The World at the End of Time

CHAPTER 26

Moon Mary was a natural moon—well, a formerly natural moon, now terraformed and made lovely. Along with the myriad habitats it orbited around the brown dwarf, Nergal. "Forta needs a moon's gravity," Frit explained on the way. "Dancers have to have a lot of muscles, you know! If he can dance here he can dance anywhere—well, not on a planet, or anything like that, but on any of the other moons or the habitats. The exercise will be good for your leg while it heals, too."

"Besides, we've got a lot of data in our store," Forta put in hospitably. "I'm sure you'll find all sorts of interesting things in it."

And Balit said with excitement, "Look over there, Viktor! That's Moon Mary. Watch how we come in—oh, Viktor, I do love being in space!"

Viktor did watch. It was worth watching. They didn't simply "land." Moon Mary was not left wide open to the universe; it couldn't be, since it didn't have enough gravitation to hold a breathable air. To land, their little ship had to slide through an opening that appeared magically in the atmosphere-holding, radiation-shielding forcefield that kept the people who lived on Moon Mary safe.

As soon as Viktor stood up his bad leg told him he wasn't in habitat minigravity any more. It hurt when he put his weight on it. He winced.

But this was more like it! It wasn't a habitat, it was practically a planet. The buildings stuck up on the surface, as they ought to; and there was a real sky.

Actually the sky wasn't real at all, for if you had subtracted the force shield what remained would have been terrible. The shield diminished the intensity of the ruddy glow of Nergal. It might also, Viktor thought critically at first, have diminished their capacity to extract "solar" energy from Nergal, but it turned out they didn't need that. Moon Mary was packed with geothermal energy, easily extracted through steam wells. The satellite was so close to its primary, immense Nergal, that it was under constant gravitational flexing and stress from Nergal's great mass, and so its interior was constantly being heated by friction, compression, and strain.

Of course, experience had taught Viktor that there was a black lining to every silver cloud. He found what the bad side of Moon Mary's geothermal activity was very quickly. They were hardly out of the spaceport when Viktor felt the ground shudder beneath him. Balit giggled. Forta smiled tolerantly, and Frit explained, "Just an earthquake, Viktor. We have them all the time."

"But we're used to them," Forta added. "Truly, there's no danger."

When Viktor saw that his hosts lived in a pencil-thin tower thirty stories high, he swallowed. They took a glass-walled elevator, which slid rapidly up the outside of the tower, letting him see just how far they were soaring above the hard ground. In the elevator he swallowed again, and was glad when it slowed gently to their floor and Forta politely opened the door for him. Once inside their apartment everything was reassuringly stable. They seemed to have the whole floor to themselves. All the rooms except the sanitary facilities were outside rooms—which meant they had curved walls and large windows looking out on the parklike gardens outside, with red Nergal hanging huge over half the sky. He allowed them to point out the room that would be his, and he kept Forta and Balit company as they pulled meals out of their freezer and set the table—until another sudden shiver of the whole structure made him grab for the back of a chair.

"You'll get used to it, Viktor," Balit said, trying not to show amusement. "We're quite safe here."

"All our buildings are designed for this sort of thing," Forta added.

It took a while for Viktor to believe it, but it was true enough. Of course, he knew that the problem of earthquakes had even been solved back on Earth itself, in the pre-Toyota Japan of the nineteenth century and earlier. Since earthquakes could knock buildings down, you didn't want any building that might fall on you and crush you to death. Those early Japanese found a satisfactory solution for their time: Build everything out of the flimsiest material you can find—and don't smoke in bed.

But when the twentieth century came along those lessons didn't apply anymore. Technological man had possessions. A home needed to be a place to store the possessions, as well as a place to sleep and eat. Preindustrial Japan had handled that by having as few possessions as possible, and those light and sturdy. Their grandchildren, however, lived in Toyota-, Sony-, Nissan-Japan, and they wanted more. They wanted to own a large number of tangible things, even if they were large and heavy. They wanted homes that could house their washer-dryers, stereos, Jacuzzis, king-sized beds with innerspring mattresses, radar ovens, food processors, and VCRs. They wanted flush toilets. They wanted built-in garages and electronic stoves.

All those new wants made hard work for the architects. Plumbing? Well, yes, but water intakes and sewage outlets meant underground networks of pipes and conduits that could rupture in even a moderate quake. They wanted high rises, which meant elevators and some very heavy structural members that could fall on the inhabitants unless built with sophisticated skill and attention to the harmonics of the natural frequencies of earthquake shocks. Paper and bamboo went out. Sprung, flexible steel, prestressed concrete, and curtain walls came in.

By the time the people on Moon Mary began to build in earnest, all those old lessons were learned over again.

To be sure, those latter-day architects were helped a great deal by Mary's light gravity. There simply didn't have to be that much mass involved in support columns. They were helped even more by high technology. Chips replaced tangles of wire. Transformable walls served as windows or temperature control devices. Water recycling saved a lot of plumbing, and what couldn't be avoided was flexible and tough. When, during Viktor's first night on Moon Mary, he woke to find the whole building swaying, he was the only one in it who jumped out of bed. Everyone else slept right through, even young Balit, and the next morning they laughed at him for his fears.

They laughed quite politely, though. They were always polite. "Helpful" was another thing—they did their best, but to Viktor's crushed surprise they had little help to give.

These people, whom Nrina had touted to him as the most knowledgeable alive, didn't even know the vocabulary of astrophysical research! "Spectroscopy," Frit said, sounding the word out. "Spec—tross—k'pee. That's a really pretty word, Viktor! I must use it in a poem. And it means something about finding out what a star is like?"

"It means measuring the bands of light and dark in a spectrum from a star, so that you can identify all the elements and ions present," Viktor said darkly, gazing at the man who had been advertised to know all these things.

"Ions! Spectrum! Oh, Viktor," Frit said with delight, "you're just full of wonderful words I can use. Forta? Come in here, please. We're going to find some 'spectroscopy' in our files for dear Viktor!"

But, as it turned out, they didn't.

They couldn't, or not in any easy way, at least. Between the two of them, Frit and Forta managed to get their data-retrieval desks to turn up several hundred references to one astronomical term or another. But "spectroscope" was not among them. Neither was "spectroscopy," nor even the field terms "cosmology" or "astrophysics." True, there were long lists of citations under such promising words as "nova" and "supernova" and "black hole" and even "Hertzsprung-Russell diagram." But, when tracked down, all the references were to plays, paintings, musical compositions, poems (some by Frit himself), and dances, frequently by Forta.

"It's only programmed for the things we're really interested in," Forta apologized.

Viktor couldn't believe their failure. He was the only disappointed person, though. Frit and Forta were enthralled.

