The World at the End of Time

CHAPTER 24

Nrina was flushed and excited as they boarded the bus. "It's going to be a nice party," she was saying. She seemed younger than Viktor had ever seen her, happily making sure her packages were stored and that Viktor got a window seat. "Have you got the cat? Please, don't let go of it. We'll have a couple of velocity changes, and we don't want it flying around and hitting some other passenger in the face. You don't get spacesick, do you?"

Viktor Sorricaine, who was fairly sure he was the oldest living space pilot in the known universe, didn't dignify that with an answer. "How far are we going?" he asked as he settled himself into the soft webbing of the seat, carefully adjusting the belt so that it didn't squeeze the restless little kitten on his lap. The dark-haired man across the aisle was staring at the little animal.

"Not far. Frit's family lives on a fabrication habitat; they make things. It's two or three levels down, but it's less than a quarter-orbit away. It'll take about two hours to get there."

Two hours! A spaceflight of only two hours? But he had picked up on something else she had said. "Is it a family party? I'm not family," he objected.

She looked at him in surprise. "That doesn't matter. I am. Sort of, anyway. They'll certainly be glad to have you; there are always guests at this kind of party—" She stopped to nod to a young-looking woman who was strolling languidly through the bus, glancing to see that everyone was strapped in. "That's the driver," Nrina informed him as the woman passed. "We'll be leaving in a moment now." The driver seated herself in the front of the bus, before a broad screen. Casually she pulled a board of pale lights and twinkling colors down into her lap, glancing over it for a moment. Then she touched the control that closed the entrance hatch behind them, and Nrina said, "Here we go, Viktor. Don't let go of the cat."

Then they were in space. In space!

Viktor was thrilled by the feel of the bus launching itself free of the habitat. It wasn't violent. The launch was no more than a gentle thrust against the back of the webbing, a quarter-gravity at most. Viktor found himself grinning in pleasure, though he felt Nrina, beside him, shifting uncomfortably in her seat. Absently, Viktor patted her knee with his free hand. (Under his other hand, the kitten didn't seem to mind the acceleration at all. It was actually purring.)

Considered as a spaceship, the bus was—a bus. Even the old Newmanhome lander shuttles had been twice its size, but then they necessarily had to be; they had to carry the fuel and rockets capable of fighting a planet's gravity. The bus had no such needs. All it needed were air and room for its dozen or so passengers, and engines enough to push it along through inter-orbital space.

Just outside Viktor's window, it seemed, was the smoldering, bloody face of the brown dwarf, Nergal. The planet was less than a hundred thousand miles below them, almost hurting his eyes until Nrina indulgently leaned over him and darkened the polarization. Nergal-light wasn't like bright sunshine, it looked hot—though only visible light came through the polarization, with the infrared frequencies screened out.

The word for it was "baleful."

As the ship rotated Nergal slid away, and Viktor got a look at the habitat they had just left: A length of sewer pipe, half a mile long, spinning in stately slow motion, with odds and ends of junk hanging from it. Some of the appendages were the great mirrors that caught Nergal's hot radiation and funneled it into the magnetohydrodynamic generators that gave them the power they needed to run the habitat. Some were probably communications gear; more were things Viktor could not even guess at.

Then that was gone, too, and Viktor turned to find Nrina looking at him with interest. "You're excited, aren't you?" she asked, placing her hand over his.

"I guess I am," he admitted. "Oh, Nrina, it's so good to be in space again! That's what I dreamed about when I was a boy— Look, there's another ship!" he cried as something the size of a family car slid rapidly past, only a mile or two away.

Nrina glanced briefly at the thing. "It's just a cargo drone, probably nobody on it." Then, reassuringly, she said, "This is quite safe, you know, Viktor."

But it wasn't safety that was on his mind, it was the glandular excitement of being in space. Viktor stared longingly at the nearly empty black sky.

It was so terribly black. So very little was left of the familiar sky. Without Nergal or the distant sun, there was nothing to see but an occasional glint—a distant habitat, perhaps, or another ship—and one or two more distant things: the surviving stars.

That was it.

The familiar spread of constellations that had always been there—always—simply did not exist anymore.

Viktor shivered. He had never felt so alone.

