The World at the End of Time

CHAPTER 22

If it were not for the odd, bleak flashes of memory that sometimes cut through the fog in Viktor's brain—memories of Reesa that came and went, painful while they were there; memories of the children long dust, which left a dismal sense of hopeless loss—if it weren't for those things, Viktor might easily have thought this third act of his life close to the best.

To be sure, it was just a touch humiliating. Never once had Viktor imagined that his main career would be in sexually servicing a skinny, seven-foot woman with huge eyes. Yet it had its compensations. As the recognized lover of Nrina, Viktor became a privileged person.

He wasn't a "husband," of course. The only "rights" he had over Nrina were to share her bed—sometimes, her company—when she wasn't working; when she wasn't doing something else that she didn't wish to share with him. The basic job he had been thawed out for in the first place, as donator of sperm for her collection of useful genetic materials, no longer existed for him. Nrina explained that she had all the samples she needed for future genetic engineering. She now had better employment for that particular function. His only present responsibility was to give her pleasure. All of which added up to the fact that he was—

He didn't like to say it explicitly, but there was an old and unflattering expression for what he was. He was kept.

When Manett told him, with all that surly resentment, that Nrina had decreed Viktor was to take over his job, Viktor had thought it meant supervising the next batch of thawed-out sperm donors. But when, tentatively, Viktor asked Nrina when they were going to do the thawing she looked at him in surprise. "Oh, not now, Viktor," she said, stroking his shoulder affectionately. "First Dekkaduk and I must run the DNA assays on them, to see which are worth the trouble of thawing, don't you see? And we have much other work to do. Important work. Orders to fill, with deadlines which we must meet. No, it will be weeks at least, perhaps a whole season, before we are ready to acquire more material. But now—are you hungry? No? Then why don't we go to my bed again?" And he understood that what had once been Manett's main job was indeed now his.

Nrina's life wasn't his, though. Even her home wasn't really his; Viktor was surprised (and, on reflection, not very pleased) to find that the private chamber she had first taken him to was only a sort of guest room. Nrina's own home was far larger, and very much more complex and beautiful. It had one big room with a "transparent" ceiling—well, it wasn't always transparent, because Nrina could turn it off when she chose, and then it was only a sort of pattern of shifting, nebulous, luminous, multicolored pastel clouds. (And it wasn't really transparent, being only a sort of huge TV screen that showed the outside universe.) In the center of the room a cloudy sphere, as tall as Viktor's head, showed shapes in milky pastel light, though most of the room's illumination came from the gently glowing walls. (Nrina's people didn't seem to like harsh lighting.)

Then there was another room, quite small, but large enough for their needs. It held her own bed. That one looked terribly flimsy to Viktor; it was cantilevered out from the wall, and it did not look to Viktor as though it was built to stand very vigorous activity in it. (He was wrong about that, he discovered. The habitat's low gravity helped.) There wasn't any kitchen, exactly. There was a room with a cupboard that was a sort of a freezer and fridge, and another that was a sort of a microwave oven. (That was all they needed. These people, Viktor found, didn't ever fry or broil anything—especially not hunks of dead animal flesh.) That was where Viktor ate most of the time—Nrina sometimes, too, though often enough she was off somewhere else, with whom Viktor never knew. That was not a problem in any practical way. There was always plenty to eat. Once Viktor learned how to handle the heating apparatus he always found stews and porridges and soups and hashes ready in the fridge, and sherberts in the freezer, and any number of different kinds of fresh fruits—always fresh, always perfect, too; though some of them were wholly unfamiliar to Viktor, and a few were perfectly foul to his taste. He wondered who replenished them. Certainly not Nrina!

Nor was Viktor idle. Not really idle, he told himself, he was in fact very busy learning about this new life he had been given. He had the freedom to roam where he would on the habitat. He used that freedom, too, except when his leg was hurting too badly. That wasn't often anymore, but there were days when the pain was acute all day long. Then it hurt all the time, when it wasn't itching; sometimes it both itched, like a bad sunburn, and hurt, like a new scald.

Those days weren't a total waste, because he could spend them hunched over the communicator desk, learning all he could. But when the leg was no more than mildly annoying, he preferred to walk around.

You couldn't see much of the habitat at any one time, because everything was inside. There weren't many large open spaces. There certainly wasn't ever any sky, for a ceiling was never very far overhead. Strangely, much of the place was bent. The longest corridors were straight as laser beams, but the ones at right angles to them had perceptible upward curves.

The place was like a rolled-up version of—well, of Homeport, say. Of any city spread out on its land, except that this one had been rolled around and joined in a kind of tube. Everything Viktor saw was in the outer skin of that tube. That was why those transverse hallways were always curved. Viktor discovered that if he went all the way around one—it wasn't really far, a twenty-minute walk at most when his leg wasn't bothering him—he would come right back to his starting point.

What was in the middle? Machinery, Nrina told him when he asked her. They were lying together in her cantilevered bed, nibbling on sweet little plums, both quite relaxed. The machinery, she said, was all different kinds. The core of the habitat was where they kept the air cleaners (to filter out the wastes and replenish the oxygen), and the temperature regulators, and the generators for electrical energy, and the communications equipment, and the data machine files—and, in short, everything that was needed to make the habitat comfortably habitable. All tidily out of sight. She yawned, pitching a plum pit on the floor and nestling cozily close to him.

