The World at the End of Time

CHAPTER 20

Viktor knew he was waking up when he discovered that he was dreaming—there are no dreams in the brain of a corpsicle. What he was dreaming was about flying, and about pain.

The pain was very definite and unpleasant. It was not a nice dream, and he was glad, though very fuzzy in his mind, when he woke up.

Viktor was aware that he was definitely awake then, because when he tried to open his eyes, they were stuck. He had to strain to squint out of them. "Mom?" he asked of the thin, amused woman who was leaning over him. "Mom, are we there yet?"

He realized right away that that was foolish of him. The woman definitely wasn't his mother—wasn't anything like his mother, really. She was very tall and painfully thin, and she had great, round eyes. Viktor saw the eyes quite clearly, although he was having some annoying trouble in seeing anything else. His own eyes did not seem to want to focus clearly, and his head … his head hurt like hell.

The woman turned and said something quick, liquid, and murmurous. It was not in any language Viktor knew, although parts of it came close to making sense—as English might have sounded, perhaps, if it had been cooed by pigeons. She was speaking to someone Viktor could not see very well. Then she reached down and touched the side of Viktor's head, as though pointing something out to the unseen person.

It was probably a gentle touch, but it didn't feel that way. It told Viktor right away his dream of pain had not been entirely a dream.

The woman's touch exploded through his head like a hammer blow, dizzying him. He jerked away from that probing finger—and found that the dream of flying was not altogether an illusion, either. He moved so easily, with so little force dragging at his body, that he knew that he couldn't be on Newmanhome. In fact, he couldn't be on any planet at all; he didn't weigh enough.

Viktor let himself fall gently back, hazily pondering the problem. The woman and the other person—a man's voice, not so much cooing as harshly gargling the sounds—were carrying on a conversation in the language that Viktor could not quite comprehend. If he wasn't on a planet, he thought, he was probably on a ship. What ship? Not Ark, certainly; there was nothing left of Ark but droplets of condensed metal, if any of Ark was left at all. Not old Mayflower, either, he was sure of that. There was nothing on Mayflower like this amber-walled room with its soft clouds of pastel light drifting across the ceiling. Some things looked somewhat familiar—the thing he was lying on, for instance. It was very much like the shallow pan that corpsicles were thawed in, and he caught a quick glimpse of several others like it in the room. They were occupied. There was a human body in each, and warming radiation flooding down on them: he was not the only person being brought back to life, he thought, pleased with his cleverness at observing that.

But where was all this happening?

And what was hurting him so much? As the explosion of pain in his skull dwindled again he became aware of two other hurting places—a mean, burning sensation in his right leg below the knee, and a sharper, smaller, but still very painful, hurt in his buttock. None of it made any sense to Viktor. Nothing else did, either. "Sense" was beyond him; he was dazed, confused, disoriented, and he was even having trouble remembering. On all the evidence, he was quite sure he had just been thawed out from a time in the freezer. But he remembered, or thought he remembered, that he had been frozen before. More than once, he thought, and which time was this? He reasoned that it couldn't have been the times when he was facing a long interstellar flight, because he had been a child then. He wasn't a child anymore, of course. Was he? And who was this woman, who was now coaxing him to lie down again?

The name "Reesa" crossed his foggy mind, but he didn't think this woman was she—whoever "Reesa" was.

He shook his head to try to dispel the confusion. That turned out to be a bad mistake; the pain burst through him again. But he felt the need to demonstrate his wakeful competence at once, like someone waked in the middle of the night by the telephone who instantly protests he wasn't asleep. He licked his lips, getting ready to speak.

"I don't feel very well," he said, forming the sentence with care.

Funnily, the words didn't come out right. It was more like an animal growl than a voice. He discovered that his throat, too, was extraordinarily sore.

The woman looked amused again and gestured to the man with her in the room. The man, Viktor saw, was quite normal-looking—neither as wraithfully thin nor as tall—but he wore what the woman wore, a sort of gossamer gown. He turned out to be quite strong. He pushed Viktor back down, holding him so that the woman could do something to him again.

The woman leaned close to Viktor. With her came a fragrance half like flowers, half like distant wood smoke.

Her nearness made Viktor suddenly aware that he was quite naked. The woman didn't seem to notice, or at least to care. She peered into his eyes. She touched the base of his throat with an instrument that glittered like metal but was soft and warm to the touch, while she studied a tiny, dancing firework display of color at the instrument's base.

Then she pulled down his lower lip. Instinctively he tried to twist his head away—again that explosion of pain!—but the man in the filmy gown gripped his head roughly, holding it immobile while the woman touched the damp, tender inside of Viktor's lip with some other kind of thing, and Viktor went quickly and helplessly to sleep.

When he woke up again he was alone in the room. Even the other resuscitation pans were empty.

His head still hurt, but the other pains were gone—well, not gone entirely, but now they were only little annoyances rather than agony. When he sat up he saw that his right calf, from knee to ankle, was encased in some sort of a pale pink sausagelike contrivance. He puzzled over that for a while, poking at it with a finger. He didn't understand it. He didn't understand much of anything at all; everything seemed so complicated. The way he felt, he thought, was almost like being drunk.

He tried to recollect how he had got here. There was a memory of being told he had to go back in the freezer …

Yes, that was true, he was pretty sure. It wasn't a comforting thought, though. He had a vague memory about freezing, something that someone had told him—was her name Wanda?—long before. It did not do to be frozen too many times. That he was sure of, though what it meant was very unclear.