"Great Transporter!" Forta cried in delight. "I didn't know we had this sort of material here! Perhaps it's from Balit's school files—but see here, Frit! Isn't this beautiful?" He was looking at a five-hundred-year-old painting of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. "I can't think why people have let this be forgotten! What do you think, Frit? All these star colors! For a new dance! Don't you think they'd look marvelous in my costume?"

Frit patted his mate's arm fondly, but he was peering at the diagram on the desk. "I don't think I know what it means," he admitted.

"It shows the slope of the mass-luminosity relation," Viktor explained. "You can see how stars develop, and their color depends on the temperature of the photosphere, anywhere from red through yellow and white to blue."

"Exactly!" Forta cried, hardly listening. "I will dance the aging of a star. See, I'll start out big—" He mimicked being big, lifting his shoulder, puffing his cheeks, arcing his arms up and before him. "And then the lighting will be blue, then greenish, then yellow and smaller, for a long time—is that right, Viktor?—then big again, and red!"

"You'll be lovely," Frit said with pride. He smiled at their son, politely silent as the grown-ups talked. "Don't you think Forta could make a lovely star dance?"

"He always does," Balit said loyally, but keeping his eyes on Viktor.

Forta sighed. "But I'm afraid we're not giving our friend Viktor what he wants. There just isn't much of that sort of thing in the current files."

Viktor pricked up his ears. "Are there others?"

"Of course there's always the old data banks on Newmanhome," Frit said, looking surprised. "Only they aren't very convenient, you know. Because they're old. And they aren't here."

"Can I access them?" Viktor demanded.

Frit looked at him with the expression of a host whose guest has just requested a bigger bedroom, or a rare brand of tea. "I'm not sure if I know how you could do that," he said, thoughtfully. "Forta?"

"I suppose it's possible, Viktor," Forta said doubtfully. "They go back a long time, though, all the way back to when everybody still lived on Newmanhome. When we built the habitats, thousands of years ago, everything was shiny new, you know, and the data-retrieval systems were all redesigned. The ones we use now aren't really compatible with the ones on Newmanhome, and besides, there's hardly anyone there."

"On Newmanhome?" Viktor repeated.

Forta nodded. "It's a nasty place to live, with everything weighing so much. People don't like to go there—except funny ones like Pelly," he added laughingly. "So the old records might as well not exist, don't you see?"

Balit, watching their guest with concern, squirmed away from his parent's fondly patting hand. "We do have the paintings, Viktor," the boy piped up.

And when Viktor looked inquiringly at Balit's parents, Forta said with pride, "Yes, of course. There are some wonderful paintings of the star burst, for instance. It was still in the sky, oh, up to six or eight hundred years ago. Then it just gradually began to fade, and then the sun came back."

"That must have been an exciting time," Frit said wistfully. "Of course, we weren't born then."

Forta thought that over. "I don't know if I'd say 'exciting,' exactly. I know people did talk about it, quite a lot, once they noticed it. And there was the art. I remember my mother taking me to—whose performance was it? I think it was Danglord's—yes, that's what it was. It was a dance play about the sun returning. I was just a child, hadn't even had my coming-of-age party yet, but—" He smiled bashfully at Viktor. "It was certainly important to me. I think Danglord's play was what made up my mind to be a dancer myself."

As the family's guest expert on the care and feeding of primitive organisms, it was Viktor who had to show them how to thaw out a little of the frozen cat-milk substitute Nrina had made for them, and how to hold a bottle so the kitten could drink out of it. "She'll be eating solid food soon," he promised. "Then she won't be so much trouble. Meanwhile, what have you done about a cat box?"

Then he had to explain what a cat box was for, and help them improvise one out of a tray from the cooking room, and fill it with soil from the garden, and show them how to put the little animal in it and stroke her and encourage her until she finally did what she was put there to do.

At least he was useful for something, Viktor thought.

After a final glass of wine Frit escorted him to their guest room. "It's not actually a guest room," Frit explained, showing Viktor where the sanitary facilities were and the drawers to store his clothes. "It's going to be Balit's room, now that he's liberated—but of course he's happy to have you use it for your stay," Frit added hastily.

"I don't like to put him out," Viktor said politely.

"You aren't putting anyone out! No, we want you here, dear Viktor. In fact, it was Balit's idea. He'll stay in his own old room, where he's quite content. But this one, you see," Frit added with pride, "is an adult room. You'll have your own desk—you can use it as much as you like, of course. I think you'll be quite comfortable," he finished, looking around like any hostess. Then he grinned, a little embarrassed. "Well, I don't see any harm in telling you. We're going to be redecorating Balit's old room. We've ordered another baby from Nrina. She'll be a little girl—we're going to call her Ginga—and of course she won't be born for a long time yet, so Balit will be quite all right in that room."

It wasn't until Frit was long gone and Viktor had undressed and climbed into the soft, warm bed that it occurred to him that he should have said "Congratulations."

The ground shook again that night. Viktor woke, startled, to find something warm and soft near his toes. It mewed in protest when he moved.

He got up, grinning, and stroked the kitten back to sleep as he sat on the edge of his bed, thinking. Alone in the bedroom, Viktor admitted to himself that he was a little uncomfortable. He knew why.

He wasn't really easy in his mind to be moving into a house of gays.

Viktor was quite certain that he was not at all prejudiced against homosexuals. He'd known plenty of them, one time or another. He'd worked with them, shipped with them—they weren't any different than anybody else, he considered, except in that one particular way. But that way wasn't anyone's business but their own, and certainly it didn't matter in any real sense as long as you didn't get involved with them.

The trouble was, living with them seemed to be getting pretty involved.

It reassured Viktor that the household didn't seem much different than any other. Forta and Frit had their own bedroom. Balit had his; Viktor had the one Balit would graduate into. Nothing was, well, bizarre about the household. Not really. If Forta would sometimes kiss the back of Frit's neck as he passed behind his chair, and if Frit would slip an arm around Forta's waist while they stood together—well, they did love each other, didn't they?

What was most important, neither of them showed any indication at all of loving Viktor. Not that way, anyway.

The boy, Balit, almost did. He certainly acted loving, but there wasn't anything sexual about it. Balit sat next to Viktor when they ate their meals, and kept Viktor company while he fruitlessly hunted for what he never found on the information machines. It was Balit who marked which foods and drinks Viktor seemed to enjoy and made sure there were more of them at the next meal. He always seemed to be there, watching Viktor, whenever he was not asleep or at school.

"It's a kind of hero worship," Forta explained. The dancer was working at his bar, stretching those long, slim legs even longer, with one eye on the kitten waking on the floor between them. Viktor realized with surprise that Forta was being a cat. "This will work, I think," Forta said with pleasure, giving it up as the kitten curled up to drowse again. "What were we saying? Oh, yes. Please don't let Balit bother you. But the thing is that you were the one who actually carried him away for his freeing ceremony; that's a big thing for a young boy."

