that all of them were carrying things that looked like baseball bats, for what reason he could not guess.

Nrina introduced him all around. “This is Viktor,” she said proudly. “He was actually born on Earth! And this is Wollet, Viktor, and this is his daughter Gren. This is Velota and this Mangry—Frit’s father and mother, you know—and Forta’s sisters, Wilp and Mrust; this is Pallik over here; and do you remember Pelly?”

Recognition dawned. “I do,” he said. “I saw your ship as we were coming in. How are you, Pelly?”

The man looked agreeable but surprised. “I’m very well, of course. Why do you ask?”

Nrina laughed and interrupted, sparing Viktor the trouble of finding an answer. “That’s how they used to talk on Old Earth,” she explained. “Viktor’s really quite civilized, though. Not like some of the others.”

They didn’t shake hands, either, Viktor discovered, although several of them did hug in greeting, and one of the men kissed his cheek. Which one, Viktor could not have said. Of all the dozen names Viktor had been given he retained none, though the other party guests all seemed to know each other.

Then Nrina handed him one of the clubs. He almost dropped it—not because it was heavy, but for the opposite reason. The bat was made of a sort of rigid foam, strong and soft to the touch, that weighed almost nothing.

A soft thwack across his own back made him jump and whirl: It was the little girl—Gren?—giggling as she swung at him again. He fended the attack off with his own club, careful not to hit the girl—the blow hadn’t hurt at all, but he was very unsure of just what was going on. Her father—Wollet?—nodded approvingly, grinning as he took practice swings with his own club. “We’ll give it to them, all right,” he exulted. “Where are they, Nrina? Let’s go!”

“Hold the club behind your back, you ass,” she commanded, laughing at him. “You too, Viktor. We don’t want them to see what we’re doing, do we? Frit said they’d be watching the kite battles—yes, there they are! Oh, and look at Balit—isn’t he a perfect little doll?”

It was Wollet’s turn. “If you don’t shut up they’ll hear us,” he warned, and led the way to where two men and a young boy were watching the battling kites, their backs to the group with the clubs. The boy certainly was nice-looking—slim, pale-haired; the equivalent of an Earthly ten-year-old, with the promise of good adult looks in the bones of his face. Viktor frowned. Another puzzle! On the boy’s pretty young forehead there was exactly the same blue tattoo as Viktor wore himself. But he had no opportunity to ask about it, for the others were all shushing each other as they moved closer. Although the boy was doggedly staring at the bobbing kites, he was also stealing glances around in every direction, as though suspecting something, until one of the men with him leaned down and, smiling, whispered in his ear. Then Balit stopped looking around. Still, the body language of the way he stood showed that he was tensed up for—what?

There were other spectators, who glanced from Balit to the approaching group, with expressions of amused tolerance. The two men with Balit kept their eyes steadfastly on the kites in the sky. As they approached, Viktor saw that one of the men was as tall as himself, though as slightly built as all these people; he had both mustaches and a beard, all waxed or sprayed or some-other-how swept out in majestic and improbable long curves. The other man, smaller and even more delicately built, had one hand on the boy’s head and the other tucked into the hand of his companion. His beard was far shorter and less conspicuous—but, all the same, it was definitely a beard.

Suddenly confused, Viktor whispered to Nrina, “Who are those two guys?”

“Frit and Forta, of course. Balit’s parents.”

“Oh. For a minute I thought they were both men.”

“They are both men, Viktor. Do be quiet!”

“Oh,” Viktor said again, feeling his eyes beginning to bulge. One more surprise! He could have expected almost anything of these people, but what he had not expected at all was that Balit’s parents should both be male.

Then things got even more surprising. “Now we attack! Show no quarter!” Nrina shouted joyously, and her whole band began to run toward the little family, waving their clubs. “Don’t you dare try to resist!” Nrina ordered ferociously, thwacking the taller man happily across his shoulder with the harmless bat. “We’ve come to steal your child and you dare not try to stop us!”

But both the men, laughing, were already resisting. They whirled around, pulling soft clubs of their own out of the waistbands of their breechclouts and defending themselves vigorously against the combined attack of Nrina’s band of marauders. A couple of blows hit Viktor, who was blinking in confusion as he was thrust into the middle of the fracas. Of course, the clubs didn’t hurt. It was almost like being hit with a helium-filled balloon; the foam-light clubs were incapable of hurting anyone; and there was no doubt of the outcome—it was two against a dozen, after all. The bystanders were cheering and egging both sides on, as the outnumbered parents slowly fell back, leaving the boy standing tense and smiling anxiously behind them.

“Pick him up, Viktor,” Nrina commanded, laughing breathlessly in pursuit. “Go on, do it! You’re much stronger than any of us, so you can be the one to carry him away!”

What made Viktor follow her order was that the boy seemed to acquiesce. He moved toward Viktor, smiling tentatively and holding out his arms.

And so Viktor Sorricaine, four thousand years out of his time, found himself in the act of kidnapping a child on a manmade habitat that circled the brown dwarf, Nergal. Well, why not? he thought wryly. Nothing else made sense! Why should this?

The band of kidnappers broke off their battle and flocked after Viktor, shouting in triumph while the despoiled parents watched proudly after them. The whole abducting mob hurried into one of the entranceways. Then Nrina told Viktor to put the boy down. “I’ll take care of him from now on,” she said indulgently. “Did you meet Viktor, Balit? He was frozen for a long time, you know. He was actually on Old Earth—imagine! He’ll tell you all about it at the party, I’m sure.”

“Hello, Viktor,” the boy said politely, and then looked plaintively at Nrina. “Is it going to hurt, Aunt Nrina?”

“Hurt? Of course it won’t hurt, Balit,” she scolded indulgently. “It’ll take five minutes, that’s all. Then it will all be over. And besides, you’ll be asleep while I’m doing it. Now, come to the operating room—and, oh, I’ve got the most wonderful coming-of-age present for you!”

 

An hour later the party was in full swing. Balit was sitting on a kind of throne on top of the buffet table, a glass of wine in his hand, Nrina’s gift purring gently in his lap, and a garland of flowers on his head, while his captors and his parents and several dozen other people who had shown up from nowhere drank and ate and joked and sang and congratulated Balit on his new status as a man.

Viktor had never seen a young boy look more pleased, though he noticed that Balit did from time to time surreptitiously reach down to touch his genitals, as though to make sure they were still there.

They were. As good as new. It was simply that through Nrina’s quick and expert minor surgery, they were no longer capable of producing live sperm. “It’s what every male does when he gets close to puberty,” Wollet explained heartily, refilling Viktor’s glass. “That way he doesn’t have to worry about, you know, making someone really—what was the word?—yes, pregnant.” He gazed fondly at his daughter, who was teasingly stroking the kitten in Balit’s lap—and a little of Balit, too. “It makes the girls a little jealous,” Wollet said. “They have a coming-of-age party, too, of course, but they don’t have the jolly old fighting and the kidnapping and the carrying away, and that’s what makes this kind of party so special. Don’t you agree?”

“Oh, yes,” Viktor said politely. “Uh, Wollet? That mark on the boy’s forehead . . . ”

“The fertility mark, yes. What about it? Oh, I see you’ve got one, too. Well, Balit shouldn’t have intercourse now for a few weeks, you know, until any live sperm in his tract dissipate, then they’ll take the brand off. Hasn’t Nrina told you all this? I guess she would do you, too, if you asked her to—I mean, now that you’re not donating anymore. Oh, here comes Pelly!”

Viktor was not at his best, greeting the bloated-looking space captain; he was not used to the fact that everyone he met seemed to know all about the state of his genital system. All he could say was, in a rush, “Pelly, I really want to talk to you—”

“About Nebo. I know,” the man growled good-naturedly. “Nrina warned me you would. Let’s get out of this noise, though. Suppose we pick up a couple of drinks, and then we can go over there and sit by the edge of the pond.”

 

It wasn’t just Nebo that Viktor wanted to talk about, but Pelly was easy. He seemed almost to admire Viktor—well, naturally enough, he explained. “You, Viktor—you’ve really traveled! All the way from Old Earth—all I’ve ever done is cruise around this little system.”

So it wasn’t just the fizzy, faintly tart, mildly fruity drinks they were putting away that made Viktor feel good. He had become used to being a curiosity, but it had been a long, long time since he had felt himself admired. He glanced back at the coming-of-age party, which was increasing and multiplying as random passersby came by and joined in and stayed. Nrina was showing Balit how to feed the kitten out of the improvised bottle she had made; Frit, from the top of the banquet table, was declaiming a poem.

“Nrina said you had some artifacts you’d picked up from Nebo,” Viktor said.

Pelly shook his head. “Oh, no, not me. I mean, I didn’t pick the things up personally—I’ve never landed on Nebo, and I never will. But I do have this thing—I carry it around to show people.” He fumbled in his pouch and handed Viktor a bit of something that was metal-bright, but a pale lavender in color.

Viktor turned the thing over. It was astonishingly light, for metal: a rod about the size of his finger, tapering to round at one end, the other end cracked and jagged. “Is it hollow?” he asked, hefting it.

“No. It’s what you see. And don’t ask me what it’s for, because I don’t know.” Pelly restored it to his pouch, then had a change of mind. “I know, I’ll give it to Balit for a coming-of-age present! There are plenty more of these things—not here, of course, but on Newmanhome.” He peered keenly at Viktor and the moon face split in a smile. “I’m going back there in a few days, you know.”

“Really? to Newmanhome?”

“To tell the truth,” Pelly admitted, “I’m looking forward to it. I’m generally happier on the ship than I am here—maybe because I’m pure, you know. I mean,” he explained, “nobody tinkered with my genes before I was born. Not much, anyway, outside of, you know, getting rid of genetic diseases and that sort of thing. I probably wouldn’t even have needed the muscle builders and things to be on Newmanhome, except for growing up on a habitat—but I was always a lot heavier than the other boys.”

“I didn’t know there were any like you anymore,” Viktor said.

“There aren’t many. Maybe that’s why I like space. Maybe I take after the ones who originally came here, you know. You’ve seen their ships! Can you imagine the courage of them— What’s the matter?”

“I haven’t seen those ships. I wish I could.”

“Oh, but that’s easy enough,” Pelly said, grinning. From his shoulder bag he pulled out a flat board, glassy-topped, like the teaching desks. He touched the tiny keypad. “There it is,” he said ruefully. “Pathetic, isn’t it?”

Viktor bent over to study the picture. “Pathetic” was the right word—a single hydroxy-propelled rocket, tiny in the screen but certainly not very large in any case. It was orbiting with ruddy Nergal huge below it, and as Pelly manipulated the keypad to move the scene forward in time the ship was joined by another, and another—more than a dozen in all, linking together in a sprawling mass of nested spaceships. Viktor could see years of history happening in minutes as the ships deployed solar mirrors and began to reshape themselves. “That was the first habitat,” Pelly told him. “Altogether only eight hundred people made it to Nergal—that was all they could build ships for; the rest, I guess, just stayed there and died. Things got better when they began constructing real habitats out of asteroidal material, but for a long time they damn near starved. Then, once there was some sort of plague, and most of the ones around then died of that.” He swept his arm around the scene about them. “Did you know that all of us are descended from exactly ninety-one people? That’s all that were left after the plague. But then it began to get better.” He flicked off the screen and looked at Viktor, seeming a little abashed. “Does all this bore you?”

“Oh, no!” Viktor cried. “Honestly, Pelly, it’s what I’ve been trying to find out ever since Nrina thawed me out! Listen, what about the time-dilation effect?”

Pelly blinked politely. “I beg your pardon?”

“The basic question, I mean. The reason all this happened in the first place—the way our little group of stars took off at relativistic speeds. I’ve been trying to figure it out. The only thing I can think is that we were traveling so fast that time dilation took over—for a long time, Pelly, I can’t even guess how long—long enough so that all the stars went through their life cycles and died while we were traveling.” Viktor stopped, because Pelly’s eyes were beginning to glaze.

“Oh, yes,” Pelly said, beginning to fidget as he glanced around. “Nrina said you said things like that.”

“But don’t you see? It’s all linked together! The structures on Nebo, the Sorricaine-Mtiga objects, the foreshortening of the optical universe, the absence of all stellar objects but a handful now—”

“Viktor,” Pelly said, his voice good-natured enough but also quite definite, “I’m a space pilot, not a poet. Ask me anything about practical matters and I’m happy to talk as long as you like. But this—this—this sort of, well, mystical stuff, it’s just not what I’m interested in. Anyway,” he finished, holding up his empty glass, “we need refills now, don’t we? And they’re beginning to dance again—what say we join them?”

 

It took two more glasses of the mild, bubbly stuff before Viktor was ready to accept defeat. Ah, well, he told himself, it was too much to hope for real understanding from any of these people. All they cared about, obviously, was having fun.

But halfway through the second glass fun began to seem worth having even to someone on whom, alone, the burden of solving the riddle of the universe seemed to rest. Nrina was leading an open circle of scores of people, dancing around the guest of honor’s throne, laughing. She waved to Viktor to join them.

Why not? He swallowed the rest of the drink. Then he trotted to the line and took over Nrina’s position.

The fizzy drink probably had something to do with that. Viktor wasn’t in the habit of taking over a lead spot among strangers. Especially when, in this thistledown gravity, his steps were balloonlike rather than the macho stomps he liked best. Nevertheless, everyone followed as he led them, patiently but firmly, in a sort of loose, watered-down Hine Ma Tov—leaving out the tricky Yemeni figures, just step-bend and running steps, until everyone in the line had grasped it and was laughing and out of breath.

“That was nice,” Nrina told him breathlessly, throwing her arms around him at the end. “Kiss, Viktor!” And while they were kissing the proud father came up to them, beaming.

“Viktor! I didn’t know you were a dancer.” And before Viktor had a chance to be modest, the man was rushing on. “I’m Frit. I’m so glad Nrina brought you. We haven’t had a chance to meet, but I wanted to thank you for helping with Balit’s party.” He squeezed Viktor’s arm. “Imagine! None of his friends ever had a person from Earth carry them away! He’ll be the envy of his whole cohort.”

“It was nothing,” Viktor said graciously. Nrina patted his shoulder affectionately and strolled away. Viktor hardly noticed. He was staring in fascination at Frit’s mustaches. At close range they were even more of a marvel; they extended beyond his shoulders on both sides, and although Viktor was sure he had seen one of them bent in the mock scuffle it was now repaired and stood as proudly as before. They did not at all match Frit’s hair, either. At a distance Viktor had thought the man was wearing a white cap, but it was actually close-cropped white kinks, like the standard image of an old Pullman porter, though Frit’s skin was alabaster.

