The World at the End of Time

CHAPTER 30

When Pelly's ship brought Reesa to her waiting husband on Newmanhome she did not come alone.

Of course, the only person Viktor saw in those first moments was Reesa herself—familiar Reesa, dear Reesa, loved and lost and restored Reesa. When she came out of the lander she was as warm and solid in his arms as she had ever been, in spite of everything. But the ship was heavily laden. Dekkaduk was on the same lander, with all his equipment to revive corpsicles on the spot and heal whatever had happened to them in their icy millennia—those who could be healed at all, anyway. So were Balit's grandparents, come to visit from their manufacturing habitat, grotesque in their temporary muscles but excited as teenagers at what they were doing.

Pelly's lander had to make three trips to bring down all the cargo that time. There wasn't room in his spaceship's hold for everything. Some of their larger, ruder, sturdier things had made the voyage from Nergal strapped to the outside of Pelly's ship. It was a slow trip, and cranky piloting for Pelly, with all that added mass. It wasn't just Dekkaduk's defrosting clinic. The grandparents had not come empty-handed, but with thirty tons of equipment from their factory habitat, seeds of a machine shop to begin working the treasures the Von Neumanns had patiently brought back to Homeport. Nor did Markety's wife, Grimler, want their son growing up in a world without conveniences. So she had provided, among other things, three additional wheeled vehicles and small aircraft—now at last the people on Newmanhome could explore more of their reborn world!

For Viktor, falling peacefully asleep that night with Reesa breathing gently on his shoulder as she slept by his side, it was not just another day, it was the start of a new calendar, the beginning of another new life—and maybe, he thought, the best of them all.

In the second year of that private new calendar the human population of Newmanhome passed a thousand—nearly a hundred of the newcomers being people just arrived from the habitats, young ones mostly—and Grimler's baby was born out of its test tubes and brought to join them, and Jeren found a wife. In the third year Jeren's son added to the population—now nearly doubled again—and the machines that Balit's grandparents had brought had built the machines that built the machines that were now building vehicles and pumps, earthmovers and cranes, engines and appliances made on Newmanhome itself. The new farm plots withstood the worst of the drenching spring rains and flourished, and Newmanhome was feeding itself. And in the third year …

In the third year Balit went back to his home on Moon Mary— "Only for a short visit, Viktor," he said earnestly. "Believe me, I'll be back—" and almost as soon as he had arrived he was sending messages to Viktor. "Come to see us here, please. With Reesa, of course. Everyone's excited about the idea of seeing you!"

And, of course, on Pelly's next trip back to Nergal Viktor and Reesa went with him.

For Reesa, of course, it was all a wonderful new thrill. She had never seen the spindly, graceful homes of Moon Mary—had hardly seen even the habitat where Nrina had coaxed her back to life, for as soon as she had been well enough she had been on her way to Newmanhome and Viktor.

It was more than a tour. It was very close to a Grand Procession. They were met on Moon Mary by more than a thousand people. Frit and Forta were in the very foreground, of course, taking turns to hug Viktor and Reesa when Balit left either long enough to give them a chance. Nrina was there, too—as she pressed herself fondly against Viktor he glanced worriedly at Reesa's face; but Reesa only put her own arms around the slim woman, and if there was any jealousy there, or resentment, it never came to the surface. Some of the others Viktor recognized, or almost recognized—Balit's old schoolmates, some of the friends and family members from Balit's coming-of-age party—but there were hundreds, many hundreds, more he did not know at all. "I have some surprises for you, Viktor," Balit said proudly, pulling a slim young woman out of the throng. "This is Kiffena. Do you remember her? She was in my class when you visited, and we're going to be married."

She came willingly enough to Viktor, who naturally put his arms around her. He did not remember her out of the gaggle he had met at Balit's school, but she was certainly a pretty little thing. As he hugged her in greeting he was surprised to feel the corded muscles in her lean body—preparing for Newmanhome? Yes, of course, that would be it, he thought; Balit had promised he would be back, and certainly it would not be alone. Grinning, Viktor slapped the boy—no, the man now, certainly—on the back. To the girl he said, "You'll be a wonderful couple."

"We know you'll be very happy," Reesa said.

Then the girl moved her lips for a moment and said, "We know we will be happy, too."

Viktor blinked at her in astonishment, for she hadn't spoken in the tongue of the habitats, but in old English. She grinned. "I had to learn it for my work," she said, half-apologetically.

"Well, she really is a surprise, Balit," Viktor said. "And a very nice one, too. Congratulations."

