The World at the End of Time

CHAPTER 29

The eons of stagnation were over for Wan-To. He was not merely busy—busier than he had been for at least some sextillions of sextillions of years—he was in an absolute fury of action.

It might not have seemed that way to a normal Earth human being—if there had been such a person to observe him, if observation of Wan-To had been possible in the first place. Wan-To had no way to move fast anymore. A single thought took him weeks. To make a plan required centuries. If the imaginary Earth human could have known what Wan-To was up against, the spectacle might have reminded him of a some Earthly watchmaker, feverishly trying to assemble the most delicate of clockwork in a desperate rush to save his life—and trying to do it, moreover, while he was submerged neck-deep in quicksand. For that was how it was for Wan-To. At every step he was impeded by the thick, suffocating medium of the dead star he inhabited. Actually Wan-To was worse off than even the drowning watchmaker, because at least the watchmaker retained his memories, while the particular skills Wan-To needed now were no longer part of his active consciousness. They had been "put away" long before. That was one part of the price Wan-To had had to pay for continued existence in the feeble energies left to him in the dying star, for to save energy he had long ago had to download immense portions of himself and his memories into a kind of standby storage. So first of all he had to find and reawaken those parts; it was as though the watchmaker had to find his instruction manual before he could fit the first gear to its bearing.

It was not enough for Wan-To to make the decision to cut himself loose from the decay of his dying star and go off to revel in the hot energies of those distant, invisible suns. Making the decision was quick enough. The hunt for the "how" of doing it was much longer.

Wan-To knew the starting point, of course. He would have to reconstitute himself as a pattern of tachyons. Fast tachyons, which fortunately were low-energy ones. It was a pity, he reflected, that he couldn't use the extreme minimum-energy tachyons that were the fastest of all. Unfortunately, that was impossible; the minimum-energy tachyons couldn't carry enough information to encompass all of Wan-To. No matter. The ones that were available would do the job. He would copy himself onto a tachyon stream and make his way to this unexpected oasis of life among the desolation.

There wouldn't be much difficulty in finding his way to the little cluster of surviving stars. The sensors had not only transcribed the message; they had very accurately recorded the direction it came from. All he had to do was backtrack. Once he got anywhere near that little cluster of living stars they would be easy enough to find, for they would be bright beacons of light, the only light in a dark and entropied-out universe—beacons of hope for Wan-To.

Unfortunately, even low-energy tachyons took energy to make. That meant some pretty drastic economies for Wan-To. For quite a long time—some tens of thousands of years, he calculated—he would have to shut most of himself down. He would have to eliminate every possible activity except those barely necessary to keep him alive in a sort of standby state, so that he could hoard that pitiful trickle of energies from dying protons, storing it up to use in one prodigal burst that would send him to his resurrection.

Then even the trip itself would take measurable time. Even with the highest velocity tachyons that could do the job, say those moving at some large exponent of the speed of light, it would surely be a matter of some thousands of years. How many thousands he could not say until he got there; the location he had was only a direction. It gave no hint of distance, but there was no doubt that in this sprawled-out emptiness the distance would be considerable.

But, oh!, at the end of that immense journey … Wan-To had never felt such anticipatory joy. It was almost enough—no, he told himself, of course it was far more than enough—to make up for the great pain of what he had to do to prepare himself for it. For that was no less than the amputation of large parts of his memory, of his knowledge—of huge sections of everything that made up what was left of Wan-To himself. They were excess baggage. However treasured, they could not be taken along. Like any desperate refugee, Wan-To had to sacrifice everything that was merely dear to him for what was wholly essential.