He heard a man's voice growling something from the doorway, and when he looked around it was the fellow in the gown, looking at him. "You're awake," the man said—wonderfully, in words that Viktor understood. "Stay there. I'll see if Nrina wants to look at you."

Viktor made himself sit up. At least some questions were beginning to be clear. For some reason these people had decided to revive him from cryonic suspension. All right, he could understand that. He wondered how long he had been in the freezer this time. It couldn't be a matter of centuries again, of course. He simply would not accept that. But it had been long enough, at least, for the Reforms, or whoever's turn it was at the power plant detail this time, to get a little decent heat in the freezatorium. (But hadn't he just decided he wasn't in the freezatorium anymore? He wasn't sure.) And, if these people actually were Reforms, or if they were any other sect from frozen Newmanhome for that matter, they'd certainly changed their mode of dress. The man was taking off the filmy robe, and under it he wore nothing but a kind of kilt. Then, when the impossibly thin woman came back, Viktor observed that the gown she was wearing was the kind of clothing one wore for decoration or for modesty—well, no, not for modesty either, he thought; but certainly not for keeping out the cold. The thing was a long white smock, almost transparent, and he could clearly see that there was nothing much under it.

The woman looked different, though. She seemed to be more fretful and tired than when he had first seen her, as though she had been working hard, and the silky, gossamer gown was soiled with new spots of blood.

When he shifted position to look at her he thought to look down at himself, and was suddenly ashamed of his nakedness. Then, twisting for a better look, he saw that there was a wound on his right buttock. That was where one of the pains he had almost forgotten had come from. It wasn't an insect bite, but a sort of stab wound in the flesh. Someone had put some soft, rubbery film over it, transparent, almost invisible. The film peeled away easily when he poked at it, and under the dressing the wound was still oozing blood.

The skinny woman pushed his hand away, clucking reprovingly at him.

The man came over and firmly pressed the padding back in place. "Damn it! Leave it alone, can't you?" he said irritably. "Now sit still. Nrina's got to examine you to see if there's any more freezer burn, so you just let her do it, all right? I've got to check on the others."

Viktor puzzled earnestly over all of that. He understood all the words, though they had a strange quality, as though they had come from afar. But whatever was wrong with Viktor's head kept him from putting them together to make any kind of coherent picture. "Freezer burn—" Viktor began, but the man was already gone.

Lacking any better alternatives that he could see, Viktor did as he was told. He let the woman peer into his eyes, touch him in all sorts of personal places with her shiny instruments with their rainbow lights, lift up a corner of the pale pink sausage on his leg and peer under it, and finally replace it, looking satisfied. She patted his head—so gently, this time, that it didn't send him into a blaze of new pain.

Then she beckoned him to follow her.

He tried. He did his best, but his best wasn't very good. The right side of his head felt numb, and his right leg wouldn't support him, even in the astonishingly light gravity of the place they were in. She had to let him lean on her as they walked—it was more like gliding in a dream; like getting about in a spaceship under microdrive—through an amber-walled corridor, to their first stop.

The first stop was a tiny room containing an amber, glassy bowl in which water gently whirled. Viktor identified it easily enough: a toilet.

Viktor had not forgotten that he was quite naked, though the woman didn't seem interested in that fact. Neither did she watch him while, embarrassed, he relieved himself, nor on the other hand did she specially look away. The second stop was a shower. He looked at it doubtfully. He wasn't sure how to make it work, and he wasn't sure he could stand alone in it.

When he tried it, the leg, at least, was feeling stronger. The woman turned the shower on for him. He limped inside, bracing himself against the soft, shiny wall of the cubicle. As the gentle, warm cascade began to pour over him it was so relaxing that he found that he was actually enjoying it.

When Viktor came out of the shower the woman handed him a round, soft towel for drying himself. "Thank you," he said hoarsely, rubbing his face.

The woman looked pleased, as though at a dog that had given an appreciative woof. But when he pointed at the dressings on leg and hip, trying to ask if they had been harmed by the shower, she only shrugged, either uncomprehending or just not interested in his question.

The third stop they made was stranger and a lot less pleasant.

The woman abandoned him in another room, to the care of a different man. This one was almost as skinny as herself, though he did have some strangely knotted muscles—whereas the woman's calves were like pencils and she had no visible biceps at all. The man gestured Viktor to a seat in something that looked like a dentist's chair.

When Viktor sat down as ordered, the arms of the thing quite suddenly swung out and wrapped themselves around him. He couldn't move. At the same time something else slipped around his head and gripped it as in a vise. It wasn't painful, but it wasn't resistible, either. Then the man approached Viktor with a different kind of a glittery instrument.

He touched it to Viktor's forehead.

This metallic thing wasn't soft at all. It bit into the flesh of Viktor's forehead and stung like a wasp. Viktor shouted in surprise and tried to struggle. That was no use. He was held fast. When the man took the instrument away the spot itched terribly, like a bee sting; but then the man sprayed the spot where he had been working with a different kind of metallic thing. The itching stopped at once, and the man touched something that caused the chair to release Viktor.

That ruled out the cloudy theory Viktor had just begun to formulate provisionally, that these people had thawed him out for the purpose of a little recreational torture. Then the man led him, stepping in long, gentle, high-rising paces, to another chamber, where he shoved Viktor inside and closed the door behind him.

Viktor looked around him. He was in a room with a number of flimsy-looking chairs (perhaps a waiting room?) and a kind of glass-topped desk (but it showed no other signs of being an office). Glassware and some metallic things sat under a mirror that was set against one wall, but it wasn't, as far as Viktor could decide, a laboratory.