Chatter beside him reminded him that he wasn't alone at all. Nrina had taken the kitten from him and was feeding it with a little object like a baby bottle, while half a dozen other passengers were clustered around in admiration, braced awkwardly against the mild thrust of the ship. "Yes, it is called a 'cat,' " Nrina was explaining. "No, they've been extinct for ages. Yes, it's the only one of its kind now—I just finished it—but if it lives I think I'll make a mate for it. No, they aren't wild animals. People used to have them in their houses all the time. Didn't they, Viktor?" she appealed.

"What? Oh, yes, they make great pets," Viktor confirmed, recalled to reality. "They do have claws, though. And they needed to be housebroken."

That led to more questions (What were "claws"? What was "housebroken"? Could they be trained to do useful things, like gillies?) until the driver broke up the party. "Everyone get back to his seat, please," she called. 'We'll be matching orbit with the target in a moment."

As the little ship swerved Viktor saw what was waiting for them. This new habitat was also cylindrical—no doubt because that was the best shape for an orbiting people container—but along its perimeter were a dozen rosettes of air hatches where odd-looking little ships had attached themselves. "They're raw-materials gatherers," Nrina explained when he asked. "This is a manufacturing habitat, didn't I tell you? That's what Frit's family does, manufacturing. Those things—I suppose you've never seen them before—they are set loose here. Then they go out to the asteroids and so on to grow and reproduce themselves and bring back metals and things to use—"

Viktor felt a start of recognition. "Like Von Neumann machines?" he asked, remembering the ore-collecting nautiloids that he had encountered so often in the seas of Newmanhome.

"I don't know what those are, but—oh, look! That must be Pelly's ship!"

And Viktor forgot the Von Neumanns, because as the habitat rotated under them he saw what Nrina was pointing to. Yes, that was a ship, a real spaceship, hugged to the shell of the habitat. The ship had to be nearly a thousand feet long by itself, and it in turn had hugged to its own shell a lander larger than their bus. He stared at it longingly. That was more like it! A man could take pride in piloting a ship like that …

"Maybe Pelly will be at the party," Nrina said with pleasure. "Anyway, we'll be getting out in a minute, Viktor. Do you want to take the cat?" She passed the kitten to him and then, leaning past him, looked with disfavor at the habitat. "It doesn't look like much, does it? It's so big. It has to be, I suppose, because they do all sorts of industrial things there. I don't think anyone would live there if they didn't have to. Still, it's quite nice on the inside, anyway. You'll see."

What she said was true. On the inside the factory habitat was nice, very much so, but it took Viktor a while to find that out.

Its design was not like the one they had come from. It was almost a reversal of Nrina's, in fact. Instead of a shell of dwelling places surrounding a core of machinery, this habitat's machinery was all in the outer shell. The passengers exited the bus into a noisy, steel-walled cavern, with the thumping, grinding sounds of distant industrial production coming from somewhere not far on the other side of the wall. Then Viktor and Nrina and the kitten took a fast little elevator, and when they emerged Viktor saw that the whole heart of the cylinder was a vast open space. Great trees grew along the inside of the rim, all queerly straining up toward the axis of the cylinder. There a glowing rodlike thing stretched from end to end to give them light. The whole place was almost like a vast park, rolled around to join itself.

It was a teetery, vertiginous place to be, for the ground beneath Viktor's feet curved up past the glowing central rod to become the sky over his head. Nothing fell on him, of course. Viktor knew perfectly well that nothing could, because the rotation of the habitat pasted those distant upside-down trees and people as firmly to their "ground" as he was pasted to his. All the same, he was less uneasy when he avoided looking up. There were plenty of other things to see. There were brooks and ponds. There were beds of flowering plants, and farm patches. There were even herds of what looked like sheep and cattle, grazing on the meadows that bent up to join on the far side of the habitat. There were people, too, many people, going about their business or simply strolling and enjoying the park.

Viktor realized that something was missing from the bizarre scene: buildings. There were none in sight. It seemed that no one lived on the surface of this interior shell; their homes, their offices or workshops or whatever, were all inside the shell, "underground," so to speak, with only entranceways visible on the surface—like the one they had come out of, rising direct from the bus dock.

"Ah, yes," Nrina said as she got her bearings. She pointed to a round pond a hundred yards away—just far enough along the curve of the shell to make Viktor uneasy again, because the water looked as though it really ought to be spilling over out of its bed. "Sit there on that bench," she commanded. The bench was in a trellis of something like grapevines. "Let me have the cat—we don't want Balit to see it yet. Then you just stay there while I find the others and check the operating room." She was gone before he could ask her what in the world she wanted an "operating room" for.

