The World at the End of Time

CHAPTER 10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"For what?" Viktor demanded, astonished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But we're digging more geothermal shafts," Viktor objected.

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

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

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

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

Viktor didn't let him finish. "I want to go along," he declared.

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

"And then what?" Viktor demanded.

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

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

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

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

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

"I hope Edwina's keeping the kids covered up," Reesa murmured.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The slow way," Bu sneered.

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

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

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

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

"What stars?" Reesa asked.

"Our own stars! The ones that aren't shifting. They aren't any dimmer, are they?"

"They don't look that way," Billy Stockbridge said cautiously. "What about it?"

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

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

"It's worse than that, Captain," Billy Stockbridge put in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Billy pursed his lips. "That's true." And that was all he said.

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

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

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

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

"What labels?" Viktor demanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What sorts of things?"

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

"Why do you think it's crazy?" Lundy asked, sounding interested and not at all defensive.

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

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

"Why?"

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

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

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

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

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

"On what? On taking Ark to Nebo?"

Lundy shrugged.

"And you've been planning this for—how long?" Viktor demanded.

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

"I don't know," Viktor said wretchedly.

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