But Viktor was wide awake. It was all a wonder to him. Technologically wonderful, of course, but also wonderful to think of starved, poverty-stricken refugees from old Newmanhome building all these things—enough of them to hold three hundred million people!

"Well, they didn't build them all at once, Viktor," Nrina pointed out reasonably, stretching her long, slim legs ("slim" now to Viktor's mind—no longer "skinny") and yawning again. "Once they got a good start it was easy enough. There were plenty of asteroids to mine for materials, and Nergal gave off a lot of heat, as long as you got close enough to it. Of course, now that the sun's back in business we wouldn't need to stay around Nergal anymore—but why would we bother to move?"

"Well, to a planet," Viktor began. "Newmanhome, for instance. They say it's warmed up now—"

"Planets!" she scoffed. "Planets are nasty. Certainly, now that Newmanhome is pretty well thawed out people can survive there, but who would want to?"

I would, Viktor thought, but he wasn't sure he meant it, so all he said was, "Some people might."

"Some silly people do," she admitted. "There are a few odd ones who seem to enjoy poking through the old records, and of course we need someone to pick over the freezers to find whatever organisms are left that might supply useful DNA. I don't call that living, Viktor." And she went on to explain why it certainly wasn't any kind of life she could stand for herself. The gravity! Why, on Newmanhome they had to move around in wheelchairs most of the time, even if they'd taken the muscle-building and calcium-binding treatments that would let them stand it at all. (As, it turned out, Dekkaduk had—thus those incongruous knots of muscle.) That much gravity certainly wasn't good for anybody. Not to mention the discomfort. No, it wasn't at all the kind of life she personally could tolerate.

And then, stroking his thigh, she interrupted herself. "Hold still a minute, Viktor," she ordered, leaning over to poke at his leg. "Does that feel all right?"

He craned his neck to peer at the pink sausage casing. "I guess so. I almost forget it's there." But reminded, he was aware of the smell. The wrapping was porous, to let the wound breathe as it healed, and odors did leak out.

Nrina didn't seem to mind them. "I'd better take another look," she decided. And then, "Oh, no, I'm meeting Kotlenny; well, Dekkaduk can do it. Go over and tell him to give you an examination."

Dekkaduk was waiting for him when Viktor got to the examining room. His expression was hostile.

It was no worse than Viktor had expected. Dekkaduk did not seem to be a friendly man. Their first meeting had been when Dekkaduk had tattooed the fertility warning on Viktor's forehead; all right, that was just a duty, and if it had been painful probably that couldn't be helped. But ever since the time they had taken DNA samples from Nrina's corpsicles, along with the departed Manett, Dekkaduk had given every sign of despising the man from Old Earth.

"Ouch!" Viktor exclaimed, as Dekkaduk peeled the dressing off his leg. (That might not have been on purpose. Still, removing the dressing didn't hurt when Nrina did it.) Then as the full aroma of the healing wound floated to his nostrils, Dekkaduk muttered furiously to himself and ostentatiously turned the room's ventilation higher. (Well, it did stink. But that much? Nrina didn't appear to find the smell intolerable, after all.)

Dekkaduk hurt him (Viktor kept count) eight different times in the course of a two-minute examination. Even the healing, cleaning spray he used to cover the pink new flesh stung bitterly (Nrina's hadn't), and when he was through and the leg was rebandaged Dekkaduk simply said, "You're healing. Go away now."

Viktor went. Once away from Dekkaduk's touch the leg hardly hurt at all anymore. As he strolled along the corridor he was thinking of possible explanations for the man's hostility. It could, of course, be just his nature. Dekkaduk might simply have interests of his own and regard this rude survivor from prehistoric ages, Viktor Sorricaine, as an irritating irrelevance.

But there was another possibility that Viktor thought likely. What if Dekkaduk were not only Nrina's assistant, but her lover? More likely ex-lover—and jealous. It was a quite plausible theory, Viktor thought. It was even one that gave him a certain amount of satisfaction, because there was enough rude, prehistoric carnality in Viktor's genetic predispositions to allow him to enjoy beating out another male for a mate.

He had been walking without paying much attention to where he was going. He passed other people from time to time. Some he had met before, even spoken to; he was beginning to be on nodding terms, at least, with some of Nrina's neighbors, and as he got used to the stretched-out, willowy shapes of these people he began to notice individual differences.

At first they had all looked alike, like members of some famine-stricken basketball team. Then he began to distinguish among them. Some were darker than others. Hair color varied from so pale and fine that it seemed almost transparent to coarse strands like charcoal-colored knitting wool. Both men and women might have facial hair, though women's was usually only a pair of narrow sideburns. Quite a few of the people struck Viktor as downright ugly—noses that were splayed, hooked or reduced to the size of a shirt button; teeth that seemed too big for their mouths, or, in one particular case, a woman with vampire incisors that lay against her lower lip. (She had seemed more willing to be friendly than most. Viktor had not encouraged her.)

