The World at the End of Time

CHAPTER 16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hello," he said, forcing a smile. "I'm Viktor. Which one are you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And when will that be?"

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

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

"The universe, yes," she said, nodding encouragingly.

"That's what I mean. Why do you call it the universe?"

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

He blinked at her. "No longer true?"

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

"Why not?" he demanded. "Can't we talk while we work?"

"We don't," she whispered, looking agonizedly toward the returning workers.

"But I do," he said, smiling.

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

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

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

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

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

He didn't finish, because Mirian gave him an unfriendly look. "No," Mirian said, crossing himself.

"No what?" Viktor asked plaintively.

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

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

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

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

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

"Of course, I know that, but what I want to know—"

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

"Why do you have to be so nasty?"

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

Viktor was puzzled. "Paying how?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But was that really a "life"?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She had.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reesa was there.

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

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

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

"Are you all right?" he whispered into his wife's fine, warm-smelling hair.

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

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

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

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

He stared at her. "You knew that?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then what's the matter with you?"

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

"Wondering about what?"

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

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!"