He was not alone in it. Three other men, as naked as Viktor himself, were sitting uneasily in the frail chairs, talking to each other in worried, low tones. One of the men was black, one short and pale. The third was also pale but taller than Viktor and hugely built; and all three had the human-scale bodily form Viktor was used to, not the famine-victim limbs and structure of the woman who had thawed him out.

As Viktor came in, all three of the men looked quickly up at him with a fearful sort of suspicion in their eyes. Then their expressions cleared quickly, as though they had recognized him.

Well, they couldn't have. Viktor knew that. He was quite sure they were all total strangers to him; but then he saw that each of them bore a bright blue device tattooed on their foreheads, and in the wall mirror he caught a glimpse of the same design on his own. It was an elliptical border enclosing some hen-scratchings that might have been numbers or words.

It was that tattoo that they had recognized. They all wore the same brand. So they were all in the same boat—whatever that boat was.

The tall man got up, offering a hand to shake. "Welcome to the party," he said, in the quick, rough English of the quarreling sects of frozen Newmanhome. "What did you get the freeze for?"

Viktor puzzled over the meaning of what the man had just said to him, rubbing the mark on his forehead absently. When he had put it together, through the cloud that seemed to pervade his mind, he rehearsed for a moment, then managed a full sentence. "They just didn't like me," he croaked.

"Mary!" the black one said. "When did they start doing it for that? I got my own freeze in three eighty-six, but at least I had a trial. They said it was for unauthorized parenting. Well, it was just her word against mine, but what could I do? Jeren here was frozen for drunkenness, and Mescro got it for thievery—"

The short, pale man cut in, scowling. "Watch your mouth, Korelto! I didn't steal anything. I just made a mistake and went through the meal line twice—it could've happened to anybody when they were on overload!"

"Does it matter?" The black man smiled. "Only it looks to me as though things must've got really bad by the time they froze you—uh—"

It took Viktor a moment to realize he was being asked his name. "Ah, Viktor," he got out.

The black man—Korelto?—looked at him searchingly, then glanced at his companions. "Are you all right?" he asked.

"He's a dummy," the short one named Mescro declared.

"Aw, no," the big one said. He looked down at the floor, as though abashed at his own temerity in trying to contradict the other. "He's just, you know, mixed up." He looked up appealingly at Viktor, then at the doorway. "Isn't that true, Manett?" he asked.

The man who had been in the thawing-out room stood there, gazing at them without pleasure. "No, Jeren, he's a dummy, all right," Manett confirmed. "Nrina says he's got freezer burn. Looks like it got his leg and his brain. But he'll do for what Nrina wants him for."

There was a satisfied, challenging look on his face that made the black man ask worriedly, "What's that, Manett?"

"That's what you're about to find out, guys," Manett said, with the pleasure of an old hand breaking in the new recruits. "It's time for you to pay for your thawing out."

"Pay how?" the little thief named Mescro demanded. "And what's going on, anyway?"

Manett pursed his lips thoughtfully. "Well, I'm willing to clue you in first," he said, hiking himself up on one of the benches to lecture. "Only don't interrupt, because you've got to earn your pay in a few minutes; Nrina's waiting for the stuff. Let's see. My name's Manett, I told you that, and I'm your boss. That's the most important thing you have to remember. It means you do everything I tell you, understand that? You'll be seeing a lot of me for a while. Then, next thing, probably you'll want to know the date. All right. It's the forty-fourth of Summer, in the year forty-two hundred and fifty-one A.L." There were gasps at that—Viktor was only one of the ones gasping—but Manett quelled it with a frown and went on. "Next: What's going to happen to you? Nothing bad. You'll be all right. Don't worry about that. You'll stay here for a few days, as long as Nrina wants you. You'll have to start learning the language while you're here, but that's pretty easy. You'll see. Then you'll go to live in another habitat, probably—I don't know which one—"

"Hey!" Korelto interrupted. "Hold on a minute! What's a habitat?"

Manett gave him a mean look. "Didn't I tell you not to interrupt? This is a habitat. What you're living in now. Anyway, what happens when you leave here I don't exactly know—I've never been on any habitat but this one, but Dekkaduk and Nrina say you'll be okay. You might as well believe them—you don't have any other choice, do you? Anyway, right after you do what you're here for we'll get something to eat and then I'll have more time, all right? Now," he said, standing up, "it's time to earn your pay. So will you get up, all of you, and go over there and take one of those specimen bottles each? And then, what you do, you each jack off into it, and be sure you don't spill a drop."

The fuzziness in Viktor's brain wasn't altogether a disadvantage right then, he thought. The thing he was told to do was degrading, and it made him feel ashamed and angry. If he had felt really sober he would have been twice as humiliated at what he was made to do.

But he did it. So did all three of the others, as startled as Viktor at the bizarre orders. They grumbled and tried to joke while they did it, but the jokes were resentful and nobody laughed.

Viktor was still trying to sort out the dreamy maze in his mind. There were so many questions! It was hard even to form them, but some stood out. For one: What was "freezer burn"? Viktor knew he'd heard the words before, and he knew they meant something bad. He just didn't know what. He knew that he could have asked the others, but he wasn't ready to do that—wasn't ready to hear the answer, perhaps.

Then there was that other big question. When Manett told them the date, was he joking?

It couldn't really be nearly four thousand years since he'd last been alive. Could it?

He cursed the fogginess in his brain then. He wanted to think. There were things he had forgotten, and he wanted them back! The things he did remember were fragmentary and unsatisfying …

They weren't pleasing, either.