“You must meet Forta,” Frit went on, beckoning to the—well, Viktor thought, I guess you would say to the other father, though how all that worked out he couldn’t imagine. “This is Viktor, dear,” Frit told his mate. “Nrina says he’s very interested in the stars and all.”

“Yes, she told me,” Forta said, demurely offering his shoulder to hug. “Do you know what we should do, Frit? We should ask Viktor to come and stay with us for a while. Balit already asked me if we could; he was just thrilled at being kidnapped by somebody from Old Earth! I know Balit would love to show him off to his friends—”

“Yes, dear,” Frit said tolerantly. “But what would Viktor think of that? We can’t expect him to spend his time with a bunch of kids.”

Viktor blinked, then said, suddenly hopeful, “I’d really like to talk to you about what’s happened to the universe. If I wouldn’t be any burden—”

“Burden?” Forta echoed. “No, certainly you wouldn’t be a burden; we’d love to have you come home with us. And—” He hesitated, then grinned modestly. “—since you’re interested in dancing, shall I dance for you now? Frit’s just finished a new poem in honor of Balit’s coming of age—it’s about growth and maturity—and I’ve done the dance accompaniment.”

“Please do,” Viktor said. He was completely out of it, really. He was wholly confused about what had been going on and what was to come. But he was game. He didn’t, after all, have many other options.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 25

 

 

When Wan-To became aware that a fresh burst of tachyons had struck his receptors, he did not respond very quickly. (He didn’t do anything very quickly these days.) It took him a while to switch from one mode of activity to another.

Torpidly, almost groaning in protest, he bestirred himself to see what this latest batch of tachyons was like. Naturally, his detectors had recorded them in case he wanted to examine them in detail—though that was probably hardly worth the trouble. Or wouldn’t have been, if he had had anything more worthwhile to do.

Wan-To was not excited about the event. He had lost the habit of excitement, in this dead universe where there was no light, no X rays, no cosmic rays, no anything but the distant purring, popping sound of the protons of his own star as they gave up the ghost. Even so, it wasn’t unusual for batches of stray radiation of one kind or another to reach him. Infrequent, yes—everything was infrequent these days. But not startling. Such things were simply the showers of particles that were the ghosts of some immense stellar catastrophes from long ago—from the time when any immense event could still happen, in this moribund universe.

But this time . . . This time . . .

This time it was the most exciting thing that had happened to Wan-To in a very long time indeed. Although he could hardly believe it at first, he was soon certain that this was no random burst of particles. It was a message.

 

It was a wonder that Wan-To could read the message at all. The coded pulses were of the very lowest-energy tachyons—therefore almost the fastest of all—and yet they had taken a long time to reach him (so vast had the always-expanding universe become, in ten to the fortieth years). They had to have been transmitted with considerable power, too. Wan-To knew this to be true not merely because of the distance they had traveled, but because he observed that the tachyons had not been transmitted in a tight, economical beam. They had been broadcast.

Broadcast! So the sender hadn’t known where he was! But they were definitely meant for Wan-To—the opening pulses said so.

That fact was as much of a thrill to Wan-To as the first ecstatic sight of a sail on the horizon to any shipwrecked mariner. Impossible though it was to believe, even now, in this terminal coma of the universe, there was someone somewhere who had something to say to him.

But what was this message?

To find that out was a labor requiring much energy out of Wan-To’s slender store, as well as a great deal of long, hard concentration. The message had come in very fast. The whole burst had taken only a matter of seconds, and it had been many ages since Wan-To had been able to operate at that speed. He had almost forgotten what it was like to do things at the speed of nuclear reactions. In order to interpret the message at all, he had to slow it down by orders of magnitude and ponder its meaning bit by bit.

Then, too, although the message had been stored automatically for examination at his own pace, the poverty of Wan-To’s resources meant that even the basic storage was sketchy. Some sections of the message seemed to be missing. Some of the content was doubtful. Wan-To found it necessary to reactivate large parts of his “mind” from inactive storage to help in puzzling out what the message meant, and that in itself was a considerable drain on his meager strength.

But, in the final analysis, he didn’t need to read it all. The signature alone was enough to tell him nearly all there was to know.

It had come from that long-forgotten idiot, the one he had charged with sending a little flock of stars on a wild-goose chase—Matter-Copy Number Five.

Five’s stars were still alive.

Those long-ago stars had been careening through space so fast that time dilation had frozen them nearly immobile. They had not aged. They hadn’t rotted into decay with the rest of the universe.

In a universe where everything else had decayed into stagnant death, they were still young . . . and bursting with power!

 

 

 

CHAPTER 26

 

 

Moon Mary was a natural moon—well, a formerly natural moon, now terraformed and made lovely. Along with the myriad habitats it orbited around the brown dwarf, Nergal. “Forta needs a moon’s gravity,” Frit explained on the way. “Dancers have to have a lot of muscles, you know! If he can dance here he can dance anywhere—well, not on a planet, or anything like that, but on any of the other moons or the habitats. The exercise will be good for your leg while it heals, too.”

“Besides, we’ve got a lot of data in our store,” Forta put in hospitably. “I’m sure you’ll find all sorts of interesting things in it.”

And Balit said with excitement, “Look over there, Viktor! That’s Moon Mary. Watch how we come in—oh, Viktor, I do love being in space!”

Viktor did watch. It was worth watching. They didn’t simply “land.” Moon Mary was not left wide open to the universe; it couldn’t be, since it didn’t have enough gravitation to hold a breathable air. To land, their little ship had to slide through an opening that appeared magically in the atmosphere-holding, radiation-shielding forcefield that kept the people who lived on Moon Mary safe.

As soon as Viktor stood up his bad leg told him he wasn’t in habitat minigravity any more. It hurt when he put his weight on it. He winced.

But this was more like it! It wasn’t a habitat, it was practically a planet. The buildings stuck up on the surface, as they ought to; and there was a real sky.

Actually the sky wasn’t real at all, for if you had subtracted the force shield what remained would have been terrible. The shield diminished the intensity of the ruddy glow of Nergal. It might also, Viktor thought critically at first, have diminished their capacity to extract “solar” energy from Nergal, but it turned out they didn’t need that. Moon Mary was packed with geothermal energy, easily extracted through steam wells. The satellite was so close to its primary, immense Nergal, that it was under constant gravitational flexing and stress from Nergal’s great mass, and so its interior was constantly being heated by friction, compression, and strain.

Of course, experience had taught Viktor that there was a black lining to every silver cloud. He found what the bad side of Moon Mary’s geothermal activity was very quickly. They were hardly out of the spaceport when Viktor felt the ground shudder beneath him. Balit giggled. Forta smiled tolerantly, and Frit explained, “Just an earthquake, Viktor. We have them all the time.”

“But we’re used to them,” Forta added. “Truly, there’s no danger.”

When Viktor saw that his hosts lived in a pencil-thin tower thirty stories high, he swallowed. They took a glass-walled elevator, which slid rapidly up the outside of the tower, letting him see just how far they were soaring above the hard ground. In the elevator he swallowed again, and was glad when it slowed gently to their floor and Forta politely opened the door for him. Once inside their apartment everything was reassuringly stable. They seemed to have the whole floor to themselves. All the rooms except the sanitary facilities were outside rooms—which meant they had curved walls and large windows looking out on the parklike gardens outside, with red Nergal hanging huge over half the sky. He allowed them to point out the room that would be his, and he kept Forta and Balit company as they pulled meals out of their freezer and set the table—until another sudden shiver of the whole structure made him grab for the back of a chair.

“You’ll get used to it, Viktor,” Balit said, trying not to show amusement. “We’re quite safe here.”

“All our buildings are designed for this sort of thing,” Forta added.

It took a while for Viktor to believe it, but it was true enough. Of course, he knew that the problem of earthquakes had even been solved back on Earth itself, in the pre-Toyota Japan of the nineteenth century and earlier. Since earthquakes could knock buildings down, you didn’t want any building that might fall on you and crush you to death. Those early Japanese found a satisfactory solution for their time: Build everything out of the flimsiest material you can find—and don’t smoke in bed.

But when the twentieth century came along those lessons didn’t apply anymore. Technological man had possessions. A home needed to be a place to store the possessions, as well as a place to sleep and eat. Preindustrial Japan had handled that by having as few possessions as possible, and those light and sturdy. Their grandchildren, however, lived in Toyota-, Sony-, Nissan-Japan, and they wanted more. They wanted to own a large number of tangible things, even if they were large and heavy. They wanted homes that could house their washer-dryers, stereos, Jacuzzis, king-sized beds with innerspring mattresses, radar ovens, food processors, and VCRs. They wanted flush toilets. They wanted built-in garages and electronic stoves.

All those new wants made hard work for the architects. Plumbing? Well, yes, but water intakes and sewage outlets meant underground networks of pipes and conduits that could rupture in even a moderate quake. They wanted high rises, which meant elevators and some very heavy structural members that could fall on the inhabitants unless built with sophisticated skill and attention to the harmonics of the natural frequencies of earthquake shocks. Paper and bamboo went out. Sprung, flexible steel, prestressed concrete, and curtain walls came in.

By the time the people on Moon Mary began to build in earnest, all those old lessons were learned over again.

To be sure, those latter-day architects were helped a great deal by Mary’s light gravity. There simply didn’t have to be that much mass involved in support columns. They were helped even more by high technology. Chips replaced tangles of wire. Transformable walls served as windows or temperature control devices. Water recycling saved a lot of plumbing, and what couldn’t be avoided was flexible and tough. When, during Viktor’s first night on Moon Mary, he woke to find the whole building swaying, he was the only one in it who jumped out of bed. Everyone else slept right through, even young Balit, and the next morning they laughed at him for his fears.

They laughed quite politely, though. They were always polite. “Helpful” was another thing—they did their best, but to Viktor’s crushed surprise they had little help to give.

These people, whom Nrina had touted to him as the most knowledgeable alive, didn’t even know the vocabulary of astrophysical research! “Spectroscopy,” Frit said, sounding the word out. “Spec—tross—k’pee. That’s a really pretty word, Viktor! I must use it in a poem. And it means something about finding out what a star is like?”

“It means measuring the bands of light and dark in a spectrum from a star, so that you can identify all the elements and ions present,” Viktor said darkly, gazing at the man who had been advertised to know all these things.

“Ions! Spectrum! Oh, Viktor,” Frit said with delight, “you’re just full of wonderful words I can use. Forta? Come in here, please. We’re going to find some ‘spectroscopy’ in our files for dear Viktor!”

But, as it turned out, they didn’t.

They couldn’t, or not in any easy way, at least. Between the two of them, Frit and Forta managed to get their data-retrieval desks to turn up several hundred references to one astronomical term or another. But “spectroscope” was not among them. Neither was “spectroscopy,” nor even the field terms “cosmology” or “astrophysics.” True, there were long lists of citations under such promising words as “nova” and “supernova” and “black hole” and even “Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.” But, when tracked down, all the references were to plays, paintings, musical compositions, poems (some by Frit himself), and dances, frequently by Forta.

“It’s only programmed for the things we’re really interested in,” Forta apologized.

Viktor couldn’t believe their failure. He was the only disappointed person, though. Frit and Forta were enthralled.

“Great Transporter!” Forta cried in delight. “I didn’t know we had this sort of material here! Perhaps it’s from Balit’s school files—but see here, Frit! Isn’t this beautiful?” He was looking at a five-hundred-year-old painting of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. “I can’t think why people have let this be forgotten! What do you think, Frit? All these star colors! For a new dance! Don’t you think they’d look marvelous in my costume?”

Frit patted his mate’s arm fondly, but he was peering at the diagram on the desk. “I don’t think I know what it means,” he admitted.

“It shows the slope of the mass-luminosity relation,” Viktor explained. “You can see how stars develop, and their color depends on the temperature of the photosphere, anywhere from red through yellow and white to blue.”

“Exactly!” Forta cried, hardly listening. “I will dance the aging of a star. See, I’ll start out big—” He mimicked being big, lifting his shoulder, puffing his cheeks, arcing his arms up and before him. “And then the lighting will be blue, then greenish, then yellow and smaller, for a long time—is that right, Viktor?—then big again, and red!”

“You’ll be lovely,” Frit said with pride. He smiled at their son, politely silent as the grown-ups talked. “Don’t you think Forta could make a lovely star dance?”

“He always does,” Balit said loyally, but keeping his eyes on Viktor.

Forta sighed. “But I’m afraid we’re not giving our friend Viktor what he wants. There just isn’t much of that sort of thing in the current files.”

Viktor pricked up his ears. “Are there others?”

“Of course there’s always the old data banks on Newmanhome,” Frit said, looking surprised. “Only they aren’t very convenient, you know. Because they’re old. And they aren’t here.”

“Can I access them?” Viktor demanded.

Frit looked at him with the expression of a host whose guest has just requested a bigger bedroom, or a rare brand of tea. “I’m not sure if I know how you could do that,” he said, thoughtfully. “Forta?”

“I suppose it’s possible, Viktor,” Forta said doubtfully. “They go back a long time, though, all the way back to when everybody still lived on Newmanhome. When we built the habitats, thousands of years ago, everything was shiny new, you know, and the data-retrieval systems were all redesigned. The ones we use now aren’t really compatible with the ones on Newmanhome, and besides, there’s hardly anyone there.”

“On Newmanhome?” Viktor repeated.

Forta nodded. “It’s a nasty place to live, with everything weighing so much. People don’t like to go there—except funny ones like Pelly,” he added laughingly. “So the old records might as well not exist, don’t you see?”

Balit, watching their guest with concern, squirmed away from his parent’s fondly patting hand. “We do have the paintings, Viktor,” the boy piped up.

And when Viktor looked inquiringly at Balit’s parents, Forta said with pride, “Yes, of course. There are some wonderful paintings of the star burst, for instance. It was still in the sky, oh, up to six or eight hundred years ago. Then it just gradually began to fade, and then the sun came back.”

“That must have been an exciting time,” Frit said wistfully. “Of course, we weren’t born then.”

Forta thought that over. “I don’t know if I’d say ‘exciting,’ exactly. I know people did talk about it, quite a lot, once they noticed it. And there was the art. I remember my mother taking me to—whose performance was it? I think it was Danglord’s—yes, that’s what it was. It was a dance play about the sun returning. I was just a child, hadn’t even had my coming-of-age party yet, but—” He smiled bashfully at Viktor. “It was certainly important to me. I think Danglord’s play was what made up my mind to be a dancer myself.”

 

As the family’s guest expert on the care and feeding of primitive organisms, it was Viktor who had to show them how to thaw out a little of the frozen cat-milk substitute Nrina had made for them, and how to hold a bottle so the kitten could drink out of it. “She’ll be eating solid food soon,” he promised. “Then she won’t be so much trouble. Meanwhile, what have you done about a cat box?”