Balit looked astonished. "Oh, no, Viktor. Kiffena isn't the surprise. Kiffena is the one who's going to tell you the surprise—one of the surprises, anyway. But let's go home now, please? After dinner we can talk in peace."

Frit and Forta had prepared a handsome meal. "Nothing elaborate," Frit said modestly, handing around grapes the size of a baby's fist, "for it's just family, you know."

"I'm really honored to be a member of this family," Reesa said, and took Frit's hand to kiss it before she let him go on with the grapes. "Balit's been a really good friend to us on Newmanhome, and—" Suddenly she was startled, almost panicked, as the room swayed under her. "Dear God! What's that?"

Viktor, after a moment's shock of his own, laughed at her. "I forgot to tell you about earthquakes. Moon Mary does this kind of thing every once in a while."

"But we're perfectly safe here," Forta said reassuringly. When he was sure that Reesa was over her startlement, and everyone had had everything they wanted from the meal, he stood up again. "I've got to practice," he sighed. "I'm going to perform a new dance—I hope you'll enjoy it, Viktor and Reesa, because it's partly for you. But I won't dance it properly if I don't rehearse it again, so, Frit, will you come and count for me while I work at the bar? You'll forgive us, won't you, Reesa?"

"Of course," Reesa said politely. But her eyes were amused, and when Balit's parents were gone she turned to him. "They're leaving us alone on purpose, aren't they?" she asked. "Does this have anything to do with those surprises you were talking about?"

Balit leaned back, his eyes twinkling. "You are very clever," he said. "You are also correct. Let me begin by telling you about Kiffena. She is a specialist in datamachine architecture."

"I didn't know," Viktor said, smiling across the table at the pretty young woman. "In fact, I didn't know there were any people like that at all."

"I began the study when Balit was sending all those exciting stories back to us," the girl said, smiling back. "It seemed such a pity for all that information to be lost."

"She's been studying the datastore, Viktor," Balit said with excitement. "It may be that not everything was lost."

That stopped Viktor. "What are you talking about?" he demanded.

Kiffena said with pride, "Balit sent me some of the data fiches from the store. I've managed to reclaim most of one fiche and part of three others, Viktor. They were magnetically stored, you see. Most of the magnetism was lost because of flooding, but there is a little residual—sometimes too little to make out, but sometimes not."

"It's not about astrophysics, though," Balit apologized.

"No," the girl said, shaking her head. "I'm not sure what the main fiche is about, Viktor. We tried to have it translated, but some of the words just don't make sense. Look."

And she keyed Balit's desk and displayed some sections of what looked like a printed book.

"Oh, I know what that is," Reesa said suddenly. "It's case law. I mean, it's what judges decided in some lawsuit or criminal trial, long and long ago. People used to worry about those things a lot, back on Earth."

"But that's wonderful, Kiffena!" Viktor said. "If you can get anything at all out of that mess, maybe we can get some of the good stuff. You said you unscrambled parts of three others?"

"I don't know if they're much better," she admitted ruefully. "One was something about history. Have you ever heard of a man named Artvasdes? He was what they called the 'king' of something called 'Armenia' on Earth, long ago, and he had a war with someone named 'Cleopatra.' "

"I've heard of Cleopatra," Viktor said. "Not the other fellow, no."

"And then there's a story about some people that, really, Viktor, seemed to spend an awful lot of time worrying about things that didn't really matter—it's called Remembering Bygone Times—"

"Remembrance of Things Past. Marcel Proust," Reesa said, laughing. "I read that once."

"You said there was more?" Viktor asked.

"Yes," said Balit ruefully. "That really looked good for a while, Viktor. It had a lot of data about Jupiter, Venus, the Sun, the Moon—the Old Earth Solar system—and about a number of asterisms—"

"The fiche called them 'constellations,' " Kiffena corrected him.

"Constellations, then. Groups of stars as seen from Earth. They were called things like Libra and Sagittarius and Aries. We thought it might be something like a child's primer on astronomy."

"But what it was," Kiffena said ruefully, "was some sort of magical system for forecasting events."

"I think it's called 'astrology,' " Viktor said.

"I would have liked to try it out," Kiffena said, "but of course we don't have any of those planets or constellations any more."

"But that's wonderful," Viktor cried, suddenly realizing what all this meant. "Do you think you can restore much of the store?"

Balit looked downcast. "Not much, Viktor," he said regretfully. "I picked out some of the best-preserved fiches to send Kiffena. Most of it is just—well, pulverized."

"But a lot of it, yes, Viktor," Kiffena said encouragingly.

"The thing is, it's not organized anymore, so we can't pick out one section—say, astronomy—and work on that part. There's no way to know what any particular fiche holds until we start to restore it."