"He's no trouble at all," Viktor protested. "I like having him around."

"Well, it's obvious he likes you." Forta sighed. "I mean, he likes you as a person, not just because of what you did. As a matter of fact—" Forta hesitated, then smiled. "Actually, Balit wondered if he could ask you to come to his school. If you wouldn't mind. He'd like to show you off. I know it wouldn't be much fun for you, spending an hour or two with a bunch of little kids staring and asking you all kinds of questions—but you can't blame them, Viktor. You were born on Old Earth. They aren't likely to see anybody like you again."

"I'd be glad to," Viktor promised.

The school was no more than a hundred yards from Balit's home, in the middle of a grove of broad-leafed trees that hung with fruit and blossoms interchangeably. (There weren't any seasons on Moon Mary. Plants grew and bloomed when they felt like it, not when the weather changed. The weather never changed.) Red Nergal hung in the eastern sky, where it always hung in their position on Moon Mary's surface. At their distance it loomed no larger than Earth's moon, but Viktor could feel the heat from it. And in the west was one bright star. "There used to be thousands and thousands of stars," Viktor told the boy, who nodded in solemn appreciation.

"Things must have been so much nicer then," he sighed. "We go in there, Viktor. That's the door to my class."

It wasn't much of a door—Moon Mary's buildings did not have very strong walls, since they didn't need them to keep out cold or heat; it was light, pierced wood, as might have been in Earth's old tropics, and it opened to Balit's touch.

It wasn't much of a class, either—eight kids, mostly girls—and it didn't seem to be exactly a classroom. It looked rather like the guest lounge of a small motel at first, a bedroom-sized chamber with hassocks and couches strewn before a collection of child-sized teaching desks, but as Balit led Viktor in the room darkened.

"We'll have to wait a minute," Balit apologized. "They're starting a viewing. I don't know what it is, though—" And then, all around the children, a scene sprang into life, three-dimensional, seeming natural size, full color. "Oh, look, Viktor! They're doing it specially for you! They're showing Old Earth!"

If it was really Earth, it was not an Earth Viktor recognized. He seemed to be standing on a sort of traffic island in the middle of a large street, and it was by no means empty. Thousands, literally thousands, of people were riding bicycles toward him in a dense swarm that spilt in two just before they reached him, and came together again on the other side. They wore almost uniform costumes—white shirts, dark blue trousers—and they were almost all male. And Oriental. There was no sound, but to one side was a huge marble building set in a sort of park, and on the other what looked like a hotel and office buildings.

"I don't know where this is supposed to be," Viktor apologized.

Balit looked embarrassed. "But they said it was Earth," he complained. "Wait a minute." He bent to whisper to the little girl nearest him. "Yes, this is Earth, all right. It is a place called Beijing, around the year one thousand nine hundred sixty, old style."

"I was never in Beijing," Viktor said. "And anyway—" He stopped there. What was the use of telling these children that they were not off by a mere few thousand miles, but by several centuries? He settled for, "It's very nice, though. But can we turn it off?"

Then Viktor had the floor. The teacher sat there smiling, leaving it all to the children to ask questions, and that they did. About Old Earth. (People rode horses? If they made love did they really have babies out of their bodies? And what, for heaven's sake, was a "storm"?) About the Sorricaine-Mtiga objects (Oh, they must have been exciting to see!), and about his near-death in orbit around Nebo (Something tried to kill you? Really take away your life?), and about Newmanhome and the Big Bang and the reasons why there were so few stars anymore anywhere in the sky.

That was where Viktor began to wax really eloquent, until Balit, speaking for all of them, said gravely, "Yes, we see, Viktor. The stars that blew up, the sun going dim, the changes on Nebo, the disappearance of all the other stars—we see that as they all happened at the same time, or close enough, they must be connected. But how?"

And all Viktor could say was, "I wish I knew."

That night Balit was telling his parents excitedly about the hit Viktor had made with his classmates. "Viktor was almost killed by those things on Nebo," the boy said, thrilled. "Frit? Can I go to Nebo sometime?"

"What, and get killed?" Frit teased.

Forta was stretching and bending at his bar, but he panted, "No one goes to Nebo, Balit, dear. It's worse than Newmanhome! You couldn't even stand up there."

"Pelly can," the boy objected. "He gets injections, and then he's almost as strong as Viktor."

Frit looked shocked. "Balit! No. Those injections destroy your figure. Do you want to bloat those pretty legs so they look like balloons? No offense," he added hastily, catching Viktor's eye. "But, Balit, you couldn't ever really dance that way, you know."

"I might not want to be a dancer, Frit," his son told him.

Forta straightened up abruptly in the middle of a long stretch. He blinked worriedly at his son. "Well, of course," he began, "what you do in your adult life is entirely up to you. Neither Frit nor I would think of trying to prevent you from anything you really wanted to do, once you were grown—"

"But I am grown," Balit told him seriously. "It's almost time for me to have the mark off my forehead. Then I could even marry if I wanted to."

Frit cleared his throat. "Yes, of course," he said, tugging at one of his mustaches. "However—"

He paused there, looking at Viktor in a way Viktor understood at once. A guest must not involve himself in family affairs.

"I think I'll go back to my desk," he said.

But what he wanted was not there. Viktor began to think that nothing he found was going to scratch his itch of curiosity. The more he found, the more he realized there was not much to find on the subjects he cared about.

There was plenty in the files on the history of the human race after the Reforms had put him back in the freezer. They had had a war about the destruction of Ark, of course—each sect blaming the other. They had (as Viktor counted them up) a war every two or three years anyway, on one pretext or another. It was easy enough to see why they were so combative. Viktor could imagine the lives of the bare few thousand of them, near starving in their icy caves, wounded by events that they had never expected and that they could not explain—there was no future for them. Of all the things they lacked, the one in shortest supply was hope.

It was astonishing to Viktor that they had somehow found the resources and the will to dispatch a handful of rickety, improvised ships to Nergal. That was heroic. It was very nearly superhuman; it meant long years of savage discipline, starving themselves and denying themselves for that one last, supreme effort. He marveled at their progress since then—now so many teeming millions, living in such luxury! It wasn't the numbers that made him wonder, of course. The increase was not surprising, since they'd had several thousand years to do it in. You only have to double a population ten times—ten generations will do it easily, if there's plenty of food and no saber-toothed tigers to keep the surplus down—to multiply it by a thousand.

Nor was it surprising that in the course of that mighty effort they threw some unneeded junk overboard—junk with names like astronomy and astrophyics and cosmology.