Then he had to explain what a cat box was for, and help them improvise one out of a tray from the cooking room, and fill it with soil from the garden, and show them how to put the little animal in it and stroke her and encourage her until she finally did what she was put there to do.

At least he was useful for something, Viktor thought.

After a final glass of wine Frit escorted him to their guest room. “It’s not actually a guest room,” Frit explained, showing Viktor where the sanitary facilities were and the drawers to store his clothes. “It’s going to be Balit’s room, now that he’s liberated—but of course he’s happy to have you use it for your stay,” Frit added hastily.

“I don’t like to put him out,” Viktor said politely.

“You aren’t putting anyone out! No, we want you here, dear Viktor. In fact, it was Balit’s idea. He’ll stay in his own old room, where he’s quite content. But this one, you see,” Frit added with pride, “is an adult room. You’ll have your own desk—you can use it as much as you like, of course. I think you’ll be quite comfortable,” he finished, looking around like any hostess. Then he grinned, a little embarrassed. “Well, I don’t see any harm in telling you. We’re going to be redecorating Balit’s old room. We’ve ordered another baby from Nrina. She’ll be a little girl—we’re going to call her Ginga—and of course she won’t be born for a long time yet, so Balit will be quite all right in that room.”

It wasn’t until Frit was long gone and Viktor had undressed and climbed into the soft, warm bed that it occurred to him that he should have said “Congratulations.”

The ground shook again that night. Viktor woke, startled, to find something warm and soft near his toes. It mewed in protest when he moved.

He got up, grinning, and stroked the kitten back to sleep as he sat on the edge of his bed, thinking. Alone in the bedroom, Viktor admitted to himself that he was a little uncomfortable. He knew why.

He wasn’t really easy in his mind to be moving into a house of gays.

Viktor was quite certain that he was not at all prejudiced against homosexuals. He’d known plenty of them, one time or another. He’d worked with them, shipped with them—they weren’t any different than anybody else, he considered, except in that one particular way. But that way wasn’t anyone’s business but their own, and certainly it didn’t matter in any real sense as long as you didn’t get involved with them.

The trouble was, living with them seemed to be getting pretty involved.

It reassured Viktor that the household didn’t seem much different than any other. Forta and Frit had their own bedroom. Balit had his; Viktor had the one Balit would graduate into. Nothing was, well, bizarre about the household. Not really. If Forta would sometimes kiss the back of Frit’s neck as he passed behind his chair, and if Frit would slip an arm around Forta’s waist while they stood together—well, they did love each other, didn’t they?

What was most important, neither of them showed any indication at all of loving Viktor. Not that way, anyway.

The boy, Balit, almost did. He certainly acted loving, but there wasn’t anything sexual about it. Balit sat next to Viktor when they ate their meals, and kept Viktor company while he fruitlessly hunted for what he never found on the information machines. It was Balit who marked which foods and drinks Viktor seemed to enjoy and made sure there were more of them at the next meal. He always seemed to be there, watching Viktor, whenever he was not asleep or at school.

“It’s a kind of hero worship,” Forta explained. The dancer was working at his bar, stretching those long, slim legs even longer, with one eye on the kitten waking on the floor between them. Viktor realized with surprise that Forta was being a cat. “This will work, I think,” Forta said with pleasure, giving it up as the kitten curled up to drowse again. “What were we saying? Oh, yes. Please don’t let Balit bother you. But the thing is that you were the one who actually carried him away for his freeing ceremony; that’s a big thing for a young boy.”

“He’s no trouble at all,” Viktor protested. “I like having him around.”

“Well, it’s obvious he likes you.” Forta sighed. “I mean, he likes you as a person, not just because of what you did. As a matter of fact—” Forta hesitated, then smiled. “Actually, Balit wondered if he could ask you to come to his school. If you wouldn’t mind. He’d like to show you off. I know it wouldn’t be much fun for you, spending an hour or two with a bunch of little kids staring and asking you all kinds of questions—but you can’t blame them, Viktor. You were born on Old Earth. They aren’t likely to see anybody like you again.”

“I’d be glad to,” Viktor promised.

 

The school was no more than a hundred yards from Balit’s home, in the middle of a grove of broad-leafed trees that hung with fruit and blossoms interchangeably. (There weren’t any seasons on Moon Mary. Plants grew and bloomed when they felt like it, not when the weather changed. The weather never changed.) Red Nergal hung in the eastern sky, where it always hung in their position on Moon Mary’s surface. At their distance it loomed no larger than Earth’s moon, but Viktor could feel the heat from it. And in the west was one bright star. “There used to be thousands and thousands of stars,” Viktor told the boy, who nodded in solemn appreciation.

“Things must have been so much nicer then,” he sighed. “We go in there, Viktor. That’s the door to my class.”

It wasn’t much of a door—Moon Mary’s buildings did not have very strong walls, since they didn’t need them to keep out cold or heat; it was light, pierced wood, as might have been in Earth’s old tropics, and it opened to Balit’s touch.

It wasn’t much of a class, either—eight kids, mostly girls—and it didn’t seem to be exactly a classroom. It looked rather like the guest lounge of a small motel at first, a bedroom-sized chamber with hassocks and couches strewn before a collection of child-sized teaching desks, but as Balit led Viktor in the room darkened.

“We’ll have to wait a minute,” Balit apologized. “They’re starting a viewing. I don’t know what it is, though—” And then, all around the children, a scene sprang into life, three-dimensional, seeming natural size, full color. “Oh, look, Viktor! They’re doing it specially for you! They’re showing Old Earth!”

If it was really Earth, it was not an Earth Viktor recognized. He seemed to be standing on a sort of traffic island in the middle of a large street, and it was by no means empty. Thousands, literally thousands, of people were riding bicycles toward him in a dense swarm that spilt in two just before they reached him, and came together again on the other side. They wore almost uniform costumes—white shirts, dark blue trousers—and they were almost all male. And Oriental. There was no sound, but to one side was a huge marble building set in a sort of park, and on the other what looked like a hotel and office buildings.

“I don’t know where this is supposed to be,” Viktor apologized.

Balit looked embarrassed. “But they said it was Earth,” he complained. “Wait a minute.” He bent to whisper to the little girl nearest him. “Yes, this is Earth, all right. It is a place called Beijing, around the year one thousand nine hundred sixty, old style.”

“I was never in Beijing,” Viktor said. “And anyway—” He stopped there. What was the use of telling these children that they were not off by a mere few thousand miles, but by several centuries? He settled for, “It’s very nice, though. But can we turn it off?”

Then Viktor had the floor. The teacher sat there smiling, leaving it all to the children to ask questions, and that they did. About Old Earth. (People rode horses? If they made love did they really have babies out of their bodies? And what, for heaven’s sake, was a “storm”?) About the Sorricaine-Mtiga objects (Oh, they must have been exciting to see!), and about his near-death in orbit around Nebo (Something tried to kill you? Really take away your life?), and about Newmanhome and the Big Bang and the reasons why there were so few stars anymore anywhere in the sky.

That was where Viktor began to wax really eloquent, until Balit, speaking for all of them, said gravely, “Yes, we see, Viktor. The stars that blew up, the sun going dim, the changes on Nebo, the disappearance of all the other stars—we see that as they all happened at the same time, or close enough, they must be connected. But how?”

And all Viktor could say was, “I wish I knew.”

 

That night Balit was telling his parents excitedly about the hit Viktor had made with his classmates. “Viktor was almost killed by those things on Nebo,” the boy said, thrilled. “Frit? Can I go to Nebo sometime?”

“What, and get killed?” Frit teased.

Forta was stretching and bending at his bar, but he panted, “No one goes to Nebo, Balit, dear. It’s worse than Newmanhome! You couldn’t even stand up there.”

“Pelly can,” the boy objected. “He gets injections, and then he’s almost as strong as Viktor.”

Frit looked shocked. “Balit! No. Those injections destroy your figure. Do you want to bloat those pretty legs so they look like balloons? No offense,” he added hastily, catching Viktor’s eye. “But, Balit, you couldn’t ever really dance that way, you know.”

“I might not want to be a dancer, Frit,” his son told him.

Forta straightened up abruptly in the middle of a long stretch. He blinked worriedly at his son. “Well, of course,” he began, “what you do in your adult life is entirely up to you. Neither Frit nor I would think of trying to prevent you from anything you really wanted to do, once you were grown—”

“But I am grown,” Balit told him seriously. “It’s almost time for me to have the mark off my forehead. Then I could even marry if I wanted to.”

Frit cleared his throat. “Yes, of course,” he said, tugging at one of his mustaches. “However—”

He paused there, looking at Viktor in a way Viktor understood at once. A guest must not involve himself in family affairs.

“I think I’ll go back to my desk,” he said.

But what he wanted was not there. Viktor began to think that nothing he found was going to scratch his itch of curiosity. The more he found, the more he realized there was not much to find on the subjects he cared about.

There was plenty in the files on the history of the human race after the Reforms had put him back in the freezer. They had had a war about the destruction of Ark, of course—each sect blaming the other. They had (as Viktor counted them up) a war every two or three years anyway, on one pretext or another. It was easy enough to see why they were so combative. Viktor could imagine the lives of the bare few thousand of them, near starving in their icy caves, wounded by events that they had never expected and that they could not explain—there was no future for them. Of all the things they lacked, the one in shortest supply was hope.

It was astonishing to Viktor that they had somehow found the resources and the will to dispatch a handful of rickety, improvised ships to Nergal. That was heroic. It was very nearly superhuman; it meant long years of savage discipline, starving themselves and denying themselves for that one last, supreme effort. He marveled at their progress since then—now so many teeming millions, living in such luxury! It wasn’t the numbers that made him wonder, of course. The increase was not surprising, since they’d had several thousand years to do it in. You only have to double a population ten times—ten generations will do it easily, if there’s plenty of food and no saber-toothed tigers to keep the surplus down—to multiply it by a thousand.

Nor was it surprising that in the course of that mighty effort they threw some unneeded junk overboard—junk with names like astronomy and astrophyics and cosmology.

And their descendants, the soft, pretty Nrinas and Fortas and Frits, had never seen any reason to revive them.

 

Except for little Balit. Balit wanted to hear everything Viktor had to say—about the universe itself (especially about the way it had been, in the old days, when there really was a whole universe outside their own little group), about Old Earth, about Newmanhome in the days of its burgeoning glory. It was Balit who came to Viktor with the news that Pelly had landed on Newmanhome. “Maybe he can help you access the old files, Viktor,” Balit said helpfully, glancing at his fathers—who, for some reason, were politely saying nothing at all.

“Could he really do that?”

“We can call him to ask,” Balit said, now not looking at his fathers at all. “I know how much you want to get that data.”

Forta cleared his throat. “Yes, we all know that,” he observed.

“But it would be interesting to me, too,” Balit protested. “I like it when Viktor talks about those old things.”

Forta said, loving but firm, “It’s your bedtime, Balit.”

“Then Viktor could tell me a bedtime story,” Balit pleaded. Viktor surrendered. He followed the boy to his bath and sat with him as, damply clean, Balit rolled himself into the soft, gauzy bedclothes and looked up at him expectantly.

Viktor found himself moved by the situation, so familiar, so different. It made him think of telling stories to his own children long ago on Newmanhome, and before that hearing his father tell them to him ages past on the ship. He reached out to stroke Balit’s warm, fuzzy head.

“Shall I tell you about the beginning of the universe?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, Viktor! Please!”

Obediently Viktor began. “Once upon a time there was nothing, not anything anywhere, except for one little point of matter and energy and space. There weren’t any stars. There weren’t any galaxies. There wasn’t even any space yet, really, because space hadn’t been invented.”

“What did that point look like, Viktor?” the boy asked drowsily.

“I don’t know. Nobody knows, Balit. It was just a—an egg, sort of, that held inside itself the possibility of everything that now exists, or ever did exist, or ever will exist. And then that egg hatched. It exploded. Do you know what that explosion was called, Balit?”

The boy searched his memory. “What you called the Big Bang?” he guessed.

“That’s right. The Big Bang. It started out terribly hot and terribly dense, but as it expanded it cooled off. It didn’t grow into space. It made the space, as it grew, and it filled it with things—and finally we came along.”

Balit blinked up at Viktor. “Were we the only ones who came along, Viktor?” he asked.

“I don’t know the answer to that, either, Balit. I haven’t heard of any others. There could have been. There might have been millions of different kinds of people. They could have evolved and developed and then died away, just as human beings did— except for us few.”

“It must have been beautiful, when there were all those stars and galaxies.”

“It was. But stars die, too. All things die, even the universe, even—” To Viktor’s surprise, he found his throat tightening. He had to turn his head away for a moment.

“What’s wrong, Viktor?” Balit said in sudden alarm.

“Nothing, Balit. I think you’d better go to sleep now.”

“No,” the boy insisted. “You looked very sad just then. Was it about something bad? Was it—” He hesitated, then said in a rush, “Was it about the love partner you told me about?”

“It was about my wife,” Viktor corrected him.

Balit nodded soberly. “I know how Frit or Forta would feel if one of them lost the other,” he told Viktor. He looked at him for a moment, then said, sounding very tentative, “Viktor? Didn’t Nrina say she could make you a mate? Don’t you think you might let her?”

Viktor glared at him with a sudden near-anger. Then he relaxed, took a deep breath, and tousled the boy’s hair. “You’re officially grown-up,” he said, “but I think you’ve got a little way to go in some ways. That isn’t how it works, Balit.”

“Then how does it works Viktor?” Balit persisted.

Viktor shook his head. “For me, now,” he said, “I don’t think it’s ever going to work again at all.”

 

The mechanics of calling someone on Newmanhome were not that difficult, especially after Balit showed Viktor how to use the desk to do it. Actually making the call, however, was a lot harder.

Once again, it was a matter of that unbreakable speed limit of light’s velocity. (The human race had never managed to use tachyons or the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky effect for any practical purpose. With only their own tiny little cluster of astronomical objects to work on, they hadn’t really needed to.) At their current orbital positions, Moon Mary was a good five hundred million miles from Newmanhome—nearly three-quarters of an hour each way for a message to arrive. You couldn’t converse. It was more like sending a telegram and waiting for a response, though of the course the “telegram” was a television message.

So Viktor, with Balit beside him to help, put through a call to Pelly, all those hundreds of millions of miles away. “Hello, Pelly,” he said, as though reading from a script. “This is Viktor. I was hoping—” He came to a stop there, and looked to Balit for help. “Tell him what you want,” the boy prompted.

“Everything I want?”

“Yes, exactly, everything,” the boy ordered, sounding exasperated. “How will he know if you don’t tell him? Tell him you would like all the old records—about Nebo, about astronomical observations, everything you wish.”

