It was a long, silent time before the door to the council chamber opened, and Mirian came out.

He came over to them. “You are granted asylum,” he said grudgingly. “The council has just made its decision.”

“But—but—but I thought we’d appear before them!” Viktor exclaimed.

Mirian looked at him curiously. “Why would the council want you to do that? What could you tell them that they don’t already know, from the transcripts of your questioning?”

“I wanted to talk about the universe!” Viktor shouted. “My father was an astrophysicist—I learned from him! The way that thing looks in the sky has to mean that our whole group of stars is traveling very close to the speed of light, and I want to help to figure out why!”

Mirian looked suddenly gray. “Shut your face,” he hissed, glancing around. “Do you want the freezer again? Most of us are on overload now, you know—if the orbital power plant doesn’t start working soon there’ll be a hell of a big freezing bee! No, count your blessings, Viktor. The council thinks you two might be helpful in launching the rockets for the fuel transfer—that’s a break you don’t deserve. Don’t screw it up by talking blasphemy!”

 

 

 

CHAPTER 17

 

 

Wan-To’s first few thousand years in the galaxy that was his new home went like the twinkling of an eye, and he was busy all the time. There was so much to do!

None of it was really difficult for him, of course. There was nothing he hadn’t done many times before—this was, after all, his twentieth or thirtieth star, not to mention that he was now on his third galaxy. He had had plenty of practice, and so he knew exactly what to do first and precisely how to do it.

The first two things were to sniff out every corner of his star and to rebuild his external eyes. That didn’t take very long. A century or two, and he was already at home. Wan-To had chosen an F-9 star this time—a little bigger and brighter than most of those he had preferred before, but he felt he deserved the extra energy, which was to say the extra comfort.

Then, of course, he had to check out the rest of this new galaxy. That necessarily took quite a lot longer. It meant creating a few thousand Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pairs and sending them off to other parts of the galaxy, so he could keep an eye on everything that was going on in the new territory he had claimed.

Wan-To couldn’t help feeling a certain tension during that period. After all, a galaxy is a big place. The one he had chosen had nearly four hundred billion stars, with a well-defined spiral structure—a pretty desirable neighborhood, and how could he be sure that some undesirable element didn’t lurk somewhere in it?

But as the reports from his widespread ERPs began to arrive, they all came up empty. As far as he could tell, which was pretty far, every object in this galaxy was simply obeying the dumb natural laws of physics. There were no unwelcome signs of tampering. No unexplained patterns in the photospheres of any of the several billion stars he was able to examine in detail, no radiation coming in to any of his sensors that wasn’t explained by the brute force of natural processes.

Wan-To began to relax. He had found a safe new home! Like any ancient mountain man, coming across a verdant Appalachian valley for the first time, he saw that it was his to clear and plant and harvest and own, and he might easily, like one of them, have said, This is the place.

He was secure.

It was only after he was well settled in, with all his sensors deployed and all their reports reassuring, that it occurred to Wan-To to ask the next question:

Secure for what?

 

Wan-To mused over that question for a long time. He was not religious. The thought of a “religion” had never crossed Wan-To’s mind, not once in all the billions of years since he had first become aware that he was alive. Wan-To could not possibly believe in a god, since Wan-To, to all intents and purposes, was the most omnipotent and eternal god he could have imagined.

Nevertheless, there were occasional troubling questions of that sort that passed through Wan-To’s vast mind. A human philosopher might have called them theological. The most difficult one—it was hard for Wan-To even to frame it—was whether there was any purpose in his existence.

Naturally, Wan-To was well aware of one overriding purpose of a kind—self-preservation, the one imperative that governed all of Wan-To’s plans and actions. Nothing was ever going to change that; but once it occurred to him to ask what he was preserving himself for he could not quite see an answer.

The troubling question kept coming back to him.

Perhaps it was just that Wan-To was passing through what humans called “a mid-life crisis.” If so, it had come upon him early. Wan-To wasn’t anywhere near middle-aged. He was hardly past the adolescence of his immensely long span of existence, for he wasn’t then much more than twelve or fifteen billion years old.

Wan-To didn’t spend all his time brooding over the meaning of it all. He had plenty to do. Just investigating every corner of his new galaxy, first to seek possible enemies, finally just to know it, took quite a while—there were, after all, those four hundred billion stars, spread over some trillions of cubic light-years of space. Over a period of a few millions of years he studied the data coming from the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pairs he had planted at strategic locations in the arms, in the core, in the halo, everywhere in the galaxy that looked interesting. A lot of it was interesting indeed—coalescing gas clouds heavy with the approaching birth of new stars, supergiants exploding into density waves that impregnated other clouds, black holes, neutron stars . . . He had seen them all before, of course, but each one was just a little different, and generally intensely interesting.

Then that permanent itch of curiosity that needed always to be scratched drove his investigations farther into space. His galaxy was his own, uncontested; but Wan-To well understood that one little galaxy was very small stuff indeed in the vast scale of the expanding universe.

When he looked out on the distant rest of the universe he could not see that it had changed much in the few billion years of his investigations. There was a certain tendency for the distant blue fuzzies to turn greenish—they were farther away now, and receding relatively faster. And he saw that some of the older galaxies, even a few quite nearby, were beginning to show signs of senile decay. They were shrinking and losing mass—“evaporating” is the word that would have occurred to a human being. Wan-To understood the process very well. When any two stars happened to wander close to each other in their galactic orbits—as was bound to happen, time and again, in eternity—they interacted gravitationally. There was a transfer of kinetic energy. One picked up a little velocity, the other lost some. Statistically, over the long lifetime of a galaxy some of those stars would keep on adding speed and others would lose some—the faster-moving ones would sooner or later be flung clear out of their parent galaxy, while the slower ones would spiral hopelessly down toward collapse in the center, forming mammoth black holes. Such a process didn’t happen rapidly—not in a mere few billion years, that was to say.

But Wan-To could see the process going on, and it made him wonder uneasily about his future.

He wished he had someone to talk to about all these things.

He wished, in fact, that he had someone to talk to about anything. He was getting really lonesome.

He brought himself up sharply every time he came to that point in his thinking, because he knew what the perils were of creating company for himself . . .

But in the long run he could not help himself. He succumbed. It was inevitable. Even Adam hadn’t been able to stand the solitude of Eden forever.

 

Wan-To reminded himself that, whatever else they might be, any new copies of himself first and foremost had to be safe. He wanted no one, ever, sniping at him from ambush again.

So the first playmate he created in his new galaxy was stringently edited, with every character trait that led toward independence of action carefully censored out, and an unswervable devotion to himself tailored in. He omitted all the information that made it possible to use the gravitational forces that could wreck stars; he blotted out the parts that led to such emotions as anger and jealousy and pride. He made the new copy, most of all, content.

His newest copy was only a shadow of himself, really. It wasn’t much smarter than his almost forgotten doppel, Matter-Copy Number Five. It didn’t have enough personality to deserve a real name. Wan-To called it “Happy.”

Happy was certainly happy. Happy took everything in stride. If Wan-To snapped at him, Happy replied with soothing burbles of good-natured sound—you might almost call them “giggles.” When Wan-To was in a bad mood, Happy blithely ignored it.

Since one of the things Wan-To wanted from his dream companions was sympathy, he tried again. The new one was as dumb and feckless as Happy, and as impotent to cause trouble, but it was designed to care about Wan-To; he named it “Kind.”

Within the next few thousand millennia Wan-To had created for himself a “Funny” and a “Sweet” and a “Sympathetic” and even a “Motherly”—Wan-To didn’t call it exactly that, of course, because he had no idea of “mothers”; but if it had been human it would have clucked over him and fretted when he fretted and every day made him chicken soup.

So for a while Wan-To was no longer alone. But they weren’t real company. They were idiots.

He was surrounded by a dozen cheerfully babbling children—sweet, obedient, charming . . .

Stupid.

No matter how much a parent loves his little ones, there comes a time when he wishes they would grow up . . . and Wan-To realized ruefully that he had made that impossible for his new flock. He was almost tempted to make a few more, with just a trifle more of independence and aggressiveness . . .

But self-preservation always intervened.

 

Then he got his first real surprise.

One of his widespread Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pairs reported peculiar behavior on the part of a star in its neighborhood. The thing had flared.

Well, that in itself wasn’t very interesting. Stars were flaring somewhere in his galaxy all the time; it was a thing that some stars did. But this one was different. Frighteningly different. It wasn’t behaving in the normal fashion of any proper flare star, but very much the way Wan-To and his earlier family had caused in their jolly little war of brothers. It was what Earthly astronomers had briefly called a “Sorricaine-Mtiga object”—

And it was not natural.

For a moment Wan-To felt stark terror. Had some of the others survived and sought him out here? Had some of his new brood somehow, impossibly, managed to break through their programming? Was there a threat?

If it was, it was not from any of his children. He queried each one of them, sternly, carefully, and their innocently wondering replies were convincing. “Oh, no, Wan-To, I haven’t destroyed any stars. How could I? I don’t know how.” And, “We wouldn’t do anything like that, Wan-To, you wouldn’t let us.”

Nevertheless another star flared.

The alternative possibility was even more frightening. Could one of that old crew of ingrates have followed him here? But there were no signs of it—none of any intelligence in any of the four hundred billion stars of his new galaxy. Not even a whisper of tachyon transmission, not anywhere.

As a last, baffled resort, it occurred to Wan-To to check some of the planets in systems near the flared stars . . . and what he then found was the most incredible thing of all.

There were artifacts there! On planets! There were planets where energy was being released, sometimes quite a lot of it, in forms and with modulations that were never natural!

There was alien life in his galaxy, and it was made of solid matter.

For the first time in many millions of years Wan-To thought of his lost doppel on the little planet he had sent speeding off into infinity. That had told him of solid-matter life, too, and he had dismissed it. But what was going on here was something else. These—creatures—were using quite high-order forces. If they could flare stars, then they knew how to manipulate the vector bosons that controlled gravity. And that meant that they might someday threaten Wan-To.

There was only one thing to do about that. Horrified, Wan-To did what any householder would do when he discovered loathsome pests in his backyard. It was a job for an exterminator.

It was only when Wan-To had made quite sure that none of those pesky little things survived that he thought of his lost doppel again. His good humor recovered, he thought with amusement of the way the doppel had tolerated them.

Well, if it had, Wan-To thought, it probably by now had learned the error of its ways.

 

But in fact the doppel hadn’t.

It had been a long time for the doppel to be out of contact with Wan-To—not nearly as long, in its time-dilated frame of reference, as it had been for Wan-To himself, of course, but still long enough. It had been quite long enough for the doppel to realize, with a real sense of loss, that there weren’t ever going to be any fresh orders from its master.

The doppel had no way of communicating with Wan-To’s murderous rivals, either. Even if they hadn’t been cut off by the relativistic effects of the system’s all-but-light velocity just as Wan-To himself had, Five had no Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky mechanisms for reaching them anyway. Wan-To had made sure of that. In fact, there was not any intelligent being, anywhere within the range of the doppel’s senses, at all—except for those few strange solid-matter creatures it had permitted to live (for a while) on the surface of its planet.

The doppel certainly had very little in common with such rude entities. But they were there, and even a doppel can get lonesome.

 

It was for that reason that Five had permitted the survivors among the creatures that fell out of the destroyed Ark to reach the surface of Nebo without being annihilated. One of them, unfortunately, had gotten seriously broken when Five bashed its container, but there were three others.

In its first casual “glance” Five saw that there was nothing about the three surviving little monsters that constituted any kind of a threat. If they had been a little more technologically advanced—if they had carried with them any of that worrisome antimatter that the ship held, or any kind of weaponry more advanced than mere chemistry—then they would have died before they touched ground.

Five was not very intelligent, but it was smart enough to be assured that these things represented no danger at all.

Well, then, what did they represent?

When Five reported them to its master, Wan-To’s response was not very helpful. Wan-To didn’t tell it what to do about them. Wan-To left the matter discretionary.

So Five did what it was best equipped to do. It studied the things.

From the point of view of little Luo Fah, the first in the landing party whom Five chose to examine, that process was terrifying, agonizing, and fatal. Luo had hardly stepped out of the lander, mask pumping oxygen into her faceplate, pistol at the ready, when she was snatched brutally into the air and—well—disassembled. The clothes, the gun, and the air mask were the first to go, as Five methodically dismantled its curious little specimen to see what it was all about. There was stark fear and a lot of pain as things were wrenched off her with little concern for what they did to her clutching fingers and resisting limbs. The next part was far worse, but fortunately for Luo she didn’t feel it. She was dead by the time the interior of her body was opened up for study.

The other two in the team were luckier—for a while.

One specimen had been enough for Five to deduce, roughly, how these things worked. They had a chemical basis, it perceived. They required an influx of gases (it didn’t call the process “breathing,” but it understood the necessity from the distress Luo had exhibited when it took her mask away). So it determined simply to observe the others for a while.

Five was cautious, of course. When it detected electromagnetic radiation, definitely patterned in nonnatural ways, coming from something inside the lander it could not permit that—who knew what the purpose of it was? So it destroyed the lander’s radio transmitter with one quick, controlled bolt. That was bad luck for the man who happened to be the one transmitting, because the blast burned his face quite horribly. But it wasn’t quite as bad for Jake Lundy, because Five then perceived that it had to be more careful with these things.

Five did not exactly have emotions. What Five had was orders. They were the commandments written in stone. They could not be violated . . . but what a pity that they hadn’t included instructions for dealing with these solid-matter creatures and their artifacts.

Five also had a good deal of resourcefulness. What it didn’t know it was quite capable of trying to learn. It was always possible, it reasoned, that at some time Wan-To would call again and would want to be fully informed about these unexpected visitors.

So it permitted those two to live. They were fascinating to watch. Five was fascinated to observe, as the burn victim’s wounds slowly began to heal, that they seemed to have some sort of built-in repair systems, like Five itself. (But then why hadn’t the two earlier ones managed to put themselves back together?) As Five learned more and more about their needs it even provided them with the kinds of air they seemed to want—the kinds, at least, that they kept inside their vehicle. When it deduced they also needed water—by observing how carefully they measured it out to each other in captivity—it made them some water. When it discovered they needed “food”—which took quite a while longer, and the two survivors were cadaverous by the time Five got to that point—that was harder, but Five had of course long since investigated the chemistry of the things the specimens had eaten, and of the excrement they insisted on carrying outside and burying. It was no impossible task for Five to create a range of organic materials to offer them; and some, in fact, they did seem to be willing to “eat.”

Unfortunately for Jake and his one surviving companion, that was pretty late in the game.

Five saw that things were going badly for its specimens. They were moving slower and more feebly. Sometimes they hardly moved at all for long periods. They spent a lot of time making sound vibrations to each other, but those slowed and became less frequent with time, too, as did their peculiar habit of, one at a time, making those same sound vibrations to a kind of metallic instrument. (Naturally Five investigated the instrument, but it seemed to do nothing more than make magnetic analogues of those vibrations on a spool of metal ribbon, so it returned the thing to them only slightly damaged.)

Five wondered why they didn’t copy themselves, so as to have new, young beings of their sort to carry on for them. It thought that would be nice. That would provide a permanent stock of such playthings; Five could investigate them in detail, over a long period of time, offering them all kinds of challenges and rewards to see what they would do.

Disappointingly, the time came when the second of them stopped moving entirely, and as the body began to bloat Five reluctantly conceded that its specimens had died. And they hadn’t ever copied themselves!

Five could not understand at all. It had never occurred to the doppel that they were both male.

 

A little while later—oh, a few hundred years—when the specimens were long dissolved into uninteresting dust, Five got another surprise.

When the doppel had not heard from Wan-To for all that time, because the relativistic shift had decoupled its Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pair, it began to wonder if it should not try some other kind of communication. Or, more important, whether Wan-To was trying to call it, say, by means of tachyons.

So it began listening more intently on the tachyon frequencies, then even on the unlikely electromagnetic ones. It heard nothing—nothing, at least, from any stellar source anywhere, except for the endless hiss of hydrogen and the chatter of carbon monoxide and the mutterings from all the other excited molecules in the stellar photospheres and gas clouds—nothing that was artificial.

Until it realized that there was, in fact, a quite definitely artifactual signal beginning to come in now and then on the radio frequencies. It closely resembled the one that had caused it to destroy the lander’s radio—and it came from Five’s own solar system.

In fact, it came from a planet. That was astonishing to Five. A human being would not have been more surprised if a tree had spoken to him.

Of course, the doppel had no idea what messages were being conveyed by these bizarre signals, but once it had located their source it took a closer look in the optical frequencies, and what it saw gave it a start.

The hulk of the ship it had blasted was beginning to move under its own power again. It was being hijacked!

In that moment of discovery, Five came very close to again unleashing the forces that had destroyed Ark in the first place. If it had been a human, its fingers would have been on the button. Since Five was only a matter doppel it had no fingers; but the generators which produced the X-ray laser began to glow and build up to full power.

But they didn’t fire.

Five withheld the command. It couldn’t make up its mind what to do. If only Wan-To could be asked for instructions!

Fretfully Five ran over its instructions. There was nothing useful in them about solid-matter beings. All Five was ordered to do, really, was to snatch this group of stars out of its neighborhood and fly it away. It had done that. And it had no useful further instructions.

Five tried to do what its program had never intended it for; it tried to decide on its own if its instructions had some sort of built-in termination. The energies of the stars themselves kept pushing them faster and faster, by always lesser increments of velocity, right up against that limiting velocity of light itself.

Should Five allow them to go on accelerating forever? Trying to accelerate, at least—the rate of acceleration was always dropping now, asymptotically to be sure, but converging toward c itself.

If not, when should Five stop it? If it stopped, what should it do then?

Five had no answers to those questions. It would have to use its own discretion, perhaps—but if it guessed wrong, Wan-To might be angry.

Five was desperate, but not desperate enough to risk that. Not yet.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 18

 

 

Because the plan to revive Mayflower’s MHD-microwave generators had originated with the Great Transporters, it was a Great Transporter woman named Tortee who was in charge. When Viktor and Reesa reported to her room she was waiting for them. Not patiently.

Tortee turned out to be incongruously fat, and that was astonishing to Viktor. How could anyone get that much to eat in this mob of the underfed? She was lying back on a chaise longue, blankets wrapped over her plump legs, and she glared at them suspiciously. “Who are you? Where’s that silly little bitch with the tea?” she demanded. “Never mind. Where were we? Oh, yes,” she remembered, sounding spiteful, “what they want to do is to try to start up the orbiting power generator again. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Of course, Tortee,” Reesa said, causing Viktor to look at her sharply. Her tone had been admiring and deferential. Even soapy.

“Well, it’s a waste,” Tortee grumbled. “What they want us to do is take the little bit of fuel that’s left in Ark and transfer it to Mayflower, turn it into electricity, beam it down. It’s crazy.”

“I guess so,” Viktor said slowly. Following his wife’s lead, he was doing his best to be agreeable to the old woman—Reesa’s eyes were on him, to remind him. Still, the plan didn’t sound entirely crazy to him. It wasn’t that different from what he had helped do a few hundred years before. But Tortee was the boss of the project that had got him off the shit detail, and he didn’t want to argue with her—especially not here in her own room, with view screens and computer terminals all around her. Terminals meant data. He coveted that room—not least for its huge, wide bed.

“No, that’s really crazy,” Tortee was insisting. “Think! We’d have to rebuild the rectenna in the first place; they tore that down long ago for the metal—and what would we have to tear down now for metal to rebuild it? Then there’s the problem of transferring fuel from the engine accumulators in one ship to the generators in another. That’s a lot harder than what you did back in the old days, Viktor. Then you only had to move the whole reserve fuel storage unit, right? And that was dangerous enough, but this means taking the drive apart. I’ve studied the plans. A million things can go wrong—and everything’s a lot older now, so the chances of an accident are a lot worse.”