On Newmanhome, at least on the fat, rich Newmanhome of his youth, Viktor would have wondered why these people hadn't had orthodontia or plastic surgery. Here he wondered even more, because those traits had to be on purpose. Some parents had gone to some genetic engineer like Nrina and chosen that receding chin, those pendulous ears for their child.

As Viktor strolled, idle and aimless, he saw the vampire-toothed woman coming toward him.

She was even taller than Nrina and—in the same ethereal way as Nrina, of course—quite as pretty. (Not counting those disconcerting teeth, of course.) The woman had let Viktor clearly know that strange, big-muscled primitives out of the freezatorium were in some ways quite interesting—though she had looked regretfully at the tattoo on his forehead. But Viktor only nodded to her now. It wasn't that his fertility was a serious problem. If Nrina had some kind of contraception, this other woman could probably manage it, too, but that meant a different kind of problem.

Kept men, Viktor was nearly sure, were expected to be faithful to their keepers.

He was quite a bit farther away from Nrina's area than he remembered going before. Ahead of him the corridor suddenly widened to an open space. There was a little pond, and around it were patches of growing things.

It was a farm.

Nrina had told him there was a farm on the habitat, though he'd never seen it before. It was really very pleasant. It wasn't at all like any farm on ancient Newmanhome, because of the funny way it bent, pond and all, and the fact that the "sky" was almost within touching distance over his head. But there were growing things there. He recognized some of them as having been in Nrina's locker, and was pleased to bend down and pick a—tomato? Something that tasted like a tomato, anyway, although it was a deep purple in color.

It occurred to him that it was possible these plants belonged to someone.

He looked around. There was no one in sight. He ate the tomato, nibbling around the stem, and tossed the little green remnant to the ground as he strolled. That was curious, too, he observed, for the ground wasn't really ground. This was no plowed half acre of somebody's produce garden; the tomato vines grew out of long, bulkheaded rows of something that was paler and spongier than any earth Viktor had ever seen, and between the rows were immaculately swept footpaths.

Someone kept this farm extraordinarily neat.

Then Viktor caught a glimpse of one of the "someones."

He was at the far end of the open space, and as he turned to go back he saw some dark-skinned person at the edge of the pond. He didn't actually see the whole person. The pond, and the land around it, had curved up until they were almost hidden by the bulge of the ceiling between. (So strange to look at! One wondered why the pond didn't spill out.) What Viktor saw was someone's feet, seemingly wearing dark, furry boots, and someone's hands tipping a sort of bucket into the lake.

Immediately the surface of the pond at that point began to erupt into little spouts and fountains. Fish were feeding there. Pleased with the discovery, Viktor started back in that direction.

The fish feeder was faster than he. By the time he got to where he could see the whole other end of the farm enclosure there was no one there. But the splashes he had seen were definitely fish feeding. They were still swirling around, just under the surface of the water, rising to snap at little bits of something edible floating where the fish attendant had left them.

It would be nice, Viktor thought, to feed the fish himself some time. Feeling at ease after his stroll, he went back to Nrina's home and busied himself with the teacher desk, awaiting her return from her laboratory.

She was later than Viktor expected, but he didn't mind. His unreal mentor of the desk hardly ever had to correct his grammar anymore, but remained ready to help whenever Viktor got stuck. That wasn't often. As Viktor gained skills he gained confidence. Apart from the fact that it taught him things he wanted to learn, just playing with the desk was fun; it was like an immensely complicated video game with real rewards for winning.

It was beyond his competence, or his mentor's aid, to access the kind of cosmological data he really wanted. Simple astronomy was easy enough, though. With the mentor assisting, Viktor got a look at each of the stars that had accompanied their own sun through space; they had all been given names, but the names rolled off his mind. Then he looked at their own planets, one by one … and then he struck oil.

With the mentor's help Viktor got a sort of travelogue of the mysterious planet of Nebo. Someone had done a flyby and deployed a robot shuttle. The shuttle didn't land. It simply skimmed through the atmosphere of Nebo, taking pictures of the great metal objects that Viktor had seen from space. It seemed that its handlers had been interested in two particular areas. In one there was a protruding edge of worn metal that Viktor thought might have been what was left of Ark's lander; there was nothing else of interest nearby. The other was in very bad shape. The buildings seemed to have been blown up by some powerful explosion; but what that was about, too, Viktor could not learn.

Viktor stopped for a moment, listening. "Nrina?" he called. He thought he'd heard a sound somewhere in the other room, but it wasn't repeated and he went back to the desk.

Then Viktor switched views. "Habitats," he commanded, and his mentor provided him with the fact that there were more than eight hundred of them circling sullen, swollen Nergal. Then there were the natural moons human beings had colonized: Mary, Joseph, Mohammed, and Gautama were the important ones. (Sudden thrill almost of nostalgia: so some of the religious differences of frozen Newmanhome had persisted even here!)

Then he switched again, to study the other planets once more. Nothing had changed on most of them. Ishtar was still Ishtar, Marduk Marduk—gas giants with nothing much to recommend them—and Ninih, of course, was still too small and too far from the primary to be of interest to anybody. He stared briefly at the surface of ruddy Nergal (nothing much to look at but storms of superheated gases), then turned to the planet that mattered most to him: old, almost abandoned Newmanhome.