So, gathering speed as he went along, Viktor did. It made a formidable list. When he was through, Balit leaned past him and turned off the desk. Viktor looked at him inquiringly. “What do we do now?”

“We do nothing now,” Balit told him. “It will be hours at least before Pelly can reply, and perhaps he is busy doing something else, and perhaps what you ask takes time.”

“I imagine it will,” Viktor said gloomily. Balit laughed.

“Oh, Viktor,” he said with affection, “it is only hours, perhaps, not forever. Come and walk with me. Perhaps when we get back there will be a response.”

When they had taken that belly-twisting elevator drop down to the parklike grounds around the building, Balit said curiously, “Would you really go to Nebo if you could?”

“In a hot minute,” Viktor said emphatically.

“Even though it’s dangerous?”

Viktor thought. “I’m not sure it’s dangerous anymore,” he said. “They did let that party land—”

“But then some of them were killed!”

“Yes, because they tried to force their way in,” Viktor agreed. “That might not be necessary. There are other ways of investigating what’s in those structures. Not X rays, probably; but ultrasound ranging, perhaps, or something like a neutrino source that can look right through them—”

“No one has any ‘neutrinos,’ Viktor,” Balit said in reproof. Viktor laughed. “All right then. Maybe all we’d really need is a really big can opener. And some dumb volunteer to run it— like me.”

Balit shuddered deliciously at the thought. Then he asked, “Viktor? What’s a ‘can opener’?”

 

There wasn’t any answer to Viktor’s call when they got back, or the next day, or the day after that.

By the end of his third week on Moon Mary Viktor had begun to wonder just how long a guest was supposed to stay. When he touched on the subject with his hosts they were invariably hospitable, and invariably hard to pin down. “Oh, but Balit loves having you here, Viktor, and Forta’s been dying to have you show him some more of those quaint old dances.”

“And it’s so good for your leg to heal here,” Forta put in helpfully.

“But Nrina—” he began.

“Oh, Nrina,” Frit said, affably dismissing Nrina. “She’ll be in touch before long, Viktor, you’ll see. That reminds me, I’ve been meaning to ask you something. Do you think those Nebo colors—the ones you showed us the other day—do you think they would make a good costume for Forta?” And then that inevitably led to a few hours with Forta in his studio, demonstrating the waltz and the Peabody, to be worked into a dance Forta was planning on the heroic subject of the disastrous landing on Nebo.

It was not merely Viktor’s desire to be a good guest—that was to say, one who left before his hosts began to despair he would ever go—that made him begin to be uncomfortable. He also had another problem that was growing larger. Moon Mary was a big place. It was full of people, all kinds of people, and Viktor could not help noticing that some of the ones he passed in the parks and streets were female—were so conspicuously female, to all of his senses, that sometimes he almost thought they were scent marking the shrubbery. It distracted him in ways he had almost forgotten.

To put it more concretely, he was getting pretty horny.

 

When Pelly’s answer came at last it wasn’t very helpful. The broad pumpkin face looked a little annoyed. “I’ll ask around about what you want to know, Viktor, but I don’t know much about that sort of thing myself. Markety might know; he spends a lot of time digging up old stuff, and so does his wife, Grimler. Unfortunately they’re not here now, and I’m leaving myself pretty soon. Listen. While I think of it, if you see Nrina ask her how she’s coming with my gillies. They need some more here. And say hello to Balit for me.”

That was it. Viktor looked helplessly at Balit. “Who are Markety and Grimler?”

“I guess they’re people who live on Newmanhome—I mean real people. Well, you know what I mean, Viktor,” he finished, half apologizing. Then he thought for a moment and added, “I think Markety studied with Forta for a while, when I was little.”

“Do you mean he’s a dancer? What would a dancer be doing on Newmanhome?”

Balit grinned. “Dancing, I guess. Don’t you think you should give Nrina her message?”

“Oh, well,” Viktor said, stalling, “yes, maybe . . .”

But in the long run he did—hesitantly; he had always thought that Nrina should be the one to call him. But when he saw her lean, wide-eyed face looking up at him out of the desk panel he was unexpectedly happy. Conscious of the boy beside him, Viktor said stiffly, “How are you, Nrina? I’ve missed you.”

It was a downer that she didn’t respond right away. She was gazing up at him without speaking for several seconds, but just as Viktor was beginning to feel insecure she spoke up. “That is good to hear,” she said, smiling. (Oh, of course. Distance again. Only a matter of seconds, this time, because Nrina’s habitat was less than a million miles from Moon Mary—but that was something like five seconds travel time each way. Quite long enough to be disconcerting.)

She did, Viktor thought, still seem affectionate. He gave her Pelly’s message, and Nrina thought for a moment. “The gillies are young,” she said doubtfully. “I wasn’t going to send them for another couple of seasons. Still, it might be better for them to finish growing up where they’re going to live. These are special gillies, you know. They’re almost as strong as the original ‘gorillas’ you talk about, I think, but a lot more tractable. Like you,” she finished, with an affectionate grin. “Oh, and I’m not too happy with the DNA from the stiffs I’ve still got. If you talk to Pelly tell him to bring me some more—no,” she corrected herself, “I might as well call him myself. Well. It’s been nice talking to you. Balit, is that you? How are you doing with your genetic studies?”

“All right, I guess, Aunt Nrina,” the boy piped up. “Of course, I haven’t had much time, helping Viktor and all.”

“I believe that,” she agreed ruefully. “He does take a lot of time, doesn’t he? But he’s worth it.” And she blew them both a kiss and was gone, and she hadn’t said a word about his coming back to her.

 

Nor did she in the days that followed. Nor did Pelly call back. When Viktor grumbled to Balit the boy said, “He’s probably on his way home now, Viktor. But I’m sure he got your message to those other people.”

“Then why don’t they answer?” Viktor demanded. The boy shrugged, and Viktor’s temper rose. “I could understand it if it was all lost! It’s wonderful that it hasn’t been lost, but you tell me they’ve had power all along, the geothermal generators have kept right on working, so the data’s there, only nobody ever wants to look at it!”

“Please don’t get excited, Viktor,” Balit pleaded.

“I can’t help it. Doesn’t anybody care?”

“I care, Viktor. Really, though, you should be more calm.” Balit hesitated, then said with determination, “Do you know what I think, Viktor? I think you are building up too many tensions.”

Viktor gave him a hostile look. “What tensions are you talking about?”

Balit’s expression seemed to show he was sorry he’d brought the subject up, but he took the plunge. “Why don’t you have a sexual partner, Viktor?” he asked with determination.

Viktor flushed. He was taken aback. “I—” he said. “I, uh—” He was having trouble responding; the last thing he had expected was to have to discuss his sex life with this child. He managed to get out, “Well, if I did, it wouldn’t be, uh, safe for the woman—”

“Because you are potent, yes, of course,” Balit agreed earnestly. “That can be fixed, just as it was for me. In a few days the rest of my residual sperm will be resorbed and my brand removed, and then I can have sexual intercourse freely again, just as you could.”

“Wait a minute,” Viktor said, staring at the boy. “Again?”

Balit looked puzzled. Then he said, in a self-deprecating way, “Of course, before I was mature it was only with young girls. For practice, as we say—though I did enjoy it very much. Soon it will be with real women. It can be for you, too, Viktor, if you want it. It doesn’t hurt a bit,” he added encouragingly, “well, except for a little bit, right at first. You know, you don’t have to have a wife. You don’t have to agree to a pairing right at first; hardly anybody does that.”

“So it seems,” Viktor growled, thinking of Nrina.

The boy’s puzzled look returned, but he just asked curiously, “Have you ever done that, Viktor? Paired, I mean?”

“Sure I have,” Viktor replied. Then, more slowly, he said, “I was married for a long time. Her name was Reesa—Theresa McGann—but she’s dead now.”

Fascinated, Balit went on, “And did you and this Reesa Theresa McGann have actual children together? I mean, born out of her body?”

“Yes, we did,” Viktor said shortly. His discomfort was growing. It was not often that he thought of those long-dust members of his family, and it felt as though thinking of them now was likely to begin to hurt.

“And did you love her?” Balit demanded.

Viktor looked at the boy. “Yes!” he shouted. And realized again, quite a lot too late, that it was very true.

 

Time passed slowly for Viktor. He spent a lot of time in his room, waiting for the message from Newmanhome that might answer all his questions, but it never came.

There was no point in calling Pelly again, because the space captain was well on his way back to Nergal. Viktor hesitated about trying Markety or Grimler, whoever they were, but finally impatience won over hesitation and he placed a call to each of them.

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

None of it was any help.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

“With spaceships, you mean?”

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

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

“Exactly!” Viktor cried in triumph.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“About Balit’s future,” Forta amplified.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

The next batch was more puzzling still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are ‘wars,’ Viktor?”

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

“That’s the way it looks, Balit.”

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

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

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

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

But Balit didn’t laugh. He was sleeping. And as Viktor carried the boy to his bed, he wasn’t laughing, either.

 

Viktor sought out the one of Balit’s parents at home. He found Frit painting something on a large screen. “I’m sorry I kept him so late. We got to talking about why all these things had happened—”

“Where you go wrong, Viktor,” Frit told him serenely, “is in always asking why. There doesn’t have to be a why. You don’t have to understand things; it’s enough to feel.”

Viktor looked uncomprehendingly at the designs Frit was painting on the screen. The screen, he saw, was flimsy, it would be transferred to the wall of the room that would some day be Ginga’s. It was a wall poem. He laughed. “So I shouldn’t try to understand why you’re doing that? When Ginga isn’t even born, and won’t be able to read for years yet?”

“No, Viktor, that is very easy to understand,” Frit said indulgently. “When Ginga learns to read I want her first words to come from her father. No,” he went on, brushing in another character in a chartreuse flourish and looking critically at the result, “it is this obsession of yours for understanding the sky that worries me. It upsets Balit, I’m afraid. What’s the use of it? The sky is the sky, Viktor. It has nothing to do with our lives.”

“But you’ve written poems about the sky!”

“Ah, but that is art. I write poems about what people feel about the sky. No one can experience the sky, Viktor; one can only look at it and see it as an object of art.” He shook his wooly head in reproof. “All these things you tell to Balit—hydrogen atoms fusing into helium, suns exploding and dying—there’s no feeling there. They’re just horrid mechanical things.”

In spite of himself, Viktor was amused. “Aren’t you even curious?”

“About stars? Not at all! About the human heart, of course.”

“But science—” Viktor stopped, shaking his head. “I don’t see how you can talk that way, Frit. Don’t you want to know things? Don’t you want to have Balit understand science?” He waved an arm around the future nursery. “If it weren’t for science, how could you and Forta have had a child?”

“Ah, but that’s useful science, Viktor! That’s worth knowing about—not like your worrying about whose lines are where in which spectra. It’s good because it makes our lives better. But I’m not at all curious about why stars shine and what makes them hot—and least of all about where they’ve all gone—because there’s nothing anyone can do about it anyway. Is there?”

 

By the time word came that Pelly was back in the habitats Viktor was beginning to feel as though he had seriously out-stayed his welcome on Moon Mary. Balit was still loyal. Frit was unfailingly polite. Forta, at least, had a use for their guest; he borrowed Viktor for an hour or so almost every day to dance with him. Forta appreciated it, and for Viktor it seemed good exercise for his nearly healed leg, though Frit did not seem to approve. Viktor heard them talking, not quite out of earshot, and Frit was being reasonable. “Folk dancing? Oh, yes, Forta dear, but what is folk dancing, after all? It’s simply what primitive people used to do when they didn’t have professionals to watch. But you are an artist!”

“And you,” Forta told him good-humoredly, “are a little jealous, aren’t you?”

“Of course not! On the other hand, dear . . .”

And the rest of the conversation Viktor could not hear, which was probably just as well.

Viktor was leading Forta through the familiar, sweet Misirlou when the package arrived from Pelly. Viktor opened it with excitement—something from Nebo for him to study, something more informative than the broken bits and pieces like Balit’s keepsake?

It was not from Nebo. It was human-made and very old. Pelly’s message said, “This appears to have come from one of your old ships, Viktor. I thought you’d like to listen to it.”

The last time Viktor had seen that object was on old Ark, just before the fatal attempt at landing a team of investigators. It was, in fact, Ark’s own black-box recording log.

It even still worked—more or less; someone had been repairing it, somewhere along the line, and much of the material was erased, much more so deteriorated in sound quality that Viktor could hardly make it out. But there was one tiny section that was loud and clear—and the voice that was speaking on the log was one Viktor knew well.

Jake Lundy. It was the voice of Viktor’s rival speaking from the grave.

When Balit came in, an hour later, he found Viktor sitting over the log, listening once again to the voice of his long-dead rival. “. . . have now been in this ship for fifty-seven days,” it was saying, the voice weak and cracking. “I can’t hold out much longer. The others are dead, and I guess—”

That was all that was still intelligible.

Balit put his arm around Viktor in compassion. He listened to the tape with Viktor, then listened again. “I know how you feel, Viktor,” he declared. “It must be awful, hearing your friend’s voice when he’s been dead for thousands of years.”

Viktor looked at him without expression.

“Jake Lundy wasn’t a friend,” he said.

“Then why—”

But Viktor could not answer, because he couldn’t find words to tell the boy how the voice of Reesa’s long-dead lover had suddenly started a hopeless longing for the long-dead Reesa herself.

That night, dancing Misirlou again with Forta, Viktor found himself near to weeping.

“Is something wrong?” Forta asked worriedly. Viktor just shook his head and went on with the dance. When Frit came in, looking faintly jealous at the sight of Viktor holding Forta, he said, “Listen, something’s come up. I’ve been talking to Nrina. She thinks we should come to visit her—look at the sketches and talk to her about Ginga.”

The principal thought in Viktor’s mind was that he was not, just then, ready to resume his affair with the woman who had brought him back to life.

 

When they reached Nrina’s habitat she was there to greet them, proudly exclaiming over Balit’s now blemishless forehead. “No brand! Oh, and you’ll be making love first chance you get now, won’t you?”

“Of course,” Balit said sedately. Then Nrina whisked them off to her laboratory—all but Viktor. Viktor was not involved in the planning of the new baby. He was given the freedom of her quarters to wait for her pleasure instead.

It was a long wait. Then, when she did arrive, her words were not of love. For the first time in Viktor’s experience of her, Nrina looked angry. “Do you know how much it cost Frit and Forta to dig up all those old records for you?”

He was taken aback. “They didn’t say anything about the cost,” he protested.

“Of course not. You were their guest.”

Viktor said doggedly, “I’m really sorry, Nrina, but how was I to know it cost so much money? Nobody ever said anything to me.”

“Said what it cost? Oh, Viktor! Did you really think that two sensitive, artistic, decent people like Frit and Forta would say anything so vulgar?”