And their descendants, the soft, pretty Nrinas and Fortas and Frits, had never seen any reason to revive them.

Except for little Balit. Balit wanted to hear everything Viktor had to say—about the universe itself (especially about the way it had been, in the old days, when there really was a whole universe outside their own little group), about Old Earth, about Newmanhome in the days of its burgeoning glory. It was Balit who came to Viktor with the news that Pelly had landed on Newmanhome. "Maybe he can help you access the old files, Viktor," Balit said helpfully, glancing at his fathers—who, for some reason, were politely saying nothing at all.

"Could he really do that?"

"We can call him to ask," Balit said, now not looking at his fathers at all. "I know how much you want to get that data."

Forta cleared his throat. "Yes, we all know that," he observed.

"But it would be interesting to me, too," Balit protested. "I like it when Viktor talks about those old things."

Forta said, loving but firm, "It's your bedtime, Balit."

"Then Viktor could tell me a bedtime story," Balit pleaded. Viktor surrendered. He followed the boy to his bath and sat with him as, damply clean, Balit rolled himself into the soft, gauzy bedclothes and looked up at him expectantly.

Viktor found himself moved by the situation, so familiar, so different. It made him think of telling stories to his own children long ago on Newmanhome, and before that hearing his father tell them to him ages past on the ship. He reached out to stroke Balit's warm, fuzzy head.

"Shall I tell you about the beginning of the universe?" he asked.

"Oh, yes, Viktor! Please!"

Obediently Viktor began. "Once upon a time there was nothing, not anything anywhere, except for one little point of matter and energy and space. There weren't any stars. There weren't any galaxies. There wasn't even any space yet, really, because space hadn't been invented."

"What did that point look like, Viktor?" the boy asked drowsily.

"I don't know. Nobody knows, Balit. It was just a—an egg, sort of, that held inside itself the possibility of everything that now exists, or ever did exist, or ever will exist. And then that egg hatched. It exploded. Do you know what that explosion was called, Balit?"

The boy searched his memory. "What you called the Big Bang?" he guessed.

"That's right. The Big Bang. It started out terribly hot and terribly dense, but as it expanded it cooled off. It didn't grow into space. It made the space, as it grew, and it filled it with things—and finally we came along."

Balit blinked up at Viktor. "Were we the only ones who came along, Viktor?" he asked.

"I don't know the answer to that, either, Balit. I haven't heard of any others. There could have been. There might have been millions of different kinds of people. They could have evolved and developed and then died away, just as human beings did— except for us few."

"It must have been beautiful, when there were all those stars and galaxies."

"It was. But stars die, too. All things die, even the universe, even—" To Viktor's surprise, he found his throat tightening. He had to turn his head away for a moment.

"What's wrong, Viktor?" Balit said in sudden alarm.

"Nothing, Balit. I think you'd better go to sleep now."

"No," the boy insisted. "You looked very sad just then. Was it about something bad? Was it—" He hesitated, then said in a rush, "Was it about the love partner you told me about?"

"It was about my wife," Viktor corrected him.

Balit nodded soberly. "I know how Frit or Forta would feel if one of them lost the other," he told Viktor. He looked at him for a moment, then said, sounding very tentative, "Viktor? Didn't Nrina say she could make you a mate? Don't you think you might let her?"

Viktor glared at him with a sudden near-anger. Then he relaxed, took a deep breath, and tousled the boy's hair. "You're officially grown-up," he said, "but I think you've got a little way to go in some ways. That isn't how it works, Balit."

"Then how does it works Viktor?" Balit persisted.

Viktor shook his head. "For me, now," he said, "I don't think it's ever going to work again at all."

The mechanics of calling someone on Newmanhome were not that difficult, especially after Balit showed Viktor how to use the desk to do it. Actually making the call, however, was a lot harder.

Once again, it was a matter of that unbreakable speed limit of light's velocity. (The human race had never managed to use tachyons or the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky effect for any practical purpose. With only their own tiny little cluster of astronomical objects to work on, they hadn't really needed to.) At their current orbital positions, Moon Mary was a good five hundred million miles from Newmanhome—nearly three-quarters of an hour each way for a message to arrive. You couldn't converse. It was more like sending a telegram and waiting for a response, though of the course the "telegram" was a television message.

So Viktor, with Balit beside him to help, put through a call to Pelly, all those hundreds of millions of miles away. "Hello, Pelly," he said, as though reading from a script. "This is Viktor. I was hoping—" He came to a stop there, and looked to Balit for help. "Tell him what you want," the boy prompted.

"Everything I want?"

"Yes, exactly, everything," the boy ordered, sounding exasperated. "How will he know if you don't tell him? Tell him you would like all the old records—about Nebo, about astronomical observations, everything you wish."

So, gathering speed as he went along, Viktor did. It made a formidable list. When he was through, Balit leaned past him and turned off the desk. Viktor looked at him inquiringly. "What do we do now?"

"We do nothing now," Balit told him. "It will be hours at least before Pelly can reply, and perhaps he is busy doing something else, and perhaps what you ask takes time."

"I imagine it will," Viktor said gloomily. Balit laughed.

"Oh, Viktor," he said with affection, "it is only hours, perhaps, not forever. Come and walk with me. Perhaps when we get back there will be a response."

When they had taken that belly-twisting elevator drop down to the parklike grounds around the building, Balit said curiously, "Would you really go to Nebo if you could?"

"In a hot minute," Viktor said emphatically.

"Even though it's dangerous?"

Viktor thought. "I'm not sure it's dangerous anymore," he said. "They did let that party land—"

"But then some of them were killed!"

"Yes, because they tried to force their way in," Viktor agreed. "That might not be necessary. There are other ways of investigating what's in those structures. Not X rays, probably; but ultrasound ranging, perhaps, or something like a neutrino source that can look right through them—"

"No one has any 'neutrinos,' Viktor," Balit said in reproof. Viktor laughed. "All right then. Maybe all we'd really need is a really big can opener. And some dumb volunteer to run it— like me."

Balit shuddered deliciously at the thought. Then he asked, "Viktor? What's a 'can opener'?"

There wasn't any answer to Viktor's call when they got back, or the next day, or the day after that.

By the end of his third week on Moon Mary Viktor had begun to wonder just how long a guest was supposed to stay. When he touched on the subject with his hosts they were invariably hospitable, and invariably hard to pin down. "Oh, but Balit loves having you here, Viktor, and Forta's been dying to have you show him some more of those quaint old dances."

"And it's so good for your leg to heal here," Forta put in helpfully.

"But Nrina—" he began.