As Viktor sat, the quivers in his stomach began to settle down. The air was warm enough to be friendly but not oppressive; there was a gentle, steady breeze, perhaps from the rotation of the cylinder. A fair number of people were in sight, though none close enough to Viktor to talk to. Near the round pond there was a grassy meadow, where twelve or fourteen adults and children were flying huge bright, many-colored kites, laughing and shouting as they played the fluttery things in the steady breeze.

Of course, like everyone else Viktor encountered these days, they were just about naked—breechclouts, yes, they all had those, and a few wore gauzy cloaks, or even hats; but that was it. And they were having fun. They weren't just flying the kites for the sake of watching them dart and wheel in the sky. They were in a contest. The kite flyers were fighting one kite against another. Some of the players were children, most were fully grown, and all of them were screaming in excitement as they tried to use the sharp edges of their own kite tails and cords to cut someone else's down.

Between Viktor and the kite flyers was a sort of garden. Some pale, long fruit was being harvested—maybe a kind of cucumber? Viktor thought. And a crew of dwarfish, hairy "gillies" was moving along the rows to pick the ripe fruit. They seemed to Viktor larger, or at least squatter, than the ones he had seen before. As Viktor watched, one of them glanced around, then crammed one of the fruits into its own mouth. When it saw Viktor watching, it winked at him in embarrassment.

So even the gillies had privileges here. He found the thought reassuring. It emboldened him to pick a few grapes off the vines he was sitting under. They were not very sweet, but they were deliciously cool on his tongue.

When Nrina came back she was not alone.

Half a dozen or more other men and women came milling out of the entranceway with her, all next door to naked, of course, and all chuckling to each other and looking anticipatory. They were all strangers to Viktor—almost all, anyway, though one exceptionally stocky, round-faced man looked vaguely familiar. Viktor was surprised to see that all of them were carrying things that looked like baseball bats, for what reason he could not guess.

Nrina introduced him all around. "This is Viktor," she said proudly. "He was actually born on Earth! And this is Wollet, Viktor, and this is his daughter Gren. This is Velota and this Mangry—Frit's father and mother, you know—and Forta's sisters, Wilp and Mrust; this is Pallik over here; and do you remember Pelly?"

Recognition dawned. "I do," he said. "I saw your ship as we were coming in. How are you, Pelly?"

The man looked agreeable but surprised. "I'm very well, of course. Why do you ask?"

Nrina laughed and interrupted, sparing Viktor the trouble of finding an answer. "That's how they used to talk on Old Earth," she explained. "Viktor's really quite civilized, though. Not like some of the others."

They didn't shake hands, either, Viktor discovered, although several of them did hug in greeting, and one of the men kissed his cheek. Which one, Viktor could not have said. Of all the dozen names Viktor had been given he retained none, though the other party guests all seemed to know each other.

Then Nrina handed him one of the clubs. He almost dropped it—not because it was heavy, but for the opposite reason. The bat was made of a sort of rigid foam, strong and soft to the touch, that weighed almost nothing.

A soft thwack across his own back made him jump and whirl: It was the little girl—Gren?—giggling as she swung at him again. He fended the attack off with his own club, careful not to hit the girl—the blow hadn't hurt at all, but he was very unsure of just what was going on. Her father—Wollet?—nodded approvingly, grinning as he took practice swings with his own club. "We'll give it to them, all right," he exulted. "Where are they, Nrina? Let's go!"

"Hold the club behind your back, you ass," she commanded, laughing at him. "You too, Viktor. We don't want them to see what we're doing, do we? Frit said they'd be watching the kite battles—yes, there they are! Oh, and look at Balit—isn't he a perfect little doll?"

It was Wollet's turn. "If you don't shut up they'll hear us," he warned, and led the way to where two men and a young boy were watching the battling kites, their backs to the group with the clubs. The boy certainly was nice-looking—slim, pale-haired; the equivalent of an Earthly ten-year-old, with the promise of good adult looks in the bones of his face. Viktor frowned. Another puzzle! On the boy's pretty young forehead there was exactly the same blue tattoo as Viktor wore himself. But he had no opportunity to ask about it, for the others were all shushing each other as they moved closer. Although the boy was doggedly staring at the bobbing kites, he was also stealing glances around in every direction, as though suspecting something, until one of the men with him leaned down and, smiling, whispered in his ear. Then Balit stopped looking around. Still, the body language of the way he stood showed that he was tensed up for—what?