“I’m sorry,” he grumbled. And then, defensively, he said, “What does it matter? You people are closing your eyes to what’s really important—what’s happening to the universe.”

He stopped, surrendering because he could see that she was looking at him with resigned incomprehension. She said, obviously trying to be reasonable, “But Viktor, you said yourself all these things were zillions of miles away and they took millions of years to happen. How can you call them ‘important’?”

He ground his teeth. “Knowledge is important!” he barked. It was an article of faith.

Unfortunately, Nrina was not of his religion. She took a turn or two around the room, looking at him in bafflement.

Viktor did not like the feeling that he had committed a terrible social blunder. “I could get a job and pay them back,” he offered.

“The kind of job you could get, Viktor,” she said with a sigh, “would not pay them back in twenty years. What can you do?” She hesitated, then plunged in. “Viktor? Who are Marie, Claude, Reesa, and Mom?”

“What?”

“They are names you used to say. When you were feverish from freezer burn,” she explained. “Sometimes you called me Marie and Claude, sometimes Reesa. And just at the beginning I think you said ‘Mom.’ Were these women you loved?”

He was flushing. “One was my mother,” he said gruffly. “Marie-Claude and Reesa—yes.”

“I believed it was that.” She sighed, twirling a lock of his hair in her slim fingers. Then she looked at him seriously. “Viktor,” she said, “I could design a woman like you if you wished. I could make one from your own genes, as I did with Balit for Forta and Frit. Or, if you can describe this Reesa and this Marie-Claude, I could make one like them. Or with the best qualities of both; if you wish. She would be physically of your kind, not as tall and slim as we are. Of course,” she added compassionately, “it would take time. The embryo must gestate, the child grow—twenty years, perhaps, before she would be of mating age . . .”

He looked at her with a sudden shock. “What are you telling me?” he demanded. “Do you want to stop our, uh, our—”

She let him flounder without an ending to the sentence. When it was clear he couldn’t find one, she shook her head affectionately. “Come to bed,” she ordered. “It’s late.”

He obeyed, of course. And when they had made love, and Viktor rolled over to get some sleep, it seemed that it was only minutes before Nrina was poking at him.

It must have been later than he thought, because she was fully dressed, gauzy work robe over her cache-sex, hair pinned up out of the way. “Get up, Viktor,” she ordered.

He craned his neck to blink at her. “What? Why?” It wasn’t uncommon for Nrina to have to get up early to work, but she didn’t usually insist on his own rising.

She looked serious. “I want you to go to Newmanhome with Pelly,” she told him.

He gaped at her. “Newmanhome?”

“He is leaving tomorrow,” she said.

Viktor rubbed his eyes. He was having trouble taking in what she had said. “Are you angry because of the money?” he asked plaintively.

“No. Yes, but that isn’t why. It is simply time for it to be over, that’s all.”

“But—but—”

“Oh, Viktor,” she sighed. “Why are you being so difficult? You didn’t think I would pair with you permanently, did you?”

 

Pelly’s ship was as impressive inside as out—only a chemical rocket, to be sure, but a huge one. Viktor was impressed all over again at the richness of a society that could afford to build such vast, sophisticated machines for so little purpose.

To Viktor’s surprise, Frit, Forta, and Balit turned up at the launching, Forta and Frit almost weeping as they kissed their son. It looked exactly like a farewell. “Balit!” Viktor cried. “What is this?”

“I’m coming with you,” the boy said simply. Incredulous, Viktor turned toward the parents—and recoiled from the anger in their eyes.

“Yes, he is going to join you, Viktor,” Frit said bitterly. “We have discussed it all night, but Balit insists. He is freed now; how can we stop him? But I cannot forgive you, Viktor, for putting these ideas in his head.”

 

 

 

CHAPTER 27

 

 

In the middle of that feebly expiring universe, Wan-To suddenly felt almost young again. There was still nuclear fusion going on somewhere!

Then the last of the ancient memories fell into place, and his next thought was to curse himself.

He had been such a fool. Why hadn’t he thought ahead? Why hadn’t he planned for this? It would have been so easy for him to do this same trick on any scale he liked, to send whole galaxies of stars off in the long-term storage of fast-as-light travel, so that he would have billions upon billions of them ready for his use in this time of his need!

For that matter, why hadn’t he built some sort of homing impulse into the matter-doppel’s instructions, so that they could have returned to normal space nearby?

The list of charges Wan-To could make against himself had suddenly become almost endless, but he gave up on them as common sense reasserted itself. Self-recrimination wasn’t really Wan-To’s style. Anyway he had more exciting things to think about.

Yes, yes, the memories were clear. There were twelve stars, and they were still alive! Still even young! And all his!

True, they had been somewhat depleted by the drain of energies that had been needed to send them hurtling across the universe, and certainly they were now a terribly long way away—but they were his. He searched eagerly through his specific memories of that offhand action. There was not much there, but he was certain that some of them had billions of years yet to go even on the main sequence—then they would be long-lived dwarfs for much longer than that.

Cheerful for the first time in many eons, Wan-To began the task of planning how to make use of this wholly unexpected new gift.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 28

 

 

Landing on Newmanhome again was a thrill for Viktor Sorincaine. For one thing, it was real spaceflight! The vessel was a real spaceship landing shuttle, and Pelly let him sit in the copilot seat as they brought it in. Just being on Newmanhome was an even greater thrill; it was home again. His real home. The place where he belonged—even though, shockingly, the place was no longer anything like the green and promising land he had grown up in. (Nothing green had lived through Newmanhome’s ages of ice. Nothing was alive anywhere at all on Newmanhome, except what the habitat people had put there.) Yet Viktor even had friends there! Jeren was waiting eagerly for him, shy and dumb and devoted; and Korelto. Even surly Manett managed to grumble a greeting as he clasped Viktor’s shoulder. His eyes, though, were fixed on little Balit as the boy was helped out of the lander and onto a carrying chair. “He’s really Frit and Forta’s kid?” Manett whispered. “He actually came with you? Fred! Then maybe something’s really going to happen around here after all!”

“Sure things are going to happen!” Jeren rumbled loyally. “Viktor’s here now!” Then he wheedled, “But leave him alone, you guys, all right? He needs time to get settled in, doesn’t he? Now, look, Viktor, I fixed up a place for you. I can take you there any time. Are you hungry? I could make some rabbit stew—real rabbits, Viktor; we’ve got a whole flock of them breeding now . . .”

Viktor hardly heard any of that. He was gazing around at the planet he had left. It wasn’t all depressing. Although the hills were brown and bare, the bay was clear blue. So was the sky, with cotton-ball clouds dotted out over the ocean. And there was definitely a certain amount of life on Newmanhome again. Human life, anyway. Practically the planet’s whole population—nearly sixty people!—had come to greet the new arrivals, like the citizens of any frontier town gathered at the railroad station to see the train come in.

“I’d better help Balit,” Viktor said—to no one in particular, to all of them. He hurried over to where the boy was painfully levering himself into the sedan chair, with a pair of squat, husky gillies standing ready to take up the carrying rods. Balit looked up at him, trembling—partly with the effort of holding his head straight in Newmanhome’s gravity, to be sure, but also with sheer excitement.

“This is wonderful, Viktor,” he breathed. And then he fumbled a metal case from his pouch. “Hold still, please.”

Viktor allowed his picture to be taken, then ordered parentally, “Put your hat on. You don’t know what sunburn can be like; you’re not used to it.” As the boy obeyed, Viktor looked up. Pelly was escorting a lean habitat man over to join them. The man was hobbling on two canes, and he had a blue beret pulled down almost to his eyes. A woman, as tall and thin as himself but almost as pretty as Nrina, limped after them.

“Viktor,” said Pelly, “this is Grimler, and her husband, Markety. They’re the ones who sent you the data you asked for.”

“Tried to anyway,” the woman said, giving Viktor a hug of greeting. “I hope it was some use for you—I admire you so much, you know.”

While Viktor was still blinking in surprise at that, the man was going on. “It’s harder from the actual stores,” Markety apologized. “You’ll see. We can take you there any time you like.”

“Any time,” the woman echoed hospitably. “Do you want to go up there now?”

“Oh, yes,” Viktor said.

 

It was a good thing they had built the datastore and the freezers adjacent to the power plant up in the hills instead of in Homeport itself. There wasn’t any Homeport anymore. At least, there was nothing left of it that was visible. The place where the city of Homeport had once been was now at the bottom of the bay.

The bad thing, however, was that a hill was still a hill. To go up it took work.

Balit, Grimler, and Markety didn’t even try to climb it themselves; that was what the gillie litter bearers were for. Their squat bodies were solid muscle; Nrina’s arts had seen to that. Viktor envied them. His own muscles, softened by so many months in the soft gravity of habitat and Moon Mary, complained of the task of lifting a human body so far. Halfway up, Viktor had to pause to catch his breath.

When he looked around for familiar landmarks there weren’t any. “I don’t see the power plant buildings,” he protested.

From beside him, Korelto said reasonably, “Of course you don’t see them, Viktor. They got buried.” He wasn’t out of breath at all—of course, Viktor reflected, he’d had more time to get in shape on Newmanhome.

“But the plant’s still running,” Jeren assured him. “You can hear it if you listen, and the buildings are still there. And lots of the things in them are still okay. Come on, it’s just another twenty minutes or so.”

“Just give me a minute,” Viktor said. He turned as the gillies brought Balit up next to him and set the chair down. The boy looked up at him, weary but grinning and game.

“Are we there yet, Viktor?” he asked. And then, without waiting for an answer, he pulled his camera out again in excitement. “Look up there! Aren’t those things clouds?”

Viktor nodded, without answering. He was listening. Apart from the occasional sounds of the climbing party, the silence was almost absolute. A faint sigh of wind. Some distant machine noises from the little cluster of buildings at the foot of the hill, where Pelly’s ship was being unloaded.

And—yes—a high-pitched, almost inaudible whisper from farther up on the hillside. The sound was familiar to Viktor, even after all the time that had passed. “Is that the power plant turbines I hear?” he asked.

From his own sedan chair, now coming up even with them, the man named Markety said, “Yes, of course it’s the turbines. Are we going to stand here and talk or go on? I thought you people were used to this kind of drag. You two,” he ordered Balit’s gullies. “Pick the chair up and let’s move.”

“Do you want me to give you a hand, Viktor?” Jeren asked anxiously. “I know how I felt when I got back here, the first few days. Weak! I never felt like that before. But it’ll pass, honest it will, Viktor.”

“Of course it will,” Viktor growled, panting hard, waving off the offer to help. The other thing about Newmanhome he had almost forgotten was that it could be hot. He was not only fatigued but sweating profusely when the trail turned. A shaft entrance lay ahead—something new; something dug recently to get down to something else long buried beneath the surface. Pairs of gillies were coming out of it, carrying freezer capsules.

“Let them pass,” Markety called from behind. “They’ve got cargo to take down to the ship.”

Viktor was glad to oblige. He gazed around, wondering. There was a time—oh, a long time ago, a terribly long time ago—when all this hillside had been green and sweet, and people had gathered around to picnic and dance and listen to old Captain Bu’s speeches. This had to be the same place. But how sadly it had changed. He remembered that he had been there with Reesa and Tanya and the baby, before they married . . .

He had to look away, for his eyes were stinging. He saw Jeren looking at him worriedly and pulled himself together as the gillies lumbered past on their way downhill.

The turbine scream was louder now, unmistakable. There was another throbbing sound that was harder to identify, until Viktor saw a stream of muddy water gushing down alongside the trail.

Jeren saw what he was looking at. “That’s from the pumps,” he explained. “They have to keep pumping the water out, of course.”

“Pumping?” Viktor repeated, and his heart sank.

For it had never occurred to him that freezing meant ice, and melting meant flooding.

Viktor turned to Markety, whose chair was just coming up behind him. “Is that why you had so much trouble retrieving the data?” he demanded. “Because the datastores were all under water?”

Markety looked astonished, then, as understanding dawned, the expression turned to compassion. “Oh,” he said. “I thought you knew that.”

 

Viktor had not forgotten what homesteading a new world was like, not entirely, anyway. What he had forgotten was how much work it was.

Annoyingly, everyone he saw seemed to think that he had come there for no other reason than to take part in the work—if not in fact to oversee it. They did need overseeing. When Viktor explained what a well was, and a septic tank, and why the former always had to be dug uphill from the latter, Markety was almost pathetically grateful. “How did you get along without me?” Viktor asked, half-amused, half-aghast at these inept pioneers.

“Very badly, I’m afraid,” Markety said at once. “We need you. After all, you’re the only person who’s ever seen Newmanhome the way it ought to be.”

So, willy-nilly, Viktor was drafted into every project. The good thing about hard, demanding work was that it kept one too busy to dwell on defeats. Well, it almost did; but nothing could quite wipe out of Viktor’s mind the thoughts of those ruined stacks of magnetic fiches that had once held the sum of human knowledge. Meltwater had done what time alone could not. All the chambers that had held the datastores had been under water. And even the parts that had now been pumped dry were a soggy ruin; steel was rust, silicon was cracked and crazed; everything was caked in mud. To restore any of the lost information would be something like burning a book in a crucible and trying to read its contents in the smoke.

Meanwhile, there was the work.

The most important job on the reborn planet was providing enough food to keep the people alive. Naturally, Pelly’s ship brought tons of food on every trip, and the first habitat visitors had installed gillie-manned hothouses to grow the kinds of things they were used to eating. It wasn’t enough. The revived corpsicles, who were by far the greater part of Newmanhome’s tiny population, had to find ways to feed themselves.

It was Manett who led Viktor to the scratched-out plot of hillside ground that was their first attempt at a farm. It was fortunate that Jeren’s promise had been kept: Viktor’s muscles had accustomed themselves to carry his full weight around again—there were aches, but they did their job. Even Balit was getting used to the demands on his artificial muscles, though on the trip to the farm plots Jeren carried the boy on his back.

As soon as they had reached the plot Jeren set the boy down and turned to Viktor, his face grinning with pride. “What do you think?” he asked modestly, waving at the irregular rows of green. “I didn’t do all of it. Markety let us use the gillies for some of the work. And Manett helped, and some of the others.”

Viktor studied the spindly shoots. The mere sight of growing things was a lift to the spirits, among so much bare desolation, but there was nothing there that grew higher than his knee, and nothing resembling fruit on any of it. He asked apologetically, “What are they?”

Jeren looked surprised. “Potatoes,” he said, pointing. “All those right there. And there’s carrots, and cabbage—you had some of that last night, remember? And we tried tomatoes and peppers, but they didn’t come out real well.”

“They came out terrible,” Manett growled. “The carrots get all squashed and funny-looking, too.”