"Oh, Nrina," Frit said, affably dismissing Nrina. "She'll be in touch before long, Viktor, you'll see. That reminds me, I've been meaning to ask you something. Do you think those Nebo colors—the ones you showed us the other day—do you think they would make a good costume for Forta?" And then that inevitably led to a few hours with Forta in his studio, demonstrating the waltz and the Peabody, to be worked into a dance Forta was planning on the heroic subject of the disastrous landing on Nebo.

It was not merely Viktor's desire to be a good guest—that was to say, one who left before his hosts began to despair he would ever go—that made him begin to be uncomfortable. He also had another problem that was growing larger. Moon Mary was a big place. It was full of people, all kinds of people, and Viktor could not help noticing that some of the ones he passed in the parks and streets were female—were so conspicuously female, to all of his senses, that sometimes he almost thought they were scent marking the shrubbery. It distracted him in ways he had almost forgotten.

To put it more concretely, he was getting pretty horny.

When Pelly's answer came at last it wasn't very helpful. The broad pumpkin face looked a little annoyed. "I'll ask around about what you want to know, Viktor, but I don't know much about that sort of thing myself. Markety might know; he spends a lot of time digging up old stuff, and so does his wife, Grimler. Unfortunately they're not here now, and I'm leaving myself pretty soon. Listen. While I think of it, if you see Nrina ask her how she's coming with my gillies. They need some more here. And say hello to Balit for me."

That was it. Viktor looked helplessly at Balit. "Who are Markety and Grimler?"

"I guess they're people who live on Newmanhome—I mean real people. Well, you know what I mean, Viktor," he finished, half apologizing. Then he thought for a moment and added, "I think Markety studied with Forta for a while, when I was little."

"Do you mean he's a dancer? What would a dancer be doing on Newmanhome?"

Balit grinned. "Dancing, I guess. Don't you think you should give Nrina her message?"

"Oh, well," Viktor said, stalling, "yes, maybe …"

But in the long run he did—hesitantly; he had always thought that Nrina should be the one to call him. But when he saw her lean, wide-eyed face looking up at him out of the desk panel he was unexpectedly happy. Conscious of the boy beside him, Viktor said stiffly, "How are you, Nrina? I've missed you."

It was a downer that she didn't respond right away. She was gazing up at him without speaking for several seconds, but just as Viktor was beginning to feel insecure she spoke up. "That is good to hear," she said, smiling. (Oh, of course. Distance again. Only a matter of seconds, this time, because Nrina's habitat was less than a million miles from Moon Mary—but that was something like five seconds travel time each way. Quite long enough to be disconcerting.)

She did, Viktor thought, still seem affectionate. He gave her Pelly's message, and Nrina thought for a moment. "The gillies are young," she said doubtfully. "I wasn't going to send them for another couple of seasons. Still, it might be better for them to finish growing up where they're going to live. These are special gillies, you know. They're almost as strong as the original 'gorillas' you talk about, I think, but a lot more tractable. Like you," she finished, with an affectionate grin. "Oh, and I'm not too happy with the DNA from the stiffs I've still got. If you talk to Pelly tell him to bring me some more—no," she corrected herself, "I might as well call him myself. Well. It's been nice talking to you. Balit, is that you? How are you doing with your genetic studies?"

"All right, I guess, Aunt Nrina," the boy piped up. "Of course, I haven't had much time, helping Viktor and all."

"I believe that," she agreed ruefully. "He does take a lot of time, doesn't he? But he's worth it." And she blew them both a kiss and was gone, and she hadn't said a word about his coming back to her.

Nor did she in the days that followed. Nor did Pelly call back. When Viktor grumbled to Balit the boy said, "He's probably on his way home now, Viktor. But I'm sure he got your message to those other people."

"Then why don't they answer?" Viktor demanded. The boy shrugged, and Viktor's temper rose. "I could understand it if it was all lost! It's wonderful that it hasn't been lost, but you tell me they've had power all along, the geothermal generators have kept right on working, so the data's there, only nobody ever wants to look at it!"

"Please don't get excited, Viktor," Balit pleaded.

"I can't help it. Doesn't anybody care?"

"I care, Viktor. Really, though, you should be more calm." Balit hesitated, then said with determination, "Do you know what I think, Viktor? I think you are building up too many tensions."

Viktor gave him a hostile look. "What tensions are you talking about?"

Balit's expression seemed to show he was sorry he'd brought the subject up, but he took the plunge. "Why don't you have a sexual partner, Viktor?" he asked with determination.

Viktor flushed. He was taken aback. "I—" he said. "I, uh—" He was having trouble responding; the last thing he had expected was to have to discuss his sex life with this child. He managed to get out, "Well, if I did, it wouldn't be, uh, safe for the woman—"

"Because you are potent, yes, of course," Balit agreed earnestly. "That can be fixed, just as it was for me. In a few days the rest of my residual sperm will be resorbed and my brand removed, and then I can have sexual intercourse freely again, just as you could."

"Wait a minute," Viktor said, staring at the boy. "Again?"

Balit looked puzzled. Then he said, in a self-deprecating way, "Of course, before I was mature it was only with young girls. For practice, as we say—though I did enjoy it very much. Soon it will be with real women. It can be for you, too, Viktor, if you want it. It doesn't hurt a bit," he added encouragingly, "well, except for a little bit, right at first. You know, you don't have to have a wife. You don't have to agree to a pairing right at first; hardly anybody does that."

"So it seems," Viktor growled, thinking of Nrina.

The boy's puzzled look returned, but he just asked curiously, "Have you ever done that, Viktor? Paired, I mean?"

"Sure I have," Viktor replied. Then, more slowly, he said, "I was married for a long time. Her name was Reesa—Theresa McGann—but she's dead now."

Fascinated, Balit went on, "And did you and this Reesa Theresa McGann have actual children together? I mean, born out of her body?"

"Yes, we did," Viktor said shortly. His discomfort was growing. It was not often that he thought of those long-dust members of his family, and it felt as though thinking of them now was likely to begin to hurt.

"And did you love her?" Balit demanded.

Viktor looked at the boy. "Yes!" he shouted. And realized again, quite a lot too late, that it was very true.

Time passed slowly for Viktor. He spent a lot of time in his room, waiting for the message from Newmanhome that might answer all his questions, but it never came.

There was no point in calling Pelly again, because the space captain was well on his way back to Nergal. Viktor hesitated about trying Markety or Grimler, whoever they were, but finally impatience won over hesitation and he placed a call to each of them.

There were no answers to those, either. Balit counseled patience. Balit himself was always patient with Viktor, when Viktor was gloomy or stormy; but Viktor's patience was running out. He spent more and more time with the desk, searching out every scrap of information he could find that bore at all on anything astronomical.

None of it was any help.

There was plenty of data, to be sure, on the universe as it was—nothing on how it came to be that way. For a while Viktor interested himself in the atlas of the skies. There wasn't much of it: their own planets, just as he had known them in his first years on Newmanhome, the habitats, Nergal itself.