Viktor shook his head wonderingly. "I had no idea," he said. "How did all this happen?"

"Balit," Kiffena said, hugging the young man proudly. "Balit made it happen. Didn't you know he was sending back reports every day?"

"I knew he was taking a lot of pictures, yes."

"Pictures of everything that happened, Viktor! It was so exciting for us in the school to see—well—thunderstorms! And rainbows, and swimming in the ocean, and clouds, and—everything. And then, of course," she said happily, "we all got interested. That's when I began studying datastore architecture, Viktor. We all began things like that, and in the other schools—"

Viktor blinked at her. "What other schools? I only went to yours."

"But of course we didn't keep Balit's reports to ourselves, Viktor," she said patiently. "No, not at all. Half the schools in the world were getting them—all over the habitat system and on all four moons. Different groups took on different projects, and even some of the grown-ups got interested."

"Newmanhome," Balit said sincerely, "was the most interesting thing that ever happened to us, Viktor. And, of course, with all those people taking it up, a lot got done."

Viktor looked at the boy. "I see that," he said. "Well, do you have any more surprises?"

Balit grinned at him. "A few," he said. He keyed the desk again, and a big torpedo-shaped object appeared. "This," Balit said, "is sort of like what you call our Von Neumaun machines, only bigger. It's going to go to Gold."

Reesa blinked at him. "The star?"

"That's right, Reesa, the star—the one that we think has planets. Viktor thinks maybe the machines on Nebo came from Gold, so we're sending this automatic spaceship out to survey it and come back to report. Of course," Balit added ruefully, "it will take a while. Gold's nearly eleven light-years away, and this ship can't even get up to the speed of light."

"But really, Viktor," Kiffena said, "those planets don't seem inhabited anyway."

"So this ship is just to make sure. And then there are a couple smaller ones—" He keyed the desk again, and three smaller torpedos appeared. "—which will orbit Nebo, keeping a watch on it before someone lands again."

"Lands again!"

"Oh, yes, Viktor," Kiffena said comfortably. "I think I will, if nobody else does. After all, those machines seemed to operate automatically, didn't they? So they had to have some sort of data storage and control systems. And decoding their architecture shouldn't be that much harder than trying to restore your Newmanhome store."

Viktor stared at her, then at Balit. He was almost in a daze. "I had no idea," he said. "I can hardly believe it."

"Believe it, Viktor," Reesa advised him. "When a few million bright young people get excited about something, a lot can happen."

Balit grinned at them, his arm around Kiffena. "And most of it," he said, "is still going to happen."

They didn't stay for Forta's new dance. They couldn't. The messages from Newmanhome were too urgent and too imploring—for, although there were a couple of thousand people now alive on the planet and busy about the work of bringing it back to life, Viktor and Reesa were the only two who knew what it should be.

They didn't return empty-handed, either. In the cargo hold of Pelly's ship were forty new artificial wombs for Dekkaduk's laboratory, to speed up new births; and genetically improved strains of kelp to seed the empty seas; and a dozen species of tailor-made fish to feed on the kelp when it had had a chance to grow. One of the school groups had taken on the problem of seeding the bare South Continent, and so in the cargo hold of Pelly's ship were two new little airplanes specially designed for dropping pelleted seeds of specially designed ground-cover grasses. Kiffena's group had given her a ton and a half of instruments to go on with the work of trying to recapture lost data from the files. Balit had persuaded a dozen youngsters, from his school and others, to come to study the fascinating and unprecedented subject of Newmanhome's weather, and naturally they had a ton or two of meteorological instruments of their own. Once again Pelly's ship was grotesquely deformed, with odds and ends of gear stuck to it all through the flight from Nergal, and it took four trips in the landing shuttle to get it all to the surface. And then, somehow, time had to be found to get all those things started … and to plow new farmland to feed the growing population … and to find new geothermal sources away from Homeport so that more power plants could be built so that other little communities could be launched elsewhere on the barren world … and to do—to do everything, really, and to do it all at once.

Everyone else was almost as busy, of course—with the work of resuscitating the planet, and with their own affairs, too. Every week a dozen or so newly awakened people came wonderingly out of Dekkaduk's thawing pens to join in the great task, and of course the pressure was intense to ensure that many of them were female. Families began to happen again on Newmanhome. Jeren's tall wife was bulging at the belly—neither Jeren nor she had been willing to wait for a turn at the artificial wombs. Markety's baby was walking sturdily where his parents still sometimes tottered. The freezers were still nowhere near emptied; each trip of Pelly's ship brought more people from the habitats, then went back; and yet the principal element in the population growth was already beginning to be newborns.

And then Reesa sprang her bombshell.