“Well, that’s true enough,” Reesa put in, looking warningly at Viktor. “I’m surprised the containment didn’t give out already and blow the whole ship up.”

“And then even if it succeeded,” the old woman went on, “what would we have? Enough fuel for maybe ten years of power transmission, then we’re back where we started. Total waste!”

“Terrible waste,” Reesa agreed.

“Oh, you don’t know,” Tortee said moodily. “You don’t have any idea how much this is costing us—we don’t have resources to spare here, you know! And meanwhile . . .“ She looked around conspiratorially. “And meanwhile there’s a perfectly good planet waiting out there for us, with plenty of warmth and water and air—”

Viktor cleared his throat. “You mean Nebo, I guess, is that right? But there’s also something on Nebo that shoots at us, Tortee.”

She glared at him dangerously. “Are you saying you don’t support my project?” Viktor was silent. “Answer me! I thought I could trust you—you were one of those who went there, centuries ago!”

“That was a matter of scientific investigation,” Viktor explained.

“Scientific investigation! You went there just because you were curious?”

“What better reason could there be?”

“Because Nebo is habitable now!” Tortee cried. “At least, we think it may be—and this planet isn’t, not any more. Viktor!” She studied him suspiciously for a moment. “Do you want to be back on the shit detail?” she demanded suddenly.

“No, no, not at all!” Viktor said hastily. Reesa was giving him that look again, and he knew when to surrender. Still, he was beginning to suspect that the new assignment might not altogether be a blessing. He might find himself wishing he were back enjoying the comparatively relaxed conversation with the children in the mushroom cave, because he was beginning to be convinced that his new boss, Tortee, was a certifiable nut. “The only thing that’s worrying me,” he said, feeling his way, “is what are we going to do about the part of Nebo that shoots at us? Nebo’s not exactly inviting us to come down and start living there. It’s been pretty good at keeping us out.”

“Anything worth having,” Tortee said firmly, “is worth fighting for. I’ve thought all that out. We can patch Ark with what’s left of Mayflower, then all we have to do is put in some weapons.”

“But—” Viktor began, meaning to finish the sentence by stating the certain fact that neither he nor Reesa knew anything about installing weapons in a spaceship; he didn’t get the chance. Reesa was in ahead of him.

“Right, Tortee. That’s our first job,” she said quickly. “We’ll have to have help, of course; I expect there’s somebody who can assist in designing rockets that can be launched from orbit. And we’ll need to know what the targets are; you have survey tapes to show where the attacks came from, I guess?”

“Of course,” the old woman said with pride. “I’ve had the instruments on Mayflower surveying every inch of Nebo, and I have the readings Mirian brought down with you. I can pinpoint exactly where they fired on you. There were three places; I’ve got them marked. I’m sure we can deal with that, and—what is it, Viktor?”

“The instruments,” Viktor said. “What do they say about that bright thing you call the universe?”

The old woman looked at him silently for a dangerous moment. “What do you want to know that for?”

Viktor blinked at her. It wasn’t that he couldn’t answer the question; he simply could not understand why she asked it. “Why, because—because it’s there, Tortee! That’s what science is all about, isn’t it? Trying to understand what’s going on?”

“What science is about,” Tortee proclaimed, “is making life better for everybody. That’s what you should be thinking about. Not just theories. Idle curiosity is the devil’s work; your job is to make this project succeed!”

She was looking not only angry but definitely dissatisfied with Viktor Sorricaine now. Fortunately the door opened then and a little girl staggered in with a tray. Although it was heavy laden—a pot of steaming tea, a platter of cookies, and one of sliced bread with what looked like actual butter on it—there was only one cup. The girl quailed under the imprecations Tortee hurled at her and retreated as fast as she could, but the old woman was already greedily cramming sweet biscuits into her mouth.

“There is one other thing,” Reesa said, while Tortee’s mouth was full. Tortee didn’t try to speak; she only raised an eyebrow at Reesa, still chewing.

“We should find a better place for us to live,” Reesa explained. “It would be better if we could be near you—for the work I mean. And so if you could have them give us a room of our own here—”

“Impossible!” the woman sputtered, crumbs falling onto the tray on her lap. “The Peeps would never agree to it. Dear Freddy, woman! Don’t you know how suspicious they are already? If we tried to move you in here they’d tell everybody that that just proved that the Greats were plotting to seize the ship for themselves—not that they aren’t saying it already, of course.”

“Oh, of course,” Reesa said, nodding as though the woman’s babbling made perfect sense. “Here, let me pour some more tea for you.”

She gave Viktor a quick, meaningful glance which stirred him into action. He jumped gallantly forward to hold the tray while Reesa filled Tortee’s cup. The old woman watched critically, a slice of buttered bread ready in one hand, then seized the cup and sipped it cautiously.

“That’s better,” she said. “Now, what were we talking about?”

“You explained to us why it’s impossible for us to move into this sector permanently,” Reesa said. “You made it very clear thank you, Tortee. Still, I do have to come here every day to work with you, of course. I suppose that Viktor and I might have the use of some workroom together—so we could do our jobs without disturbing you?”

“Ha!” the old woman said. Her eyes were suddenly gleaming. “I thought that was what it was about. What kind of room did you have in mind for your jobs? One with a bed, maybe?”

“Nothing like that,” Viktor said, instinctively trying to shut the door on this invasion of his privacy; but Reesa was also speaking.

“Exactly like that, if we possibly could, Tortee,” she said sweetly. “I knew you would understand.”

“Ha,” the old woman said again, eyeing them. Then she shifted her weight to a more comfortable position and grinned. “Why not? I’m going to work you harder than you’ve ever worked before, and I don’t mind paying a little extra for good work. Is this room more or less what you had in mind? Because I’m going to report to the council this afternoon, and I’ll be gone at least three hours.”

She gazed at Reesa, who only smiled, nodding her head. The old woman licked crumbs off her fingers as she nodded back. Then she looked wistfully at her bed. “It won’t do that old thing any harm to have somebody getting a little use out of it for a change—but I’m warning you! Be sure you change the sheets before I come back.”

 

Tortee did not only have a private bedroom, she had a private bath. With their first passion spent, Reesa’s second priority was a hot soak in the shallow metal tub. Viktor lay relaxed against the pillows while he waited his turn, nibbling on the staling bread and butter Tortee had left behind, listening to the faint splashing sounds from his wife’s tub. Thoughtfully he considered his existence. Things had begun to look up a little, no doubt of that. It was certainly fine to be off the shit detail. It was even finer to have a job that made some sense for a person with his skills, and finer still to have had a nice warm bed to share with his nice, warm wife—in actual privacy!

There was no reason, really, why he should feel discontented. The funny thing was that, all the same, he did. They were both alive—and reasonably secure for at least the near future—but what, he asked himself, were they alive for?

It was as disconcerting for Viktor as it had been for Wan-To to step back and look at his life like that. It made him wonder what the point was.

Viktor could not help feeling that there had to be some kind of point, or at least purpose, to it. After all, he had come close enough to losing his life often enough. He counted up: Three times frozen, three times successfully thawed without harm. He had taken three good cuts at those 180-to-1 odds; in fact, as far as the third time was concerned, you couldn’t really figure any realistic odds at all. They might have floated in space forever without being found, if it hadn’t been for someone coveting the old interstellar ship enough to spend prodigally of scarce resources to get it—and for Mirian succumbing to one of the few generous impulses in an ungenerous world when he revived them.

For what purpose? When you survived so much for so long, shouldn’t there be a reason?

It couldn’t be just to shovel excrement, or, as Reesa had been doing, breeding cockroaches in offal to feed fish. Could it be to help Tortee in her plan? Because if that was it, Viktor told himself skeptically, whoever arranged purposes had picked a loser this time: there was no way old Ark could be turned into the kind of space battleship that could win a firefight with whatever it was on the planet of Nebo that killed people.

On the other hand—

On the other hand, Tortee was gone, and Tortee’s computers were right there in the room with him.

There might be a purpose to his life, after all! Galvanized at the thought, Viktor leaped out of bed.

When, minutes, later, Reesa came shivering back into the bedroom skimpily wrapped in a towel, he hardly looked up.

She stopped abruptly, astonished. “Viktor! What are you doing with those machines?”

He glanced at her blankly. “What do you think I’m doing? That woman’s got a data linkage—all the data banks from Ark and Mayflower, the copies are still intact! Now I’m looking for later stuff, trying to find out what kind of research anyone’s done on that fireball they call the universe.”

“Are you out of your mind?” she demanded. “We can’t push Tortee too hard, Viktor. If you use her things without permission . . .”

He focused on her, his expression suddenly wrathful. Then, slowly, he relaxed. “Oh, hell,” he said. “You’re right, of course. But, my God, Reesa, this is the most important thing that ever happened! Just from the little bit I’ve been able to dig up so far, I’m pretty sure my first guess was right. Somehow or other, we’ve been picking up speed. Lots of speed; nearly the velocity of light! And that fireball is the universe, all right, but we’re traveling so fast that all the light from it is concentrated in front of us!”

“Yes, Viktor. I see how important that is to you. But the most important thing is to stay on Tortee’s good side,” Reesa said firmly.

“Oh, Christ,” Viktor said in disgust. “She’s loopy, you know. She isn’t even doing what the council ordered—they think they’re going to get power out of Ark, and she wants to send it out to fight a war!”

Reesa was practicing patience. “Dear Viktor, that’s their business, not ours. They told us to work for her, so we’ll do what she tells us to do.”

“Even if she’s out of her mind? And—” He suddenly noticed that Reesa was shivering. “Hey,” he said. “don’t catch pneumonia on me!”

She pulled the towel tighter around her, looking demure. “Shall I get dressed?” she asked, but the mere fact that she had asked determined the answer; and, besides, he was suddenly aware that he was even barer than she, and equally cold.

“Well, not right away,” he said. “Why don’t you—we, I mean—why don’t we get back under the covers for a while?”

“Let’s just remember we have to leave time to change the sheets,” Reesa said practically; but then, when they were under the covers, spooned back to front with his arm over her, she waited for him to move or to speak. He didn’t.

“You’re thinking about that fireball,” she said into the pillow.

“I can’t help it, Reesa. I—I wish I’d paid more attention to my father when I had the chance. He would have known more about it. This would have been the most interesting thing in the world to him.”

“I never doubted it was interesting, Viktor,” Reesa said gently, “and I understand how you feel about solving it.”

“It’s not just like solving a puzzle! It’s important to everybody. It has something to do with what’s going on on Nebo, too, I’m sure of it!”

“That’s possible, Viktor. I don’t see how, but I’m willing to believe it. All the same, Vik, I wouldn’t try to convince Tortee, if I were you. All Tortee wants is to get Ark flying again, with guns blazing. And she’s got troubles of her own. She’s the one who wants to colonize Nebo, and she’s got the Great Catholics behind her—but whether they’ll stay that way depends on how fast she can show some kind of results. And the others—well, the Peeps are the ones who talked the council into trying to use the fuel for microwave power, and there’s talk in Allahabad that colonizing another planet’s a good enough idea, but it shouldn’t be Nebo.”

“Where then?” Viktor asked, startled.

“They’re not very clear on that. Some of them think that since Ark’s an interstellar ship basically they should try another star. Others have ideas about the moons of Nergal—they claim there ought to be enough heat from the brown dwarf to make something possible.”

“Shades of Tiss Khadek,” Viktor said, thinking. “Well, maybe that ought to be investigated, too. But that fireball—”

“Viktor, Viktor,” his wife said gently. “If you play your cards right you’ll have plenty of chances to see what you can find out about the fireball. In your spare time. When Tortee isn’t looking. But don’t push it, because she doesn’t want to hear.”

“I know, but—”

“Viktor. Did you know that both the Reforms and Allahabad are on overload, and the Peeps would be, too, if they hadn’t been lucky enough to lose six or seven people last week? That means the whole colony has more people than they’re allowed. So last week in Allahabad they froze three people for profaning shrines, and they’re still eleven over their proper number.”

“Profaning shrines! My God, Reesa, what kind of people are we living with?”

“We’re living with people on the edge of starvation, Viktor. That’s what you have to remember. All the time.” She hesitated. “Do you know what else I heard? Some of the Peeps don’t think even the freezers should be kept going. They’re revolutionary idealists—they think they are, anyway—and they’ve got some pretty nasty ideas. They think they might as well thaw out some of the freezers without reviving them.” She paused.

Viktor blinked at the back of her neck. “Why would they do that?” he demanded.

“Fodder,” she said briefly. “Protein sources. To feed to the chickens and the gerbils, to turn the corpses into useful food.”

“My God!” Viktor repeated, appalled.

“So go slow, my darling, please.” She was silent for a moment, reaching up to put her hand over his as it cupped her breast. Then she said, “Viktor? Now that I’m all sweet and clean, do you think you’d like to get me all sweated up one more time while we still have the use of the bed?”

And of course that was the best idea she’d had yet . . . only at the end of it, when she was shuddering and moaning, there was a timbre to the sounds his wife made that reached through to Viktor, even at the peak of his own orgasm.

He had heard sounds like those before.

Not from Reesa. He had heard them from Marie-Claude in their one coupling, when her husband had died. Like Marie-Claude, Reesa was weeping even as they made love.

She didn’t say anything in words. Neither did he. Only, when they were dressed again and making up the old woman’s bed afresh, she stopped and looked at him. “We have to make the best of things, Viktor,” she said harshly.

“Yes,” Viktor agreed; and that was the end of it. Neither of them needed to mention the names of lost Shan and Yan and Tanya, and little Quinn.

 

Making the best of things wasn’t easy. In this starved world there was hardly a “best” to aim for.

The project they were on promised more problems than rewards. Viktor had known all along that Tortee’s plans were going to be exceedingly difficult. He hadn’t known just how close they were going to be to outright impossible.

To begin with, there was the task of repairing Ark from what was left of Mayflower. How were they going to manage that? They didn’t have an orbiting shipyard to do it in; they didn’t have the big tools to do the job; they didn’t have the shuttles to launch the tools they did have into orbit. They didn’t even have the plans of the ships to work from. Those records might still be in the files somewhere, the stored data fiches that no one had looked at for a hundred years; but it would take a hundred years more, Viktor estimated, to find them again.

What he did have was a vast collection of pictures of the old interstellar ships, which Tortee had had taken from orbit, scaled, and computerized so that at least you could take some rough dimensions from them and hope the parts would fit where you wanted them to. Of course, no one expected a neat job. In space a few wrinkles or bumps made no difference—you didn’t have to streamline a spaceship. All it had to do was hold its air and stay together under acceleration.

Assuming somehow they could deal with that, the harder job was still ahead of them: Invading hostile Nebo itself.

Tortee’s promise was good there. She had provided them with a detailed mosaic of Nebo’s surface, with fine-scale blowups of all the areas where the lasers (were they really lasers? The things that jolted foreign spaceships, anyway) were based.

Reesa was the one who converted all of Tortee’s photos into three-dimensional plans for the computer to display. Tortee had good programs, painfully salvaged and restored from the ancient vaults. Viktor had seen most of the pictures before: the great, tulip-shaped horn antennae, the spiral things that had to be some other kind of antenna (or perhaps a sort of waveguide for some sort of discharge?). He even saw, with a shock, a familiar shape near one of the clusters that magnification revealed to be the wreck of Ark’s lander.

There was no sign of bodies anywhere near the lander. There was no sign of anything alive there, either, or anywhere else on Nebo.

After a week of hard work Viktor began to believe that targeting those conspicuous artifacts might indeed be possible after all. But after you targeted them, what were you going to hit them with?

That was when Tortee delivered on another promise. She had undertaken to find someone who knew something about rocket weaponry, and when she produced him Viktor was astonished to see that it was Mirian.

 

Viktor met Reesa as she came in from the Peeps’ chambers, and the two of them went hand in hand to the workroom next to Tortee’s. Mirian was waiting for them, nervously stroking his pale beard. “Listen, Viktor,” he said at once, “I didn’t give you any breaks before, you know? I’m sorry about that. Things were tough for me. I hope you won’t hold it against me.”

“Yeah?” Viktor said, not committing himself.

“I mean it,” Mirian said earnestly. “I don’t blame you if you’re mad, but, see, I need this job. Working in the freezers . . .“ He looked embarrassed. “Well, when they send you there to work what they’re saying is, ‘Watch it, fellow, or you’ll be inside them before you know it.’ So this is a big chance for me. I’ll do my best for you. I swear I will.”

“I’m not the one you have to worry about; Tortee’s in charge,” Viktor said uncomfortably.

Reesa was more practical. “Do you know anything about space weapons?” she asked.

“I know as much as anybody else does.” Mirian told her, and managed a grin. Which was to say, Viktor realized as the man began describing his ideas, not very much at all. There was not much call for long-range weaponry in this frozen-over world; there weren’t any long-range targets. When the sects fought among themselves it was mostly with clubs and knives, and the big terror weapon was a hand grenade.

Still, grenades meant explosives; and once you had explosives you could put a bunch of them in a warhead and mount it on a rocket. There was nothing intrinsically hard about building a rocket, either—the ancient Chinese had done it when most of the world still lived in mud huts. The hard part was guidance.

But, Mirian explained eagerly, guidance only meant cannibalizing instrumentation from Ark and Mayflower and the surviving lander shuttles. In the long retreat from near-Nebo, while Reesa and Viktor had still been slumbering undiscovered in the freezer pods, Mirian had put in weeks in a space suit, roaming the old ship, investigating the resources it still provided, and planning a revengeful return. “We can do it,” he promised. “Honest to Fred we can!”

“At least,” Reesa said practically, “we can see if we can. If it’s possible at all—”

“It has to be!” Mirian cried.

 

Viktor’s doubts did not diminish as the days went on. He had a very clear memory of the jolting blows Ark had suffered. The idea of taking on that sort of technology with the improvised firecracker rockets Mirian was trying to build was ludicrous.

Now and then, in the privacy of pillow talk with his wife, Viktor expressed his doubts. The rest of the time he kept his mouth shut. Yet, grudgingly, he admitted to himself that whatever these people lacked in wisdom or manners they made up in courage. Nothing was easy for them. Even food was so scarce that the storehouses were tiny: food didn’t need to be stored for long when Sunday’s harvest was Wednesday’s memory. The 2,350 inhabitants of the four colonies lived on a marginal 2,200 calories a day—yet that added up to five million calories that had to be supplied each day. So many kilograms of chicken, frogs, rabbits, and fish; so many metric tons of grains, tubers, and pulses; so many cubic meters of leafy vegetables and fruits. The vegetables were not very leafy, nor were the fruits the handsome, unblemished objects Viktor remembered from his childhood supermarkets. But there was just so much you could do about growing things in caverns under the ice. Viktor’s “shit detail” mushroom farm had supplied only a tiny fraction of that everyday crush of provender, but every tiny fraction was urgently needed. The alternative was overload—and if overload wasn’t checked the next step was starvation.

Still they had managed to refurbish an old chemical rocket and send it clear to Nebo’s orbit, board old Ark, and get it going again. The old interstellar ship had been at the aphelion of its stretched-out orbit of the time. They had not risked coming close to the faceless enemy on Nebo—yet they had stolen old Ark away from him. Whoever he was.

Viktor disliked these people very much. All the same, there was a faint touch of admiration coloring his contempt.