He caught his breath.

Newmanhome had changed again. It was reborn, all rolling seas, empty meadows, and young forests where the ice had gone—but it was not the Newmanhome he had lived on. It was scarred. During the glaciation all the planet's liquid water had been ice, covering the continents. As it melted, it formed huge meltwater lakes, blocked by ice dams. When the dams broke through, great torrents had scoured out scablands all the way to the sea.

There was no trace left that Viktor could find of the docks for the ocean-going ships or the town. True, in the hills near where he thought Homeport might have been, trying to translate the desk's coordinate system into his familiar navigation numbers, there was a cluster of buildings. But whether that was related to the old city he could not say.

This time he definitely heard the sound, and he could tell that it came from the kitchen.

"Who's there?" he cried. He heard the freezer door close, but there was no other answer. Puzzled, Viktor went to the food room.

Someone was leaving through the other door—hastily, as though not wanting to be seen. Viktor stood there, blinking. The bowls had been refilled with fresh fruit. The scatter of used dishes he had left was gone.

So that, he thought dazedly, was how the housework got done. But how peculiar that it was done by someone squatter and broader than himself, wearing a grizzled gray fur coat.

Half an hour later Nrina came back, to be greeted by his questions. "Yes, of course," she said, surprised he should ask. "Naturally we have someone to do things like that. Who would do them, otherwise? You saw one of the gillies."

"Gillies?" Viktor repeated, and then blinked as he connected the sound of the word with the glimpses he had caught. "Do you mean gorillas?"

"They're called 'gillies,' Viktor," Nrina said impatiently. "I don't know the word 'gorilla.' They are related to humans but without much intelligence—normally. Of course, we have modified them to be somewhat brighter—and quite a lot less belligerent and strong. Even so, they can't speak."

"You modified them?" he repeated.

"From genetic materials we found in the freezers, yes. Why not? Did you think I only made human beings?"

"I didn't know what you made," he said. He sounded aggrieved even to his own ears. He must have sounded so to Nrina, because she looked at him seriously for a moment.

Then she laughed. "Well," she said, "why don't I show you? Would you like to watch me work?"

Nrina was a creature shaper. Viktor began to realize that this woman was a major VIP, a star, famous through the habitats. She was remarkable even among the small number of greatly respected people who designed living architectures. The gorilla menials had come from their labs. So had the food animals and plants; so had the gorgeous and bizarre-smelling blossoms that decorated the spaces of their lives. Although their biggest business was making babies to order, she and her assistant, Dekkaduk, could make almost anything.

Dekkaduk was not pleased at Viktor's visit. He insisted that Viktor wear the gauzy robe over his cache-sex, and then fussily demanded he wear a hat, too. "Who knows what parasites might be in that disgusting fur on his head?" Dekkaduk demanded. He was nearly bald himself.

"Why, Dekkaduk," Nrina said, laughing, "probably about the same sorts of things as in my own hair. By now." Dekkaduk flushed furiously.

Nevertheless, Viktor wore the cap.

When Dekkaduk considered Viktor sufficiently sanitary, he turned away, glowering, and started work. He used the desk keypad to set up a large picture on the wall screen. It was a three-D representation of a young woman. She looked something like Nrina, but her hair was cocoa where Nrina's was butter, and her eyes were closer set. "Who is she?" Viktor asked politely, and Dekkaduk glared at him.

"You must not talk to us while we are working," he scolded. "But I will answer this question for you. She is no one. She hasn't been born yet. This is only what her parents want her to look like, and so we will arrange it. Now don't ask more questions until we are through."

So Viktor watched the image of the child who was not only not yet born but not even conceived, as Nrina and Dekkaduk matched the DNA strings that would produce that height, that color of eye, that taper of finger and that delicate arch of foot. That part of the process was not interesting for Viktor to watch, simply because he could not follow what was happening. Under the holographic image was a changing display of symbols and numbers—specifications, Viktor supposed, though he couldn't read them. No doubt they had to do with not only external appearances but nerve structures and disposition and … well, who knew what characteristics these people would want in a child?

But whatever the desire was, Nrina could supply it. She had no problem preparing the genetic blueprint that filled the order, and then it was only a matter of cutting and splicing and matching in.

The things they did were not merely a matter of surface appearance. They weren't even mostly surface appearance. The most important thing they built into every new baby was health.

There were all kinds of hereditary traits that had to be added or deleted or simply changed around a little. The effect was vast. The boys who came from Nrina's laboratory would never lose their virility or develop that benign prostatic hyperplasia called "old men's disease." The girls, however long they lived, would never acquire the "widow's hump" of osteoporosis. Bad genes were repaired on the spot.