There were other spectators, who glanced from Balit to the approaching group, with expressions of amused tolerance. The two men with Balit kept their eyes steadfastly on the kites in the sky. As they approached, Viktor saw that one of the men was as tall as himself, though as slightly built as all these people; he had both mustaches and a beard, all waxed or sprayed or some-other-how swept out in majestic and improbable long curves. The other man, smaller and even more delicately built, had one hand on the boy's head and the other tucked into the hand of his companion. His beard was far shorter and less conspicuous—but, all the same, it was definitely a beard.

Suddenly confused, Viktor whispered to Nrina, "Who are those two guys?"

"Frit and Forta, of course. Balit's parents."

"Oh. For a minute I thought they were both men."

"They are both men, Viktor. Do be quiet!"

"Oh," Viktor said again, feeling his eyes beginning to bulge. One more surprise! He could have expected almost anything of these people, but what he had not expected at all was that Balit's parents should both be male.

Then things got even more surprising. "Now we attack! Show no quarter!" Nrina shouted joyously, and her whole band began to run toward the little family, waving their clubs. "Don't you dare try to resist!" Nrina ordered ferociously, thwacking the taller man happily across his shoulder with the harmless bat. "We've come to steal your child and you dare not try to stop us!"

But both the men, laughing, were already resisting. They whirled around, pulling soft clubs of their own out of the waistbands of their breechclouts and defending themselves vigorously against the combined attack of Nrina's band of marauders. A couple of blows hit Viktor, who was blinking in confusion as he was thrust into the middle of the fracas. Of course, the clubs didn't hurt. It was almost like being hit with a helium-filled balloon; the foam-light clubs were incapable of hurting anyone; and there was no doubt of the outcome—it was two against a dozen, after all. The bystanders were cheering and egging both sides on, as the outnumbered parents slowly fell back, leaving the boy standing tense and smiling anxiously behind them.

"Pick him up, Viktor," Nrina commanded, laughing breathlessly in pursuit. "Go on, do it! You're much stronger than any of us, so you can be the one to carry him away!"

What made Viktor follow her order was that the boy seemed to acquiesce. He moved toward Viktor, smiling tentatively and holding out his arms.

And so Viktor Sorricaine, four thousand years out of his time, found himself in the act of kidnapping a child on a manmade habitat that circled the brown dwarf, Nergal. Well, why not? he thought wryly. Nothing else made sense! Why should this?

The band of kidnappers broke off their battle and flocked after Viktor, shouting in triumph while the despoiled parents watched proudly after them. The whole abducting mob hurried into one of the entranceways. Then Nrina told Viktor to put the boy down. "I'll take care of him from now on," she said indulgently. "Did you meet Viktor, Balit? He was frozen for a long time, you know. He was actually on Old Earth—imagine! He'll tell you all about it at the party, I'm sure."

"Hello, Viktor," the boy said politely, and then looked plaintively at Nrina. "Is it going to hurt, Aunt Nrina?"

"Hurt? Of course it won't hurt, Balit," she scolded indulgently. "It'll take five minutes, that's all. Then it will all be over. And besides, you'll be asleep while I'm doing it. Now, come to the operating room—and, oh, I've got the most wonderful coming-of-age present for you!"

An hour later the party was in full swing. Balit was sitting on a kind of throne on top of the buffet table, a glass of wine in his hand, Nrina's gift purring gently in his lap, and a garland of flowers on his head, while his captors and his parents and several dozen other people who had shown up from nowhere drank and ate and joked and sang and congratulated Balit on his new status as a man.

Viktor had never seen a young boy look more pleased, though he noticed that Balit did from time to time surreptitiously reach down to touch his genitals, as though to make sure they were still there.

They were. As good as new. It was simply that through Nrina's quick and expert minor surgery, they were no longer capable of producing live sperm. "It's what every male does when he gets close to puberty," Wollet explained heartily, refilling Viktor's glass. "That way he doesn't have to worry about, you know, making someone really—what was the word?—yes, pregnant." He gazed fondly at his daughter, who was teasingly stroking the kitten in Balit's lap—and a little of Balit, too. "It makes the girls a little jealous," Wollet said. "They have a coming-of-age party, too, of course, but they don't have the jolly old fighting and the kidnapping and the carrying away, and that's what makes this kind of party so special. Don't you agree?"