Their paltry group of surrounding stars had been studied, after a fashion—long enough to give them names, not much more. There was one group of four stars usually called "the Quadrangle"—their names were Sapphire, Gold, Steel, and Blood, taken, Viktor supposed, from the way they looked in the sky. There was Solitary—all off by itself in its part of the sky; a natural enough name. There were the binary pair, now called Mother and Father, with a period of about eight hundred years. There was Neighbor, the nearest star at less than three light-years distance, but an uninspiring little K-8.

Then there was Milk. Viktor studied the pale glow of Milk carefully, because it was the corpse of one of the stars that had flared in his own long-ago skies. The desk could tell him little, for no one lately had seemed to care why stars were different in color, and certainly no one had thought much about stellar evolution. But Viktor was nearly sure that what they saw wasn't the star itself anymore, but the shell of expanding gases it had thrust out of itself, now lit from within.

Then he discovered that someone, sometime in the past, had taken the trouble to look a little more closely at all those stars and had found out that Gold had six detectable planets.

Planets! And yellow Gold was a G-4—close enough to their own stellar type, indeed to the type of Earth's own sun.

Was it possible that someone had lived on one of Gold's planets?

By the time he could talk to Balit again he was bubbling with excitement. "It all fits together, Balit!" he cried. "There's a planetary system, not very distant at all. Suppose there's life on one of those planets, Balit!"

"You mean people like us?" Balit asked, wide-eyed.

"I don't know about that, Balit. Probably not very much 'like' us, if you mean two arms, two legs, two eyes—I don't have any idea what they might look like. But like us in that they've developed intelligence. And technology! Why not? They might even be a little farther along in science and technology than the human race ever was—it wouldn't have to be very far to make a big difference!"

"With spaceships, you mean?"

"Exactly! With interstellar spaceships. Suppose these Golden aliens, for purposes of their own—and how could we ever guess what their purposes might be? Suppose they decided to move a little furniture around. A dozen stars or so, for instance. Suppose they sent a crew to Nebo to build the machines that would take the energies of our sun, and use them to propel these few stars at high speed across the universe. Don't you see, Balit? It explains everything!"

"And if we studied the things on Nebo very carefully we might know how to do things like that ourselves? Or at least know why?"

"Exactly!" Viktor cried in triumph.

But the triumph didn't last, for a guess was only a guess, and there was no way to test his hypothesis. He spent more and more time in his room, fruitlessly going over the data, wishing for word from Newmanhome. He was gazing at the pale point of light that was the star Gold, when Frit tapped on the door. He was carrying the kitten, and he had an apologetic look. "Balit forgot to feed her, and now he's in bed," Frit said. "Can you help?"

"Sure," Viktor said, not very graciously. The kitten was big enough to eat regular food now. "I'll come out. You don't have to carry her," he added. "Put her down; if she's hungry she'll follow us."

Frit politely set the cat on the floor and led the way. To Viktor's surprise, Forta was in the "kitchen"—that was the only way Viktor could think of the room—sipping a glass of wine and looking expectant. Viktor found the little container of scraps of food, opened it, and set it on the floor. The kitten strolled over, sniffed at it, and then looked up at him. He smiled. "She's just being polite," he said. "That's what she wanted. See, she's eating now."

As he turned to leave, Forta said, "Why don't you have a glass of wine with us, Viktor?"

Viktor perceived that it wasn't just a casual invitation. He sat down and let Forta fill a glass for him before he said, "You didn't really need me to feed the cat, did you?"

Forta dimpled. "Not really. We wanted to talk to you, after Balit was asleep."

Faint alarm bells sounded in Viktor's head. "Is something wrong?" he asked.

"Not really wrong, no, Viktor," Frit said honestly. "It's just that we're a little bit concerned about Balit."

"About Balit's future," Forta amplified.

Frit nodded. "We've always hoped he would want to become an artist of some sort—a dancer, perhaps, like Forta."

"He wouldn't have to be a dancer, as long as it was something that used his creative ability. Nrina thinks he has real talent as a gene worker," Forta added. "That's a kind of art, too, of course."

"But lately he's been so—well, so excited about these stars and things of yours, Viktor," Frit finished.

Viktor took a sip of his wine, feeling the strain between the obligations of a good guest and that burning need to know. "Balit's a very intelligent boy. He's really interested in science, too," Viktor said. "I think he could be good at it."

"Yes, we're sure he could, Viktor," Forta said reasonably. "But what kind of a life would Balit have if he confined his talents to 'science'? Nobody's a 'scientist.' People will think he's odd."

"In my time it was a highly honored profession," Viktor said defensively—and, he thought, not entirely truthfully; for it depended on which "time" he was talking about. Certainly the icy Newmanhome of the four warring sects had offered few honors to scientists.

"In your time," Forta repeated. His tone wasn't exactly disdainful, but the best you could say was that it was forgiving. "Anyway, Viktor, it's not creative, is it? There's nothing new for him to do—you said yourself, all this sort of 'science' thing was well known thousands and thousands of years ago."

"Not all of it, no. No one really understood what happened to our stars! Even the parts that were understood then—the basic astrophysics and cosmology—nobody seems to know anything about them now. They need to be rediscovered."

Frit said earnestly, "But don't you see the difference? Rediscovery, Viktor dear, is not the same as creation, is it? You can't blame us for wanting something grander for our boy."

"Oh, Frit," Viktor said, despairing, "how can I make you understand? What could be grander than answering the question of what happened to the entire universe? Maybe Balit can discover that! He's interested. He's smart. He simply doesn't have the education. First he needs a grasp of cosmology and nuclear decay and—"

"No one knows those things anymore, Viktor. Truly. They simply aren't interesting to us."

"But they must be on record somewhere," Viktor said, clutching at straws. "I know the data banks in Ark and Mayflower had all that material—"

"They don't exist anymore, Viktor. What was left of them must have been salvaged for structural materials thousands of years ago."

"But they were copied onto the files on Newmanhome."

Frit gave Forta a meaningful look. "Yes, Newmanhome," he said.

Forta sighed. For some reason the thought of the files on Newmanhome seemed to make him uncomfortable. "Well," he said, "we'll see what we can do."

"I hope I can repay you," Viktor said.

Forta gave him a strange look. "That's all right," he said, sounding insincere. Then, "Do you know a lot of stories like the Big Bang one you were telling Balit?"

"Oh, dozens," Viktor told him, aware for the first time that the parents had been listening in. In fact he did. In fact he had all the stories his father had told him still well in mind—the story of the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle that fueled the stars, the story of the death of massive stars in supernovae and the birth of pulsars and black holes, the stories of Kepler's Laws of Motion and of Newton's, and of Einstein's superseding laws, and of the rules of quantum mechanics that went beyond even Einstein.