Single-gene disorders were the easiest to deal with, of course. They came in three main kinds. There was the kind where a bad gene from either parent made the trouble; the recessive (or homozygous) kind where there wasn't any trouble unless it came from both parents; and the X-linked recessives that affected only males. All Nrina had to do with such conditions was a little repair work. If there was something wrong with the Apo B, C, and E genes Nrina made it right—and reduced the risk of a future coronary. If the hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyl-transferase gene was defective, a good one was patched in, and the child would not have Lesch-Nyhan disease. Codon 12 of the c-K-ras gene could be supplemented with a single nucleotide, and therefore went the risk of most pancreatic carcinomas and a lot of the colorectal ones, too. So Nrina's handmade children were exempt from many of the ills the flesh was (otherwise) heir to. No child born of their laboratory would ever have Epstein-Barr, or sickle-cell anemia, familial hypercholesterolemia, Huntington's disease, hemophilia, or any other of the hereditary nasties. Their arteries shrugged cholesterol away. Their digestive tracts contained no appendix; there were no tonsils in their throats.

For that reason Nrina knew very little of surgery. In some ways her grasp of medical science was centuries behind old Earth's—or even Newmanhome's. Dealing with Viktor's freezer-ulcerated leg was about as far as they could go. No one in Nrina's world was competent to cut out a lung or chop a hole in a side for a colostomy bag. No one ever needed such things. Oh, they did die—sooner or later. But usually later; and usually because they were simply wearing out; and almost always because they knew that death was coming and chose not to stay around for the final decay.

When they had finished with the day's production Viktor paused as he slipped out of his cloak. "Could you do anything you wanted to to them?" he asked. "I mean, could you give a baby six toes? Or two heads?"

Dekkaduk gave him an unforgiving look. "Thank you," he said, "for reminding us how primitive you are. Of course we could, but we never would. Who would want it?"

Even Nrina sighed. "Sometimes you are almost too odd, Viktor," she complained.

When Nrina at last pronounced Viktor's brain as cloudless as it was likely to get ("You will not remember everything, Viktor, and you will seem to remember some things that never really happened … but only a little, I think"), he began to think seriously about his future.

The big question, of course, was what future did he have in this place?

Reason told Viktor that the fact that he had any future at all was a great, big plus. He took some comfort from that. Anyway, he didn't need a lot of comforting, for making love to Nrina was a grand aspirin for all aches of the soul. Sometimes his trick memory would throw up a sudden misplaced image. Then he found himself thinking of lost Reesa, with a kind of melancholy ache that nothing was ever going to heal. That didn't last, and meanwhile Nrina was there. She was willing and adventurous in bed, and when they were not making love she was—well, much of the time—affectionate, kind, and friendly.

It was true that she was simply not interested in some of the things that mattered to Viktor. The mystery of what had happened to the universe, for instance. Of course, she pointed out, there should be plenty of material on just about everything somewhere in the teaching files, if Viktor wanted to use them. He could even use her own desk, she added—when she wasn't using it herself, of course. When Viktor complained that the mentor didn't seem able to turn up the really interesting stuff, Nrina even took time to try to instruct him in some of the desk's refinements.

The desk really was a desk—sort of. At least, it looked like a kind of old-fashioned draftsman's table. It was a broad, flat rectangle, tipped at an angle, with a kneeling stool before it and a kind of keypad in the lower left-hand corner. The symbols on the keys meant nothing at all to Viktor, but Nrina, leaning gently over his shoulder and smelling sweetly of her unusual perfume and herself, showed him how to work the pads. "Can you read the letters, at least?" she asked.

"No. Well, maybe. I think so," he said, squinting. "Some of them, anyway." The written language had not changed a great deal, but it had become phonetic; the alphabet had eleven new letters. Nrina rapidly scrolled down to "cosmology," after getting Viktor to try spelling it in the new alphabet.

Nothing appeared in the screen.

"That is quite strange," she said. "Perhaps we're spelling it wrong." But though they tried half a dozen different ways, the desk obstinately refused them all. Nor was it any more help with "time dilation" or "relativistic effects" or even "quantum mechanics."

"What a pity," Nrina sighed. "We must be doing something wrong."

"Thanks," Viktor said glumly.

"Oh, don't be unhappy," she said, cajoling. Then she brightened. "There are other things you can do," she said. "Have you ever tried calling anyone? A person, I mean? I have to call Pelly anyway. Here, let me show you how to call."

"You mean like a telephone?"

"What is 'telephone'? Never mind, I'll show you." She tapped the keypad, got a scroll, stopped it at that name, and tapped the name. As Viktor opened his mouth she said quickly, "This is my personal directory—there's also a general one which I will show you how to use, but I don't use the big one when I don't have to. Would you? Wait a minute, here he is."

The desk went pale and opaque; on the black space on the wall behind it the face of a man formed pumpkin fat, with a pumpkin smile. "Pelly?" Nrina said. "Yes, of course, it's Nrina. This is my friend Viktor—you saw him before, of course."

"Of course, but he was frozen then," the pumpkin grinned. "Hello, Viktor."

"Hello," Viktor said, since it seemed to be expected of him.

Nrina went right on. "Your gillies are ready," she told the man. "And a couple of the donors want to go back. When will you leave?"

"Six days," the man said. "How many gillies?"

"Twenty-two, fourteen of them female. I hope I'll see you before you go?"

"I hope so. Nice meeting you—I mean alive, Viktor," Pelly said, and was gone.