He did remember, cloudily, waking up from a different freezing—had it been in old Ark? (He did remember the old interstellar ship Ark, though the memory was peculiarly fragmentary. It was almost as though there had been two different ships.) That time it had been a terrible shock. To have learned that everyone he had known was four hundred Newmanhome years dead had been numbing.

But at least then he had recognized the sensation. He had known that he felt numb.

To find out that another four thousand years, nearly, had passed while he lay as a lump of dreamless and unfeeling ice—why, it felt like nothing at all. He didn't feel pain. He didn't even feel the numbness. He didn't feel at all.

When they had embarrassedly made their donations of sperm, the trusty named Manett showed them to their quarters. Food was waiting for them, fresh fruits and things like meat patties and things like little cakes—and things Viktor could hardly recognize at all, some cold, some hot, some tasting nasty to his untrained palate.

"You're on your own time now," Manett announced. "You have to start learning to talk to these people pretty soon, but right now all you have to do is eat."

The tall man named Jeren cleared his throat and whispered apologetically, "Do we get paid for this?"

"Paid! Holy Freddy, man! Don't you think you got paid already, just by being taken out of the freezer?" Then Manett paused to think it over. "Actually, that's a tough question," he admitted. "I can't say I exactly understand the money system here, but there is one, I guess. No, you don't get paid. Whatever it costs for your food and all that probably gets charged to Nrina's laboratory somehow. If you want anything else, forget it. You can't afford it."

Mescro pricked up his ears. "What can't we afford?" he asked.

"Different things," Manett said, scowling. "Don't bother me with that kind of stuff now. Now, you all look like you've got enough jism stored up to squeeze out a sample four or five times a day for Nrina, so we're going to do you one more time before you go to sleep—but for right now you better get started learning the language."

"Aw, wait a minute," Korelto objected. "We haven't even finished eating yet!"

"Well, snap it up," Manett growled. But he was enjoying his role as mentor and straw boss, and when they insisted on asking him more questions, endless questions, through mouths stuffed with food, he tolerantly gave them answers.

Viktor wasn't one of the questioners. He ate in silence, trying to follow what was being said, missing most of it. Could it really be true that his brain had been damaged by "freezer burn"? It was certain that something had happened; the talk rolled over him, too fast to follow, too hard to understand. Then a familiar word caught his attention: the black man, Korelto, asking, "Where are we? It isn't Newmanhome, is it?"

"Hell, no. I told you that. It's a habitat."

"You mean another planet? Maybe Nebo?"

Manett gave him an incredulous stare. "Nebo? Don't you know what it's like on Nebo? We never go near Nebo—it's hot as hell, and people get hurt there!"

Viktor frowned, puzzled. He had been close enough to Nebo to know that it couldn't be called "hot" anymore—not after the weakening of the sun's output. Still, he supposed, in comparison with the system's frozen-over other planets …

But Manett wasn't waiting for the next question. "You want to know where we are?" he asked. "I'll show you." And he got up from the table and walked over to one of those glass-topped things that looked like desks. "Come on over," he called, scowling over a thing like a keypad in one corner of it. "Just a minute …"

They were all clustered around it as Manett hit a key. The glass turned misty, then cleared again.

"There's old Nergal," Manett said, proud of his success in getting the thing to work.

Viktor yelped. So did the other three. They were looking straight down onto something immense and redly glowing, like a bed of mottled coals.

Viktor couldn't help himself. He reached out blindly and caught the arm of the big man named Jeren. Jeren was shaking, too, but he held on to Viktor as they all stared down. Viktor felt himself falling into that glowing hell—no, not falling, exactly; what he felt was that ruddy Nergal was swimming up toward him, drowning him.

Manett's voice came to him from far away. "That's what they call the brown dwarf. They moved here while the sun was cold, and we're living in a habitat around it. A habitat is kind of like a big spaceship, you know? Only it doesn't go anywhere, it just stays in orbit. That's where everybody's been living for the last few thousand years, when it was so cold before the old sun came back."

"The sun came back?" one of the others cried out, astonished, but Viktor hardly heard. He was staring down, transfixed. He knew, part of him knew, that he wasn't really being swallowed by that glowing pyre; it was, he told himself, only part of the "freezer burn," the numbness in his head that was like a gauze scrim slipped between himself and the world. But he could feel himself swaying.

"Hey," he heard Jeren's worried voice say. "Something's wrong with this guy."

Manett's face appeared before Viktor. He looked disgusted. "You're relapsing," he accused. "You'd better get to bed."

Viktor tried to focus on him and failed. "All right, Daddy," Viktor said.

When he woke again his throat felt less like sandpaper, but his other parts were worse. Nor was his mind much clearer. He had a confused memory of being wakened and ordered to masturbate again into one of the soft, crystalline plastic vials, and of men's voices around him when he slept, but it was all hopelessly cloudy.

The voices were still going on. He lay trying to follow what they were talking about, with his eyes closed. Manett's voice drowned out the others. He was saying smugly, "You know what they want. They want you to jerk off into bottles. That's why they brought you up here, for sperm. It's like cross-breeding animals, you know? They've been out here for thousands of years and they want to get some lost genes back into the pool. Oh, it isn't just you guys. There are a couple of dozen of us real men around in one habitat or another that they've thawed out already. Not counting the stiffs—there's maybe a hundred of those stashed away in Nrina's cryonics place, waiting until she needs them."

"Is that where we were?" somebody asked.

"In the freezer? Of course that's where you were, where else? Nrina thaws out a few guys at a time for samples, then mostly they get sent away when she's through with them. But I stay here. I'm the only one on this habitat permanently. Nrina kept me to help her out, you know?"

