The World at the End of Time

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.