Even Mirian turned out to be quite human as they worked together. The man was a lot younger than Viktor had thought. Mirian was only thirty-nine—in Newmanhome years, at that; the equivalent of an Earthly college kid. That surprised Viktor. He seemed much too young to have volunteered for the mission on Nebo. Yet it also turned out that Mirian was married and had even left a child behind when he took off for the long mission. “But of course I volunteered, Viktor,” he explained. “The Greats were pretty close to overload, and when I got caught—”

“Caught at what?” Viktor asked, guessing that the girl had turned up pregnant and Mirian had had to marry. But it wasn’t that.

Mirian looked shamefaced, picking at his beard. “They charged me with theft. Said I’d eaten some of the community’s honey. Well, I did,” he conceded, “but it was only a few drips in a broken comb. It probably would have been just wasted otherwise. So they said they wouldn’t prosecute if I volunteered for Nebo duty.” He looked around apprehensively and lowered his voice. “It was Tortee’s honey,” he whispered. “She was the one who said I had to choose between the ship or the freezer.”

“Tortee seems to have a lot of authority,” Viktor commented.

“You’d better say that! She’s—well, listen. How old do you think she is?”

Viktor shrugged. “Maybe a hundred and twenty?” Newmanhome years, of course, but none of these people had ever counted in anything else.

“Try seventy-five,” Mirian chortled, enjoying Viktor’s astonishment—why, the woman was Reesa’s age! “That’s right. She could still be having babies, except her husband’s in the freezer—he worked there, and they caught him making a fire to keep warm. So she just eats, instead of, you know, being with a man. And—”

He stopped, looking suddenly frightened. “Oh, I thought I heard her coming,” he said. “Listen, we’d better get to work. Now, we’ve got these fuel canisters; we can use them for the body of the rockets . . .”

 

The people on Newmanhome had a fair supply of explosives. They needed them now and then. When the ice moved, as it unpredictably did, glacier lips had to be blasted to keep them from burying what was left of Homeport too deep to survive.

But explosives were too dangerous to be freely available; half a dozen little wars among the sects had proved that. The explosives plant was located three kilometers away, heavily guarded by a fully armed squad from each of the sects, and the shuttle that would someday take people back up to Ark and Mayflower was within its perimeter, guarded just as heavily.

Viktor eagerly accepted the chance to go outside to visit the launch site. It was the Peeps’ day off, so Reesa was obliged to stay idle with the others in the warrens of the People’s Republic, but Viktor and three others, one from each but the Peeps sect, struggled into extra layers of clothing topped with sheepskins; an electrically warmed mesh covered his mouth and nose, and a visor was over his eyes. Even so, that first Arctic-plus blast that struck him soaked through the furs and the four layers of garments in moments, leaving him shaking as he toiled after the other four to the place where stronger, colder men were tanking up the lander shuttle with liquid oxygen and alcohol.

At least the winds were only winds. They did not drive blizzards of snow against the struggling men and women. The winds couldn’t do that; snow almost never fell anymore. The air of Newmanhome had been squeezed skin-cracking dry, for there were no longer any warm oceans anywhere on the planet to steam water vapor into the air so that it could come down somewhere else as rain or snow. There wasn’t any somewhere else when the whole planet was frozen over.

Squinting against the blast, Viktor could see the dark, cold sky.

It was not anything like the skies he had known before. The shrunken sun gave little heat. Even the dozen stars that were left were themselves, Viktor was almost sure, dimmer than they had been.

And then, as Newmanhome turned, red Nergal appeared, as bloodily scarlet-bright as ever. Minutes later that great puzzle, “the universe,” burst eye-blindingly white over the horizon. Viktor gazed at it and sighed.

If only his father had lived to see. If only these people were willing to try to understand! If only—

He felt Mirian tapping him on the shoulder. Viktor looked where the younger man was pointing, up toward that same eastern horizon. “Yes, the universe,” Viktor said eagerly through the mesh. “I’ve been thinking—”

Mirian looked suddenly fearful. “Hey, not that!” he cried over the sound of the wind. “Please don’t talk about that! I meant over there, next to it.”

Squinting through the mesh, Viktor saw what Mirian was calling his attention to. It was a faint spot of light, barely visible as it moved down toward its setting: Ark, in its low orbit, moving toward its final rendezvous with Mayflower.

Viktor stared at it. The time was getting close. When Ark and Mayflower were linked together the lander would be launched, and then it would all start.

He was suddenly coldly certain that Tortee was going to order him onto the shuttle. And he didn’t want to go.

 

 When they were back in the dining hall again Mirian was charged up with optimism. “We’re going to do it,” he told Viktor positively. “We’ve got crews trained for repair all ready; they’ll be taking off for Ark in a couple of weeks, and then—”

“And then,” Viktor said, as gently as possible, “we have to hope that they can get the ship habitable again; and that these rockets will work; and that that little bit of antimatter left in Ark’s drive will hold out long enough to ferry people back and forth.”

Mirian paused, a spoonful of the stew of corn and beans halfway to his mouth. “Don’t talk like that, Viktor,” he begged.

Viktor shrugged and remembered to smile. He was beginning to thaw out after his long run outside, and even the meatless-day stew tasted good. The important thing, he told himself, wasn’t that this harebrained project should work, it was only that people could believe that it might. Even a false hope was better than no hope at all.

“I do wish,” he said, “that we had some more antimatter. We could do a lot with more power. Even maybe build some lasers or something—something better than—” He stopped himself from saying what he had been about to say about the feeble rockets Mirian was putting together. “It was pretty nice when we had Earth technology going for us,” he said wistfully.

“Is it true that you people actually made this antimatter stuff?” Mirian asked enviously.

“Not me. Not here—but, back on Earth, sure. They made all kinds of things, Mirian. Why, back on Earth . . .”

Mirian wasn’t the only one listening as Viktor reminisced about the wonders of the planet he had left as a child. A woman across the table put in, “You mean you just walked around? Outside? Without even any clothes on? And things just grew out in the open?”

“It was like that here on Newmanhome, too,” Viktor reassured her.

“And they didn’t worry about—” She paused, looked around, and lowered her voice. “—like, overload?”

Viktor gave her a superior smile. He knew he was rubbing salt in wounds, but he couldn’t help it. “If you mean killing people because there are too many to feed, no. Not ever. Fact, they wanted more people. Everybody was supposed to have all the children they could. Reesa and I had four,” he boasted, unwilling to try the explanation of what was meant by “Reesa and I” and the divided parentage of the children . . .

The children.

Viktor lost the thread of what he was saying. Suddenly the cooling stew and the smells of the densely packed dining hall stopped being pleasant. The children! And he would never see any of them again.

Viktor excused himself and stumbled away to the jakes. He didn’t have to urinate. He just didn’t want anyone to see, in case he had to cry.

 

When he got back Mirian gave him a quick, hooded look and went on talking about his experiences as a freezer guard. “They’ve got all kinds of stuff in there,” he was saying. “You wouldn’t believe all of it. There’s one whole chamber that’s full of frozen sperm and ova, animals that they brought from Earth and never started up here. Whales! Termites! Chimpanzees—”

“What’s a termite?” the woman across the table asked, but she was looking at Viktor.

Viktor did his best. “It’s a kind of an insect, I think. They used to worry about them eating the wood in their houses in California. And a chimpanzee’s like a monkey—I think,” he added honestly, because all he remembered of chimpanzees was that he had seen a lot of almost human-looking primates one day at the San Diego Zoo, and he had been more impressed by the terrible way they smelled than by his father’s lectures on which was which.

There was silence for a moment. Then Mirian put in, “We saw Ark when we were outside. Only it was near the fireball, so we couldn’t get a really good look at it.”

Viktor saw that everyone looked a little embarrassed when Mirian mentioned the fireball. Yet the man had brought it up; it was as good a chance as any to probe. “About that fireball,” he began.

Conversation stopped. Everyone’s eyes were on him, and every mouth was closed. Even Mirian was looking suspiciously at him.

The hell with them, Viktor thought. “I know what that fireball is,” he announced. “It’s a foreshortened view of the universe. Somehow, I don’t know how, we’ve been accelerated so fast that we’re catching up with all the light from everywhere.”

Silence. No response at all. Then Mirian swallowed and said, “Maybe we should be getting back to work, Viktor.”

But the woman across the table reached out to touch his arm. “What are you telling us, Viktor?” she asked. “How could that happen?”

“I don’t have the faintest idea,” he said bitterly. “Something is pulling us. Or pushing us, maybe, but I don’t know any forces that could do that. Anyway our planet, and the sun, and all the other planets around it, and a few other stars are all being pulled along very fast by something.”

“What do you mean, ‘something’? Do you mean by God?” the woman asked, crossing herself. “Freddy didn’t say anything about that!”

“No, not God,” Viktor said hastily. “It doesn’t have anything to do with God, of course. It’s some natural force, probably—or, well—” He stopped, angry at these people and even more at himself.

He hadn’t stopped in time. “Are you saying the Great Transporter isn’t God?” the woman demanded. An old man down the table stood up, his white mustaches quivering.

“I don’t like this kind of talk!” he announced. “I’m going back to work!”

And Mirian, glowering as he led Viktor away from the table, warned, “You have to watch what you say, man! I’m as tolerant as the next fellow, you know that—but you don’t want a charge of heresy and corruption of faith, do you?”

This day, Viktor thought gloomily, was not going well at all.

It did not occur to him that it was capable of getting a lot worse.

 

He was hunched over the keyboard when Tortee came back to her room. He cleared the screen quickly, but not quickly enough: She had caught a glimpse of the spectral analysis display. “What’s that, Viktor?” she demanded ominously. “Have you finished the repair plans?”

“Almost done, Tortee,” he said with a false smile, keeping his anger inside. “I’ll have them for you this afternoon.”

“I want them now! I’ve got a meeting with the Four-Power Repair Committee, and I need to show them what has to be done to the Ark. What’ve you been doing? No,” she said forcefully as he opened his mouth, “I want to know what you were really doing. Show me that screen again!”

“But, really, Tortee,” he began, and then knew it was no use. Sullenly he keyed in the file name and watched as the damning spectrum flashed on the board.

The old woman might have been a religious bigot, but she was not a scientific fool. She recognized the patterns at once. “You’re checking spectra,” she announced, “and I can guess what that’s a spectrum of. Viktor, I don’t know what to do with you. You’ve been openly talking religious error—” He started to speak again, startled, but she overrode him. “Don’t deny it! Do you think people don’t report to me? Half a dozen people heard you in the dining hall today! And you’re wasting working time with your immoral habits. I can’t put up with this. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

“I’m only trying to find out the truth about what’s going on!” Viktor cried hotly.

“The truth,” Tortee said icily, “has long since been revealed to us. Blessed Freddy set it down for all to see in His Third Testament, and that’s the only truth that matters. I forbid you ever to speak of this subject again.” He was astonished to see that she was really angry. Her pudgy face was squeezed into a scowl. “Don’t try my patience too far, Viktor! I don’t want to have to punish you. You wouldn’t like it.” She stared at him for a moment, then added as an afterthought, “You can forget about using my room for your personal pleasure again, too. Now get out of here! You and Mirian are wanted at the shuttle. They’re almost ready to fuel up for the first repair crew.”

 

It could have been worse, Viktor thought sourly. Reesa was right. He had gone farther with Tortee—well, with all these superstition-ridden, mule-stubborn people—than was sensible.

For that matter, sending him out to the freezer complex was punishment in itself. It was late. There was little chance they would be able to get back before dark, and no one wanted to be outside when even the feeble heat of sun and star burst were gone.

Mirian did his best to hurry the workers at the liquid-gas plant along. It wasn’t hard to do, because the fuel detail wanted to be back by nightfall, too. Working at top speed, he and Viktor checked the fuel manifests, inspected the tanks’ seals, and agreed that it was all in order. But the haste was all in vain, because then they were shunted over to the cryonics caves to wait. Their four-power escort hadn’t shown up on time.

“Oh, hell,” Mirian groaned, pulling unhappily at his beard. “We’ll never get back before dark.”

“I’m sorry, Mirian,” Viktor said. “I think I got Tortee mad at me.”

“You think you did! Oh, Viktor, just shut up. Every time you open your mouth you make more trouble!” And he slumped down against a wall and closed his eyes, refusing to speak.

Absently Viktor strolled around the chilly cave, glancing at the tunnels that led off from the central chamber. Inside each tunnel was row on row of capsules. Each one held a human body—convicted “criminals” mostly—with crosses for the Greats and the Reforms, crescents for the Moslems, and five-pointed stars for the Peeps. Those were the fruits of overload, Viktor knew, and dourly thought that the chances were good that he would be joining them if he didn’t learn to keep his mouth shut.

By the time the escort arrived Viktor had made up his mind. He would never say a blasphemous word again. He would follow Reesa’s example. He would do his best to please Tortee and to make her hopeless plan work.

He couldn’t wait to see Reesa to tell her about his resolve.

It was almost dark by the time the two of them and their escort were stumbling through the freezing gale back to the dwelling tunnels. The fireball “universe” had already set, and the sun was nearly at the horizon; it was definitely getting too cold to be out of doors.

Mirian glanced at Viktor, then made a gesture of reconciliation. He pointed to the horizon. There was Mayflower, a hand’s-span north of the setting sun. The old ship was just beginning to climb up the sky from the west in its hundred-minute orbit, with Ark still out of sight below and behind it.

Mirian put his head next to Viktor’s and bawled, over the noise of the wind, “It won’t be so bad, Viktor. Once they get the repairs going Tortee will be easier to get along with, you’ll see.”

“I hope so,” Viktor shouted back, and bent his head, squinting against the cold as he trudged along. Easier to get along with! That wouldn’t be hard, he thought resentfully. He slipped on a slanting block of ice, cursed, caught himself—

And heard a strange moaning sound from Mirian.

Viktor looked up quickly. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a quick flicker of light. Startled, he stared up. It was Mayflower, suddenly shining bright, almost as suddenly darkening again.

“What is it, Mirian?” he cried.

But Mirian didn’t know. No one knew, until they had toiled back inside the tunnels again and the word from Tortee’s instruments had spread like wildfire.

The sudden brightening of Mayflower had been only reflected light from another, hidden source. And that source—

It had been the worst disaster imaginable.

Ark had blown up.

 

Fortunately for the people on Newmanhome, Ark had still been below the horizon when it happened. It wasn’t a chemical explosion that had blasted the old ship into ions, not even a nuke: it was the annihilation of matter and antimatter, pounds of mass converted into energy in the twinkling of an eye, in accordance with the old formula: e = mc². That hemisphere directly under Ark had received a sudden flood of radiation like an instant flare from the heart of a star.

There was nothing living on that part of Newmanhome. That was fortunate. For, of course, anything that had been alive in the face of that terrible blast would have stopped living at once.

The skeleton crew on Mayflower were less fortunate. Even through the thick skin of the spaceship, they had received more radiation than the human body was meant to experience in a lifetime.

And Tortee was weeping hysterically in her room. She refused to see Viktor at all. She let Mirian in for only a moment, and when he came out he was looking very grave.

“It’s over,” Mirian told Viktor mournfully. “If we don’t have Ark we don’t have a working drive. We can’t build a rocket ship big enough to attack the planet.”

“No, of course not,” Viktor agreed, dazed, wishing Reesa were there. “What happened?”

“Aw, who knows?” Mirian said despondently. “Tortee thinks it was the Peeps. She thinks they were so set on getting microwave power that they started fooling around with the drive—to keep us from using it again, you know? And it just went off.” He stopped for a moment, gazing at Viktor with an ambiguous expression. Then he said, “I’ve been thinking, Viktor. You’ve had a pretty good run for your money.”

Viktor blinked, not seeing the connection. “I have?”

“I mean,” Mirian explained, “you were born on Earth. Good Freddy, Viktor, that makes you just about the oldest person in the world.”

“I guess it does,” Viktor said grudgingly. That was an interesting thought, but not the kind that reconciled you to anything.

“So when the council decides . . .” Mirian left it hanging there. Victor looked at him in puzzlement.

“What is there to decide? You said yourself, the project’s over.”

“I don’t mean the project, I mean about you, Viktor. Tortee won’t stand up for you anymore, not after this. Not after—well, you know,” he said awkwardly, “we’re always pressed for living space here.”

“What are you talking about?” Viktor demanded, losing patience. “Are you saying I have to go live with the Peeps or something, like Reesa?”

“Oh, no, not with the Peeps. And I suppose they might keep Reesa on. But you, Viktor—well,” he said fairly, “it’s not like death. We don’t kill people. That’s against the Commandments. And, who knows, somebody, sometime—there’s always the chance that someday someone will thaw you out of the freezer.”

 

 

 

CHAPTER 19

 

 

By the time Wan-To had worn out his hundredth star he began to get uneasy again. It wasn’t that he was fearing attack from his long-gone siblings, for that had not happened in many hundreds of billions of years. He certainly wasn’t worrying about the matter-creatures his long-forgotten Matter-Copy Number Five had reported. No, what was bothering Wan-To was that he couldn’t help noticing that his neighborhood was going downhill.

It was no longer a prime, desirable place to be. Most of the stars in this galaxy of his were aging, and everything was getting rather shabby.

Of course, with four hundred billion stars to choose from, he wasn’t really out of living space. There were even a few late-generation stars of his favorite kind, type G—like Earth’s long-gone sun, for Wan-To’s taste in stars was very like that of the human race, in many ways. When the one he was in was showing signs of bloat, since he definitely didn’t want to sit through the transformation to red giant again, he picked out the best of the available Gs and made the move.

His latest home was a G0, a good, clean star. It was brighter and bigger than most, though Wan-To found after he had moved in that it had a faintly annoying taste of metals—naturally enough, since it had been formed out of gas clouds that had already been through a star or two.

Little annoyances like that weren’t really important. But the star wasn’t ideal, either, and Wan-To didn’t see why he should be uncomfortable in his own home. He thought about alternatives. He always had the option of moving into a different stellar type, of course—say, an elderly K, or even a little red M. He knew Ms well; that was the kind of star in which Wan-To, long since, had installed his childish companions. He had certainly done that for the children’s own good (because those stars were really long-lived and stable), but it was also, to be perfectly truthful, partly for Wan-To’s own sake, because those smaller stars gave the children less energy to support their constant babble.

That was what was wrong with the long-lived stars, right there. They had less energy.

That ruled them out for Wan-To, who couldn’t see why he should cut back on his own life-style, no matter what. But he could see, not very far ahead, a time when there just wouldn’t be any new G-type stars left.

After some thought, the solution occurred to Wan-To. It was simple enough once he had thought of it.

If this galaxy, and most of the others, had grown past the age of frequent star formation by natural processes, why should that be a problem? There was always Wan-To, with his mastery of unnatural processes, to help things along!

So he found a nice, clean gas cloud out in the galactic halo and set to work. It was simple enough. All he had to do was prod at it with a flux of gravitons, graviphotons, and graviscalars, judiciously applied in all the right places, to speed its condensation. Then he blew up a few heavy stars nearby, timing their rhythmic pulses to encourage some of the gas-cloud material to fall together in stars. He knew exactly what to do. After all, he had seen it happen often enough over the last billions of years! Once you got a density wave going, with a radiative-shock compression factor of a hundred to one or so, the gas clouds couldn’t help becoming stars.

True, it would take some millions of years for them to settle down, but he had lots of time. True, he had to deplete the energies of many thousands of otherwise healthy nearby stars to get the process going . . . but what were a few thousand unimportant stars to Wan-To?

 

Whatever else he did, Wan-To was always careful to keep an eye on the galaxy he had left behind him—the old Milky Way, which he had fled when it turned into a battleground. He wondered if any of his colleagues had survived. He had spotted the star he had escaped from early in his observations—it had been no more than a ruin by then, its greenish planetary nebula already breaking up into wisps of meaningless gas, its helium-burning shell detached from the carbon and oxygen core, the core itself now no more than a white dwarf with a density of tons per cubic inch.