"Oh, yes," Viktor said politely. "Uh, Wollet? That mark on the boy's forehead … "

"The fertility mark, yes. What about it? Oh, I see you've got one, too. Well, Balit shouldn't have intercourse now for a few weeks, you know, until any live sperm in his tract dissipate, then they'll take the brand off. Hasn't Nrina told you all this? I guess she would do you, too, if you asked her to—I mean, now that you're not donating anymore. Oh, here comes Pelly!"

Viktor was not at his best, greeting the bloated-looking space captain; he was not used to the fact that everyone he met seemed to know all about the state of his genital system. All he could say was, in a rush, "Pelly, I really want to talk to you—"

"About Nebo. I know," the man growled good-naturedly. "Nrina warned me you would. Let's get out of this noise, though. Suppose we pick up a couple of drinks, and then we can go over there and sit by the edge of the pond."

It wasn't just Nebo that Viktor wanted to talk about, but Pelly was easy. He seemed almost to admire Viktor—well, naturally enough, he explained. "You, Viktor—you've really traveled! All the way from Old Earth—all I've ever done is cruise around this little system."

So it wasn't just the fizzy, faintly tart, mildly fruity drinks they were putting away that made Viktor feel good. He had become used to being a curiosity, but it had been a long, long time since he had felt himself admired. He glanced back at the coming-of-age party, which was increasing and multiplying as random passersby came by and joined in and stayed. Nrina was showing Balit how to feed the kitten out of the improvised bottle she had made; Frit, from the top of the banquet table, was declaiming a poem.

"Nrina said you had some artifacts you'd picked up from Nebo," Viktor said.

Pelly shook his head. "Oh, no, not me. I mean, I didn't pick the things up personally—I've never landed on Nebo, and I never will. But I do have this thing—I carry it around to show people." He fumbled in his pouch and handed Viktor a bit of something that was metal-bright, but a pale lavender in color.

Viktor turned the thing over. It was astonishingly light, for metal: a rod about the size of his finger, tapering to round at one end, the other end cracked and jagged. "Is it hollow?" he asked, hefting it.

"No. It's what you see. And don't ask me what it's for, because I don't know." Pelly restored it to his pouch, then had a change of mind. "I know, I'll give it to Balit for a coming-of-age present! There are plenty more of these things—not here, of course, but on Newmanhome." He peered keenly at Viktor and the moon face split in a smile. "I'm going back there in a few days, you know."

"Really? to Newmanhome?"

"To tell the truth," Pelly admitted, "I'm looking forward to it. I'm generally happier on the ship than I am here—maybe because I'm pure, you know. I mean," he explained, "nobody tinkered with my genes before I was born. Not much, anyway, outside of, you know, getting rid of genetic diseases and that sort of thing. I probably wouldn't even have needed the muscle builders and things to be on Newmanhome, except for growing up on a habitat—but I was always a lot heavier than the other boys."

"I didn't know there were any like you anymore," Viktor said.

"There aren't many. Maybe that's why I like space. Maybe I take after the ones who originally came here, you know. You've seen their ships! Can you imagine the courage of them— What's the matter?"

"I haven't seen those ships. I wish I could."

"Oh, but that's easy enough," Pelly said, grinning. From his shoulder bag he pulled out a flat board, glassy-topped, like the teaching desks. He touched the tiny keypad. "There it is," he said ruefully. "Pathetic, isn't it?"

Viktor bent over to study the picture. "Pathetic" was the right word—a single hydroxy-propelled rocket, tiny in the screen but certainly not very large in any case. It was orbiting with ruddy Nergal huge below it, and as Pelly manipulated the keypad to move the scene forward in time the ship was joined by another, and another—more than a dozen in all, linking together in a sprawling mass of nested spaceships. Viktor could see years of history happening in minutes as the ships deployed solar mirrors and began to reshape themselves. "That was the first habitat," Pelly told him. "Altogether only eight hundred people made it to Nergal—that was all they could build ships for; the rest, I guess, just stayed there and died. Things got better when they began constructing real habitats out of asteroidal material, but for a long time they damn near starved. Then, once there was some sort of plague, and most of the ones around then died of that." He swept his arm around the scene about them. "Did you know that all of us are descended from exactly ninety-one people? That's all that were left after the plague. But then it began to get better." He flicked off the screen and looked at Viktor, seeming a little abashed. "Does all this bore you?"

"Oh, no!" Viktor cried. "Honestly, Pelly, it's what I've been trying to find out ever since Nrina thawed me out! Listen, what about the time-dilation effect?"