Viktor heard a leering, sycophantic chuckle from one of the others. It sounded like Mescro. Then Manett's voice picked up again. "They collect a batch of corpsicles from the freezers on Newmanhome and bring them here. Nrina takes cell samples from each, then she thaws out the ones that look interesting. You know that jab on your asses?" Viktor remembered the bandage clearly enough. "Well, that's where she gouged out a piece to get a DNA sample."

"I don't remember that part," one of the others objected—Jeren, Viktor thought.

" 'Course not. How could you? You were frozen—that's why it made such a big hole." Manett pulled down the waistband of his skirt to display the spot on his own hip where only a puckered little dimple still showed. "Don't worry, it heals up. Then after she checks the sample out, if your genes look interesting, she thaws you out and turns you over to me."

"Is that why they tattooed us, to show we're like gene donors?" Korelto asked.

Manett laughed. "You think they need a tattoo to show that? Don't you see what they look like—skinny as skeletons? No, they can tell that much just by looking at us. That mark," he said, sounding prideful, "is kind of a like a warning, you know? It tells all the women that we're still potent sperm donors. All the other males around here have that stuff turned off as soon as their balls start working. They can make love, all right—believe me, it's one of their favorite things! But they don't produce sperm. The women don't want to get pregnant, you know."

"But if they don't get pregnant, then how—"

"You mean babies? Sure they have babies, only they do it in a test tube, like. That's what Nrina does in her laboratory. They match up the sperm and the ovum in a kind of an incubator and they carry it to term, and when the baby's ready they pull it out and put it in a nursery. Listen, these people don't do anything that hurts. Or even makes them sweat—except for fun," he added, grinning. "Don't worry about it. If they ever decide they've got enough of your DNA they'll fix you, too, and then they'll take the mark off your forehead and you can plow right in."

Jeren, who was somewhat slow of thought, had just gotten to the question that interested him. "Wait a minute," he said. "Are you saying that, you know, some of these women might want to …"

Manett looked smug. "Has happened," he announced.

"Even the cute one that thawed us out?"

Manett scowled. "Never mind about her," he said darkly. "Change the subject."

"Sure, Manett," Mescro said, grinning. "Only I notice you don't have the tattoo any more, and I was just wondering—"

"I said change the subject!" Manett roared. And then, as he saw Viktor trying to sit up, he said, "Oh, look, sleeping beauty's awake. What do you want, Viktor?"

"Well," Viktor said, trying to get the words out in spite of the sudden, almost breathless feeling that had hit him, "is it all men? I mean, if these people are so hungry for different genetic traits, don't they thaw out women, too?"

"Hell, no. Why would they do that? They don't really use the sperm, you know. It's just easy for them to work with, so they just extract the gene fragments they want, and then they mix them up with other strains to get the kind of genes they need for—for whatever they need them for, anyway. That's not my department. Nrina's told me all about that, but I guess I didn't listen. Anyway, that," he said, preening himself, "is one way we have an advantage over the women. We guys can produce a million sperms a day. Women can maybe do one ovum a month, if they're lucky, so if they want genes from a female they just do it the hard way, from tissue samples." He peered in a friendly manner at Viktor, who wasn't smiling. "What's the matter, you afraid you can't make your million a day?"

Viktor shook himself. "I—no. Nothing," he said.

But it hadn't really been nothing. It had been a quick flare-up of unexpected and quite unjustified hope, quickly blighted. No. There was no point in hoping along those lines.

Because that one little corner of his mind had suddenly come clear, like the desk that had showed him Nergal, and he had remembered Reesa.

For the next few days of Viktor's new life he thought of Reesa almost constantly—while he was falling asleep, while he was just coming awake, while he was donating his sperm samples, while he was eating, while he was trying to learn the new language—all the time. But he could think of her only as you think of the dead. Of the long dead, at that.

He wondered, in an abstracted sort of way, if Reesa had had a happy life after his freezing. He wondered if she had missed him, or if she had reconciled herself sooner or later to his loss and, say, married someone else. Someone like Mirian, perhaps. She would have been a prized sort of wife for a Great Catholic, Viktor thought, because she was quite capable of being sexually active but no longer of complicating his life by becoming pregnant.

He told himself that he hoped she had married. He hoped she'd been happy—as happy as anyone could be in that world, anyway.

He didn't go so far as to hope she hadn't missed him. And he did miss her, certainly he did. But it was a sort of remote, somehow well-aged pain. As soon as he had heard the present date he had almost felt the quick, irrevocable shifting of gears in his mind. That history was ancient.

No one could mourn for four thousand years.

The curtain had come down on the first two acts of his life. He was just beginning Act Three.

It might not be the life he wanted … but it was the only life he had left.

Viktor forced himself to plunge into studying the language of these frail, remarkable people who had brought him back to life. It wasn't easy. The fog around his brain made everything difficult, but there was help for him.

The biggest help was the desks.

They were actually like his old teaching machines, he saw. They provided him with hours on end of conversation with the image of a friendly, helpful, wise teacher talking to him from the desk.

The teacher was certainly not real. Viktor knew that; it was a computer-generated, three-dimensional picture, and the fact that it looked like an amiable (if exceptionally skinny) young man did not deceive him. It was real enough to correct his accent, straighten out his grammar, and provide him with the translation of every word and thought he needed.

The others who had been revived with him were, of course, busy at the same thing. Only Jeren, the gentle giant, was finding the process as hard as Viktor. Jeren was not a bright man. It wasn't freezer burn in Jeren's case. The man had just been born with a few slow linkages in his brain. Even with the cobwebs that cluttered his own mind, Viktor was far quicker than Jeren.

