The World at the End of Time

CHAPTER 15

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

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

Then he began to have problems of another kind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that was all right; he had got away.

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

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

But at least he would be safe.

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

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