"Yes, of course," Forta said, yawning. "Those are very interesting. I know Balit loves to hear about them—"

"But not all the time, please, Viktor," Frit finished. "If you don't mind."

Then the long-awaited transmission came in from Newmanhome, and it was not at all what Viktor had expected.

To begin with, of course it wasn't Pelly calling—the space captain had to be halfway back to Nergal by now. The face on the screen was a man wearing a sort of floppy beret, pulled down almost to his eyebrows; he was a habitat person, all right, but he was actually wearing clothes. "Viktor," he began without preamble, "I'm Markety. I'm just here for a short time, but I've managed to collect some of the material for you. Give my respects to Forta, please—he is one of my heroes, as I am sure he knows. Here's the material."

Eagerly Viktor watched the screen on the desk as new pictures began to appear. Puzzledly he stared at them. After months he knew what sort of thing the desk produced when interrogated; these were quite different. They were simply a series of—well, photographs! The first batch was pictures of bits and pieces of machinery, some of it the same shiny lavender metal as the keepsake Balit proudly kept by his bedside, some of unidentifiable materials that could have been steel or glass or ceramic. It dawned on Viktor that they were the odds and ends that had been salvaged from the surface of the planet Nebo—but there was no explanation for any of them, no hint of what they might be for, or what studies might have been made of them.

The next batch was more puzzling still.

It had to do with astrophysics, all right, but it was not data displayed from a computer file. It was pictures—pictures of pages of manuscript, or log books, or even a few pages from a book here and there. They seemed to have been taken from the freezers.

They were all fragmentary—a couple of pages of something, without beginning or end; the pages themselves as like as not torn or frayed or spotted into illegibility. Some of them made Viktor blink. Some of it went so far back that his father's own observations were there.

For a while at least, someone had been faithful at keeping records. (Billy Stockbridge, perhaps, loyal to Pal Sorricaine to the last?) There were spectrograms of the sun as it cooled; of the star burst as it grew; of the dozen stars that still remained in their sky—dimmer than before, but not swallowed into the star burst.

None of them were anything like the spectrograms Pal Sorricaine had so doggedly gleaned of the stars that had flared and died all about them. The Sorricaine-Mtiga objects were still unique.

None of the spectrograms made any sense to Viktor, either. The dead observers had left their own speculations, but none of them was convincing. None of them explained what it was that had stolen most of the stars out of the sky. And they were all so very old that there was nothing at all about the fireball that had dominated the sky for so long.

When Balit came back from school Viktor was still puzzling over the transmission. He displayed it all over again for Balit, but repetition didn't make it clearer. Balit didn't do any homework that night. He and Viktor ate quickly and returned to the desk. It was the objects from Nebo that seemed most fascinating to the boy. "But what can they be?" he asked, not for the first time, and, not for the first time, Viktor shook his head.

"The only way to find out is to investigate them. Somebody made them, after all—somebody from Gold, or somewhere else, but still some person. They can be opened up."

Balit shivered. "People did try, Viktor. More than twenty of them were killed."

"People die for a lot less important reasons," Viktor said roughly. "Naturally it would have to be done with a lot of precautions. Systematically. The way people used to defuse bombs in wars.

"What are 'wars,' Viktor?"

But Viktor refused to be sidetracked. They pored over the material until it was late and Balit, yawning, said, "I don't know if I understand, Viktor. Are our stars the only ones still alive, anywhere?"

"That's the way it looks, Balit."

"But stars live forever, Viktor," the boy said drowsily.

"Not forever. For a long time—" Viktor stopped, remembering a joke. He laughed as he got ready to tell it. "There used to be a story about that, Balit. A student is asking his astronomy teacher a question: 'Pardon me, professor, but when did you say the sun would turn into a red giant and burn us all up?'

"The professor says, 'In about five billion years.'

"So the student says, 'Oh, thank God! I thought you said five million.'"

But Balit didn't laugh. He was sleeping. And as Viktor carried the boy to his bed, he wasn't laughing, either.

Viktor sought out the one of Balit's parents at home. He found Frit painting something on a large screen. "I'm sorry I kept him so late. We got to talking about why all these things had happened—"

"Where you go wrong, Viktor," Frit told him serenely, "is in always asking why. There doesn't have to be a why. You don't have to understand things; it's enough to feel."

Viktor looked uncomprehendingly at the designs Frit was painting on the screen. The screen, he saw, was flimsy, it would be transferred to the wall of the room that would some day be Ginga's. It was a wall poem. He laughed. "So I shouldn't try to understand why you're doing that? When Ginga isn't even born, and won't be able to read for years yet?"

"No, Viktor, that is very easy to understand," Frit said indulgently. "When Ginga learns to read I want her first words to come from her father. No," he went on, brushing in another character in a chartreuse flourish and looking critically at the result, "it is this obsession of yours for understanding the sky that worries me. It upsets Balit, I'm afraid. What's the use of it? The sky is the sky, Viktor. It has nothing to do with our lives."

"But you've written poems about the sky!"

"Ah, but that is art. I write poems about what people feel about the sky. No one can experience the sky, Viktor; one can only look at it and see it as an object of art." He shook his wooly head in reproof. "All these things you tell to Balit—hydrogen atoms fusing into helium, suns exploding and dying—there's no feeling there. They're just horrid mechanical things."

In spite of himself, Viktor was amused. "Aren't you even curious?"

"About stars? Not at all! About the human heart, of course."

"But science—" Viktor stopped, shaking his head. "I don't see how you can talk that way, Frit. Don't you want to know things? Don't you want to have Balit understand science?" He waved an arm around the future nursery. "If it weren't for science, how could you and Forta have had a child?"

"Ah, but that's useful science, Viktor! That's worth knowing about—not like your worrying about whose lines are where in which spectra. It's good because it makes our lives better. But I'm not at all curious about why stars shine and what makes them hot—and least of all about where they've all gone—because there's nothing anyone can do about it anyway. Is there?"

By the time word came that Pelly was back in the habitats Viktor was beginning to feel as though he had seriously out-stayed his welcome on Moon Mary. Balit was still loyal. Frit was unfailingly polite. Forta, at least, had a use for their guest; he borrowed Viktor for an hour or so almost every day to dance with him. Forta appreciated it, and for Viktor it seemed good exercise for his nearly healed leg, though Frit did not seem to approve. Viktor heard them talking, not quite out of earshot, and Frit was being reasonable. "Folk dancing? Oh, yes, Forta dear, but what is folk dancing, after all? It's simply what primitive people used to do when they didn't have professionals to watch. But you are an artist!"

"And you," Forta told him good-humoredly, "are a little jealous, aren't you?"