“The rabbits like the green stuff, even if we can’t eat it. Besides, the carrots taste all right,” Jeren said defensively.

“They taste like carrots, sure,” Manett agreed, “but even in the caves we used to grow carrots that were four times as long as those. What’s the matter with them, Viktor?”

Viktor was conscious of Balit’s eyes on him. “I wasn’t ever a farmer, really,” he apologized. No one said anything. They were waiting for him to go on. He said uncomfortably, “Has anybody tested the soil?” Blank looks gave him the answer. “They might need some kind of fertilizer,” he explained. “Minerals or something. I wish we could get at the data-stores. I’m sure they’d have all kinds of agricultural information.’’

“You know we can’t do that, Viktor,” Manett snapped.

Jeren pointed out, pacifically, “See, Viktor, none of us ever tried to grow anything out in the open, like this.”

Viktor nodded in silence. He knew they were waiting for him to speak. He knew, too, that the most honest thing he could tell these people would be that he didn’t know how to help them. He even opened his mouth to say as much, but Balit was speaking ahead of him. The boy said confidently, “Viktor will take care of it. Back on Moon Mary he told me lots of stories about when people were growing things on farms. Didn’t you, Viktor? I remember you talked about irrigating the fields. And what was the other thing, something about seeding the ground with earthworms?”

“Well, yes,” Viktor said unwillingly, “I saw all that kind of stuff done. But I never—”

He stopped there, looking around at the way they were hanging on his words. Even surly Manett was gazing at him with hope.

“But,” Viktor corrected himself, “I, uh, I—” He looked around the field for inspiration, then finished, “I don’t see any way of watering these crops. Some of the plants look pretty dry.”

“It rains on them, doesn’t it?” Manett growled.

“It only rained once in the last three weeks,” Jeren corrected him. “Maybe Viktor’s right. Look, there’s plenty of water down there in the bay. We could take some of the pumps from the freezer—”

“No!” Viktor yelled, shocked. “That’s salt water! That’ll kill them.”

“Oh, sure,” Jeren said remorsefully. “All right, then there’s a creek that goes down by the landing strip, how about that?”

But by then Viktor had an idea. “Why pump it uphill?” he asked. “There’s all that water that’s being pumped out of the power plant area. I saw it running down by the trail. We could get the gillies to dig a ditch, divert it to here. Or, even better in the long run, we could start a new farm, wherever the water comes down.”

He stopped, because they were all grinning at him. Balit’s face was shining with particular pride. “I told you Viktor would know,” the boy informed the others. “Now what do we do about this fertilizer stuff, Viktor?”

Viktor thought for a moment. “I suppose if we sent some soil samples back to Nergal somebody could test them and tell us what to do,” he said slowly. “Then, I remember we seeded earthworms. I don’t imagine any of those survived the ice, but there might be some left in the freezers. We could look. If there aren’t any there, maybe Nrina or somebody could make some for us. You have to have something like earthworms to get a good crop, because they lighten the soil and help things grow.”

He stopped, because Balit was looking doubtful. “What is it?” he asked.

“Well, there’s one thing I don’t understand about that, Viktor,” Balit said diffidently. “In school we learned about growing things, and nobody ever said anything about earthworms.”

Viktor frowned, trying to remember what the farms in the habitats had been like. “Maybe they prepare the soil a different way on the habitats,” he hazarded. “Probably they do—I’m sure the crops on the habitats don’t grow in plain dirt. It’s bound to be something artificial—really special—probably with all the minerals and so on that the plants need measured out exactly. But here we’re talking about trying to restore vegetation to a whole planet, Balit. The earthworms would do it all for us, you see. And—yes, now that I think of it, you might need other kinds of bugs, too. Bees, for instance. Some kinds of plants have to have bees, to carry the pollen around so the seeds will develop.”

He stopped, startled by the expressions of relief on every face.

“I told you,” Balit repeated happily.

And Jeren said with pride, “I knew things would be all right as soon as I saw you get off the ship, Viktor.”

 

By the time Pelly’s ship took off again for the return flight to Nergal, Viktor had come to terms with his worst defeat . . . almost.

It wasn’t easy to do that. The destruction of the data files meant the end of a lot of hopes for him, but the thought of bringing Newmanhome back to life provided a different kind of hope. Almost as good. Not quite.

But everyone around him seemed almost cocky with expectations for the future, even Pelly. In the last moments before takeoff, Pelly took time out from shouting at the gillies as they finished loading the lander to clasp Viktor’s shoulder awkwardly and say, “I’m sorry about your files, Viktor. Listen, if there’s anything I can do—”

“Thanks anyway,” Viktor said.

Pelly paused to study him thoughtfully. “You know,” he said, “sometimes when things are at their rottenest something nice happens. Maybe something that you don’t even expect. You could turn out to have a pretty happy life here, Viktor, with a little luck.”

“I know that,” Viktor said, summoning up a smile. It wasn’t a smile of amusement or pleasure, but the kind of graveside smile a widow gives to the friends offering condolence. “Jeren’s been telling me the same thing. You’re both right, of course.”

But it didn’t feel as though they were right, and he was glad enough when Pelly had to break off his efforts at consolation to give orders to the gillies. And then, very quickly, Markety finished the last of his weepy farewells to his wife, who was going back to Nergal for a visit; and the last of the capsules containing corpsicles for Nrina’s lab were stowed, and the gillies were herded away out of range of the rocket’s exhaust, and Pelly waved a final good-bye from the port . . . and then the port was closed. Everyone retreated to safety, Jeren carrying Balit and anxiously urging Viktor on with them. The lander motors spilled out a little wisp of flame, then roared. The ship picked up speed as the noise became deafening—rolled away—began to lift—and was suddenly only a dot in the sky, disappearing over Great Ocean. Everyone was watching. No one spoke. Viktor caught a glimpse of Balit, staring wistfully at the vapor trails the lander had left behind, and behind him Markety, looking very tired and staring sadly after the disappearing ship that was carrying his wife away.

Then the ship was out of sight. The last fading thunder of its engines died away, and the silence of lonely, empty Newmanhome came in around them.

It was Manett who broke it. “Well,” he said, his tone angry as he challenged them all, “now we can get back to digging those irrigation ditches.”

 

Two weeks later the ditches were dug and a trickle of muddy water seeped into the soil of the farm plot whenever somebody, usually Jeren, lifted the flat panel that served as a gate. It hadn’t rained, but the plants were already looking a little healthier. Korelto and half a dozen others were spending their days in the cryonics chambers, looking for the earthworms and bees that Viktor had prescribed, or for anything else that might be useful to their task—without much luck so far, but still hoping.

Viktor did not go with them for that. Viktor did not like being in the place where he had lain as a corpsicle for all those centuries; it was too much like visiting his own grave.

In any case, there were plenty of other things to keep Viktor busy, and some of them were even pleasant. One morning he sought Balit out and offered him a treat. “Markety’s got an inflatable boat, and there’s something I want to look at. How would you like to go out on the bay?”

Naturally the boy had only one answer to that. “Oh, Viktor,” he sighed when they were afloat. “I didn’t know people could go floating out onto all that water—without even getting wet! No one I know has ever done such a thing!” And he dabbled his bare feet into the water, squealing in pleasure at the unexpected cold.

Viktor pulled them a few hundred yards away from shore and then rested on his oars, looking about. Balit had his camera out again, taking pictures in sheer joy of everything he could find. But when Viktor looked at the same things—the barren hills, the empty skyline—it all seemed bare and hopeless. The idea of a living Newmanhome seemed like a mirage. Apart from the handful of revived corpsicles, no one seemed to care. Even Markety. If these were the most enterprising people alive, Viktor thought sourly—and people like Markety and Pelly had to be that, since they were the only ones who bothered to come here—then the human race was in bad trouble . . .

But the sun was warm, and the water gentle. The only breeze was mild and on-shore; there were no waves to speak of, and no risk of being blown out to sea. “What was it you wanted to see, Viktor?” Balit inquired.

“Look down into the water,” Viktor ordered. “See if you can find anything that doesn’t look natural.” And then, as the boy leaned precariously over the side, Viktor pulled him back, laughing. “Don’t fall in. You don’t know how to swim yet.”

“But there are some funny-looking things down there, Viktor. Are they what you mean?”

Viktor leaned over to look. It took a moment to be sure of what he was looking at, for they were nearly buried in mud, but then he nodded in satisfaction. “I thought they’d be there. They’re Von Neumanns.”

“What are Von Neumanns, Viktor?”

“Do you know the things that bring metals in from the asteroids? The things your grandparents use to manufacture things with? Those are Von Neumanns, too. These are the same kind of thing, only these don’t travel in space—they feed on metals in hot springs under the sea. And it looks like they went right on doing it for a long time! There are thousands of them here, Balit.” And he tried to explain how the Von Neumann nautiloids had gone out for untold centuries, even under the ice when Newmanhome was frozen, eating and reproducing, and then returning as their chemical sniffers sorted out the flavors of Homeport, as salmon did on Earth, and their tiny brains told them to return for harvesting.

“But there wasn’t anyone here to harvest them,” Viktor said

“So they’re no good anymore?” the boy asked.

“Not at all! I’m glad to see they’re really there. They could be pretty valuable, if we had any way to use them. Pure metals, already refined, all sorts of raw materials . . .” He grinned wryly. “If we had factories we could do a lot of manufacturing. If we had food to feed the people to run the factories. If we had the people to grow the food to feed the people. If—”

He broke off as he realized Balit was holding the camera on him. “Come on, Balit, what are you going to do with all these pictures? Why don’t you turn that thing off?”

“No, it’s really interesting, Viktor,” the boy protested. “What do you mean, if you had people?”

Viktor resigned himself. “All right, let’s start from the beginning. The whole planet’s bare, right? Which means there’s no ground cover to hold the soil in place. So it’s been washing down into the sea for a couple of centuries now, which means that if it isn’t stopped fairly soon Newmanhome will stay dead.” He paused for a moment, trying to remember the bright, promising early days of the first colony on Newmanhome. “So what has to be done, as soon as possible, is get some kind of vegetation going, all over the world. That means planting seeds—a whole planet’s worth of seeds, Balit; millions of tons of them. I suppose they’d have to be sown from airplanes—if we had airplanes. If we had the seeds to sow. Then—are you sure you want to hear all this?”

“Please, Viktor!” the boy begged.

Viktor shrugged. “But we need people to do the work. Not only to sow the seeds planetwide, but to grow food to feed everybody doing it. And to build the planes, maybe; and before that to build the factories to build the planes. Balit,” he said earnestly, “I’ve been through this before, and it’s hard. When the first Earth ships landed here they had a few thousand people, and all kinds of machinery designed for every purpose you can imagine—and still everybody was working night and day for years. How many people are on Newmanhome now?”

“Sixteen,” the boy said promptly. “I mean, sixteen from the habitats, plus forty-two like you, and all the gillies.”

“Sixteen,” Viktor said, nodding. “Plus forty-two like me. Of course there are a few thousand more—like me—in the freezers, but we can’t do much about it. Manett says they tried to revive some on their own, but most of them died. Freezer burn, over all that time, the only chance is to take them back to the habitats where somebody like Nrina has all the equipment and can do the job right. No,” he said, staring emptily at the brown hills, “I don’t see how it’s possible. We just don’t have the resources to stay alive here, much less try to figure out—”

He stopped himself, then grinned at the boy. “I was all set to go on about Nebo and what happened to the universe again, wasn’t I? And you’ve already heard enough about that.”

“Never enough, Viktor,” Balit said seriously, but he turned off his camera. Then he said, “There are plenty of people on the habitats, you know.”

“Sure there are. They stay there, too. They don’t come to crude places like this.”

“I’m here, Viktor.”

Apologetic, Viktor reached out to stroke the boy’s shoulder. “I know you are, Balit. I appreciate it. But—let’s be serious, Balit. How many people are willing to leave the habitats and come here? And the ones who do come, how long can they stay? You can’t tell me you’re comfortable here.”

“It’s not so bad, Viktor,” the boy said, trying to sound as though he meant it. They were silent for a moment, then Viktor pointed down through the water.

“See those lumps down there? Not the Von Neumanns, the square-edged ones? I think those were the docks of Homeport. Of course, they’re buried in mud now, but I’m pretty sure that’s what they were.”

“Wouldn’t the docks be at the water’s edge, Viktor?”

“They were. But that was before the ice pushed the land down; that happens, sometimes.” Viktor looked around. “I’d bet,” he said, “that we’re floating right now just about over where Homeport was!”

He stopped paddling and gazed at the water, trying to reconstruct the plan of the old town. It could have been so. This could have been the waterfront—that patch back there where his home had been—up higher, near where the present shoreline lay, perhaps the old site of the schoolhouse where he had first met brash, red-headed, teen-aged Theresa McGann . . .

“Is something the matter, Viktor?” Balit asked anxiously.

Viktor blinked. After a moment he managed a grin. “It’s all right,” he said. “I was just remembering.”

Balit nodded, studying Viktor’s face. Then he said hesitantly, “Viktor? Has—ah—has Nrina called you?”

Viktor looked at the boy. “It wasn’t Nrina I was thinking about,” he said.

“I know,” the boy said. “I just wondered.” And then he said, “When we give Markety’s boat back to him, do you think we should ask him to show us the Nebo things?”

“Oh, my God,” Viktor said, shaking his head in astonishment. Because, incredible as it was, with all the other things that had been going on since he arrived back on Newmanhome, he had almost forgotten “the Nebo things.”

 

The things weren’t in a museum, or anything like one. They were in a shed on the outskirts of the little colony, and most of the space was full of junk that no one wanted but no one was willing to throw away. Since that exactly described the artifacts from Nebo, they were there—half-concealed behind a litter of broken dune-buggy wheels, stacks of cracked crockery dug out of the ice-age warrens, and other unnameable debris,

When, with Markety’s help, Viktor and Balit got to the Nebo things they were not much better. The largest of them Viktor had already seen, on Nrina’s desk machine, a lavender metal object as big as a man, more or less cubical in shape. Viktor poked it cautiously. It was very solid. “Why weren’t these things taken to the habitats?” he asked.

Markety looked astonished. “They might be dangerous, Viktor. You know what happened on Nebo when people tried to poke into that sort of thing. They’re better here, so that in case anyone does anything risky there would be less damage—I mean, to anything important,” he explained.

“You mean if anybody tries to see what’s inside them,” Viktor said, nodding. “Maybe you’re right, but it has to be done.”

Markety’s astonishment turned to worry. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Viktor.”

“It doesn’t have to be done here. Maybe they could be taken to some other part of Newmanhome—maybe we could work out some kind of remote-controlled machinery to try to open them up—I don’t know, maybe the best place to do it is on Nebo itself. But in the long run we have to take the chance, because we do have to know!” As the words came out of his mouth Viktor heard, surprisingly, that he sounded as though he were actually growing excited again.

