The World at the End of Time

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.