"You see how it works? You can call anyone that way. Anyone in our orbits, anyway—it's harder when they're in space or on Newmanhome. Then you have to allow for transmission time, you see."

But Viktor had no one to call. "What did he mean when he said he saw me when I was frozen?" he asked.

"That's Pelly," she explained. "He pilots spaceships. He's the one who brought you and the others back from Newmanhome." Then she said, remembering, "Oh, yes. He's been to Nebo, too. If you're so interested in it, you can ask him about it if we see him."

With the clues Nrina had given him, Viktor managed to work the directory himself. The desk gave more than a "phone number." It told him about Pelly: space captain; resident, generally, of Moon Gautama, but most of the time somewhere between the orbiting habitats and the other planets of the system.

He was poring over the views of Nebo again when Nrina came back, surprised to see him still bent over the desk. "Still at it, Viktor? But I'm tired; I'd like to rest now." And she glanced toward the bed.

"There are a lot of things I still want to know, Nrina," he said obstinately. "About Pelly, for instance. Why is he so fat?"

"So he can get around on Newmanhome, of course," Nrina explained. "He has to have supplements to build up his muscles—"

"Steroids?" Viktor guessed.

Nrina looked pleased. "Well, something like that, yes. And calcium binders so his bones won't break too easily, and all sorts of other things. You've seen how Dekkaduk looks? And he's only been to Newmanhome a few times, collecting specimens—" She looked embarrassed. "Bringing back people for me, I mean."

"Like me."

"Well, yes, of course like you. Anyway, Pelly goes there all the time. It makes him look gross, of course, which is why I would never— Oh, Viktor, I didn't mean it that way. After all, you were born like that."

He let that pass. "And did Pelly really land on Nebo?"

"You mean in person? Certainly not. No one has done that for many years."

"But people have landed there?"

Nrina sighed. "Yes, certainly. Several times."

"But not anymore?"

"Viktor," she said sensibly, "of course not. What would be the point? There's air, but it's foul; the heat is awful. And the gravity crushes you to walk there, Viktor—well, not you, no, but any normal person. It's much stronger than on a Moon. It's almost as bad as Newmanhome, but at least Newmanhome has a decent climate."

"But Nrina! There may be people on Nebo. Some of my own friends landed there—"

"Yes, and never came back. I know. You told me," Nrina said. "Isn't that a good enough reason to stay away?"

"But somebody made those machines. Not human, no."

"There's no one there. We've looked. Just the old machines."

"And have the machines been investigated scientifically?"

She frowned. "I don't know what you mean by 'scientifically.' Some people were interested in them, yes. They even brought some small things back to study—I remember Pelly had a piece of metal he showed me once."

Viktor inhaled sharply. "Can I see the things? Are they in a museum?"

But Nrina only laughed when he tried to explain what a museum was like, from his fading memories of the Los Angeles Art Museum and the La Brea Tar Pits. "Keep all those dirty things around? But why, Viktor? No one should keep trash. We'd just be choking on our own old worn-out things! No, I'm sure they were studied at the time. No doubt there are assay reports and probably pictures of them somewhere—you can use the desk to see what they look like, and I think a few people like Pelly might have a few little bits for curios. But we certainly don't have a place where we keep such things, and besides—"

She looked suddenly harsh, almost as though both frightened and angry. "Besides," she finished, "those hideous metal things are dangerous. That's why no one lands there anymore. People got killed there!"

And then, reluctantly, she went to the desk and showed him what had happened, more than a century before. A ship landing on Nebo. People coming out of it, grotesque in metallized film suits to keep out the heat and helmets to give them air to breathe; they approached one of the mauve pyramids, half-buried in the shifting sands of Nebo. They were trying to drill a way in—

And then it exploded.

Of the pyramid itself nothing at all was left; it simply was vaporized. No more of the people. A few fragments of nearby objects, blasted in the explosion, littered the sands.

When he looked up he saw that Nrina had averted her eyes. "Turn it off," she ordered. "Those people were killed."

He surrendered. She came closer, smiling down at him. "That's better," she said softly, leaning against his shoulder.

He didn't resist. He didn't encourage her either. "All right, Nrina, I see what happened, but it doesn't tell me anything. What are those machines?"

"But no one knows that, Viktor," she said patiently. "And it isn't very interesting."

"It is to me! I want to know what they were there for—who built them—how they work. All this 'what' stuff is very interesting, of course, but can't I ever find out a 'why'?"

"Why what, Viktor?" she asked kindly, stroking his stubbly cheek. "Wouldn't you like to grow a beard? Most men do, if they can."

"No, I don't want to grow a beard. Please don't change the subject. I mean I want to know why things happen—the theoretical explanation behind the things I see."

"I don't think those words mean anything," she said, frowning. "I understand 'theory,' of course. That is the background of genetics, the rules that tell us what to expect when, for instance, we strip a certain nucleotide out of a gene and patch in another."

"Yes, exactly! That's what I mean! What I'm looking for is something on astronomical theory."

Nrina shook her head. "I have never heard of any 'astronomical' theories, Viktor."