“Pelly says maybe it could be done in space,” Balit offered eagerly.

“Just so it’s done, I don’t care how,” Viktor said. “Those Nebo machines did things human beings couldn’t even imagine—ever—even when they could travel from star to star.”

Markety coughed. “We know they were pretty good at killing people, anyway,” he conceded.

“I don’t think those deaths were on purpose,” Viktor argued. “Not all of them, anyway. At least we know that they actually helped some people—the ones I saw land on Nebo; we have the tapes to prove it. Yes, they died after a while, but they weren’t simply murdered . . . God knows why,” he finished. Then he went on. “I haven’t said all of this even to you, Balit, but I have a kind of an idea. I think there’s another civilization around—not human. At least, I think there was, and that they sent somebody to Nebo long ago—very long ago, even before the first New Ark landed here from Earth.”

“Nobody’s ever said anything like that, Viktor,” Balit said worriedly. “Where would those people come from?”

“I don’t know. The star Gold has planets, according to Pelly. Maybe the people who landed on Nebo came from one of those planets. Anyway, I think that for some reason—I can’t even guess what it might have been—they constructed those machines on Nebo to tap the energies of our sun, and use them to accelerate this whole little group of stars.”

“Why would they do that?” Markety asked good-naturedly.

“I have no idea. I said so. But we’ll never have any hope of knowing ‘why’ unless we can figure out ‘how’—and that means taking some of those machines apart to see what made them run!”

There was a moment’s silence. Then Markety said diffidently, “Viktor? You don’t mean you’re going to, well, just try to break one of them open by yourself, do you?”

“If there was no other way, I would,” Viktor said uncompromisingly.

“My,” Markety said, pursing his lips. He studied Viktor’s face uncomprehendingly, then sighed. “Well, let’s talk about something more cheerful. Are you getting hungry?” he asked. “I was hoping you two would join me for lunch—I have some good things Pelly brought from home. What about it, Balit?”

But Balit wasn’t listening. His eyes were on the door. “Viktor? Why is it getting so dark outside?” he asked.

Viktor turned to look. It was true; the bright day had turned gloomy. The sun was gone, and the clouds were thick and black. “Well,” he said, “if we’re going anywhere maybe we’d better hurry. I think it’s going to rain.”

 

Rain it did—the first big warm drops splashing on them even before they reached Markety’s home, then crashing torrents when they were safely inside. Balit was delighted. He kept jumping up to the doorway, to take more and more pictures. It was coming down most imposingly, with thunder that made Balit hold his ears and lightning strokes that made him squeal—not in fear, or not all in fear, but mostly in a thrill of excitement at this unprecedented, unimaginable spectacle of the elements at work.

The lunch was all Markety had promised, and he was a cheerful host. “I do apologize for not knowing more about those Nebo things, Viktor,” he said, steadying his hand to pour wine. It took both his hands to hold the decanter against Newmanhome’s pull, one to support the other. “It was my wife, really, who was interested in them—Grimler, you remember? You met her when you arrived.”

“Oh,” Viktor said, trying to recapture the memory of a slim, pretty woman. “I think I did.”

“And she went back with Pelly, unfortunately. I really miss her . . . But I can’t say she knew very much about them, you know, it was just that she thought they were interesting.”

“I’d like to talk to her anyway,” Viktor said.

“And so you shall, as soon as she gets back.” Markety sipped the wine, made a critical face, then beamed. “Yes, I think it’s all right. Balit? If you can sit still for a moment I’d like to offer a toast to your wonderful parents.”

“Just a minute,” the boy called from the doorway, fascinated as he took his pictures of the bright violence in the sky and the muddy rivulets that were running down the walkway outside. “Oh, Viktor,” he breathed, “I just can’t wait till I send these pictures to my class—they’ll be so jealous.” Then he recollected himself. “You wanted to drink a toast, Markety?”

“To our great artists, Frit and Forta,” Markety said, lifting his glass with ceremony. Then, when they had drunk, he added, “They’re part of the reason Grimler sent the data to you, you know. Of course, she was interested anyway, but she would have done anything if Frit or Forta asked her to—any of us would! Did you see his new dance-poem about the kitten? No? Perhaps it was while you were in flight, but we saw the transmission here. Marvelous!”

“Did you know that Viktor has danced with Forta?” Balit put in.

Markety blinked at him in astonishment. “This Viktor? He dances? He’s danced with Forta? Why, that’s wonderful, Viktor,” he said enthusiastically. “I had no idea. I really envy you, Viktor. Actually—” He permitted himself a rueful little smile. “At one time, you know, I wanted to be a dancer myself. I even hoped to study with Forta for a time. It didn’t work out. He’s kind enough to say he remembers me, but I think he’s just being polite. I didn’t really have the talent, I’m afraid, except in a very amateur way. And in this gravity of course I can’t dance at all.”

“Viktor can,” Balit pointed out. “He grew up here.”

Markety stared at the boy, then, with sudden respect, at Viktor. “Really,” he marveled. “Could you some time, Viktor? Perhaps after Grimler comes back? I know she’d be thrilled.”

“Certainly Viktor will dance for you,” Balit said graciously. “We’ll need music, but I’ll ask Forta to transmit some.”

“Wonderful,” Markety breathed, and if he had been a hospitable host before, now he was almost overwhelming. The scariness of Viktor’s ideas about Nebo were forgotten. Markety selected the finest fruits for Viktor and Balit, and would not eat himself until convinced they were satisfied. But he was beaming. “Isn’t this fine? The rain, and such good company, and all these things going on around us? I can’t tell you how glad we are that we’re here—Grimler and me—I mean, when she’s here.”

Maybe it was the wine. Certainly there had been a lot of it, but for whatever reason, Viktor couldn’t help asking, “How come? I mean, I didn’t think you habitat people liked planets all that much.”

Markety looked both proud and embarrassed. “Grimler and I aren’t like all the habitat people,” he stated confidently. “I admit some of our friends think we’re crazy, but—actually, we like it here. Grimler’s said many times things are just too easy in the habitats. There’s no challenge. And here’s a whole planet that we can make live again—we just want to do our little part in bringing that about. So our lives will be worth something, do you understand? And she’d be here now, except for—”

Markety hesitated for a moment, then, grinning, pulled the blue beret off his head.

It was the first time Viktor had seen him bareheaded. Beside him, Balit made a startled little sound as they both saw that Markety’s forehead was emblazoned with the fertility emblem.

“That’s right,” he said, with that same mixture of pride and embarrassment. “Grimler and I decided we even wanted to have our own baby! Not that there’s anything wrong with what Nrina does,” he added swiftly. “That’s all very well for those who prefer it. But we wanted one who was our natural child, not programmed ahead of time, and so . . . well, we just went ahead and did it, the old-fashioned way. We made Grimler what you call ‘pregnant.’ ”

“I’m amazed,” Viktor declared truthfully.

“Oh, everybody is,” Markety said modestly. “But that’s what we want—someone who can grow up here on Newmanhome, and not have to take all those pills and injections, and—well, to be more or less just like you, Viktor!”

And that was when there was a scrambling at the door and Jeren turned up, soaked and glistening with rain, his face white with misery.

“Viktor!” he croaked. “The farm! We were just up there checking on everything, and it’s gone! All of it! All the seedlings! They’re just washed away!”

And behind him Manett came raging in. “Curse you, Viktor! You made us dig that ditch, and now it’s just ruined everything!”

And when the worst of the storm was over, and bits of blue were beginning to appear in the east, and Viktor trudged up to look, every word had been true. A healthy stream poured through the new aqueduct, and right on through the little planted area. Not everything was gone, quite. But only a few rows highest up, farthest from the irrigation ditch, survived; everything else was furrowed and glistening mud.

“We should have directed the ditch into some kind of holding pond,” Viktor said remorsefully. “And we shouldn’t have planted on a hillside like this in the first place—I didn’t think about erosion. Especially with all that bare ground up the hill.” He shook his head in self-reproach. “I should have known,” he said.

“Damn right you should,” Manett snarled.

 

The next day it was as though the storm had never been, the sky cobalt, the sun warm, hardly a cloud in the sky.

But the storm’s traces had not gone away. It wasn’t just the farm. The street of the little community was ankle deep in brown, gluey mud. Nothing with wheels could move in it. Even the gillie litter bearers could make little headway, their furred feet turning into balls of clinging, sticky stuff; the habitat people painfully picked their way along, one slow step at a time, when they had to go out. Most of them chose to spend the day indoors.

Yet Balit was entering the communications shed at the end of the street. Viktor saw the boy and felt a moment’s surprise, but he was talking to Jeren. “We’ll have to find a new place for the farm,” he said. “On a level. Preferably with some sort of a ridge between it and the hills, so if there’s a flood it’ll be diverted away from the plants. And near enough to a stream so we can irrigate.”

“I don’t think we can go looking for a place today,” Jeren said doubtfully.

“No, not until the ground dries out a little,” Viktor agreed. “And we’ll have to do something here, too. I don’t suppose we can pave the street, but maybe we could plant grasses all around the village to hold the soil when it rains.”

“We can do that,” Jeren agreed, looking over Viktor’s shoulder. “Viktor? I think Balit’s waving to you.”

When Viktor turned, he saw it was true. When he trudged his way to the communications shack, the mud sucking at his feet at every step, the boy was bubbling with pleasure. “Viktor, come inside, please. Right away! I’ve just had a message from Moon Mary that I want you to see!”

There was no denying Balit’s excitement. Viktor supposed it would be another loving communication from Frit or Forta, or both of them; for those came almost every day.

It was neither Frit nor Forta. When the picture came on it was a cluster of Balit’s schoolmates, laughing and excited. They weren’t in their classroom. They were gathered around a plot of ground with bright-green, healthy-looking seedlings poking out of it. “See, Viktor? They did what you said,” Balit said proudly.

“What I said?”

“That we should have the soil analyzed. Pelly had some clods on the cryonics capsules he was bringing back, so I asked my school to take it on as part of their project.”

“What project?” Viktor demanded.

“They’ve taken on Newmanhome as a project,” Balit explained. “Not just the soil—that’s only part of it. But they had it tested to see what it needed, and then they added things. Look at the difference now!”

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

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

“Grimler? Markety’s wife?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And none of that was true now.

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

But when Balit came shouting his name—

 

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

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

 

 

 

CHAPTER 29

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

CHAPTER 30

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, of course, on Pelly’s next trip back to Nergal Viktor and Reesa went with him.

 

For Reesa, of course, it was all a wonderful new thrill. She had never seen the spindly, graceful homes of Moon Mary—had hardly seen even the habitat where Nrina had coaxed her back to life, for as soon as she had been well enough she had been on her way to Newmanhome and Viktor.

It was more than a tour. It was very close to a Grand Procession. They were met on Moon Mary by more than a thousand people. Frit and Forta were in the very foreground, of course, taking turns to hug Viktor and Reesa when Balit left either long enough to give them a chance. Nrina was there, too—as she pressed herself fondly against Viktor he glanced worriedly at Reesa’s face; but Reesa only put her own arms around the slim woman, and if there was any jealousy there, or resentment, it never came to the surface. Some of the others Viktor recognized, or almost recognized—Balit’s old schoolmates, some of the friends and family members from Balit’s coming-of-age party—but there were hundreds, many hundreds, more he did not know at all. “I have some surprises for you, Viktor,” Balit said proudly, pulling a slim young woman out of the throng. “This is Kiffena. Do you remember her? She was in my class when you visited, and we’re going to be married.”

She came willingly enough to Viktor, who naturally put his arms around her. He did not remember her out of the gaggle he had met at Balit’s school, but she was certainly a pretty little thing. As he hugged her in greeting he was surprised to feel the corded muscles in her lean body—preparing for Newmanhome? Yes, of course, that would be it, he thought; Balit had promised he would be back, and certainly it would not be alone. Grinning, Viktor slapped the boy—no, the man now, certainly—on the back. To the girl he said, “You’ll be a wonderful couple.”

“We know you’ll be very happy,” Reesa said.

Then the girl moved her lips for a moment and said, “We know we will be happy, too.”

Viktor blinked at her in astonishment, for she hadn’t spoken in the tongue of the habitats, but in old English. She grinned. “I had to learn it for my work,” she said, half-apologetically.

“Well, she really is a surprise, Balit,” Viktor said. “And a very nice one, too. Congratulations.”

Balit looked astonished. “Oh, no, Viktor. Kiffena isn’t the surprise. Kiffena is the one who’s going to tell you the surprise—one of the surprises, anyway. But let’s go home now, please? After dinner we can talk in peace.”

 

Frit and Forta had prepared a handsome meal. “Nothing elaborate,” Frit said modestly, handing around grapes the size of a baby’s fist, “for it’s just family, you know.”

“I’m really honored to be a member of this family,” Reesa said, and took Frit’s hand to kiss it before she let him go on with the grapes. “Balit’s been a really good friend to us on Newmanhome, and—” Suddenly she was startled, almost panicked, as the room swayed under her. “Dear God! What’s that?”

Viktor, after a moment’s shock of his own, laughed at her. “I forgot to tell you about earthquakes. Moon Mary does this kind of thing every once in a while.”

“But we’re perfectly safe here,” Forta said reassuringly. When he was sure that Reesa was over her startlement, and everyone had had everything they wanted from the meal, he stood up again. “I’ve got to practice,” he sighed. “I’m going to perform a new dance—I hope you’ll enjoy it, Viktor and Reesa, because it’s partly for you. But I won’t dance it properly if I don’t rehearse it again, so, Frit, will you come and count for me while I work at the bar? You’ll forgive us, won’t you, Reesa?”

“Of course,” Reesa said politely. But her eyes were amused, and when Balit’s parents were gone she turned to him. “They’re leaving us alone on purpose, aren’t they?” she asked. “Does this have anything to do with those surprises you were talking about?”

Balit leaned back, his eyes twinkling. “You are very clever,” he said. “You are also correct. Let me begin by telling you about Kiffena. She is a specialist in datamachine architecture.”

“I didn’t know,” Viktor said, smiling across the table at the pretty young woman. “In fact, I didn’t know there were any people like that at all.”

“I began the study when Balit was sending all those exciting stories back to us,” the girl said, smiling back. “It seemed such a pity for all that information to be lost.”

“She’s been studying the datastore, Viktor,” Balit said with excitement. “It may be that not everything was lost.”

That stopped Viktor. “What are you talking about?” he demanded.

Kiffena said with pride, “Balit sent me some of the data fiches from the store. I’ve managed to reclaim most of one fiche and part of three others, Viktor. They were magnetically stored, you see. Most of the magnetism was lost because of flooding, but there is a little residual—sometimes too little to make out, but sometimes not.”