It looked like an abandoned home, and it was. No one could possibly have moved into that after he left, Wan-To was sure. Pretty sure. But he kept an eye on it, and on all the other stars that he suspected might once have sheltered one of his kind.

They were all ruins now, too. Possibly his siblings had all killed each other off? Possibly Mromm had been the last there was, and Wan-To needn’t have run away after all?

“Possibly” wasn’t good enough. Whatever else Wan-To did, he was never going back to that galaxy.

But was that enough? Was staying away from the competitors he knew about going keep him safe from possible unknown others?

Wan-To wasn’t a bit sure of that. It struck him as a wonder that he had never met another like himself, apart from the copies he had made. That seemed statistically improbable to him. In this old universe, how could he be the only one? If natural forces had accidentally brought his unfortunate progenitor to life way back in the universe’s infancy—when it was no more than four or five billion years old, imagine!—didn’t it stand to reason that that accident might have been repeated somewhere since then?

But no other ever showed up . . . and, on balance, that was fine with Wan-To.

Wan-To had pretty much accepted the fact that he would be alone for all of that remaining long eternity that stretched ahead—not counting, of course, the sweet but boring babble of the children.

He didn’t like the loneliness, though. He wished he were wise enough to create equals who could not ever become competitors. He was almost sure that there ought to be a way to do it. But he didn’t know the way, and he refused to take the chance.

 

Of course, it never occurred to Wan-To that these solid-matter pests who kept developing every few hundred million years or so could be company. They were simply too far beneath him. (Imagine a human being buddying up with a spirochete!)

They were interesting, after a fashion. It entertained Wan-To to see how “matter-life” kept trying to amount to something, eon after eon, on this planet or that.

After the first few he had learned that the things usually started as “organisms”—that was not his word, of course, but the concept he had in mind was of creatures that metabolized oxygen and were composed largely of complex carbon compounds, which was pretty much the same thing. Lots of planets developed “organisms,” but only a very few permitted their organic life to reach the stage of being able to interfere with the physical world. Sometimes the amusing little things did that very well. Sometimes they did it almost as well as Wan-To himself, for quite often they learned such skills as how to fission uranium and fuse hydrogen, and they very often sooner or later managed to build strange little metallic shells in which they ventured into space. A few exceptional races even succeeded in taming the subatomic particles Wan-To himself employed, neutrinos and quarks and graviscalars.

But none of them went beyond that; and none of them stayed at that point.

To Wan-To’s surprise, they seemed to be a self-limiting phenomenon.

Wan-To didn’t realize that at first. So the first half-dozen times an organic race got that far Wan-To simply gathered his forces and obliterated them, people, planets, star, and all.

Then he got more curious, and thus more daring. He withheld his hand for a while to see what would happen—of course, always poised to destroy them the moment they became a threat, or even became aware of his existence.

What he discovered, perplexingly, was that that point never came. That was a strange and somewhat repellent thing about these little solid-matter creatures: Not long after they became able to wield significant forces, they invariably used them to destroy themselves.

Wan-To thought wryly that they weren’t much smarter than his own kind. Not as smart, in fact. For, of Wan-To’s kind, at least Wan-To himself had managed to stay alive, while of all the matter-creatures he had ever heard of or encountered, every one, he thought, was long since extinct.

In this, of course, he was quite wrong.

 

The doppel called Five could have corrected Wan-To, if there had been any way left for Five to reach his master.

The doppel was no longer entirely sure that it wanted to reach Wan-To anymore, because it wasn’t sure that Wan-To would approve of what it had done. Five hadn’t disobeyed any orders. But it had taken the liberty of trying to guess what Wan-To’s orders would have been, if Wan-To had thought to give them, and so, after a long, long time pushing ever nearer to the speed of light, it had reversed the thrust of its impellers.

Five, along with all its flock of stars and orbiting bodies, was slowing down.

That was very daring of Five, and Five knew it. Of course, it took as long to slow down as it did to accelerate to that all-but-light velocity in the first place. Five had plenty of time to reconsider its rash action. But Five wasn’t built that way. It was built to do only what its master wanted, or what it thought Wan-To wanted.

In that long deceleration Five was aware of the activities of the matter-creatures that had attacked it—or that it had attacked, whichever way one chose to look at it. The things were quiet enough for a while. Then Five noticed that they were putting artifacts into space again. None of the things came very near Nebo, so it didn’t have to take any action. Actually, it saw with interest, most of the artifacts seemed to head out farther into the solar system. That was fine with Five. Let them do what they liked around the brown dwarf, as long as they didn’t come near Nebo.

And then, when the deceleration had slowed enough so that the great light flare that had been all the light of the universe should have resolved itself into a surrounding sphere of stars and galaxies again . . . it didn’t.

Five was filled with what a human would have described as terror. Things were not the way they should be! The universe had become very strange!

The doppel thought long and hard, and saw only one way out for it.

First it summoned up all its strength to create a flood of low-energy, high-velocity tachyons. It impressed on them a message, keyed to Wan-To’s own preferred tachyon band. It shut down almost all of its equipment to divert the energies left into broadcasting that message, over and over.

Five had no idea whether Wan-To would ever receive that last somber message. It was not even sure that Wan-To still existed anywhere, and certainly Five didn’t have even a hint of a clue as to where that “anywhere” in this suddenly immensely scattered universe might be.

Then Five did the only thing left for it to do.

If Five could not serve Wan-To, there was no reason for it to exist any longer. Maybe, even, if it had served Wan-To badly (as it feared), it no longer deserved to exist.

So when all its accumulated energy had been used up and its last message had gone out, Five, in its equivalent of an agony of shame, performed its equivalent of ritual suicide. It shut itself off.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 20

 

 

Viktor knew he was waking up when he discovered that he was dreaming—there are no dreams in the brain of a corpsicle. What he was dreaming was about flying, and about pain.

The pain was very definite and unpleasant. It was not a nice dream, and he was glad, though very fuzzy in his mind, when he woke up.

Viktor was aware that he was definitely awake then, because when he tried to open his eyes, they were stuck. He had to strain to squint out of them. “Mom?” he asked of the thin, amused woman who was leaning over him. “Mom, are we there yet?”

He realized right away that that was foolish of him. The woman definitely wasn’t his mother—wasn’t anything like his mother, really. She was very tall and painfully thin, and she had great, round eyes. Viktor saw the eyes quite clearly, although he was having some annoying trouble in seeing anything else. His own eyes did not seem to want to focus clearly, and his head . . . his head hurt like hell.

The woman turned and said something quick, liquid, and murmurous. It was not in any language Viktor knew, although parts of it came close to making sense—as English might have sounded, perhaps, if it had been cooed by pigeons. She was speaking to someone Viktor could not see very well. Then she reached down and touched the side of Viktor’s head, as though pointing something out to the unseen person.

It was probably a gentle touch, but it didn’t feel that way. It told Viktor right away his dream of pain had not been entirely a dream.

The woman’s touch exploded through his head like a hammer blow, dizzying him. He jerked away from that probing finger—and found that the dream of flying was not altogether an illusion, either. He moved so easily, with so little force dragging at his body, that he knew that he couldn’t be on Newmanhome. In fact, he couldn’t be on any planet at all; he didn’t weigh enough.

Viktor let himself fall gently back, hazily pondering the problem. The woman and the other person—a man’s voice, not so much cooing as harshly gargling the sounds—were carrying on a conversation in the language that Viktor could not quite comprehend. If he wasn’t on a planet, he thought, he was probably on a ship. What ship? Not Ark, certainly; there was nothing left of Ark but droplets of condensed metal, if any of Ark was left at all. Not old Mayflower, either, he was sure of that. There was nothing on Mayflower like this amber-walled room with its soft clouds of pastel light drifting across the ceiling. Some things looked somewhat familiar—the thing he was lying on, for instance. It was very much like the shallow pan that corpsicles were thawed in, and he caught a quick glimpse of several others like it in the room. They were occupied. There was a human body in each, and warming radiation flooding down on them: he was not the only person being brought back to life, he thought, pleased with his cleverness at observing that.

But where was all this happening?

And what was hurting him so much? As the explosion of pain in his skull dwindled again he became aware of two other hurting places—a mean, burning sensation in his right leg below the knee, and a sharper, smaller, but still very painful, hurt in his buttock. None of it made any sense to Viktor. Nothing else did, either. “Sense” was beyond him; he was dazed, confused, disoriented, and he was even having trouble remembering. On all the evidence, he was quite sure he had just been thawed out from a time in the freezer. But he remembered, or thought he remembered, that he had been frozen before. More than once, he thought, and which time was this? He reasoned that it couldn’t have been the times when he was facing a long interstellar flight, because he had been a child then. He wasn’t a child anymore, of course. Was he? And who was this woman, who was now coaxing him to lie down again?

The name “Reesa” crossed his foggy mind, but he didn’t think this woman was she—whoever “Reesa” was.

He shook his head to try to dispel the confusion. That turned out to be a bad mistake; the pain burst through him again. But he felt the need to demonstrate his wakeful competence at once, like someone waked in the middle of the night by the telephone who instantly protests he wasn’t asleep. He licked his lips, getting ready to speak.

“I don’t feel very well,” he said, forming the sentence with care.

Funnily, the words didn’t come out right. It was more like an animal growl than a voice. He discovered that his throat, too, was extraordinarily sore.

The woman looked amused again and gestured to the man with her in the room. The man, Viktor saw, was quite normal-looking—neither as wraithfully thin nor as tall—but he wore what the woman wore, a sort of gossamer gown. He turned out to be quite strong. He pushed Viktor back down, holding him so that the woman could do something to him again.

The woman leaned close to Viktor. With her came a fragrance half like flowers, half like distant wood smoke.

Her nearness made Viktor suddenly aware that he was quite naked. The woman didn’t seem to notice, or at least to care. She peered into his eyes. She touched the base of his throat with an instrument that glittered like metal but was soft and warm to the touch, while she studied a tiny, dancing firework display of color at the instrument’s base.

Then she pulled down his lower lip. Instinctively he tried to twist his head away—again that explosion of pain!—but the man in the filmy gown gripped his head roughly, holding it immobile while the woman touched the damp, tender inside of Viktor’s lip with some other kind of thing, and Viktor went quickly and helplessly to sleep.

 

When he woke up again he was alone in the room. Even the other resuscitation pans were empty.

His head still hurt, but the other pains were gone—well, not gone entirely, but now they were only little annoyances rather than agony. When he sat up he saw that his right calf, from knee to ankle, was encased in some sort of a pale pink sausagelike contrivance. He puzzled over that for a while, poking at it with a finger. He didn’t understand it. He didn’t understand much of anything at all; everything seemed so complicated. The way he felt, he thought, was almost like being drunk.

He tried to recollect how he had got here. There was a memory of being told he had to go back in the freezer . . .

Yes, that was true, he was pretty sure. It wasn’t a comforting thought, though. He had a vague memory about freezing, something that someone had told him—was her name Wanda?—long before. It did not do to be frozen too many times. That he was sure of, though what it meant was very unclear.

He heard a man’s voice growling something from the doorway, and when he looked around it was the fellow in the gown, looking at him. “You’re awake,” the man said—wonderfully, in words that Viktor understood. “Stay there. I’ll see if Nrina wants to look at you.”

Viktor made himself sit up. At least some questions were beginning to be clear. For some reason these people had decided to revive him from cryonic suspension. All right, he could understand that. He wondered how long he had been in the freezer this time. It couldn’t be a matter of centuries again, of course. He simply would not accept that. But it had been long enough, at least, for the Reforms, or whoever’s turn it was at the power plant detail this time, to get a little decent heat in the freezatorium. (But hadn’t he just decided he wasn’t in the freezatorium anymore? He wasn’t sure.) And, if these people actually were Reforms, or if they were any other sect from frozen Newmanhome for that matter, they’d certainly changed their mode of dress. The man was taking off the filmy robe, and under it he wore nothing but a kind of kilt. Then, when the impossibly thin woman came back, Viktor observed that the gown she was wearing was the kind of clothing one wore for decoration or for modesty—well, no, not for modesty either, he thought; but certainly not for keeping out the cold. The thing was a long white smock, almost transparent, and he could clearly see that there was nothing much under it.

The woman looked different, though. She seemed to be more fretful and tired than when he had first seen her, as though she had been working hard, and the silky, gossamer gown was soiled with new spots of blood.

When he shifted position to look at her he thought to look down at himself, and was suddenly ashamed of his nakedness. Then, twisting for a better look, he saw that there was a wound on his right buttock. That was where one of the pains he had almost forgotten had come from. It wasn’t an insect bite, but a sort of stab wound in the flesh. Someone had put some soft, rubbery film over it, transparent, almost invisible. The film peeled away easily when he poked at it, and under the dressing the wound was still oozing blood.

The skinny woman pushed his hand away, clucking reprovingly at him.

The man came over and firmly pressed the padding back in place. “Damn it! Leave it alone, can’t you?” he said irritably. “Now sit still. Nrina’s got to examine you to see if there’s any more freezer burn, so you just let her do it, all right? I’ve got to check on the others.”

Viktor puzzled earnestly over all of that. He understood all the words, though they had a strange quality, as though they had come from afar. But whatever was wrong with Viktor’s head kept him from putting them together to make any kind of coherent picture. “Freezer burn—” Viktor began, but the man was already gone.

Lacking any better alternatives that he could see, Viktor did as he was told. He let the woman peer into his eyes, touch him in all sorts of personal places with her shiny instruments with their rainbow lights, lift up a corner of the pale pink sausage on his leg and peer under it, and finally replace it, looking satisfied. She patted his head—so gently, this time, that it didn’t send him into a blaze of new pain.

Then she beckoned him to follow her.

He tried. He did his best, but his best wasn’t very good. The right side of his head felt numb, and his right leg wouldn’t support him, even in the astonishingly light gravity of the place they were in. She had to let him lean on her as they walked—it was more like gliding in a dream; like getting about in a spaceship under microdrive—through an amber-walled corridor, to their first stop.

The first stop was a tiny room containing an amber, glassy bowl in which water gently whirled. Viktor identified it easily enough: a toilet.

Viktor had not forgotten that he was quite naked, though the woman didn’t seem interested in that fact. Neither did she watch him while, embarrassed, he relieved himself, nor on the other hand did she specially look away. The second stop was a shower. He looked at it doubtfully. He wasn’t sure how to make it work, and he wasn’t sure he could stand alone in it.

When he tried it, the leg, at least, was feeling stronger. The woman turned the shower on for him. He limped inside, bracing himself against the soft, shiny wall of the cubicle. As the gentle, warm cascade began to pour over him it was so relaxing that he found that he was actually enjoying it.

When Viktor came out of the shower the woman handed him a round, soft towel for drying himself. “Thank you,” he said hoarsely, rubbing his face.

The woman looked pleased, as though at a dog that had given an appreciative woof. But when he pointed at the dressings on leg and hip, trying to ask if they had been harmed by the shower, she only shrugged, either uncomprehending or just not interested in his question.

The third stop they made was stranger and a lot less pleasant.

The woman abandoned him in another room, to the care of a different man. This one was almost as skinny as herself, though he did have some strangely knotted muscles—whereas the woman’s calves were like pencils and she had no visible biceps at all. The man gestured Viktor to a seat in something that looked like a dentist’s chair.

When Viktor sat down as ordered, the arms of the thing quite suddenly swung out and wrapped themselves around him. He couldn’t move. At the same time something else slipped around his head and gripped it as in a vise. It wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t resistible, either. Then the man approached Viktor with a different kind of a glittery instrument.

He touched it to Viktor’s forehead.

This metallic thing wasn’t soft at all. It bit into the flesh of Viktor’s forehead and stung like a wasp. Viktor shouted in surprise and tried to struggle. That was no use. He was held fast. When the man took the instrument away the spot itched terribly, like a bee sting; but then the man sprayed the spot where he had been working with a different kind of metallic thing. The itching stopped at once, and the man touched something that caused the chair to release Viktor.

That ruled out the cloudy theory Viktor had just begun to formulate provisionally, that these people had thawed him out for the purpose of a little recreational torture. Then the man led him, stepping in long, gentle, high-rising paces, to another chamber, where he shoved Viktor inside and closed the door behind him.

Viktor looked around him. He was in a room with a number of flimsy-looking chairs (perhaps a waiting room?) and a kind of glass-topped desk (but it showed no other signs of being an office). Glassware and some metallic things sat under a mirror that was set against one wall, but it wasn’t, as far as Viktor could decide, a laboratory.

He was not alone in it. Three other men, as naked as Viktor himself, were sitting uneasily in the frail chairs, talking to each other in worried, low tones. One of the men was black, one short and pale. The third was also pale but taller than Viktor and hugely built; and all three had the human-scale bodily form Viktor was used to, not the famine-victim limbs and structure of the woman who had thawed him out.

As Viktor came in, all three of the men looked quickly up at him with a fearful sort of suspicion in their eyes. Then their expressions cleared quickly, as though they had recognized him.

Well, they couldn’t have. Viktor knew that. He was quite sure they were all total strangers to him; but then he saw that each of them bore a bright blue device tattooed on their foreheads, and in the wall mirror he caught a glimpse of the same design on his own. It was an elliptical border enclosing some hen-scratchings that might have been numbers or words.

It was that tattoo that they had recognized. They all wore the same brand. So they were all in the same boat—whatever that boat was.

The tall man got up, offering a hand to shake. “Welcome to the party,” he said, in the quick, rough English of the quarreling sects of frozen Newmanhome. “What did you get the freeze for?”

Viktor puzzled over the meaning of what the man had just said to him, rubbing the mark on his forehead absently. When he had put it together, through the cloud that seemed to pervade his mind, he rehearsed for a moment, then managed a full sentence. “They just didn’t like me,” he croaked.

“Mary!” the black one said. “When did they start doing it for that? I got my own freeze in three eighty-six, but at least I had a trial. They said it was for unauthorized parenting. Well, it was just her word against mine, but what could I do? Jeren here was frozen for drunkenness, and Mescro got it for thievery—”

The short, pale man cut in, scowling. “Watch your mouth, Korelto! I didn’t steal anything. I just made a mistake and went through the meal line twice—it could’ve happened to anybody when they were on overload!”

“Does it matter?” The black man smiled. “Only it looks to me as though things must’ve got really bad by the time they froze you—uh—”

It took Viktor a moment to realize he was being asked his name. “Ah, Viktor,” he got out.

The black man—Korelto?—looked at him searchingly, then glanced at his companions. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“He’s a dummy,” the short one named Mescro declared.

“Aw, no,” the big one said. He looked down at the floor, as though abashed at his own temerity in trying to contradict the other. “He’s just, you know, mixed up.” He looked up appealingly at Viktor, then at the doorway. “Isn’t that true, Manett?” he asked.

The man who had been in the thawing-out room stood there, gazing at them without pleasure. “No, Jeren, he’s a dummy, all right,” Manett confirmed. “Nrina says he’s got freezer burn. Looks like it got his leg and his brain. But he’ll do for what Nrina wants him for.”

There was a satisfied, challenging look on his face that made the black man ask worriedly, “What’s that, Manett?”

“That’s what you’re about to find out, guys,” Manett said, with the pleasure of an old hand breaking in the new recruits. “It’s time for you to pay for your thawing out.”

“Pay how?” the little thief named Mescro demanded. “And what’s going on, anyway?”