As they lay spooned together in bed, at the end of one long, wearying day, she whispered to the back of his neck, "Viktor? Are you asleep?" And then she went on quickly. "There's something on my mind."

"Oh?" he said—not wanting to say yes, sure, he'd noticed her frequent abstraction, supposing it to be the shock of coming to this new, unexpected and highly confusing new life.

But then she said, "I talked to Nrina while we were on Moon Mary."

"Oh," he said, in quite a different tone. He was at once wide awake. "Reesa, darling," he said, guilty, placating, "I hope you understand—I mean, I thought you were dead."

But her finger was over his lips, and she was laughing at him. "You're always talking when you should be listening, Viktor dear," she told him. "I'm not interested in what you did while I was dead. Only I'm not dead anymore, you see, and Nrina—Nrina took me aside to tell me something. She said she had cell samples from both of us. She said it didn't matter, of course, if I couldn't bear a child myself anymore, because I wouldn't have to. Not as long as she had the samples from both of us. She wondered if you and I wanted—"

She stopped there. Viktor squirmed around on the bed to face her in the gloom. Then, looking him in the eye, she finished, "A baby."

"Oh, my God," Viktor whispered softly. He was silent for a long moment. A baby! A baby would not replace lost Shan and Yan and Tanya and little Quinn, but still …" What did you tell Nrina?" he asked.

He was not surprised to see her cheeks were damp. "I told her we'd think about it, Vik. And I'm thinking about it very hard right now."

When Forta performed his new dance the whole community took time off to watch.

It wasn't Forta in the flesh, of course. Forta in the flesh was still millions of miles away, on the moon of ruddy Nergal. But Forta in the live broadcast from his own stage on Moon Mary was still wonderful, brilliant Forta, and he danced beautifully. Viktor saw with pleasure that there were traces in Forta's dance of the Yemeni step and the dip and curtsy Viktor had taught him. But there was more to it—so much more!—that was all Forta's own genius: grace and passion, yes, and courage and hope, too.

When it was over Forta returned to the cameras to say, breathless and happy, "I've dedicated this new dance, 'The Greening of Newmanhome,' to my son, Balit, and his bride, Kiffena, and most of all to our dear friends Viktor and Reesa and all those who join them in the real greening that is going on on Newmanhome now. All of us wish them well!"

Of course, there was a party to follow the performance, a happy one that lasted a long time. When it was over Viktor could not sleep. He got up from the bed where Reesa was peacefully smiling in her slumber and walked out into the dark streets, gazing up at the five lonely stars in the black sky.

Lonely …

What had happened to everything? Viktor scowled at the unanswering sky. He walked past the communications shack, one of the few lighted structures in the little settlement, down toward the water. Behind him he heard a door close, but he didn't turn. He stopped a few yards from the edge of the bay. There was nothing to be seen out over Great Ocean, not even a line of horizon, only darkness. Near his feet the little waves peacefully ran up the gravel and retreated, with a sighing sound.

Behind him Balit's voice said, "Viktor? I thought that was you. I called Forta to congratulate him on his performance, and I've just got his answer. He's been so busy, Viktor! He said he's been getting calls from all over the habitats—not just fan calls, calls from people wanting to know how they could help us here!"

Viktor turned and peered at the gangling young man. "That's nice," he growled.

Balit blinked at him but went on enthusiastically. "Yes, and do you know what they've done? Three of the other schools got together, and they've launched a new observatory! A really big one this time. Big mirrors and radio webs—it'll be looking for infrared and radio and gamma radiation and all those things you've been talking about. And Forta says they're even talking about moving one of the habitats, or building a new one, in orbit around Newmanhome!"

He broke off, aware that Viktor was not matching his pleasure. "Is something the matter, Viktor?" he asked worriedly.

Viktor flung his arm up toward the black sky. "Look," he said. "It's all gone! The whole universe, it's simply grown old and died on me!"

Balit was silent for a moment. "That might be," he admitted. "But really, Viktor—don't you remember all the things you've told me? That's there. This is here. Our own sun isn't old. It's got billions of years left—much longer than all the time life's existed in this system."

"I know that," Viktor said wearily.

"But, Viktor—what does it matter what happened to the rest of the universe?"

"It matters that I don't know what happened," Viktor said tightly. "And I never will! Oh, it's wonderful that Kiffena's trying to patch up some of the old records, and people are starting to look for new answers again, and—it's all wonderful, I admit it! But it's all taking so long. And even if sometime people do find out what was going on on Nebo, and what caused our stars to do what they did—I won't live long enough to find it out!"

"But Viktor," Balit said lovingly, "I will."