“It’s not about astrophysics, though,” Balit apologized.

“No,” the girl said, shaking her head. “I’m not sure what the main fiche is about, Viktor. We tried to have it translated, but some of the words just don’t make sense. Look.”

And she keyed Balit’s desk and displayed some sections of what looked like a printed book.

“Oh, I know what that is,” Reesa said suddenly. “It’s case law. I mean, it’s what judges decided in some lawsuit or criminal trial, long and long ago. People used to worry about those things a lot, back on Earth.”

“But that’s wonderful, Kiffena!” Viktor said. “If you can get anything at all out of that mess, maybe we can get some of the good stuff. You said you unscrambled parts of three others?”

“I don’t know if they’re much better,” she admitted ruefully. “One was something about history. Have you ever heard of a man named Artvasdes? He was what they called the ‘king’ of something called ‘Armenia’ on Earth, long ago, and he had a war with someone named ‘Cleopatra.’ ”

“I’ve heard of Cleopatra,” Viktor said. “Not the other fellow, no.”

“And then there’s a story about some people that, really, Viktor, seemed to spend an awful lot of time worrying about things that didn’t really matter—it’s called Remembering Bygone Times—”

“Remembrance of Things Past. Marcel Proust,” Reesa said, laughing. “I read that once.”

“You said there was more?” Viktor asked.

“Yes,” said Balit ruefully. “That really looked good for a while, Viktor. It had a lot of data about Jupiter, Venus, the Sun, the Moon—the Old Earth Solar system—and about a number of asterisms—”

“The fiche called them ‘constellations,’ ” Kiffena corrected him.

“Constellations, then. Groups of stars as seen from Earth. They were called things like Libra and Sagittarius and Aries. We thought it might be something like a child’s primer on astronomy.”

“But what it was,” Kiffena said ruefully, “was some sort of magical system for forecasting events.”

“I think it’s called ‘astrology,’ ” Viktor said.

“I would have liked to try it out,” Kiffena said, “but of course we don’t have any of those planets or constellations any more.”

“But that’s wonderful,” Viktor cried, suddenly realizing what all this meant. “Do you think you can restore much of the store?”

Balit looked downcast. “Not much, Viktor,” he said regretfully. “I picked out some of the best-preserved fiches to send Kiffena. Most of it is just—well, pulverized.”

“But a lot of it, yes, Viktor,” Kiffena said encouragingly.

“The thing is, it’s not organized anymore, so we can’t pick out one section—say, astronomy—and work on that part. There’s no way to know what any particular fiche holds until we start to restore it.”

Viktor shook his head wonderingly. “I had no idea,” he said. “How did all this happen?”

“Balit,” Kiffena said, hugging the young man proudly. “Balit made it happen. Didn’t you know he was sending back reports every day?”

“I knew he was taking a lot of pictures, yes.”

“Pictures of everything that happened, Viktor! It was so exciting for us in the school to see—well—thunderstorms! And rainbows, and swimming in the ocean, and clouds, and—everything. And then, of course,” she said happily, “we all got interested. That’s when I began studying datastore architecture, Viktor. We all began things like that, and in the other schools—”

Viktor blinked at her. “What other schools? I only went to yours.”

“But of course we didn’t keep Balit’s reports to ourselves, Viktor,” she said patiently. “No, not at all. Half the schools in the world were getting them—all over the habitat system and on all four moons. Different groups took on different projects, and even some of the grown-ups got interested.”

“Newmanhome,” Balit said sincerely, “was the most interesting thing that ever happened to us, Viktor. And, of course, with all those people taking it up, a lot got done.”

Viktor looked at the boy. “I see that,” he said. “Well, do you have any more surprises?”

Balit grinned at him. “A few,” he said. He keyed the desk again, and a big torpedo-shaped object appeared. “This,” Balit said, “is sort of like what you call our Von Neumaun machines, only bigger. It’s going to go to Gold.”

Reesa blinked at him. “The star?”

“That’s right, Reesa, the star—the one that we think has planets. Viktor thinks maybe the machines on Nebo came from Gold, so we’re sending this automatic spaceship out to survey it and come back to report. Of course,” Balit added ruefully, “it will take a while. Gold’s nearly eleven light-years away, and this ship can’t even get up to the speed of light.”

“But really, Viktor,” Kiffena said, “those planets don’t seem inhabited anyway.”

“So this ship is just to make sure. And then there are a couple smaller ones—” He keyed the desk again, and three smaller torpedos appeared. “—which will orbit Nebo, keeping a watch on it before someone lands again.”

“Lands again!”

“Oh, yes, Viktor,” Kiffena said comfortably. “I think I will, if nobody else does. After all, those machines seemed to operate automatically, didn’t they? So they had to have some sort of data storage and control systems. And decoding their architecture shouldn’t be that much harder than trying to restore your Newmanhome store.”

Viktor stared at her, then at Balit. He was almost in a daze. “I had no idea,” he said. “I can hardly believe it.”

“Believe it, Viktor,” Reesa advised him. “When a few million bright young people get excited about something, a lot can happen.”

Balit grinned at them, his arm around Kiffena. “And most of it,” he said, “is still going to happen.”

 

They didn’t stay for Forta’s new dance. They couldn’t. The messages from Newmanhome were too urgent and too imploring—for, although there were a couple of thousand people now alive on the planet and busy about the work of bringing it back to life, Viktor and Reesa were the only two who knew what it should be.

They didn’t return empty-handed, either. In the cargo hold of Pelly’s ship were forty new artificial wombs for Dekkaduk’s laboratory, to speed up new births; and genetically improved strains of kelp to seed the empty seas; and a dozen species of tailor-made fish to feed on the kelp when it had had a chance to grow. One of the school groups had taken on the problem of seeding the bare South Continent, and so in the cargo hold of Pelly’s ship were two new little airplanes specially designed for dropping pelleted seeds of specially designed ground-cover grasses. Kiffena’s group had given her a ton and a half of instruments to go on with the work of trying to recapture lost data from the files. Balit had persuaded a dozen youngsters, from his school and others, to come to study the fascinating and unprecedented subject of Newmanhome’s weather, and naturally they had a ton or two of meteorological instruments of their own. Once again Pelly’s ship was grotesquely deformed, with odds and ends of gear stuck to it all through the flight from Nergal, and it took four trips in the landing shuttle to get it all to the surface. And then, somehow, time had to be found to get all those things started . . . and to plow new farmland to feed the growing population . . . and to find new geothermal sources away from Homeport so that more power plants could be built so that other little communities could be launched elsewhere on the barren world . . . and to do—to do everything, really, and to do it all at once.

Everyone else was almost as busy, of course—with the work of resuscitating the planet, and with their own affairs, too. Every week a dozen or so newly awakened people came wonderingly out of Dekkaduk’s thawing pens to join in the great task, and of course the pressure was intense to ensure that many of them were female. Families began to happen again on Newmanhome. Jeren’s tall wife was bulging at the belly—neither Jeren nor she had been willing to wait for a turn at the artificial wombs. Markety’s baby was walking sturdily where his parents still sometimes tottered. The freezers were still nowhere near emptied; each trip of Pelly’s ship brought more people from the habitats, then went back; and yet the principal element in the population growth was already beginning to be newborns.

And then Reesa sprang her bombshell.

As they lay spooned together in bed, at the end of one long, wearying day, she whispered to the back of his neck, “Viktor? Are you asleep?” And then she went on quickly. “There’s something on my mind.”

“Oh?” he said—not wanting to say yes, sure, he’d noticed her frequent abstraction, supposing it to be the shock of coming to this new, unexpected and highly confusing new life.

But then she said, “I talked to Nrina while we were on Moon Mary.”

“Oh,” he said, in quite a different tone. He was at once wide awake. “Reesa, darling,” he said, guilty, placating, “I hope you understand—I mean, I thought you were dead.”

But her finger was over his lips, and she was laughing at him. “You’re always talking when you should be listening, Viktor dear,” she told him. “I’m not interested in what you did while I was dead. Only I’m not dead anymore, you see, and Nrina—Nrina took me aside to tell me something. She said she had cell samples from both of us. She said it didn’t matter, of course, if I couldn’t bear a child myself anymore, because I wouldn’t have to. Not as long as she had the samples from both of us. She wondered if you and I wanted—”

She stopped there. Viktor squirmed around on the bed to face her in the gloom. Then, looking him in the eye, she finished, “A baby.”

“Oh, my God,” Viktor whispered softly. He was silent for a long moment. A baby! A baby would not replace lost Shan and Yan and Tanya and little Quinn, but still . . .”    What did you tell Nrina?” he asked.

He was not surprised to see her cheeks were damp. “I told her we’d think about it, Vik. And I’m thinking about it very hard right now.”

 

When Forta performed his new dance the whole community took time off to watch.

It wasn’t Forta in the flesh, of course. Forta in the flesh was still millions of miles away, on the moon of ruddy Nergal. But Forta in the live broadcast from his own stage on Moon Mary was still wonderful, brilliant Forta, and he danced beautifully. Viktor saw with pleasure that there were traces in Forta’s dance of the Yemeni step and the dip and curtsy Viktor had taught him. But there was more to it—so much more!—that was all Forta’s own genius: grace and passion, yes, and courage and hope, too.

When it was over Forta returned to the cameras to say, breathless and happy, “I’ve dedicated this new dance, ‘The Greening of Newmanhome,’ to my son, Balit, and his bride, Kiffena, and most of all to our dear friends Viktor and Reesa and all those who join them in the real greening that is going on on Newmanhome now. All of us wish them well!”

Of course, there was a party to follow the performance, a happy one that lasted a long time. When it was over Viktor could not sleep. He got up from the bed where Reesa was peacefully smiling in her slumber and walked out into the dark streets, gazing up at the five lonely stars in the black sky.

Lonely . . .

What had happened to everything? Viktor scowled at the unanswering sky. He walked past the communications shack, one of the few lighted structures in the little settlement, down toward the water. Behind him he heard a door close, but he didn’t turn. He stopped a few yards from the edge of the bay. There was nothing to be seen out over Great Ocean, not even a line of horizon, only darkness. Near his feet the little waves peacefully ran up the gravel and retreated, with a sighing sound.

Behind him Balit’s voice said, “Viktor? I thought that was you. I called Forta to congratulate him on his performance, and I’ve just got his answer. He’s been so busy, Viktor! He said he’s been getting calls from all over the habitats—not just fan calls, calls from people wanting to know how they could help us here!”

Viktor turned and peered at the gangling young man. “That’s nice,” he growled.

Balit blinked at him but went on enthusiastically. “Yes, and do you know what they’ve done? Three of the other schools got together, and they’ve launched a new observatory! A really big one this time. Big mirrors and radio webs—it’ll be looking for infrared and radio and gamma radiation and all those things you’ve been talking about. And Forta says they’re even talking about moving one of the habitats, or building a new one, in orbit around Newmanhome!”

He broke off, aware that Viktor was not matching his pleasure. “Is something the matter, Viktor?” he asked worriedly.

Viktor flung his arm up toward the black sky. “Look,” he said. “It’s all gone! The whole universe, it’s simply grown old and died on me!”

Balit was silent for a moment. “That might be,” he admitted. “But really, Viktor—don’t you remember all the things you’ve told me? That’s there. This is here. Our own sun isn’t old. It’s got billions of years left—much longer than all the time life’s existed in this system.”

“I know that,” Viktor said wearily.

 “But, Viktor—what does it matter what happened to the rest of the universe?”

“It matters that I don’t know what happened,” Viktor said tightly. “And I never will! Oh, it’s wonderful that Kiffena’s trying to patch up some of the old records, and people are starting to look for new answers again, and—it’s all wonderful, I admit it! But it’s all taking so long. And even if sometime people do find out what was going on on Nebo, and what caused our stars to do what they did—I won’t live long enough to find it out!”

“But Viktor,” Balit said lovingly, “I will.”

 

 

 

CHAPTER 31

 

 

What Wan-To was doing was pruning himself—as surgically as any horticulturist trying to save a winter-struck shrub.

Wan-To didn’t call it that, of course. He had no experience of horticulture. He had never seen a flower garden in the dying fall of a year, when the plants prepare themselves for the death of winter; roots are allowed to die, stalks wither, flowers turn brown and fall to the ground—everything is sacrificed to the growth of the healthy seeds that will bring the new plant to life again when the soil warms.

But what he was doing in that moribund universe was the same thing. Everything had to be allowed to die except that one little kernel of self that was the essence of Wan-To. Eyes were allowed to go blind. Thought processes were rigorously pruned. Memories were abandoned—oh, so many memories! Memories of the eternity of Wan-To’s life, the eons of joyous frolicking in his thousand giant young stars, the pride of creating his own stars, his own galaxies, his own copies. Everything had to go. All the memories of Wan-Wan-Wan and Kind and all his other copies—gone. The taste of a G-class star turning red giant, forgotten. The delights and terrors of warring against his competitors, abandoned. There was simply no room for any of these things in the little tachyon seed that would be Wan-To, speeding across the dead emptiness toward his rebirth. Even the tiny trickle of energy that was spent in hoarding them could be squandered that way no longer but had to go toward creating the tachyon pattern itself.

There were some memories that he couldn’t bring himself to throw away. He could not force himself to discard the memory of that tiny group of stars itself—could a dying man make himself forget the promise of Heaven?

So when almost everything else was gone . . . when the task of turning himself into a seed was almost complete . . . Wan-To allowed himself the luxury of retrieving all that he knew about that wonderfully preserved cluster.

Yes, yes, it contained three medium-sized stars, just the size he liked! (A fourth, unfortunately, in some disrepair because it had been zapped in that long-ago war—but no doubt more or less healed again, in all this time.) Several other stars, not as pleasing as habitats, but still so very welcome. And even solid-matter planets, yes. Even those were precious to Wan-To now, in his final poverty.

And on those planets—

A thrill of memory shook Wan-To. He had not remembered the strange thing Matter Copy Number Five had told him, but there was the datum, long neglected, now recalled at last. Yes. It was so. The planets were known to possess that strange and unhealthy phenomenon, living matter.

Some parts of them were inhabited.

 

Wan-To stopped what he was doing for a moment to think that over. Could that forgotten fact be in any way important?

Then common sense took over. Of course not, he chided  himself. How could it? They were so tiny and helpless. Why, it was even possible that they might be quite amusing—even a kind of company for him, more or less as Kind and Sweet had been long, long ago. In any case, they could not possibly be a threat. With a healthy star behind him, he could easily enough annihilate them, if that proved necessary—as he had with creatures like them, so many times before.

It had never occurred to Wan-To to think about what those silly, short-lived little creatures might become . . . in some tens of thousands of years.