Manett pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Well, I’m willing to clue you in first,” he said, hiking himself up on one of the benches to lecture. “Only don’t interrupt, because you’ve got to earn your pay in a few minutes; Nrina’s waiting for the stuff. Let’s see. My name’s Manett, I told you that, and I’m your boss. That’s the most important thing you have to remember. It means you do everything I tell you, understand that? You’ll be seeing a lot of me for a while. Then, next thing, probably you’ll want to know the date. All right. It’s the forty-fourth of Summer, in the year forty-two hundred and fifty-one A.L.” There were gasps at that—Viktor was only one of the ones gasping—but Manett quelled it with a frown and went on. “Next: What’s going to happen to you? Nothing bad. You’ll be all right. Don’t worry about that. You’ll stay here for a few days, as long as Nrina wants you. You’ll have to start learning the language while you’re here, but that’s pretty easy. You’ll see. Then you’ll go to live in another habitat, probably—I don’t know which one—”

“Hey!” Korelto interrupted. “Hold on a minute! What’s a habitat?”

Manett gave him a mean look. “Didn’t I tell you not to interrupt? This is a habitat. What you’re living in now. Anyway, what happens when you leave here I don’t exactly know—I’ve never been on any habitat but this one, but Dekkaduk and Nrina say you’ll be okay. You might as well believe them—you don’t have any other choice, do you? Anyway, right after you do what you’re here for we’ll get something to eat and then I’ll have more time, all right? Now,” he said, standing up, “it’s time to earn your pay. So will you get up, all of you, and go over there and take one of those specimen bottles each? And then, what you do, you each jack off into it, and be sure you don’t spill a drop.”

 

The fuzziness in Viktor’s brain wasn’t altogether a disadvantage right then, he thought. The thing he was told to do was degrading, and it made him feel ashamed and angry. If he had  felt really sober he would have been twice as humiliated at what he was made to do.

But he did it. So did all three of the others, as startled as Viktor at the bizarre orders. They grumbled and tried to joke while they did it, but the jokes were resentful and nobody laughed.

Viktor was still trying to sort out the dreamy maze in his mind. There were so many questions! It was hard even to form them, but some stood out. For one: What was “freezer burn”? Viktor knew he’d heard the words before, and he knew they meant something bad. He just didn’t know what. He knew that he could have asked the others, but he wasn’t ready to do that—wasn’t ready to hear the answer, perhaps.

Then there was that other big question. When Manett told them the date, was he joking?

It couldn’t really be nearly four thousand years since he’d last been alive. Could it?

He cursed the fogginess in his brain then. He wanted to think. There were things he had forgotten, and he wanted them back! The things he did remember were fragmentary and unsatisfying . . .

They weren’t pleasing, either.

He did remember, cloudily, waking up from a different freezing—had it been in old Ark? (He did remember the old interstellar ship Ark, though the memory was peculiarly fragmentary. It was almost as though there had been two different ships.) That time it had been a terrible shock. To have learned that everyone he had known was four hundred Newmanhome years dead had been numbing.

But at least then he had recognized the sensation. He had known that he felt numb.

To find out that another four thousand years, nearly, had passed while he lay as a lump of dreamless and unfeeling ice—why, it felt like nothing at all. He didn’t feel pain. He didn’t even feel the numbness. He didn’t feel at all.

When they had embarrassedly made their donations of sperm, the trusty named Manett showed them to their quarters. Food was waiting for them, fresh fruits and things like meat patties and things like little cakes—and things Viktor could hardly recognize at all, some cold, some hot, some tasting nasty to his untrained palate.

“You’re on your own time now,” Manett announced. “You have to start learning to talk to these people pretty soon, but right now all you have to do is eat.”

The tall man named Jeren cleared his throat and whispered apologetically, “Do we get paid for this?”

“Paid! Holy Freddy, man! Don’t you think you got paid already, just by being taken out of the freezer?” Then Manett paused to think it over. “Actually, that’s a tough question,” he admitted. “I can’t say I exactly understand the money system here, but there is one, I guess. No, you don’t get paid. Whatever it costs for your food and all that probably gets charged to Nrina’s laboratory somehow. If you want anything else, forget it. You can’t afford it.”

Mescro pricked up his ears. “What can’t we afford?” he asked.

“Different things,” Manett said, scowling. “Don’t bother me with that kind of stuff now. Now, you all look like you’ve got enough jism stored up to squeeze out a sample four or five times a day for Nrina, so we’re going to do you one more time before you go to sleep—but for right now you better get started learning the language.”

“Aw, wait a minute,” Korelto objected. “We haven’t even  finished eating yet!”

“Well, snap it up,” Manett growled. But he was enjoying his role as mentor and straw boss, and when they insisted on asking him more questions, endless questions, through mouths stuffed with food, he tolerantly gave them answers.

Viktor wasn’t one of the questioners. He ate in silence, trying to follow what was being said, missing most of it. Could it really be true that his brain had been damaged by “freezer burn”? It was certain that something had happened; the talk rolled over him, too fast to follow, too hard to understand. Then a familiar word caught his attention: the black man, Korelto, asking, “Where are we? It isn’t Newmanhome, is it?”

“Hell, no. I told you that. It’s a habitat.”

“You mean another planet? Maybe Nebo?”

Manett gave him an incredulous stare. “Nebo? Don’t you know what it’s like on Nebo? We never go near Nebo—it’s hot as hell, and people get hurt there!”

Viktor frowned, puzzled. He had been close enough to Nebo to know that it couldn’t be called “hot” anymore—not after the weakening of the sun’s output. Still, he supposed, in comparison with the system’s frozen-over other planets . . .

But Manett wasn’t waiting for the next question. “You want to know where we are?” he asked. “I’ll show you.” And he got up from the table and walked over to one of those glass-topped things that looked like desks. “Come on over,” he called, scowling over a thing like a keypad in one corner of it. “Just a minute . . .”

They were all clustered around it as Manett hit a key. The glass turned misty, then cleared again.

“There’s old Nergal,” Manett said, proud of his success in getting the thing to work.

Viktor yelped. So did the other three. They were looking straight down onto something immense and redly glowing, like a bed of mottled coals.

Viktor couldn’t help himself. He reached out blindly and caught the arm of the big man named Jeren. Jeren was shaking, too, but he held on to Viktor as they all stared down. Viktor felt himself falling into that glowing hell—no, not falling, exactly; what he felt was that ruddy Nergal was swimming up toward him, drowning him.

Manett’s voice came to him from far away. “That’s what they call the brown dwarf. They moved here while the sun was cold, and we’re living in a habitat around it. A habitat is kind of like a big spaceship, you know? Only it doesn’t go anywhere, it just stays in orbit. That’s where everybody’s been living for the last few thousand years, when it was so cold before the old sun came back.”

“The sun came back?” one of the others cried out, astonished, but Viktor hardly heard. He was staring down, transfixed. He knew, part of him knew, that he wasn’t really being swallowed by that glowing pyre; it was, he told himself, only part of the “freezer burn,” the numbness in his head that was like a gauze scrim slipped between himself and the world. But he could feel himself swaying.

“Hey,” he heard Jeren’s worried voice say. “Something’s wrong with this guy.”

Manett’s face appeared before Viktor. He looked disgusted. “You’re relapsing,” he accused. “You’d better get to bed.”

Viktor tried to focus on him and failed. “All right, Daddy,” Viktor said.

 

When he woke again his throat felt less like sandpaper, but his other parts were worse. Nor was his mind much clearer. He had a confused memory of being wakened and ordered to masturbate again into one of the soft, crystalline plastic vials, and of men’s voices around him when he slept, but it was all hopelessly cloudy.

The voices were still going on. He lay trying to follow what they were talking about, with his eyes closed. Manett’s voice drowned out the others. He was saying smugly, “You know what they want. They want you to jerk off into bottles. That’s why they brought you up here, for sperm. It’s like cross-breeding animals, you know? They’ve been out here for thousands of years and they want to get some lost genes back into the pool. Oh, it isn’t just you guys. There are a couple of dozen of us real men around in one habitat or another that they’ve thawed out already. Not counting the stiffs—there’s maybe a hundred of those stashed away in Nrina’s cryonics place, waiting until she needs them.”

“Is that where we were?” somebody asked.

“In the freezer? Of course that’s where you were, where else? Nrina thaws out a few guys at a time for samples, then mostly they get sent away when she’s through with them. But I stay here. I’m the only one on this habitat permanently. Nrina kept me to help her out, you know?”

 Viktor heard a leering, sycophantic chuckle from one of the others. It sounded like Mescro. Then Manett’s voice picked up again. “They collect a batch of corpsicles from the freezers on Newmanhome and bring them here. Nrina takes cell samples from each, then she thaws out the ones that look interesting. You know that jab on your asses?” Viktor remembered the bandage clearly enough. “Well, that’s where she gouged out a piece to get a DNA sample.”

“I don’t remember that part,” one of the others objected—Jeren, Viktor thought.

“ ’Course not. How could you? You were frozen—that’s why it made such a big hole.” Manett pulled down the waistband of his skirt to display the spot on his own hip where only a puckered little dimple still showed. “Don’t worry, it heals up. Then after she checks the sample out, if your genes look interesting, she thaws you out and turns you over to me.”

“Is that why they tattooed us, to show we’re like gene donors?” Korelto asked.

Manett laughed. “You think they need a tattoo to show that? Don’t you see what they look like—skinny as skeletons? No, they can tell that much just by looking at us. That mark,” he said, sounding prideful, “is kind of a like a warning, you know? It tells all the women that we’re still potent sperm donors. All the other males around here have that stuff turned off as soon as their balls start working. They can make love, all right—believe me, it’s one of their favorite things! But they don’t produce sperm. The women don’t want to get pregnant, you know.”

“But if they don’t get pregnant, then how—”

“You mean babies? Sure they have babies, only they do it in a test tube, like. That’s what Nrina does in her laboratory. They match up the sperm and the ovum in a kind of an incubator and they carry it to term, and when the baby’s ready they pull it out and put it in a nursery. Listen, these people don’t do anything that hurts. Or even makes them sweat—except for fun,” he added, grinning. “Don’t worry about it. If they ever decide they’ve got enough of your DNA they’ll fix you, too, and then they’ll take the mark off your forehead and you can plow right in.”

Jeren, who was somewhat slow of thought, had just gotten to the question that interested him. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Are you saying that, you know, some of these women might want to . . .”

Manett looked smug. “Has happened,” he announced.

“Even the cute one that thawed us out?”

Manett scowled. “Never mind about her,” he said darkly. “Change the subject.”

“Sure, Manett,” Mescro said, grinning. “Only I notice you don’t have the tattoo any more, and I was just wondering—”

“I said change the subject!” Manett roared. And then, as he saw Viktor trying to sit up, he said, “Oh, look, sleeping beauty’s awake. What do you want, Viktor?”

“Well,” Viktor said, trying to get the words out in spite of the sudden, almost breathless feeling that had hit him, “is it all men? I mean, if these people are so hungry for different genetic traits, don’t they thaw out women, too?”

“Hell, no. Why would they do that? They don’t really use the sperm, you know. It’s just easy for them to work with, so they just extract the gene fragments they want, and then they mix them up with other strains to get the kind of genes they need for—for whatever they need them for, anyway. That’s not my department. Nrina’s told me all about that, but I guess I didn’t listen. Anyway, that,” he said, preening himself, “is one way we have an advantage over the women. We guys can produce a million sperms a day. Women can maybe do one ovum a month, if they’re lucky, so if they want genes from a female they just do it the hard way, from tissue samples.” He peered in a friendly manner at Viktor, who wasn’t smiling. “What’s the matter, you afraid you can’t make your million a day?”

Viktor shook himself. “I—no. Nothing,” he said.

But it hadn’t really been nothing. It had been a quick flare-up of unexpected and quite unjustified hope, quickly blighted. No. There was no point in hoping along those lines.

 Because that one little corner of his mind had suddenly come clear, like the desk that had showed him Nergal, and he had remembered Reesa.

 

For the next few days of Viktor’s new life he thought of Reesa almost constantly—while he was falling asleep, while he was just coming awake, while he was donating his sperm samples, while he was eating, while he was trying to learn the new language—all the time. But he could think of her only as you think of the dead. Of the long dead, at that.

He wondered, in an abstracted sort of way, if Reesa had had a happy life after his freezing. He wondered if she had missed him, or if she had reconciled herself sooner or later to his loss and, say, married someone else. Someone like Mirian, perhaps. She would have been a prized sort of wife for a Great Catholic, Viktor thought, because she was quite capable of being sexually active but no longer of complicating his life by becoming pregnant.

He told himself that he hoped she had married. He hoped she’d been happy—as happy as anyone could be in that world, anyway.

He didn’t go so far as to hope she hadn’t missed him. And he did miss her, certainly he did. But it was a sort of remote, somehow well-aged pain. As soon as he had heard the present date he had almost felt the quick, irrevocable shifting of gears in his mind. That history was ancient.

No one could mourn for four thousand years.

The curtain had come down on the first two acts of his life. He was just beginning Act Three.

It might not be the life he wanted . . . but it was the only life he had left.

Viktor forced himself to plunge into studying the language of these frail, remarkable people who had brought him back to life. It wasn’t easy. The fog around his brain made everything difficult, but there was help for him.

The biggest help was the desks.

They were actually like his old teaching machines, he saw. They provided him with hours on end of conversation with the image of a friendly, helpful, wise teacher talking to him from the desk.

The teacher was certainly not real. Viktor knew that; it was a computer-generated, three-dimensional picture, and the fact that it looked like an amiable (if exceptionally skinny) young man did not deceive him. It was real enough to correct his accent, straighten out his grammar, and provide him with the translation of every word and thought he needed.

The others who had been revived with him were, of course, busy at the same thing. Only Jeren, the gentle giant, was finding the process as hard as Viktor. Jeren was not a bright man. It wasn’t freezer burn in Jeren’s case. The man had just been born with a few slow linkages in his brain. Even with the cobwebs that cluttered his own mind, Viktor was far quicker than Jeren.

All the same, it was Jeren who became Viktor’s friend.

The little weasel Mescro was too busy trying to make a friend of Manett to pay attention to anyone who had no power, and he had attached Korelto to himself. It was Jeren who helped Viktor when he stumbled, Jeren who brought Viktor food in those first days when Viktor was too weak, or too dazed, to get up for it. He stood chastely by Viktor, eyes averted, while Viktor performed the rite of masturbation, and helped him back to bed when he was done. And he sat by Viktor, talking when Viktor felt like talking, silently watching while Viktor dozed.

Jeren was a big man—taller than Viktor, far taller than most of the people of Newmanhome’s Ice Age. He was solid, too, a hulking bear of a man, with a voice that was deep but so soft it was almost inaudible. He seemed to try to stay out of everyone’s way. When he spoke to anyone he averted his eyes, so as not to challenge the other person.

With all of Viktor’s own problems, there was something about Jeren that made Viktor feel sorry for him—or feel contemptuous of him. Why would such a big man try so hard to efface himself? Only because he felt somehow small—and if a man thinks himself small, who is anyone else to say he isn’t?

 

Viktor never succeeded in reconciling himself to what he had to do to earn his keep—most of all, because there was almost always someone there with him while he did it. Usually the person was Manett. The man seemed to enjoy humiliating his crew of sperm donors, and Viktor more than the others, it appeared. If there had ever been anything about sex that Viktor disliked, it was trying to perform in the morning, but Manett was adamant. “Do your job,” he ordered. “Then you eat. Then you get back to studying the language, and don’t argue with me!” So, minutes after awakening every day, Viktor was standing in the sperm-donation cubicle, trying to think erotic.

What made it even more difficult was that sometimes Nrina, the woman who had supervised his thawing, followed him into the chamber. Viktor hated it when she stood behind him, because for some reason she had taken to watching with evident interest. Viktor glared confusedly at her. What he could see through her transparent, open-meshed smock stirred something inside him, all right, but it wasn’t enough. He appealed to Manett. “I don’t like her being here. It makes me—uh—it interferes.”

Manett guffawed and translated. The woman replied politely. Viktor thought he could almost understand what she was saying now, in her husky, sweet voice, but he was glad when Manett translated anyway.

Manett didn’t seem glad. He spoke sourly, as though he didn’t like what he was saying. “She says she likes watching you, so go ahead.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“What’s that got to do with it? She—wait a minute.” He listened to Nrina and then, glowering, addressed Viktor again. “She wants to know if you were really born on Old Earth.”

“Of course I was. I told you.” And then, turning to the woman, Viktor said haltingly in her own language, “This is true, yes.”

“Get on with it!” Manett ordered, looking angry. “Or would you rather go back in the freezer?”

But the woman was laughing. She paused to say something to Manett and turned to leave the room. Manett looked annoyed. “Do it and then come out,” he ordered. “And then Nrina says to hurry up and finish learning the language. She wants to talk to you.”

 

The language wasn’t as hard as Viktor had first feared. A long time had passed, but there were still English words embedded in their vocabularies, or at least the ghosts of the words. The difference was far less than that between the language of his own day—whatever you took that day to be—and that of Beowulf. The vowel sounds had changed. The words were sometimes clipped and sometimes slurred, and there were many hundreds of wholly new words to learn, words that Viktor had never heard before because the things they referred to had never existed before. But within a week he could understand some of what Nrina was saying to Manett, and before long he could speak to her directly.

The “desk” teaching machines were marvelous tutors—and a good deal more. The desk was not simply for teaching. It did that function very well, but it was also an atlas, and an encyclopedia, and a patient tutor, repeating the same thing over and over again as long as Viktor wanted it, until Viktor’s slowly recovering brain could absorb it.

It was especially fine as a picture book. Even though Viktor’s brain was still fogged part of the time, and his memory sketchy almost always, he could follow what the machines told him about his new world he was living in. The human population of Newmanhome had not only recovered from its ice age (though not on Newmanhome), it had flourished madly. There were three hundred million people alive now, and they lived very well. Most of them were in what an earlier human would have called O’Neill habitats, and those were various but uniformly fine. Some were like an ancient English countryside, with trees and flowering plants and hedgerows; animals like rabbits and foxes lived in the wooded parts; songbirds and hummingbirds flew in their air. Some were like cities a mile through, with ten million people huddled together. Some were quite strange—there was even a wilderness habitat here and there with grizzly bears and tigers, jungles and forests, even great slow waterfalls. Viktor discovered that not everyone lived on the habitats. A few preferred to live on Nergal’s natural moons, now terraformed and quite comfortable. Most people tried to spend a little time on one of them now and then. It was a form of sport for them, moving about in a real gravity field, though a tiny one. They did it to keep their bodies in shape.

Considering how their bodies had stretched out in those scores of generations in micro- or low gravity, they did that very well. As Viktor caught occasional glimpses of other inhabitants of the place, he could easily see that that was true. The people of this place didn’t wear much in the way of clothing—a cache-sex, a simple strip of cloth that covered their sexual organs and the cleft between their buttocks, was good enough for most practical purposes. Sometimes they wore a bit more. When Nrina was busy in her laboratory she wore a smock to keep the messes off her body, and sometimes she wore other things, just for the prettiness of them. Women wore nothing on their breasts, most of the time. They didn’t need to. In the gentle gravity of the habitat the breasts didn’t sag.

The other side of that coin was that the males were less macho than Viktor was used to—much less.

The males were not much bigger than the women. Not much stronger, either, Viktor thought; large muscles weren’t needed where they lived. (The man, Dekkaduk, from Nrina’s laboratory turned out to be a puzzling exception.) Particularly since none of them did much physical labor. Compared to them, Viktor was a giant. He was bigger than most of his reawakened colleagues in the sperm banks, for that matter, since the Newmanhome of their time had not provided its children with a generous diet, and certainly never any fresh air.