All the same, it was Jeren who became Viktor's friend.

The little weasel Mescro was too busy trying to make a friend of Manett to pay attention to anyone who had no power, and he had attached Korelto to himself. It was Jeren who helped Viktor when he stumbled, Jeren who brought Viktor food in those first days when Viktor was too weak, or too dazed, to get up for it. He stood chastely by Viktor, eyes averted, while Viktor performed the rite of masturbation, and helped him back to bed when he was done. And he sat by Viktor, talking when Viktor felt like talking, silently watching while Viktor dozed.

Jeren was a big man—taller than Viktor, far taller than most of the people of Newmanhome's Ice Age. He was solid, too, a hulking bear of a man, with a voice that was deep but so soft it was almost inaudible. He seemed to try to stay out of everyone's way. When he spoke to anyone he averted his eyes, so as not to challenge the other person.

With all of Viktor's own problems, there was something about Jeren that made Viktor feel sorry for him—or feel contemptuous of him. Why would such a big man try so hard to efface himself? Only because he felt somehow small—and if a man thinks himself small, who is anyone else to say he isn't?

Viktor never succeeded in reconciling himself to what he had to do to earn his keep—most of all, because there was almost always someone there with him while he did it. Usually the person was Manett. The man seemed to enjoy humiliating his crew of sperm donors, and Viktor more than the others, it appeared. If there had ever been anything about sex that Viktor disliked, it was trying to perform in the morning, but Manett was adamant. "Do your job," he ordered. "Then you eat. Then you get back to studying the language, and don't argue with me!" So, minutes after awakening every day, Viktor was standing in the sperm-donation cubicle, trying to think erotic.

What made it even more difficult was that sometimes Nrina, the woman who had supervised his thawing, followed him into the chamber. Viktor hated it when she stood behind him, because for some reason she had taken to watching with evident interest. Viktor glared confusedly at her. What he could see through her transparent, open-meshed smock stirred something inside him, all right, but it wasn't enough. He appealed to Manett. "I don't like her being here. It makes me—uh—it interferes."

Manett guffawed and translated. The woman replied politely. Viktor thought he could almost understand what she was saying now, in her husky, sweet voice, but he was glad when Manett translated anyway.

Manett didn't seem glad. He spoke sourly, as though he didn't like what he was saying. "She says she likes watching you, so go ahead."

"I don't think I can."

"What's that got to do with it? She—wait a minute." He listened to Nrina and then, glowering, addressed Viktor again. "She wants to know if you were really born on Old Earth."

"Of course I was. I told you." And then, turning to the woman, Viktor said haltingly in her own language, "This is true, yes."

"Get on with it!" Manett ordered, looking angry. "Or would you rather go back in the freezer?"

But the woman was laughing. She paused to say something to Manett and turned to leave the room. Manett looked annoyed. "Do it and then come out," he ordered. "And then Nrina says to hurry up and finish learning the language. She wants to talk to you."

The language wasn't as hard as Viktor had first feared. A long time had passed, but there were still English words embedded in their vocabularies, or at least the ghosts of the words. The difference was far less than that between the language of his own day—whatever you took that day to be—and that of Beowulf. The vowel sounds had changed. The words were sometimes clipped and sometimes slurred, and there were many hundreds of wholly new words to learn, words that Viktor had never heard before because the things they referred to had never existed before. But within a week he could understand some of what Nrina was saying to Manett, and before long he could speak to her directly.

The "desk" teaching machines were marvelous tutors—and a good deal more. The desk was not simply for teaching. It did that function very well, but it was also an atlas, and an encyclopedia, and a patient tutor, repeating the same thing over and over again as long as Viktor wanted it, until Viktor's slowly recovering brain could absorb it.

It was especially fine as a picture book. Even though Viktor's brain was still fogged part of the time, and his memory sketchy almost always, he could follow what the machines told him about his new world he was living in. The human population of Newmanhome had not only recovered from its ice age (though not on Newmanhome), it had flourished madly. There were three hundred million people alive now, and they lived very well. Most of them were in what an earlier human would have called O'Neill habitats, and those were various but uniformly fine. Some were like an ancient English countryside, with trees and flowering plants and hedgerows; animals like rabbits and foxes lived in the wooded parts; songbirds and hummingbirds flew in their air. Some were like cities a mile through, with ten million people huddled together. Some were quite strange—there was even a wilderness habitat here and there with grizzly bears and tigers, jungles and forests, even great slow waterfalls. Viktor discovered that not everyone lived on the habitats. A few preferred to live on Nergal's natural moons, now terraformed and quite comfortable. Most people tried to spend a little time on one of them now and then. It was a form of sport for them, moving about in a real gravity field, though a tiny one. They did it to keep their bodies in shape.

Considering how their bodies had stretched out in those scores of generations in micro- or low gravity, they did that very well. As Viktor caught occasional glimpses of other inhabitants of the place, he could easily see that that was true. The people of this place didn't wear much in the way of clothing—a cache-sex, a simple strip of cloth that covered their sexual organs and the cleft between their buttocks, was good enough for most practical purposes. Sometimes they wore a bit more. When Nrina was busy in her laboratory she wore a smock to keep the messes off her body, and sometimes she wore other things, just for the prettiness of them. Women wore nothing on their breasts, most of the time. They didn't need to. In the gentle gravity of the habitat the breasts didn't sag.

The other side of that coin was that the males were less macho than Viktor was used to—much less.