When Viktor came home from a ramble Nrina was waiting for him. "I have something to show you," she said mysteriously, pleased with herself. "Come into my room."

There she surprised him. She opened a compartment in the wall. It revealed itself as a little cage, with something moving beyond the wire mesh. Nrina reached into it and drew out something tiny and soft.

It moved comfortably in her hand. "Tell me, Viktor," she said, hesitating as though worried at what his answer might be. "Have you ever seen one of these things before?"

"Of course I have!" He let her give him the furry little thing. "It's a kitten!"

"Exactly," she said triumphantly, observing as he stroked its fur. "Does it enjoy that?" she inquired.

"Most cats do. Where did you get it? I thought they were extinct!"

She looked gratified. "Indeed they were," she said, graciously acknowledging the remarkable nature of her feat. "I made it. There were some frozen specimens of feline sperm Pelly found when he brought you back." Experimentally she stroked the kitten as Viktor had done. Viktor could hear nothing, but the nerve endings of his hand informed him of the creature's silent, tiny purr. "It's always a worry," she said, "when you don't have any female genetic material for a new species. Oh, it's easy enough to structure an artificial ovum, but when the animal is something you've never seen before you have to wonder if you've got it exactly right."

Viktor stroked the soft, wriggly little thing and handed it back to her. "I'd say that looks like the rightest little kitten I've ever seen," he pronounced.

She accepted the compliment gracefully. "I'm going to give it to a little boy I know." Carefully she returned it to its cage, closing the door.

Viktor shook his head, marveling. "I knew you designed children. I knew you created intelligent gorillas—"

"Gillies, Viktor."

"—intelligent gillies for servants. I didn't know you could make just about anything you could imagine."

She considered that for a moment. "Oh, not anything," she decided. "Some things are physically impossible—or, anyway, I could make them, but they wouldn't survive. But this is the most interesting part of my work, Viktor. It's why anyone bothers to go to Newmanhome, really. There's a whole biota in those freezers on Newmanhome, you know. We don't know half of what's there. Even when there's a label we can't always be sure of what's inside, because they got pretty sloppy about keeping records for a while. So when I have a chance I match up sperm and ova—when I can—or find some related genetic material that I can tinker into being cross-fertile. Like this."

"Do you sell them, like a pet store?"

"I don't know what a pet store is, and I certainly don't 'sell' them, any more than I sell the babies. If someone wants them I get credit for my time." She sighed. "It doesn't always work. Sometimes I can't find a match or even make one; a lot of the specimens are spoiled, and it's terribly hard to reconstitute them. And then, even when we do get an interesting neonate, we can't always feed them. Especially the invertebrates; some of them are really specialized in diet, they just won't eat what we try to give them. So they die." She grinned. "Babies are a lot easier."

That was probably true, Viktor reflected, since the real human fetuses never appeared in Nrina's laboratory as born babies. Gestation and birthing weren't her problems. What she produced was a neat little plastic box, thermally opaque so it didn't need either warming or cooling for forty-eight hours or so, containing a fertilized ovum and enough nutrient fluid to keep it alive until the proud parents could put it in their own incubator. "Don't you ever want to see the real babies?" Viktor asked her curiously.

"What for?" Nrina asked, surprised at the question. "Babies are very messy creatures, Viktor. Oh, I like to hear how they turn out and I'm always glad to get pictures of them—every artist wants to see how his work turns out. But the only ones I ever wanted to be around for more than a day were my own." Then she was surprised again at the expression on his face. "Didn't you know? I've had two children. One of them was just a favor to her father, so I didn't keep her very long. He wanted something to remember me by, you see. Her name's Oclane and, let's see, she must be fourteen or fifteen by now. She's on Moon Joseph, but she comes to visit me sometimes. She's a pretty little girl. Very bright, of course. I think she looks a lot like me."

"I didn't know," Viktor said, hastily revising his internal image of Nrina. He had thought of her as many things, but never as a mother—not even as one of those mothers of the present new-fangled variety, who picked out specifications for their offspring and never went through the uncouth bother of pregnancy. Then he remembered her words. "You said you had two children. What about the other one?"

She laughed. "But you know him very well, Viktor. Who did you think Dekkaduk was?"

The next time Viktor saw Dekkaduk he looked at the man with new interest. Dekkaduk did, Viktor decided, more or less resemble Nrina—but then, all these people resembled each other to his eyes, in the same way that all Westerners looked alike to most Chinese. What Dekkaduk didn't look like at all was anyone young enough to be a child of Nrina's.

There was an answer to that, too: Viktor realized he had no idea at all of Nrina's age. She could have been a youthful, good-looking forty—Newmanhome years, of course. She could equally well have been a very well preserved hundred or more. None of these people ever looked old.

In bed she was definitely ageless.

Viktor took much pleasure in that part of their intimacy. Still, there were times when he felt a kind of submerged resentment that his main reason for living was to provide a little sexual excitement for a woman he hardly knew. There were even times when he remembered that he had once had a wife. Then, sometimes, a gloom descended over him that was like the suffocating withdrawal of all air, like all the light in the world going out at once.

But there were other times that were not gloomy at all. Nrina was a splendid aspirin for all those passing aches of the soul.