When Viktor began to explore outside the immediate confines of Nrina’s laboratory he encountered still more strangers. He even tried speaking to some of them now and again, for language practice, but he was wary. When he looked at them, he did not fail to see that they were looking at him as well, and with just as much speculative interest. He thought that the branding on the forehead was probably a useful precaution. Some of the glances from females were frankly sexual, and Viktor appreciated that very much . . . the memory of Reesa slowly fading from his mind.

Some of the sexually charged looks, however, were from people who were definitely male, and about that Viktor was far less pleased.

 

By the time Viktor could make himself understood to people like Nrina his life had fallen into a routine. He ate when food was offered. He slept when he was tired. He made his required four donations of sperm each day—a little surprised at himself, and not unpleased: after all, he was pretty nearly a middle-aged man now! And between times, all the time, he tried to learn this world he was in.

Of course, Viktor was not the only newcomer in the habitat. Jeren, Mescro, and Korelto were as innocent as himself, and two of them, at least, were curious. (Jeren wasn’t. Jeren took what came without complaint or question. His main interest was in following Viktor around.) But those three had an advantage Viktor didn’t share. All the things they wanted to know Manett, the veteran of more than eight months ahead of them out of the freezer, already knew—and told them. But it seemed that Manett just didn’t like talking to Viktor.

For some reason, Viktor could not guess why, Manett had taken a dislike to him. More than a dislike. Viktor pondered, without resolving, the curious idea he had formed that sometimes, when he caught Manett’s eyes on him, the expression in them looked almost like fear.

Then Nrina called him in for another examination.

When Viktor greeted her, careful with his pronunciation, the woman looked pleased, but she just waved him to a table. There she did all the things she had already done to Viktor—touched his head with various instruments, studied the polychrome readings, and felt the part just above his temple that had hurt so badly, looking satisfied when he said it hurt no more.

“Your leg, then,” she said, speaking slowly so that he could understand. He raised it obediently to the table, and she touched a buzzing rod to the dressing.

The pink sausage fell neatly open. Viktor looked, and smelled, and squinted his eyes shut, trying not to be sick. A big piece of his calf was gone. What was left stank of dead meat and decay.

Nrina didn’t seem to mind. She bent close to study it, by eye and with more of the instruments that flashed rainbow colors for her. Then, satisfied, she sprayed it with something that felt like nothing at all, but quickly dissipated the terrible odor and left the exposed raw meat covered with a film of metallic gold. She pressed the two halves of the wrapping back together and sat down facing Viktor, her knees hugged to her breast, regarding him.

When she spoke to Viktor it was slowly, a word at a time. “You have . . . suffered . . . damage . . . from improper freezing. For . . . a long time. Do you understand?” He nodded. “So . . . there are two things. Your leg. It will . . . I think . . . be all right . . . in a season. It will . . . heal completely.”

“That is good,” Viktor said.

She nodded seriously. “The brain . . . I do not know.”

Viktor blinked at her. “What?”

“I have . . . inserted . . . additional material . . . in your brain . . . to replace . . . what was lost. It may take. I think it has . . . partly.”

“Partly?”

“Perhaps more. We must wait.”

“I have been waiting,” he said bitterly.

She studied him thoughtfully for a moment. Then, smiling, she said, “You will . . . wait some more. Now go. You will help Manett. You must learn . . . to do his work.”

 

Manett was waiting for Viktor outside the examination room, and his expression was even more dour than usual. When Viktor asked him what Nrina had meant, Manett flared up. “It means she’s going to give you my job, damn your hide!” he rasped. “Come on. I’ll show you what to do—but just don’t talk to me!” And he led the way to the outermost shell of the habitat, where the wraithlike but oddly muscled man who had tattooed Viktor in the first place was waiting impatiently for them.

The man wasn’t wearing a filmy robe now; he was dressed in shiny, copper-colored things like overalls, which covered everything from neck to feet, and he had a hood of the same material in his hand. “This is Dekkaduk,” Manett said, short and surly. “Get dressed.”

Dekkaduk looked at him inquiringly, but didn’t say anything either. He waited while Viktor struggled into the same sort of garment. It was light and flexible, but it felt metallic. Still, it was elastic, too, because it slid over the sausage around Viktor’s lower leg easily enough.

“Now,” Dekkaduk said, “we go inside.” He was speaking the language of the habitat people. Because Viktor was concentrating on what he was doing it took a moment for him to understand. Manett helped him along with a shove.

“Dekkaduk said move,” he snapped. “Get your damn hood on!”

Then Viktor found out what his job was. All three of them donned their hoods, then crowded all together into a tiny cubicle; Manett pulled the outer door closed—it was thick but light—and opened a door on the other side.

Immediately the transparent front of Viktor’s hood clouded over and he felt a stinging cold. A moment later he could feel Manett roughly poking at his back, doing something that resulted first in a faint click, then a hiss. The icy cold of the suit warmed; warm air began to flow through the hood. Gradually the frosted inside of the faceplate began to clear.

Viktor could see Manett’s face bending toward his, and through the two visors he could see the man’s look of sour satisfaction. When Manett spoke Viktor could see his lips move, but the voice came from inside the hood, right next to his ear. “You’re all hooked up,” Manett announced. “Now let’s shift some stiffs.”

And so they did. For an hour or more. Warm inside their heated suits, with their warmed air supply from the cables that connected them to sockets in the wall; and the stiffs they moved were corpsicles from the cryonics chambers on Newmanhome.

What Manett and Viktor did was the hard work—pulling out the old capsules, opening them to show the frozen bodies inside. The air in the freezer must have been searingly dry, for no frost had collected on either capsules or bodies. Some were facedown, and they were the easiest; all Viktor or Manett had to do was to pull or cut away the hard-frozen fabric over the hip and then stand aside while Dekkaduk thrust a triangle-bladed instrument into each patch of rock-hard flesh to gouge out a tiny sample. The ones who had been frozen faceup were more difficult. They had to be lifted out, or at least turned to one side, so that Dekkaduk could get at them; and then Viktor could see the frozen faces. Some were almost as though only asleep. Some were contorted. Some seemed to be silently screaming.

Then they slid the capsules back—each marked with its star or cross or crescent. Viktor was glad when it was over, because it was frightening to look on the corpsicles and know that not long before he had been just like them—and not very far in the future, maybe, might well be back there again.

Back in his own study room, as he leaned over the teaching desk, he blew on his fingers. They weren’t really cold. It was his soul that was cold. He thought it would never be warm again.

But as he talked to his unreal mentor in the desk he began to forget the freezer. “What shall we study today, Viktor?” the simulacrum greeted him. “It is up to you to choose.”

“Thank you,” Viktor said, aware that he was thanking no one real. “Can you show me some more pictures, please?”

“Of course. Incidentally, your accent is getting much better. But what pictures would you like to see?”

“Well,” Viktor said, “I used to be interested in astronomy. Can you show me what the skies look like now? I mean, not just Nergal, but everything?”

“Of course,” the tutor said. “Perhaps it would be best to display it as a surround.” It disappeared from the desk, and at once an image sprang up all around Viktor. The image blotted out everything but itself, and it was almost all black. “You are looking,” the disembodied voice went on, “at every astronomical object that is visible from your present position. The habitats have been omitted.” Indeed, Viktor saw, there was the glowing cinder of Nergal. There, behind Viktor, the sun blazed—not very bright, he thought, but then they were much farther away than Newmanhome; perhaps it really had regained all of its luminosity. A couple of quite bright things had perceptible disks—some of Nergal’s moons, no doubt. He picked out a few smaller, bright objects—stars and a couple of planets . . .

Apart from that, nothing.

Nothing? Viktor sat up straight, staring around at the sparsely featured sky. “But where’s the universe?” he cried.

“You are referring to the optical concentration that was visible for some time,” the calm, disembodied voice said. “That began to dim one thousand three hundred years ago, Viktor, and by eight hundred years ago, it was no longer detectable at all. What you see is the universe, Viktor. There isn’t anything else.”

And then, with a sickening certainty, Viktor at last began to believe. It had indeed been four thousand years.

 

Two days later what Manett said came true. When Viktor and the others started toward the room with the sample tubes, ready to do their work of filling them, Manett appeared. He looked angry and frightened at the same time. “Forget it,” he said. “Nrina says she’s got enough from you guys. We—” He swallowed. “We’re leaving. All but Viktor, he stays here.”

“Leaving for where?” Korelto demanded, startled.

Mescro looked searchingly at his mentor’s face. “You’ve been fired,” he guessed accusingly.

“Shut up, Mescro!” Manett snarled. “Let’s go. There’s a bus waiting.”

“But—but—” Jeren cried, blinking as he tried to take the new situation in, “but we need to get ready!”

“For what? You’ve got nothing to pack,” Manett said cruelly. “Come on. Not you,” he added to Viktor, with poison in his voice. “Nrina wants to see you. Now.”

And thus, without warning, they were gone. Only Jeren tarried to shake Viktor’s hand sadly and to say good-bye. Viktor wasn’t even allowed to follow them to their “bus.”

Nrina was in the corridor, and she beckoned him to follow her. She was wearing a filmy rainbow-colored thing that might once have been called a negligee. It veiled, without hiding, the fact that under it she wore nothing at all, not even the cache-sex. Viktor averted his eyes, because there was something he really wanted to ask the woman, and her scanty attire made it difficult.

“It is very interesting to me that you were born on Old Earth,” she told him seriously as they walked. “Here, this is my home. You may come in.”

He followed her uneasily through a doorway. When they were inside she clapped her hands, and it closed behind them. It was not a large room, but it was prettily festooned with growing things, and there was a scent of flowers in the air. There was one of those desk things, of course, and soft pillows thrown about. The only other large bit of furniture in the room was a soft, cup-shaped thing, like the cap of a mushroom turned upside down.

It looked very much like a bed.

Nrina sat on the edge of the cup-shaped thing, which was large enough for her to stretch out in easily. She looked at Viktor appraisingly before she spoke. “Have you any questions for me, Viktor?” she asked.

Indeed he had—many, and a number that he didn’t quite want to ask. He fumbled. “I did—I did want to know something, Nrina. Is my, uh, my brain severely damaged?”

“Severely?” She thought for a moment. “No, I would not say ‘severely,’ ” she said at last. “Much of your memory has come back, has it not? Perhaps more will. The damage may not be permanent.”

“May not!”

She shrugged—it was a graceful movement, but with the extreme slimness of her body it made Viktor think of a snake slowly writhing in its coils. “What difference does that make?”

“It make a great difference to me!”

 She thought that over, looking at him carefully. Then she smiled. “But it makes none to me, Viktor,” she pointed out. And she lay back on the bed, still smiling at him, but now with a wholly different expression.

He felt himself responding. Instinctively his hand went to the brand on his forehead.

“Oh,” she said, reaching out with her own hand to take his, “that is all right, Viktor. I have fixed myself so that I cannot be fertilized. But I do want to know, I want very much to know, how you people from Old Earth made love.”

 

 

 

CHAPTER 21

 

 

By now the universe was getting pretty old, and Wan-To was very nearly the age of the universe. There was a redeeming feature to that, though, because the older Wan-To got, the longer it took for him to become older still.

That wasn’t because of the relativistic effect of time dilation. It had nothing to do with the velocity of his motion. It was only a matter of energy supply. Wan-To was living on a starvation diet, and it had made him very slow.

When Wan-To was young or middle-aged—or even quite elderly, say when he had reached the age of a few hundred billion years—he aged quickly because he did everything quickly. Wan-To was a plasma person. It was the flashing pace of nuclear fusion that drove his metabolism; changes of state happened at the speed of the creation and destruction of virtual particles, winking in and out of existence as vacuum fluctuations.

That was how it had been, once.

It wasn’t that way anymore. Wan-To was almost blind now. He could not spare the energy for all those external eyes—but it didn’t much matter, because what was there to see in this sparse, dark, cold universe? He did keep a tiny “ear” open for the sounds of possible communication—though even “possible,” he knew, was stretching it. Who was there to communicate?

Wan-To’s physical condition in itself was awful. (How awful just to have a “physical” condition at all!) He was trapped. He was embedded in a nearly solid mass, like a man buried in sand up to his neck. It wasn’t impossible for him to move. It was only very difficult, and painful, and agonizingly slow.

He could have left. He could have cut himself loose from this corpse of a star to seek another. But there weren’t any others better than the one he was in.

The wonderful quick, bright phase of his existence was so far in the past that Wan-To hardly remembered it. (His memory, too, was a function of how much energy he had to spare for it. A lot of memory was, so to speak, shut down—“on standby,” one might say, to hoard what powers he had available.) The kind of energies to support that sort of life had disappeared. There wasn’t any nuclear fusion anymore, not anywhere in the universe as far as Wan-To could see or imagine. Every fusible element had long since fused, every fissionable one had fissed.

And so the stars had gone out.

All of them. Every last one. Stars were history; and history, now, had run for so many endless eons that even Wan-To no longer kept count of the time. But time passed anyway, and now the universe had lived for more than ten thousand million million million million million million years.

That was a number without much meaning even to Wan-To. A human would have written it as the number 1 followed by forty zeroes—10,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. He wouldn’t have understood it, either, but he could have juggled numbers around to give an idea of what it meant. He might, for instance, have said that if the entire age of the universe at the time when the human race first started thinking seriously about it—everything from the Big Bang to, say, the twentieth century on Earth—had been only one second, then on the same scale its present age was coming right up on something like fifty thousand billion billion years . . .

And, of course, that number wouldn’t have meant much, either, except that anyone could see it was a very, very long time.

If Wan-To had been of a philosophical bent, he might have said to himself something consoling, like, At least I’ve had a good run for my money. Or, You only live once—but if you do it right, once is enough.

Wan-To was not that philosophical. He was not at all willing to go gladly into that long, dark night. He would have resisted it with all his force . . . if he had known a way to do it . . . and if he had had enough force to be worth talking about to resist it with.

Time was when Wan-To had hurled stars about in all the vigor of his mighty youth—had even made stars, out of clouds of dust—had even made himself a new galaxy or two, when all the ones in sight were beginning to dim toward extinction. He remembered that much, at least, because it gave him pleasure to mull over in his mind the wonderful, primordial, galaxy-sized clouds that he had caused to collapse and to begin to spin and to twinkle with billions of stars coming to life. Nothing in the universe was more powerful than Wan-To had been then, creator and destroyer of galaxies!

That had been a brave time!

But that time was long gone. In ten-to-the-fortieth-power years, most things are long gone.

 

What had happened in that long, long stretch of years?

The answer to that is simple.

Everything had happened.

The last of the galaxies had formed and evaporated and died. The last of the new stars had formed eternities before, as the last huge gas cloud shuddered into motion as a compressibility wave jolted it and caused it to crash together to form a new star. There couldn’t be any new stars anymore. There might still be a vagrant wisp of dust here and there, but gravitational attraction wasn’t strong enough to make it coalesce. That wasn’t because anything had happened to gravity itself. It was just a matter of the law of inverse squares—after all, the universe was still expanding. It could not make more matter of energy, but it kept right on making more space. As the universe expanded, it cooled—there was more and more of it every second, and so the remnant heat was diluted more and more. And so everything was farther and farther away from everything else, so far that the distances were quite meaningless.

The last of the big, bright stars had long since gone supernova; the last of the Sol types had gone supergiant and turned into a white dwarf; all of those profligate wastrels of energy had long since burned themselves out. The red dwarfs had a somewhat longer run for their money. They were the smallest and longest-lived of those furnaces of nuclear fusion that were called stars, but then they had gone, too. The last of them had long before burned itself to a lump of iron, warmed by the only energy source that was left, the terminally slow decay of the protons themselves.

Proton decay! It hurt Wan-To’s pride to have to live by so feeble an energy source as proton decay.

The only good thing about it was that it lasted a long time. When a proton decays, two up quarks and one down quark turn into a positron (which goes off and annihilates the first electron it comes across) and a quark-antiquark pair (which is to say a meson). The meson doesn’t matter to anyone after that. The positron-electron annihilation produces heat—a little heat.

And all this happened very slowly. If the average life span of a proton was—well, let’s not play the big number game anymore; let’s just say it’s a kazillion years—that didn’t mean every proton in the universe would expire on the tick of that moment. That was average. Mathematics showed that the “half-life” of the proton should then be about seven-tenths of a kazillion.

By then Wan-To would be in even more straitened circumstances, with half the protons gone. In another such period half the remainder would be gone, and then half of that remainder.

The time was in sight, Wan-To saw with gloom, when there would just not be enough whole protons in any one cadaver of a star to keep him warm.

The word “warm” is an exaggeration. No human would have thought one of those hard, dead lumps very warm; the highest temperature proton decay could attain for it was less than a dozen degrees above absolute zero.

And that was when, after everything had happened, everything stopped happening, because there wasn’t enough energy anywhere to drive events.

 

A few degrees above absolute zero wasn’t what Wan-To considered warm, either, but it was all there was left for him. The solid matter he had once despised—the iron corpse that was all that was left of his last star—was the only home he could find.

It had not been easy for Wan-To to adapt to such a horrid environment. It had only been possible at all by resigning himself to the loss of most of his functions, and the slowing down of all there were left. Now the milliseconds of Wan-To’s life dragged for thousands of years.

That was quite fast enough, in one way, for there wasn’t much left for Wan-To to do—except to contemplate the fact that his future had no future except eternity. He wasn’t even good at contemplating anymore, for his mind was fuzzy from deprivation. (Fuzzier even than that of the person who was almost as old as he was, Viktor Sorricaine.) That was just as well, because in his moments of clarity Wan-To realized that nothing was ever going to get better for him. All that would happen would be that the clinker he lived in would slowly, slowly cool even further, until there was no energy at all left to keep him alive.

And the horrible part of that was that it would go on for ever . . . or close enough . . . for so long that even his present age would seem only a moment, before the last proton expired and he was finally dead.

Nothing but a miracle could change his hopeless certain destiny.

Wan-To didn’t believe in miracles.

A miracle had to come from somewhere, and Wan-To could see no place in the doddering, dying universe where a miracle might still be born. Of course, he had long since forgotten the dozen stars he had hurled out of that ancient galaxy at so vast a speed that time, for that little system, had almost stopped.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 22

 

 

If it were not for the odd, bleak flashes of memory that sometimes cut through the fog in Viktor’s brain—memories of Reesa that came and went, painful while they were there; memories of the children long dust, which left a dismal sense of hopeless loss—if it weren’t for those things, Viktor might easily have thought this third act of his life close to the best.

To be sure, it was just a touch humiliating. Never once had Viktor imagined that his main career would be in sexually servicing a skinny, seven-foot woman with huge eyes. Yet it had its compensations. As the recognized lover of Nrina, Viktor became a privileged person.

He wasn’t a “husband,” of course. The only “rights” he had over Nrina were to share her bed—sometimes, her company—when she wasn’t working; when she wasn’t doing something else that she didn’t wish to share with him. The basic job he had been thawed out for in the first place, as donator of sperm for her collection of useful genetic materials, no longer existed for him. Nrina explained that she had all the samples she needed for future genetic engineering. She now had better employment for that particular function. His only present responsibility was to give her pleasure. All of which added up to the fact that he was—

He didn’t like to say it explicitly, but there was an old and unflattering expression for what he was. He was kept.

When Manett told him, with all that surly resentment, that Nrina had decreed Viktor was to take over his job, Viktor had thought it meant supervising the next batch of thawed-out sperm donors. But when, tentatively, Viktor asked Nrina when they were going to do the thawing she looked at him in surprise. “Oh, not now, Viktor,” she said, stroking his shoulder affectionately. “First Dekkaduk and I must run the DNA assays on them, to see which are worth the trouble of thawing, don’t you see? And we have much other work to do. Important work. Orders to fill, with deadlines which we must meet. No, it will be weeks at least, perhaps a whole season, before we are ready to acquire more material. But now—are you hungry? No? Then why don’t we go to my bed again?” And he understood that what had once been Manett’s main job was indeed now his.