The males were not much bigger than the women. Not much stronger, either, Viktor thought; large muscles weren't needed where they lived. (The man, Dekkaduk, from Nrina's laboratory turned out to be a puzzling exception.) Particularly since none of them did much physical labor. Compared to them, Viktor was a giant. He was bigger than most of his reawakened colleagues in the sperm banks, for that matter, since the Newmanhome of their time had not provided its children with a generous diet, and certainly never any fresh air.

When Viktor began to explore outside the immediate confines of Nrina's laboratory he encountered still more strangers. He even tried speaking to some of them now and again, for language practice, but he was wary. When he looked at them, he did not fail to see that they were looking at him as well, and with just as much speculative interest. He thought that the branding on the forehead was probably a useful precaution. Some of the glances from females were frankly sexual, and Viktor appreciated that very much … the memory of Reesa slowly fading from his mind.

Some of the sexually charged looks, however, were from people who were definitely male, and about that Viktor was far less pleased.

By the time Viktor could make himself understood to people like Nrina his life had fallen into a routine. He ate when food was offered. He slept when he was tired. He made his required four donations of sperm each day—a little surprised at himself, and not unpleased: after all, he was pretty nearly a middle-aged man now! And between times, all the time, he tried to learn this world he was in.

Of course, Viktor was not the only newcomer in the habitat. Jeren, Mescro, and Korelto were as innocent as himself, and two of them, at least, were curious. (Jeren wasn't. Jeren took what came without complaint or question. His main interest was in following Viktor around.) But those three had an advantage Viktor didn't share. All the things they wanted to know Manett, the veteran of more than eight months ahead of them out of the freezer, already knew—and told them. But it seemed that Manett just didn't like talking to Viktor.

For some reason, Viktor could not guess why, Manett had taken a dislike to him. More than a dislike. Viktor pondered, without resolving, the curious idea he had formed that sometimes, when he caught Manett's eyes on him, the expression in them looked almost like fear.

Then Nrina called him in for another examination.

When Viktor greeted her, careful with his pronunciation, the woman looked pleased, but she just waved him to a table. There she did all the things she had already done to Viktor—touched his head with various instruments, studied the polychrome readings, and felt the part just above his temple that had hurt so badly, looking satisfied when he said it hurt no more.

"Your leg, then," she said, speaking slowly so that he could understand. He raised it obediently to the table, and she touched a buzzing rod to the dressing.

The pink sausage fell neatly open. Viktor looked, and smelled, and squinted his eyes shut, trying not to be sick. A big piece of his calf was gone. What was left stank of dead meat and decay.

Nrina didn't seem to mind. She bent close to study it, by eye and with more of the instruments that flashed rainbow colors for her. Then, satisfied, she sprayed it with something that felt like nothing at all, but quickly dissipated the terrible odor and left the exposed raw meat covered with a film of metallic gold. She pressed the two halves of the wrapping back together and sat down facing Viktor, her knees hugged to her breast, regarding him.

When she spoke to Viktor it was slowly, a word at a time. "You have … suffered … damage … from improper freezing. For … a long time. Do you understand?" He nodded. "So … there are two things. Your leg. It will … I think … be all right … in a season. It will … heal completely."

"That is good," Viktor said.

She nodded seriously. "The brain … I do not know."

Viktor blinked at her. "What?"

"I have … inserted … additional material … in your brain … to replace … what was lost. It may take. I think it has … partly."

"Partly?"

"Perhaps more. We must wait."

"I have been waiting," he said bitterly.

She studied him thoughtfully for a moment. Then, smiling, she said, "You will … wait some more. Now go. You will help Manett. You must learn … to do his work."

Manett was waiting for Viktor outside the examination room, and his expression was even more dour than usual. When Viktor asked him what Nrina had meant, Manett flared up. "It means she's going to give you my job, damn your hide!" he rasped. "Come on. I'll show you what to do—but just don't talk to me!" And he led the way to the outermost shell of the habitat, where the wraithlike but oddly muscled man who had tattooed Viktor in the first place was waiting impatiently for them.

The man wasn't wearing a filmy robe now; he was dressed in shiny, copper-colored things like overalls, which covered everything from neck to feet, and he had a hood of the same material in his hand. "This is Dekkaduk," Manett said, short and surly. "Get dressed."

Dekkaduk looked at him inquiringly, but didn't say anything either. He waited while Viktor struggled into the same sort of garment. It was light and flexible, but it felt metallic. Still, it was elastic, too, because it slid over the sausage around Viktor's lower leg easily enough.

"Now," Dekkaduk said, "we go inside." He was speaking the language of the habitat people. Because Viktor was concentrating on what he was doing it took a moment for him to understand. Manett helped him along with a shove.

"Dekkaduk said move," he snapped. "Get your damn hood on!"

Then Viktor found out what his job was. All three of them donned their hoods, then crowded all together into a tiny cubicle; Manett pulled the outer door closed—it was thick but light—and opened a door on the other side.

Immediately the transparent front of Viktor's hood clouded over and he felt a stinging cold. A moment later he could feel Manett roughly poking at his back, doing something that resulted first in a faint click, then a hiss. The icy cold of the suit warmed; warm air began to flow through the hood. Gradually the frosted inside of the faceplate began to clear.

Viktor could see Manett's face bending toward his, and through the two visors he could see the man's look of sour satisfaction. When Manett spoke Viktor could see his lips move, but the voice came from inside the hood, right next to his ear. "You're all hooked up," Manett announced. "Now let's shift some stiffs."

And so they did. For an hour or more. Warm inside their heated suits, with their warmed air supply from the cables that connected them to sockets in the wall; and the stiffs they moved were corpsicles from the cryonics chambers on Newmanhome.