Pelly blinked politely. "I beg your pardon?"

"The basic question, I mean. The reason all this happened in the first place—the way our little group of stars took off at relativistic speeds. I've been trying to figure it out. The only thing I can think is that we were traveling so fast that time dilation took over—for a long time, Pelly, I can't even guess how long—long enough so that all the stars went through their life cycles and died while we were traveling." Viktor stopped, because Pelly's eyes were beginning to glaze.

"Oh, yes," Pelly said, beginning to fidget as he glanced around. "Nrina said you said things like that."

"But don't you see? It's all linked together! The structures on Nebo, the Sorricaine-Mtiga objects, the foreshortening of the optical universe, the absence of all stellar objects but a handful now—"

"Viktor," Pelly said, his voice good-natured enough but also quite definite, "I'm a space pilot, not a poet. Ask me anything about practical matters and I'm happy to talk as long as you like. But this—this—this sort of, well, mystical stuff, it's just not what I'm interested in. Anyway," he finished, holding up his empty glass, "we need refills now, don't we? And they're beginning to dance again—what say we join them?"

It took two more glasses of the mild, bubbly stuff before Viktor was ready to accept defeat. Ah, well, he told himself, it was too much to hope for real understanding from any of these people. All they cared about, obviously, was having fun.

But halfway through the second glass fun began to seem worth having even to someone on whom, alone, the burden of solving the riddle of the universe seemed to rest. Nrina was leading an open circle of scores of people, dancing around the guest of honor's throne, laughing. She waved to Viktor to join them.

Why not? He swallowed the rest of the drink. Then he trotted to the line and took over Nrina's position.

The fizzy drink probably had something to do with that. Viktor wasn't in the habit of taking over a lead spot among strangers. Especially when, in this thistledown gravity, his steps were balloonlike rather than the macho stomps he liked best. Nevertheless, everyone followed as he led them, patiently but firmly, in a sort of loose, watered-down Hine Ma Tov—leaving out the tricky Yemeni figures, just step-bend and running steps, until everyone in the line had grasped it and was laughing and out of breath.

"That was nice," Nrina told him breathlessly, throwing her arms around him at the end. "Kiss, Viktor!" And while they were kissing the proud father came up to them, beaming.

"Viktor! I didn't know you were a dancer." And before Viktor had a chance to be modest, the man was rushing on. "I'm Frit. I'm so glad Nrina brought you. We haven't had a chance to meet, but I wanted to thank you for helping with Balit's party." He squeezed Viktor's arm. "Imagine! None of his friends ever had a person from Earth carry them away! He'll be the envy of his whole cohort."

"It was nothing," Viktor said graciously. Nrina patted his shoulder affectionately and strolled away. Viktor hardly noticed. He was staring in fascination at Frit's mustaches. At close range they were even more of a marvel; they extended beyond his shoulders on both sides, and although Viktor was sure he had seen one of them bent in the mock scuffle it was now repaired and stood as proudly as before. They did not at all match Frit's hair, either. At a distance Viktor had thought the man was wearing a white cap, but it was actually close-cropped white kinks, like the standard image of an old Pullman porter, though Frit's skin was alabaster.

"You must meet Forta," Frit went on, beckoning to the—well, Viktor thought, I guess you would say to the other father, though how all that worked out he couldn't imagine. "This is Viktor, dear," Frit told his mate. "Nrina says he's very interested in the stars and all."

"Yes, she told me," Forta said, demurely offering his shoulder to hug. "Do you know what we should do, Frit? We should ask Viktor to come and stay with us for a while. Balit already asked me if we could; he was just thrilled at being kidnapped by somebody from Old Earth! I know Balit would love to show him off to his friends—"

"Yes, dear," Frit said tolerantly. "But what would Viktor think of that? We can't expect him to spend his time with a bunch of kids."

Viktor blinked, then said, suddenly hopeful, "I'd really like to talk to you about what's happened to the universe. If I wouldn't be any burden—"

"Burden?" Forta echoed. "No, certainly you wouldn't be a burden; we'd love to have you come home with us. And—" He hesitated, then grinned modestly. "—since you're interested in dancing, shall I dance for you now? Frit's just finished a new poem in honor of Balit's coming of age—it's about growth and maturity—and I've done the dance accompaniment."

"Please do," Viktor said. He was completely out of it, really. He was wholly confused about what had been going on and what was to come. But he was game. He didn't, after all, have many other options.