 

Nrina’s life wasn’t his, though. Even her home wasn’t really his; Viktor was surprised (and, on reflection, not very pleased) to find that the private chamber she had first taken him to was only a sort of guest room. Nrina’s own home was far larger, and very much more complex and beautiful. It had one big room with a “transparent” ceiling—well, it wasn’t always transparent, because Nrina could turn it off when she chose, and then it was only a sort of pattern of shifting, nebulous, luminous, multicolored pastel clouds. (And it wasn’t really transparent, being only a sort of huge TV screen that showed the outside universe.) In the center of the room a cloudy sphere, as tall as Viktor’s head, showed shapes in milky pastel light, though most of the room’s illumination came from the gently glowing walls. (Nrina’s people didn’t seem to like harsh lighting.)

Then there was another room, quite small, but large enough for their needs. It held her own bed. That one looked terribly flimsy to Viktor; it was cantilevered out from the wall, and it did not look to Viktor as though it was built to stand very vigorous activity in it. (He was wrong about that, he discovered. The habitat’s low gravity helped.) There wasn’t any kitchen, exactly. There was a room with a cupboard that was a sort of a freezer and fridge, and another that was a sort of a microwave oven. (That was all they needed. These people, Viktor found, didn’t ever fry or broil anything—especially not hunks of dead animal flesh.) That was where Viktor ate most of the time—Nrina sometimes, too, though often enough she was off somewhere else, with whom Viktor never knew. That was not a problem in any practical way. There was always plenty to eat. Once Viktor learned how to handle the heating apparatus he always found stews and porridges and soups and hashes ready in the fridge, and sherberts in the freezer, and any number of different kinds of fresh fruits—always fresh, always perfect, too; though some of them were wholly unfamiliar to Viktor, and a few were perfectly foul to his taste. He wondered who replenished them. Certainly not Nrina!

Nor was Viktor idle. Not really idle, he told himself, he was in fact very busy learning about this new life he had been given. He had the freedom to roam where he would on the habitat. He used that freedom, too, except when his leg was hurting too badly. That wasn’t often anymore, but there were days when the pain was acute all day long. Then it hurt all the time, when it wasn’t itching; sometimes it both itched, like a bad sunburn, and hurt, like a new scald.

Those days weren’t a total waste, because he could spend them hunched over the communicator desk, learning all he could. But when the leg was no more than mildly annoying, he preferred to walk around.

You couldn’t see much of the habitat at any one time, because everything was inside. There weren’t many large open spaces. There certainly wasn’t ever any sky, for a ceiling was never very far overhead. Strangely, much of the place was bent. The longest corridors were straight as laser beams, but the ones at right angles to them had perceptible upward curves.

The place was like a rolled-up version of—well, of Homeport, say. Of any city spread out on its land, except that this one had been rolled around and joined in a kind of tube. Everything Viktor saw was in the outer skin of that tube. That was why those transverse hallways were always curved. Viktor discovered that if he went all the way around one—it wasn’t really far, a twenty-minute walk at most when his leg wasn’t bothering him—he would come right back to his starting point.

What was in the middle? Machinery, Nrina told him when he asked her. They were lying together in her cantilevered bed, nibbling on sweet little plums, both quite relaxed. The machinery, she said, was all different kinds. The core of the habitat was where they kept the air cleaners (to filter out the wastes and replenish the oxygen), and the temperature regulators, and the generators for electrical energy, and the communications equipment, and the data machine files—and, in short, everything that was needed to make the habitat comfortably habitable. All tidily out of sight. She yawned, pitching a plum pit on the floor and nestling cozily close to him.

But Viktor was wide awake. It was all a wonder to him. Technologically wonderful, of course, but also wonderful to think of starved, poverty-stricken refugees from old Newmanhome building all these things—enough of them to hold three hundred million people!

“Well, they didn’t build them all at once, Viktor,” Nrina pointed out reasonably, stretching her long, slim legs (“slim” now to Viktor’s mind—no longer “skinny”) and yawning again. “Once they got a good start it was easy enough. There were plenty of asteroids to mine for materials, and Nergal gave off a lot of heat, as long as you got close enough to it. Of course, now that the sun’s back in business we wouldn’t need to stay around Nergal anymore—but why would we bother to move?”

“Well, to a planet,” Viktor began. “Newmanhome, for instance. They say it’s warmed up now—”

“Planets!” she scoffed. “Planets are nasty. Certainly, now that Newmanhome is pretty well thawed out people can survive there, but who would want to?”

I would, Viktor thought, but he wasn’t sure he meant it, so all he said was, “Some people might.”

“Some silly people do,” she admitted. “There are a few odd ones who seem to enjoy poking through the old records, and of course we need someone to pick over the freezers to find whatever organisms are left that might supply useful DNA. I don’t call that living, Viktor.” And she went on to explain why it certainly wasn’t any kind of life she could stand for herself. The gravity! Why, on Newmanhome they had to move around in wheelchairs most of the time, even if they’d taken the muscle-building and calcium-binding treatments that would let them stand it at all. (As, it turned out, Dekkaduk had—thus those incongruous knots of muscle.) That much gravity certainly wasn’t good for anybody. Not to mention the discomfort. No, it wasn’t at all the kind of life she personally could tolerate.

And then, stroking his thigh, she interrupted herself. “Hold still a minute, Viktor,” she ordered, leaning over to poke at his leg. “Does that feel all right?”

He craned his neck to peer at the pink sausage casing. “I guess so. I almost forget it’s there.” But reminded, he was aware of the smell. The wrapping was porous, to let the wound breathe as it healed, and odors did leak out.

Nrina didn’t seem to mind them. “I’d better take another look,” she decided. And then, “Oh, no, I’m meeting Kotlenny; well, Dekkaduk can do it. Go over and tell him to give you an examination.”

 

Dekkaduk was waiting for him when Viktor got to the examining room. His expression was hostile.

It was no worse than Viktor had expected. Dekkaduk did not seem to be a friendly man. Their first meeting had been when Dekkaduk had tattooed the fertility warning on Viktor’s forehead; all right, that was just a duty, and if it had been painful probably that couldn’t be helped. But ever since the time they had taken DNA samples from Nrina’s corpsicles, along with the departed Manett, Dekkaduk had given every sign of despising the man from Old Earth.

“Ouch!” Viktor exclaimed, as Dekkaduk peeled the dressing off his leg. (That might not have been on purpose. Still, removing the dressing didn’t hurt when Nrina did it.) Then as the full aroma of the healing wound floated to his nostrils, Dekkaduk muttered furiously to himself and ostentatiously turned the room’s ventilation higher. (Well, it did stink. But that much? Nrina didn’t appear to find the smell intolerable, after all.)

Dekkaduk hurt him (Viktor kept count) eight different times in the course of a two-minute examination. Even the healing, cleaning spray he used to cover the pink new flesh stung bitterly (Nrina’s hadn’t), and when he was through and the leg was rebandaged Dekkaduk simply said, “You’re healing. Go away now.”

Viktor went. Once away from Dekkaduk’s touch the leg hardly hurt at all anymore. As he strolled along the corridor he was thinking of possible explanations for the man’s hostility. It could, of course, be just his nature. Dekkaduk might simply have interests of his own and regard this rude survivor from prehistoric ages, Viktor Sorricaine, as an irritating irrelevance.

But there was another possibility that Viktor thought likely. What if Dekkaduk were not only Nrina’s assistant, but her lover? More likely ex-lover—and jealous. It was a quite plausible theory, Viktor thought. It was even one that gave him a certain amount of satisfaction, because there was enough rude, prehistoric carnality in Viktor’s genetic predispositions to allow him to enjoy beating out another male for a mate.

He had been walking without paying much attention to where he was going. He passed other people from time to time. Some he had met before, even spoken to; he was beginning to be on nodding terms, at least, with some of Nrina’s neighbors, and as he got used to the stretched-out, willowy shapes of these people he began to notice individual differences.

At first they had all looked alike, like members of some famine-stricken basketball team. Then he began to distinguish among them. Some were darker than others. Hair color varied from so pale and fine that it seemed almost transparent to coarse strands like charcoal-colored knitting wool. Both men and women might have facial hair, though women’s was usually only a pair of narrow sideburns. Quite a few of the people struck Viktor as downright ugly—noses that were splayed, hooked or reduced to the size of a shirt button; teeth that seemed too big for their mouths, or, in one particular case, a woman with vampire incisors that lay against her lower lip. (She had seemed more willing to be friendly than most. Viktor had not encouraged her.)

On Newmanhome, at least on the fat, rich Newmanhome of his youth, Viktor would have wondered why these people hadn’t had orthodontia or plastic surgery. Here he wondered even more, because those traits had to be on purpose. Some parents had gone to some genetic engineer like Nrina and chosen that receding chin, those pendulous ears for their child.

As Viktor strolled, idle and aimless, he saw the vampire-toothed woman coming toward him.

She was even taller than Nrina and—in the same ethereal way as Nrina, of course—quite as pretty. (Not counting those disconcerting teeth, of course.) The woman had let Viktor clearly know that strange, big-muscled primitives out of the freezatorium were in some ways quite interesting—though she had looked regretfully at the tattoo on his forehead. But Viktor only nodded to her now. It wasn’t that his fertility was a serious problem. If Nrina had some kind of contraception, this other woman could probably manage it, too, but that meant a different kind of problem.

Kept men, Viktor was nearly sure, were expected to be faithful to their keepers.

He was quite a bit farther away from Nrina’s area than he remembered going before. Ahead of him the corridor suddenly widened to an open space. There was a little pond, and around it were patches of growing things.

It was a farm.

Nrina had told him there was a farm on the habitat, though he’d never seen it before. It was really very pleasant. It wasn’t at all like any farm on ancient Newmanhome, because of the funny way it bent, pond and all, and the fact that the “sky” was almost within touching distance over his head. But there were growing things there. He recognized some of them as having been in Nrina’s locker, and was pleased to bend down and pick a—tomato? Something that tasted like a tomato, anyway, although it was a deep purple in color.

It occurred to him that it was possible these plants belonged to someone.

He looked around. There was no one in sight. He ate the tomato, nibbling around the stem, and tossed the little green remnant to the ground as he strolled. That was curious, too, he observed, for the ground wasn’t really ground. This was no plowed half acre of somebody’s produce garden; the tomato vines grew out of long, bulkheaded rows of something that was paler and spongier than any earth Viktor had ever seen, and between the rows were immaculately swept footpaths.

Someone kept this farm extraordinarily neat.

Then Viktor caught a glimpse of one of the “someones.”

He was at the far end of the open space, and as he turned to go back he saw some dark-skinned person at the edge of the pond. He didn’t actually see the whole person. The pond, and the land around it, had curved up until they were almost hidden by the bulge of the ceiling between. (So strange to look at! One wondered why the pond didn’t spill out.) What Viktor saw was someone’s feet, seemingly wearing dark, furry boots, and someone’s hands tipping a sort of bucket into the lake.

Immediately the surface of the pond at that point began to erupt into little spouts and fountains. Fish were feeding there. Pleased with the discovery, Viktor started back in that direction.

The fish feeder was faster than he. By the time he got to where he could see the whole other end of the farm enclosure there was no one there. But the splashes he had seen were definitely fish feeding. They were still swirling around, just under the surface of the water, rising to snap at little bits of something edible floating where the fish attendant had left them.

It would be nice, Viktor thought, to feed the fish himself some time. Feeling at ease after his stroll, he went back to Nrina’s home and busied himself with the teacher desk, awaiting her return from her laboratory.

 

She was later than Viktor expected, but he didn’t mind. His unreal mentor of the desk hardly ever had to correct his grammar anymore, but remained ready to help whenever Viktor got stuck. That wasn’t often. As Viktor gained skills he gained confidence. Apart from the fact that it taught him things he wanted to learn, just playing with the desk was fun; it was like an immensely complicated video game with real rewards for winning.

It was beyond his competence, or his mentor’s aid, to access the kind of cosmological data he really wanted. Simple astronomy was easy enough, though. With the mentor assisting, Viktor got a look at each of the stars that had accompanied their own sun through space; they had all been given names, but the names rolled off his mind. Then he looked at their own planets, one by one . . . and then he struck oil.

With the mentor’s help Viktor got a sort of travelogue of the mysterious planet of Nebo. Someone had done a flyby and deployed a robot shuttle. The shuttle didn’t land. It simply skimmed through the atmosphere of Nebo, taking pictures of the great metal objects that Viktor had seen from space. It seemed that its handlers had been interested in two particular areas. In one there was a protruding edge of worn metal that Viktor thought might have been what was left of Ark’s lander; there was nothing else of interest nearby. The other was in very bad shape. The buildings seemed to have been blown up by some powerful explosion; but what that was about, too, Viktor could not learn.

Viktor stopped for a moment, listening. “Nrina?” he called. He thought he’d heard a sound somewhere in the other room, but it wasn’t repeated and he went back to the desk.

Then Viktor switched views. “Habitats,” he commanded, and his mentor provided him with the fact that there were more than eight hundred of them circling sullen, swollen Nergal. Then there were the natural moons human beings had colonized: Mary, Joseph, Mohammed, and Gautama were the important ones. (Sudden thrill almost of nostalgia: so some of the religious differences of frozen Newmanhome had persisted even here!)

Then he switched again, to study the other planets once more. Nothing had changed on most of them. Ishtar was still Ishtar, Marduk Marduk—gas giants with nothing much to recommend them—and Ninih, of course, was still too small and too far from the primary to be of interest to anybody. He stared briefly at the surface of ruddy Nergal (nothing much to look at but storms of superheated gases), then turned to the planet that mattered most to him: old, almost abandoned Newmanhome.

He caught his breath.

Newmanhome had changed again. It was reborn, all rolling seas, empty meadows, and young forests where the ice had gone—but it was not the Newmanhome he had lived on. It was scarred. During the glaciation all the planet’s liquid water had been ice, covering the continents. As it melted, it formed huge meltwater lakes, blocked by ice dams. When the dams broke through, great torrents had scoured out scablands all the way to the sea.

There was no trace left that Viktor could find of the docks for the ocean-going ships or the town. True, in the hills near where he thought Homeport might have been, trying to translate the desk’s coordinate system into his familiar navigation numbers, there was a cluster of buildings. But whether that was related to the old city he could not say.

This time he definitely heard the sound, and he could tell that it came from the kitchen.

“Who’s there?” he cried. He heard the freezer door close, but there was no other answer. Puzzled, Viktor went to the food room.

Someone was leaving through the other door—hastily, as though not wanting to be seen. Viktor stood there, blinking. The bowls had been refilled with fresh fruit. The scatter of used dishes he had left was gone.

So that, he thought dazedly, was how the housework got done. But how peculiar that it was done by someone squatter and broader than himself, wearing a grizzled gray fur coat.

 

Half an hour later Nrina came back, to be greeted by his questions. “Yes, of course,” she said, surprised he should ask. “Naturally we have someone to do things like that. Who would do them, otherwise? You saw one of the gillies.”

“Gillies?” Viktor repeated, and then blinked as he connected the sound of the word with the glimpses he had caught. “Do you mean gorillas?”

“They’re called ‘gillies,’ Viktor,” Nrina said impatiently. “I don’t know the word ‘gorilla.’ They are related to humans but without much intelligence—normally. Of course, we have modified them to be somewhat brighter—and quite a lot less belligerent and strong. Even so, they can’t speak.”

“You modified them?” he repeated.

“From genetic materials we found in the freezers, yes. Why not? Did you think I only made human beings?”

“I didn’t know what you made,” he said. He sounded aggrieved even to his own ears. He must have sounded so to Nrina, because she looked at him seriously for a moment.

Then she laughed. “Well,” she said, “why don’t I show you? Would you like to watch me work?”

 

Nrina was a creature shaper. Viktor began to realize that this woman was a major VIP, a star, famous through the habitats. She was remarkable even among the small number of greatly respected people who designed living architectures. The gorilla menials had come from their labs. So had the food animals and plants; so had the gorgeous and bizarre-smelling blossoms that decorated the spaces of their lives. Although their biggest business was making babies to order, she and her assistant, Dekkaduk, could make almost anything.

Dekkaduk was not pleased at Viktor’s visit. He insisted that Viktor wear the gauzy robe over his cache-sex, and then fussily demanded he wear a hat, too. “Who knows what parasites might be in that disgusting fur on his head?” Dekkaduk demanded. He was nearly bald himself.

“Why, Dekkaduk,” Nrina said, laughing, “probably about the same sorts of things as in my own hair. By now.” Dekkaduk flushed furiously.

Nevertheless, Viktor wore the cap.

When Dekkaduk considered Viktor sufficiently sanitary, he turned away, glowering, and started work. He used the desk keypad to set up a large picture on the wall screen. It was a three-D representation of a young woman. She looked something like Nrina, but her hair was cocoa where Nrina’s was butter, and her eyes were closer set. “Who is she?” Viktor asked politely, and Dekkaduk glared at him.

“You must not talk to us while we are working,” he scolded. “But I will answer this question for you. She is no one. She hasn’t been born yet. This is only what her parents want her to look like, and so we will arrange it. Now don’t ask more questions until we are through.”

So Viktor watched the image of the child who was not only not yet born but not even conceived, as Nrina and Dekkaduk matched the DNA strings that would produce that height, that color of eye, that taper of finger and that delicate arch of foot. That part of the process was not interesting for Viktor to watch, simply because he could not follow what was happening. Under the holographic image was a changing display of symbols and numbers—specifications, Viktor supposed, though he couldn’t read them. No doubt they had to do with not only external appearances but nerve structures and disposition and . . . well, who knew what characteristics these people would want in a child?

But whatever the desire was, Nrina could supply it. She had no problem preparing the genetic blueprint that filled the order, and then it was only a matter of cutting and splicing and matching in.

The things they did were not merely a matter of surface appearance. They weren’t even mostly surface appearance. The most important thing they built into every new baby was health.

There were all kinds of hereditary traits that had to be added or deleted or simply changed around a little. The effect was vast. The boys who came from Nrina’s laboratory would never lose their virility or develop that benign prostatic hyperplasia called “old men’s disease.” The girls, however long they lived, would never acquire the “widow’s hump” of osteoporosis. Bad genes were repaired on the spot.

Single-gene disorders were the easiest to deal with, of course. They came in three main kinds. There was the kind where a bad gene from either parent made the trouble; the recessive (or homozygous) kind where there wasn’t any trouble unless it came from both parents; and the X-linked recessives that affected only males. All Nrina had to do with such conditions was a little repair work. If there was something wrong with the Apo B, C, and E genes Nrina made it right—and reduced the risk of a future coronary. If the hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyl-transferase gene was defective, a good one was patched in, and the child would not have Lesch-Nyhan disease. Codon 12 of the c-K-ras gene could be supplemented with a single nucleotide, and therefore went the risk of most pancreatic carcinomas and a lot of the colorectal ones, too. So Nrina’s handmade children were exempt from many of the ills the flesh was (otherwise) heir to. No child born of their laboratory would ever have Epstein-Barr, or sickle-cell anemia, familial hypercholesterolemia, Huntington’s disease, hemophilia, or any other of the hereditary nasties. Their arteries shrugged cholesterol away. Their digestive tracts contained no appendix; there were no tonsils in their throats.

For that reason Nrina knew very little of surgery. In some ways her grasp of medical science was centuries behind old Earth’s—or even Newmanhome’s. Dealing with Viktor’s freezer-ulcerated leg was about as far as they could go. No one in Nrina’s world was competent to cut out a lung or chop a hole in a side for a colostomy bag. No one ever needed such things. Oh, they did die—sooner or later. But usually later; and usually because they were simply wearing out; and almost always because they knew that death was coming and chose not to stay around for the final decay.