Apart from all her other virtues, Nrina was deeply fascinated with Viktor's body. It wasn't just sex she wanted from him. She wanted to prod and squeeze and feel his archaic flesh, though of course she often wanted sex, too. She could be happy for half an hour at a time as they lay naked together, experiencing the flexing of his muscles. Not just his biceps, but his forearm, his thigh, his neck, all the muscles he could flex at all, while she held her hand on them to feel them swell. "And they're natural, Viktor, truly?"

Grunting. "Of course they're natural. Only please, Nrina, don't squeeze so hard on my sore leg."

"Oh, of course." And then a moment later, "And this hair here? Did everyone have it in your time?" But Viktor had always been ticklish in the armpits, and of course that ticklishness led to tickling back, which led to other things. Or she would minutely inspect the brownish spots on the back of his hand, touching them gently in case they were painful. "What are they, Viktor?" she asked, stretching behind her to reach for something he could not see.

"We call them freckles," he grinned. "Although—well, maybe those are a little more than just freckles. People get them when they get older. They're what we call 'age spots' then. They're perfectly natural—hey! Ouch!" But she had been too quick for him, jabbing the back of his hand with the sharp little metal probe she had pulled from nowhere.

"Don't make such a fuss," she ordered, carefully putting her cell sample away. "Here, let me kiss it."

And then, after a little study in her laboratory, she told him they were simply degenerated collagen. "I could clear those spots up for you if you wanted me to, Viktor," she offered.

He reached out to touch her body, not naked this time, but with only the flimsy gauze and the cache-sex to modify it. She turned comfortably beside him, taking her ease on a fluff of airy pillows beside him. Her skin was quite flawless. "Do they offend you?" he asked.

"Of course not! Your body does not offend me!"

"Then why don't we just leave them alone?" And wryly Viktor reflected that this was a strange relationship, in which she was almost entirely absorbed in his body, while he was desperate for everything that was in her mind.

Her body she let him have almost any time he chose—usually she chose first, in fact. Her mind was another matter. Viktor didn't feel that Nrina closed him out, or went out of her way to keep information from him. It was simply that so many of the things he wanted to know bored her. "Yes, yes, Viktor," she would sigh, while he was thumping excitedly on the desk screen. "I see what you are showing me. There used to be more stars."

"Many more!" he would answer, scowling at the impoverished sky below him. But she would yawn, and perhaps put her hand in a place that made him pay attention to other things again. What was thrillingly, even frighteningly, strange to Viktor was only the natural order of things to Nrina. It was as if someone from Tahiti had seen snow for the first time: The Eskimos wouldn't have understood his feelings.

When Nrina came back from her lab and found Viktor absorbed over the desk she was tolerant about it, usually. She stripped off her robe and sat beside him. He could certainly feel bare body touching bare body, but it did not keep him from concentrating on the desk instead of the touch of flesh. "It's nice that you have an interest," Nrina observed philosophically.

He tried again. "Nrina, I'm certain that some very strange things have happened. Don't you want to know about them? Don't you even wonder?"

"It's not my line of work, Viktor," she said, looking slightly ruffled.

He said in bafflement, "The universe has died around us. We've been kidnapped. Time stopped for us—"

She was yawning. "Yes, I know. The other savages—sorry, Viktor. The other people from the freezer talk about that sometimes, too. They call it 'God the Transporter' or some such thing. A silly superstition! As if there were some supernatural being who moved stars around just for fun!"

"Then what is the explanation?"

"It doesn't need an explanation. It just is." She shrugged. "It just isn't a very interesting subject, Viktor. No one really cares except— Oh, wait a minute," she said, suddenly sitting up and looking pleased. "I almost forgot Frit!"

Viktor blinked up at her. "What's a frit?" he asked.

"Frit isn't a what, he's a who. Frit and Forta. I designed their son for them. They're old friends of mine. Matter of fact, it's Balit—that's their boy—who I made that kitten for; he'll be twenty soon, and it's time for his coming-of-age presents." She thought for a moment, then nodded. "Yes, I'm sure Frit knows all about that sort of thing. He'd be interested in you, probably. And he and Forta have been together nearly thirty years now, and we still keep in touch."

Viktor sat up straight. He had the tingling, electrical feeling that all at once, without his having anticipated it at all, a goal for his life had been given to him. "How can I reach this Frit?" he demanded.

She looked doubtful. "Well, he's very busy, but I suppose you could call him up," she said, then suddenly brightened. "I know!" she cried. "Why don't we go to Balit's party?"

"Balit's party?"

"Balit's Frit's son. They live on Moon Mary. No, wait a minute," she corrected herself. "They do live on Mary, but I think they told me they're having the party on Frit's family's habitat." She nodded to herself as the details of her inspiration were coming clear to her. "Dekkaduk can handle things here for a couple of days. It would be a nice trip for you, and I ought to take Pelly's gillies there anyway—that's where his ship is. And I'm sure they'd be glad to have us, and then you can talk to Frit all you want." She gave Viktor's thigh a decisive pat, pleased with her idea. "We'll do it! And don't ask me any more questions now, Viktor. Just believe me, it'll be fun!"