"Of course not! On the other hand, dear …"

And the rest of the conversation Viktor could not hear, which was probably just as well.

Viktor was leading Forta through the familiar, sweet Misirlou when the package arrived from Pelly. Viktor opened it with excitement—something from Nebo for him to study, something more informative than the broken bits and pieces like Balit's keepsake?

It was not from Nebo. It was human-made and very old. Pelly's message said, "This appears to have come from one of your old ships, Viktor. I thought you'd like to listen to it."

The last time Viktor had seen that object was on old Ark, just before the fatal attempt at landing a team of investigators. It was, in fact, Ark's own black-box recording log.

It even still worked—more or less; someone had been repairing it, somewhere along the line, and much of the material was erased, much more so deteriorated in sound quality that Viktor could hardly make it out. But there was one tiny section that was loud and clear—and the voice that was speaking on the log was one Viktor knew well.

Jake Lundy. It was the voice of Viktor's rival speaking from the grave.

When Balit came in, an hour later, he found Viktor sitting over the log, listening once again to the voice of his long-dead rival. "… have now been in this ship for fifty-seven days," it was saying, the voice weak and cracking. "I can't hold out much longer. The others are dead, and I guess—"

That was all that was still intelligible.

Balit put his arm around Viktor in compassion. He listened to the tape with Viktor, then listened again. "I know how you feel, Viktor," he declared. "It must be awful, hearing your friend's voice when he's been dead for thousands of years."

Viktor looked at him without expression.

"Jake Lundy wasn't a friend," he said.

"Then why—"

But Viktor could not answer, because he couldn't find words to tell the boy how the voice of Reesa's long-dead lover had suddenly started a hopeless longing for the long-dead Reesa herself.

That night, dancing Misirlou again with Forta, Viktor found himself near to weeping.

"Is something wrong?" Forta asked worriedly. Viktor just shook his head and went on with the dance. When Frit came in, looking faintly jealous at the sight of Viktor holding Forta, he said, "Listen, something's come up. I've been talking to Nrina. She thinks we should come to visit her—look at the sketches and talk to her about Ginga."

The principal thought in Viktor's mind was that he was not, just then, ready to resume his affair with the woman who had brought him back to life.

When they reached Nrina's habitat she was there to greet them, proudly exclaiming over Balit's now blemishless forehead. "No brand! Oh, and you'll be making love first chance you get now, won't you?"

"Of course," Balit said sedately. Then Nrina whisked them off to her laboratory—all but Viktor. Viktor was not involved in the planning of the new baby. He was given the freedom of her quarters to wait for her pleasure instead.

It was a long wait. Then, when she did arrive, her words were not of love. For the first time in Viktor's experience of her, Nrina looked angry. "Do you know how much it cost Frit and Forta to dig up all those old records for you?"

He was taken aback. "They didn't say anything about the cost," he protested.

"Of course not. You were their guest."

Viktor said doggedly, "I'm really sorry, Nrina, but how was I to know it cost so much money? Nobody ever said anything to me."

"Said what it cost? Oh, Viktor! Did you really think that two sensitive, artistic, decent people like Frit and Forta would say anything so vulgar?"

"I'm sorry," he grumbled. And then, defensively, he said, "What does it matter? You people are closing your eyes to what's really important—what's happening to the universe."

He stopped, surrendering because he could see that she was looking at him with resigned incomprehension. She said, obviously trying to be reasonable, "But Viktor, you said yourself all these things were zillions of miles away and they took millions of years to happen. How can you call them 'important'?"

He ground his teeth. "Knowledge is important!" he barked. It was an article of faith.

Unfortunately, Nrina was not of his religion. She took a turn or two around the room, looking at him in bafflement.

Viktor did not like the feeling that he had committed a terrible social blunder. "I could get a job and pay them back," he offered.

"The kind of job you could get, Viktor," she said with a sigh, "would not pay them back in twenty years. What can you do?" She hesitated, then plunged in. "Viktor? Who are Marie, Claude, Reesa, and Mom?"

"What?"

"They are names you used to say. When you were feverish from freezer burn," she explained. "Sometimes you called me Marie and Claude, sometimes Reesa. And just at the beginning I think you said 'Mom.' Were these women you loved?"

He was flushing. "One was my mother," he said gruffly. "Marie-Claude and Reesa—yes."

"I believed it was that." She sighed, twirling a lock of his hair in her slim fingers. Then she looked at him seriously. "Viktor," she said, "I could design a woman like you if you wished. I could make one from your own genes, as I did with Balit for Forta and Frit. Or, if you can describe this Reesa and this Marie-Claude, I could make one like them. Or with the best qualities of both; if you wish. She would be physically of your kind, not as tall and slim as we are. Of course," she added compassionately, "it would take time. The embryo must gestate, the child grow—twenty years, perhaps, before she would be of mating age …"

He looked at her with a sudden shock. "What are you telling me?" he demanded. "Do you want to stop our, uh, our—"

She let him flounder without an ending to the sentence. When it was clear he couldn't find one, she shook her head affectionately. "Come to bed," she ordered. "It's late."

He obeyed, of course. And when they had made love, and Viktor rolled over to get some sleep, it seemed that it was only minutes before Nrina was poking at him.

It must have been later than he thought, because she was fully dressed, gauzy work robe over her cache-sex, hair pinned up out of the way. "Get up, Viktor," she ordered.

He craned his neck to blink at her. "What? Why?" It wasn't uncommon for Nrina to have to get up early to work, but she didn't usually insist on his own rising.

She looked serious. "I want you to go to Newmanhome with Pelly," she told him.

He gaped at her. "Newmanhome?"

"He is leaving tomorrow," she said.

Viktor rubbed his eyes. He was having trouble taking in what she had said. "Are you angry because of the money?" he asked plaintively.

"No. Yes, but that isn't why. It is simply time for it to be over, that's all."

"But—but—"

"Oh, Viktor," she sighed. "Why are you being so difficult? You didn't think I would pair with you permanently, did you?"

Pelly's ship was as impressive inside as out—only a chemical rocket, to be sure, but a huge one. Viktor was impressed all over again at the richness of a society that could afford to build such vast, sophisticated machines for so little purpose.

To Viktor's surprise, Frit, Forta, and Balit turned up at the launching, Forta and Frit almost weeping as they kissed their son. It looked exactly like a farewell. "Balit!" Viktor cried. "What is this?"

"I'm coming with you," the boy said simply. Incredulous, Viktor turned toward the parents—and recoiled from the anger in their eyes.

"Yes, he is going to join you, Viktor," Frit said bitterly. "We have discussed it all night, but Balit insists. He is freed now; how can we stop him? But I cannot forgive you, Viktor, for putting these ideas in his head."