What Manett and Viktor did was the hard work—pulling out the old capsules, opening them to show the frozen bodies inside. The air in the freezer must have been searingly dry, for no frost had collected on either capsules or bodies. Some were facedown, and they were the easiest; all Viktor or Manett had to do was to pull or cut away the hard-frozen fabric over the hip and then stand aside while Dekkaduk thrust a triangle-bladed instrument into each patch of rock-hard flesh to gouge out a tiny sample. The ones who had been frozen faceup were more difficult. They had to be lifted out, or at least turned to one side, so that Dekkaduk could get at them; and then Viktor could see the frozen faces. Some were almost as though only asleep. Some were contorted. Some seemed to be silently screaming.

Then they slid the capsules back—each marked with its star or cross or crescent. Viktor was glad when it was over, because it was frightening to look on the corpsicles and know that not long before he had been just like them—and not very far in the future, maybe, might well be back there again.

Back in his own study room, as he leaned over the teaching desk, he blew on his fingers. They weren't really cold. It was his soul that was cold. He thought it would never be warm again.

But as he talked to his unreal mentor in the desk he began to forget the freezer. "What shall we study today, Viktor?" the simulacrum greeted him. "It is up to you to choose."

"Thank you," Viktor said, aware that he was thanking no one real. "Can you show me some more pictures, please?"

"Of course. Incidentally, your accent is getting much better. But what pictures would you like to see?"

"Well," Viktor said, "I used to be interested in astronomy. Can you show me what the skies look like now? I mean, not just Nergal, but everything?"

"Of course," the tutor said. "Perhaps it would be best to display it as a surround." It disappeared from the desk, and at once an image sprang up all around Viktor. The image blotted out everything but itself, and it was almost all black. "You are looking," the disembodied voice went on, "at every astronomical object that is visible from your present position. The habitats have been omitted." Indeed, Viktor saw, there was the glowing cinder of Nergal. There, behind Viktor, the sun blazed—not very bright, he thought, but then they were much farther away than Newmanhome; perhaps it really had regained all of its luminosity. A couple of quite bright things had perceptible disks—some of Nergal's moons, no doubt. He picked out a few smaller, bright objects—stars and a couple of planets …

Apart from that, nothing.

Nothing? Viktor sat up straight, staring around at the sparsely featured sky. "But where's the universe?" he cried.

"You are referring to the optical concentration that was visible for some time," the calm, disembodied voice said. "That began to dim one thousand three hundred years ago, Viktor, and by eight hundred years ago, it was no longer detectable at all. What you see is the universe, Viktor. There isn't anything else."

And then, with a sickening certainty, Viktor at last began to believe. It had indeed been four thousand years.

Two days later what Manett said came true. When Viktor and the others started toward the room with the sample tubes, ready to do their work of filling them, Manett appeared. He looked angry and frightened at the same time. "Forget it," he said. "Nrina says she's got enough from you guys. We—" He swallowed. "We're leaving. All but Viktor, he stays here."

"Leaving for where?" Korelto demanded, startled.

Mescro looked searchingly at his mentor's face. "You've been fired," he guessed accusingly.

"Shut up, Mescro!" Manett snarled. "Let's go. There's a bus waiting."

"But—but—" Jeren cried, blinking as he tried to take the new situation in, "but we need to get ready!"

"For what? You've got nothing to pack," Manett said cruelly. "Come on. Not you," he added to Viktor, with poison in his voice. "Nrina wants to see you. Now."

And thus, without warning, they were gone. Only Jeren tarried to shake Viktor's hand sadly and to say good-bye. Viktor wasn't even allowed to follow them to their "bus."

Nrina was in the corridor, and she beckoned him to follow her. She was wearing a filmy rainbow-colored thing that might once have been called a negligee. It veiled, without hiding, the fact that under it she wore nothing at all, not even the cache-sex. Viktor averted his eyes, because there was something he really wanted to ask the woman, and her scanty attire made it difficult.

"It is very interesting to me that you were born on Old Earth," she told him seriously as they walked. "Here, this is my home. You may come in."

He followed her uneasily through a doorway. When they were inside she clapped her hands, and it closed behind them. It was not a large room, but it was prettily festooned with growing things, and there was a scent of flowers in the air. There was one of those desk things, of course, and soft pillows thrown about. The only other large bit of furniture in the room was a soft, cup-shaped thing, like the cap of a mushroom turned upside down.

It looked very much like a bed.

Nrina sat on the edge of the cup-shaped thing, which was large enough for her to stretch out in easily. She looked at Viktor appraisingly before she spoke. "Have you any questions for me, Viktor?" she asked.

Indeed he had—many, and a number that he didn't quite want to ask. He fumbled. "I did—I did want to know something, Nrina. Is my, uh, my brain severely damaged?"

"Severely?" She thought for a moment. "No, I would not say 'severely,' " she said at last. "Much of your memory has come back, has it not? Perhaps more will. The damage may not be permanent."

"May not!"

She shrugged—it was a graceful movement, but with the extreme slimness of her body it made Viktor think of a snake slowly writhing in its coils. "What difference does that make?"

"It make a great difference to me!"

She thought that over, looking at him carefully. Then she smiled. "But it makes none to me, Viktor," she pointed out. And she lay back on the bed, still smiling at him, but now with a wholly different expression.

He felt himself responding. Instinctively his hand went to the brand on his forehead.

"Oh," she said, reaching out with her own hand to take his, "that is all right, Viktor. I have fixed myself so that I cannot be fertilized. But I do want to know, I want very much to know, how you people from Old Earth made love."