When they had finished with the day’s production Viktor paused as he slipped out of his cloak. “Could you do anything you wanted to to them?” he asked. “I mean, could you give a baby six toes? Or two heads?”

Dekkaduk gave him an unforgiving look. “Thank you,” he said, “for reminding us how primitive you are. Of course we could, but we never would. Who would want it?”

Even Nrina sighed. “Sometimes you are almost too odd, Viktor,” she complained.

 

When Nrina at last pronounced Viktor’s brain as cloudless as it was likely to get (“You will not remember everything, Viktor, and you will seem to remember some things that never really happened . . . but only a little, I think”), he began to think seriously about his future.

The big question, of course, was what future did he have in this place?

Reason told Viktor that the fact that he had any future at all was a great, big plus. He took some comfort from that. Anyway, he didn’t need a lot of comforting, for making love to Nrina was a grand aspirin for all aches of the soul. Sometimes his trick memory would throw up a sudden misplaced image. Then he found himself thinking of lost Reesa, with a kind of melancholy ache that nothing was ever going to heal. That didn’t last, and meanwhile Nrina was there. She was willing and adventurous in bed, and when they were not making love she was—well, much of the time—affectionate, kind, and friendly.

It was true that she was simply not interested in some of the things that mattered to Viktor. The mystery of what had happened to the universe, for instance. Of course, she pointed out, there should be plenty of material on just about everything somewhere in the teaching files, if Viktor wanted to use them. He could even use her own desk, she added—when she wasn’t using it herself, of course. When Viktor complained that the mentor didn’t seem able to turn up the really interesting stuff, Nrina even took time to try to instruct him in some of the desk’s refinements.

The desk really was a desk—sort of. At least, it looked like a kind of old-fashioned draftsman’s table. It was a broad, flat rectangle, tipped at an angle, with a kneeling stool before it and a kind of keypad in the lower left-hand corner. The symbols on the keys meant nothing at all to Viktor, but Nrina, leaning gently over his shoulder and smelling sweetly of her unusual perfume and herself, showed him how to work the pads. “Can you read the letters, at least?” she asked.

“No. Well, maybe. I think so,” he said, squinting. “Some of them, anyway.” The written language had not changed a great deal, but it had become phonetic; the alphabet had eleven new letters. Nrina rapidly scrolled down to “cosmology,” after getting Viktor to try spelling it in the new alphabet.

Nothing appeared in the screen.

“That is quite strange,” she said. “Perhaps we’re spelling it wrong.” But though they tried half a dozen different ways, the desk obstinately refused them all. Nor was it any more help with “time dilation” or “relativistic effects” or even “quantum mechanics.”

“What a pity,” Nrina sighed. “We must be doing something wrong.”

“Thanks,” Viktor said glumly.

“Oh, don’t be unhappy,” she said, cajoling. Then she brightened. “There are other things you can do,” she said. “Have you ever tried calling anyone? A person, I mean? I have to call Pelly anyway. Here, let me show you how to call.”

“You mean like a telephone?”

“What is ‘telephone’? Never mind, I’ll show you.” She tapped the keypad, got a scroll, stopped it at that name, and tapped the name. As Viktor opened his mouth she said quickly, “This is my personal directory—there’s also a general one which I will show you how to use, but I don’t use the big one when I don’t have to. Would you? Wait a minute, here he is.”

The desk went pale and opaque; on the black space on the wall behind it the face of a man formed pumpkin fat, with a pumpkin smile. “Pelly?” Nrina said. “Yes, of course, it’s Nrina. This is my friend Viktor—you saw him before, of course.”

“Of course, but he was frozen then,” the pumpkin grinned. “Hello, Viktor.”

“Hello,” Viktor said, since it seemed to be expected of him.

Nrina went right on. “Your gillies are ready,” she told the man. “And a couple of the donors want to go back. When will you leave?”

“Six days,” the man said. “How many gillies?”

“Twenty-two, fourteen of them female. I hope I’ll see you before you go?”

“I hope so. Nice meeting you—I mean alive, Viktor,” Pelly said, and was gone.

“You see how it works? You can call anyone that way. Anyone in our orbits, anyway—it’s harder when they’re in space or on Newmanhome. Then you have to allow for transmission time, you see.”

But Viktor had no one to call. “What did he mean when he said he saw me when I was frozen?” he asked.

“That’s Pelly,” she explained. “He pilots spaceships. He’s the one who brought you and the others back from Newmanhome.” Then she said, remembering, “Oh, yes. He’s been to Nebo, too. If you’re so interested in it, you can ask him about it if we see him.”

 

With the clues Nrina had given him, Viktor managed to work the directory himself. The desk gave more than a “phone number.” It told him about Pelly: space captain; resident, generally, of Moon Gautama, but most of the time somewhere between the orbiting habitats and the other planets of the system.

He was poring over the views of Nebo again when Nrina came back, surprised to see him still bent over the desk. “Still at it, Viktor? But I’m tired; I’d like to rest now.” And she glanced toward the bed.

“There are a lot of things I still want to know, Nrina,” he said obstinately. “About Pelly, for instance. Why is he so fat?”

“So he can get around on Newmanhome, of course,” Nrina explained. “He has to have supplements to build up his muscles—”

“Steroids?” Viktor guessed.

Nrina looked pleased. “Well, something like that, yes. And calcium binders so his bones won’t break too easily, and all sorts of other things. You’ve seen how Dekkaduk looks? And he’s only been to Newmanhome a few times, collecting specimens—” She looked embarrassed. “Bringing back people for me, I mean.”

“Like me.”

“Well, yes, of course like you. Anyway, Pelly goes there all the time. It makes him look gross, of course, which is why I would never— Oh, Viktor, I didn’t mean it that way. After all, you were born like that.”

He let that pass. “And did Pelly really land on Nebo?”

“You mean in person? Certainly not. No one has done that for many years.”

“But people have landed there?”

Nrina sighed. “Yes, certainly. Several times.”

“But not anymore?”

“Viktor,” she said sensibly, “of course not. What would be the point? There’s air, but it’s foul; the heat is awful. And the gravity crushes you to walk there, Viktor—well, not you, no, but any normal person. It’s much stronger than on a Moon. It’s almost as bad as Newmanhome, but at least Newmanhome has a decent climate.”

“But Nrina! There may be people on Nebo. Some of my own friends landed there—”

“Yes, and never came back. I know. You told me,” Nrina said. “Isn’t that a good enough reason to stay away?”

“But somebody made those machines. Not human, no.”

“There’s no one there. We’ve looked. Just the old machines.”

“And have the machines been investigated scientifically?”

She frowned. “I don’t know what you mean by ‘scientifically.’ Some people were interested in them, yes. They even brought some small things back to study—I remember Pelly had a piece of metal he showed me once.”

Viktor inhaled sharply. “Can I see the things? Are they in a museum?”

But Nrina only laughed when he tried to explain what a museum was like, from his fading memories of the Los Angeles Art Museum and the La Brea Tar Pits. “Keep all those dirty things around? But why, Viktor? No one should keep trash. We’d just be choking on our own old worn-out things! No, I’m sure they were studied at the time. No doubt there are assay reports and probably pictures of them somewhere—you can use the desk to see what they look like, and I think a few people like Pelly might have a few little bits for curios. But we certainly don’t have a place where we keep such things, and besides—”

She looked suddenly harsh, almost as though both frightened and angry. “Besides,” she finished, “those hideous metal things are dangerous. That’s why no one lands there anymore. People got killed there!”

And then, reluctantly, she went to the desk and showed him what had happened, more than a century before. A ship landing on Nebo. People coming out of it, grotesque in metallized film suits to keep out the heat and helmets to give them air to breathe; they approached one of the mauve pyramids, half-buried in the shifting sands of Nebo. They were trying to drill a way in—

And then it exploded.

Of the pyramid itself nothing at all was left; it simply was vaporized. No more of the people. A few fragments of nearby objects, blasted in the explosion, littered the sands.

When he looked up he saw that Nrina had averted her eyes. “Turn it off,” she ordered. “Those people were killed.”

He surrendered. She came closer, smiling down at him. “That’s better,” she said softly, leaning against his shoulder.

He didn’t resist. He didn’t encourage her either. “All right, Nrina, I see what happened, but it doesn’t tell me anything. What are those machines?”

“But no one knows that, Viktor,” she said patiently. “And it isn’t very interesting.”

“It is to me! I want to know what they were there for—who built them—how they work. All this ‘what’ stuff is very interesting, of course, but can’t I ever find out a ‘why’?”

“Why what, Viktor?” she asked kindly, stroking his stubbly cheek. “Wouldn’t you like to grow a beard? Most men do, if they can.”

“No, I don’t want to grow a beard. Please don’t change the subject. I mean I want to know why things happen—the theoretical explanation behind the things I see.”

“I don’t think those words mean anything,” she said, frowning. “I understand ‘theory,’ of course. That is the background of genetics, the rules that tell us what to expect when, for instance, we strip a certain nucleotide out of a gene and patch in another.”

“Yes, exactly! That’s what I mean! What I’m looking for is something on astronomical theory.”

Nrina shook her head. “I have never heard of any ‘astronomical’ theories, Viktor.”

 

When Viktor came home from a ramble Nrina was waiting for him. “I have something to show you,” she said mysteriously, pleased with herself. “Come into my room.”

There she surprised him. She opened a compartment in the wall. It revealed itself as a little cage, with something moving beyond the wire mesh. Nrina reached into it and drew out something tiny and soft.

It moved comfortably in her hand. “Tell me, Viktor,” she said, hesitating as though worried at what his answer might be. “Have you ever seen one of these things before?”

“Of course I have!” He let her give him the furry little thing. “It’s a kitten!”

“Exactly,” she said triumphantly, observing as he stroked its fur. “Does it enjoy that?” she inquired.

“Most cats do. Where did you get it? I thought they were extinct!”

She looked gratified. “Indeed they were,” she said, graciously acknowledging the remarkable nature of her feat. “I made it. There were some frozen specimens of feline sperm Pelly found when he brought you back.” Experimentally she stroked the kitten as Viktor had done. Viktor could hear nothing, but the nerve endings of his hand informed him of the creature’s silent, tiny purr. “It’s always a worry,” she said, “when you don’t have any female genetic material for a new species. Oh, it’s easy enough to structure an artificial ovum, but when the animal is something you’ve never seen before you have to wonder if you’ve got it exactly right.”

Viktor stroked the soft, wriggly little thing and handed it back to her. “I’d say that looks like the rightest little kitten I’ve ever seen,” he pronounced.

She accepted the compliment gracefully. “I’m going to give it to a little boy I know.” Carefully she returned it to its cage, closing the door.

Viktor shook his head, marveling. “I knew you designed children. I knew you created intelligent gorillas—”

“Gillies, Viktor.”

“—intelligent gillies for servants. I didn’t know you could make just about anything you could imagine.”

She considered that for a moment. “Oh, not anything,” she decided. “Some things are physically impossible—or, anyway, I could make them, but they wouldn’t survive. But this is the most interesting part of my work, Viktor. It’s why anyone bothers to go to Newmanhome, really. There’s a whole biota in those freezers on Newmanhome, you know. We don’t know half of what’s there. Even when there’s a label we can’t always be sure of what’s inside, because they got pretty sloppy about keeping records for a while. So when I have a chance I match up sperm and ova—when I can—or find some related genetic material that I can tinker into being cross-fertile. Like this.”

“Do you sell them, like a pet store?”

“I don’t know what a pet store is, and I certainly don’t ‘sell’ them, any more than I sell the babies. If someone wants them I get credit for my time.” She sighed. “It doesn’t always work. Sometimes I can’t find a match or even make one; a lot of the specimens are spoiled, and it’s terribly hard to reconstitute them. And then, even when we do get an interesting neonate, we can’t always feed them. Especially the invertebrates; some of them are really specialized in diet, they just won’t eat what we try to give them. So they die.” She grinned. “Babies are a lot easier.”

That was probably true, Viktor reflected, since the real human fetuses never appeared in Nrina’s laboratory as born babies. Gestation and birthing weren’t her problems. What she produced was a neat little plastic box, thermally opaque so it didn’t need either warming or cooling for forty-eight hours or so, containing a fertilized ovum and enough nutrient fluid to keep it alive until the proud parents could put it in their own incubator. “Don’t you ever want to see the real babies?” Viktor asked her curiously.

“What for?” Nrina asked, surprised at the question. “Babies are very messy creatures, Viktor. Oh, I like to hear how they turn out and I’m always glad to get pictures of them—every artist wants to see how his work turns out. But the only ones I ever wanted to be around for more than a day were my own.” Then she was surprised again at the expression on his face. “Didn’t you know? I’ve had two children. One of them was just a favor to her father, so I didn’t keep her very long. He wanted something to remember me by, you see. Her name’s Oclane and, let’s see, she must be fourteen or fifteen by now. She’s on Moon Joseph, but she comes to visit me sometimes. She’s a pretty little girl. Very bright, of course. I think she looks a lot like me.”

“I didn’t know,” Viktor said, hastily revising his internal image of Nrina. He had thought of her as many things, but never as a mother—not even as one of those mothers of the present new-fangled variety, who picked out specifications for their offspring and never went through the uncouth bother of pregnancy. Then he remembered her words. “You said you had two children. What about the other one?”

She laughed. “But you know him very well, Viktor. Who did you think Dekkaduk was?”

 

The next time Viktor saw Dekkaduk he looked at the man with new interest. Dekkaduk did, Viktor decided, more or less resemble Nrina—but then, all these people resembled each other to his eyes, in the same way that all Westerners looked alike to most Chinese. What Dekkaduk didn’t look like at all was anyone young enough to be a child of Nrina’s.

There was an answer to that, too: Viktor realized he had no idea at all of Nrina’s age. She could have been a youthful, good-looking forty—Newmanhome years, of course. She could equally well have been a very well preserved hundred or more. None of these people ever looked old.

In bed she was definitely ageless.

Viktor took much pleasure in that part of their intimacy. Still, there were times when he felt a kind of submerged resentment that his main reason for living was to provide a little sexual excitement for a woman he hardly knew. There were even times when he remembered that he had once had a wife. Then, sometimes, a gloom descended over him that was like the suffocating withdrawal of all air, like all the light in the world going out at once.

But there were other times that were not gloomy at all. Nrina was a splendid aspirin for all those passing aches of the soul.

Apart from all her other virtues, Nrina was deeply fascinated with Viktor’s body. It wasn’t just sex she wanted from him. She wanted to prod and squeeze and feel his archaic flesh, though of course she often wanted sex, too. She could be happy for half an hour at a time as they lay naked together, experiencing the flexing of his muscles. Not just his biceps, but his forearm, his thigh, his neck, all the muscles he could flex at all, while she held her hand on them to feel them swell. “And they’re natural, Viktor, truly?”

Grunting. “Of course they’re natural. Only please, Nrina, don’t squeeze so hard on my sore leg.”

“Oh, of course.” And then a moment later, “And this hair here? Did everyone have it in your time?” But Viktor had always been ticklish in the armpits, and of course that ticklishness led to tickling back, which led to other things. Or she would minutely inspect the brownish spots on the back of his hand, touching them gently in case they were painful. “What are they, Viktor?” she asked, stretching behind her to reach for something he could not see.

“We call them freckles,” he grinned. “Although—well, maybe those are a little more than just freckles. People get them when they get older. They’re what we call ‘age spots’ then. They’re perfectly natural—hey! Ouch!” But she had been too quick for him, jabbing the back of his hand with the sharp little metal probe she had pulled from nowhere.

“Don’t make such a fuss,” she ordered, carefully putting her cell sample away. “Here, let me kiss it.”

And then, after a little study in her laboratory, she told him they were simply degenerated collagen. “I could clear those spots up for you if you wanted me to, Viktor,” she offered.

He reached out to touch her body, not naked this time, but with only the flimsy gauze and the cache-sex to modify it. She turned comfortably beside him, taking her ease on a fluff of airy pillows beside him. Her skin was quite flawless. “Do they offend you?” he asked.

“Of course not! Your body does not offend me!”

“Then why don’t we just leave them alone?” And wryly Viktor reflected that this was a strange relationship, in which she was almost entirely absorbed in his body, while he was desperate for everything that was in her mind.

Her body she let him have almost any time he chose—usually she chose first, in fact. Her mind was another matter. Viktor didn’t feel that Nrina closed him out, or went out of her way to keep information from him. It was simply that so many of the things he wanted to know bored her. “Yes, yes, Viktor,” she would sigh, while he was thumping excitedly on the desk screen. “I see what you are showing me. There used to be more stars.”

“Many more!” he would answer, scowling at the impoverished sky below him. But she would yawn, and perhaps put her hand in a place that made him pay attention to other things again. What was thrillingly, even frighteningly, strange to Viktor was only the natural order of things to Nrina. It was as if someone from Tahiti had seen snow for the first time: The Eskimos wouldn’t have understood his feelings.

When Nrina came back from her lab and found Viktor absorbed over the desk she was tolerant about it, usually. She stripped off her robe and sat beside him. He could certainly feel bare body touching bare body, but it did not keep him from concentrating on the desk instead of the touch of flesh. “It’s nice that you have an interest,” Nrina observed philosophically.

He tried again. “Nrina, I’m certain that some very strange things have happened. Don’t you want to know about them? Don’t you even wonder?”

“It’s not my line of work, Viktor,” she said, looking slightly ruffled.

He said in bafflement, “The universe has died around us. We’ve been kidnapped. Time stopped for us—”

She was yawning. “Yes, I know. The other savages—sorry, Viktor. The other people from the freezer talk about that sometimes, too. They call it ‘God the Transporter’ or some such thing. A silly superstition! As if there were some supernatural being who moved stars around just for fun!”

“Then what is the explanation?”

“It doesn’t need an explanation. It just is.” She shrugged. “It just isn’t a very interesting subject, Viktor. No one really cares except— Oh, wait a minute,” she said, suddenly sitting up and looking pleased. “I almost forgot Frit!”

Viktor blinked up at her. “What’s a frit?” he asked.

“Frit isn’t a what, he’s a who. Frit and Forta. I designed their son for them. They’re old friends of mine. Matter of fact, it’s Balit—that’s their boy—who I made that kitten for; he’ll be twenty soon, and it’s time for his coming-of-age presents.” She thought for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, I’m sure Frit knows all about that sort of thing. He’d be interested in you, probably. And he and Forta have been together nearly thirty years now, and we still keep in touch.”

Viktor sat up straight. He had the tingling, electrical feeling that all at once, without his having anticipated it at all, a goal for his life had been given to him. “How can I reach this Frit?” he demanded.

She looked doubtful. “Well, he’s very busy, but I suppose you could call him up,” she said, then suddenly brightened. “I know!” she cried. “Why don’t we go to Balit’s party?”

“Balit’s party?”

“Balit’s Frit’s son. They live on Moon Mary. No, wait a minute,” she corrected herself. “They do live on Mary, but I think they told me they’re having the party on Frit’s family’s habitat.” She nodded to herself as the details of her inspiration were coming clear to her. “Dekkaduk can handle things here for a couple of days. It would be a nice trip for you, and I ought to take Pelly’s gillies there anyway—that’s where his ship is. And I’m sure they’d be glad to have us, and then you can talk to Frit all you want.” She gave Viktor’s thigh a decisive pat, pleased with her idea. “We’ll do it! And don’t ask me any more questions now, Viktor. Just believe me, it’ll be fun!”

 

 

 

CHAPTER 23