The World at the End of Time

CHAPTER 7

It was a pity that Pal Sorricaine never had any possible chance of meeting Wan-To, because of course Wan-To could have explained it all to him. Wan-To might even have been happy to discuss it, because he was pleased with his work.

After Wan-To, observing through his Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pair, saw the first batch of stars begin to pick up speed, he paused to enjoy the spectacle. It was good work, he thought contentedly. It was also a very smart ruse de guerre. He was sure that if he had seen this happening, without warning, his first reaction would have been to zap every one of those stars. Immediately, without second thought. They were definitely unnatural.

His sibs were bound to do the same. They might try to figure out just what was causing it, but they were very unlikely to have any ERP setups near enough for quick study, and they wouldn't find his matter doppel. It would make little difference if they did. They would assume one of those stars held a fleeing Wan-To—or somebody—and they would zap them.

It was such a good ploy that he did it again. If it was a good strategy to set up one false target it would be even better to set up several.

That was no problem for him, but it was a somewhat boring prospect. However, he didn't have to do it himself. Anything that Wan-To had ever done once he never had to do a second time, unless he wanted to for the fun of it—not when he could so easily make a copy of enough of himself to do the job. So he duplicated those parts of himself that were needed for that task, as a small "doppel" inside his own star, and instructed it to repeat the process with a few other groups of stars. The more the better, when it came to confusing his opponents; let them have a lot of things to worry about. Anyway, it was very little trouble. Making such copies of parts of himself was no harder for Wan-To than copying a computer file was for a human being. He didn't even bother to oversee his copy's work, so he didn't notice that one of the groups of stars included the star that held the planets that included the world humans had come to call Newmanhome.

Of course, it wouldn't have mattered to Wan-To if he had.

Then, for the first time in quite a while, Wan-To felt sufficiently at ease to think about relaxing for a bit. He wondered what was happening with his neighbors, and he was beginning to feel a little lonesome.

Not much had changed in his immediate vicinity. If a human astronomer had been sitting on the surface of Wan-To's G-3 star and gazing at the heavens—assuming the human could somehow have avoided flashing into a wisp of ions long enough to gaze at anything at all—he would have seen little change. He would have observed that most of the stars in Wan-To's sky were not perceptibly moving or changing color. For that matter, to the human observer it would have appeared that hardly any of them had flared into "Sorricaine-Mtiga objects," as so many had in fact been doing for the past few dozen Earth years; the human observer would have been woefully behind the news.

The reason that was so was that the human eye doesn't see anything but light. And light is bound by its limiting velocity of 186,000 miles a second. That's pretty slow—far too dreadfully slow for Wan-To's kind. Things were happening, all right, but a human observer would have had to wait a long time to find out what they were.

Wan-To, with his ERP pairs and his tachyons, was a lot better off, observationally speaking. He knew almost instantly what was happening many hundreds of light-years away. For example, he knew that nearly eighty stars had in fact been zapped by someone. He still didn't know who the someone was—well, the someones. He knew that more than one someone was involved, if only because he had zapped six of the stars himself, laying down a little probing fire of his own. He also knew that one or two of those random shots had come uncomfortably close to his own G-3, though he was pretty sure that was just an accident. He didn't guess at that. It was too important; he worked it out carefully. Wan-To had his own equivalent of chi-squared analysis, and the most rigorous interpretation of the positions of the flared stars he could make showed a highly random distribution.

The other thing Wan-To didn't know was whether anybody had been hit.

Wan-To did care about that, after his fashion. True, at least some of his neighbors seemed to be trying to kill him. But they were the only neighbors he had—not to mention that, in fact, they were in some sense his own flesh and blood.

Then he heard a signal he hadn't heard in some time. Someone was calling him.

When one of Wan-To's kind wanted to talk to another he simply activated the appropriate Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky cluster and announced his name—that is, he made the sound that passed for a name, among the plasma minds like Wan-To. They didn't make real sounds, of course. "Sound" is a matter of vibrations in the air, and certainly there was no gaseous atmosphere where any of them lived. But even in the interior of a star there are what are called acoustic phenomena—you might as well call them sounds, though no human ear could have heard them—and each one of Wan-To's siblings made a characteristic sound. There was Haigh-tik, who was actually (in a sense) Wan-To's first-born, and took after Wan-To a lot—friendly, deceitful, and very, very smart. There was Gorrrk (it was a sound rather like the cooing of a basso-profundo pigeon), and Hghumm (guttural white noise, like a cold engine finally starting), and poor, defective Wan-Wan-Wan, the dumbest of the lot, whose "name" was a little like the sound of a motorcyclist gunning his motor at a red light. Nobody paid much attention to Wan-Wan-Wan. Wan-To had made him late in his "parenthood," when he had become very cautious about how much of his own powers he passed on to his progeny, and poor Wan-Wan-Wan was pretty close to an idiot. There were eleven of them, all told, Wan-To himself included, and seven of them had tried to call him while he was busy setting his stars in motion.

Wan-To considered that fact. Very likely one (or more) of the seven was the one who was trying to kill him, calling to see if he was still alive.

But there were the three silent others to think about. They hadn't called. That might be even more significant. Perhaps they had been zapped; or perhaps they were the ones who were doing the zapping, lying low in the hope that the others would think they were gone.

What a pity it was, Wan-To thought ruefully, that it should always come to this in the end.

Restlessly he checked his sensors. Everything was going as planned. Five separate groups of stars, the smallest with only half a dozen members, the largest with well over a hundred, were already accelerating out of their positions in the sky, in random directions. (Let Haigh-tik try to figure that out, Wan-To thought gleefully.) They would be going pretty fast before long; his constructs tapped the energy of the stars themselves to drive them, converting their interior particles in gravitons to create attractors, even bending the curvature of space around them to isolate them and speed things up.

He wondered if Haigh-tik and the others would really assume that Wan-To himself was in one of those clusters, running away. That would be a useful deception—if it worked—but Haigh-tik in particular was too much like Wan-To himself to be fooled very long.

No, Wan-To thought regretfully, deception wouldn't work very long between Haigh-tik and himself. Sooner or later one of them would have to destroy the other.

It was a great pity, he told himself soberly. Then, for something to do, he sent out the pulses that would turn three more possible targets into seminovae.

It would have been so nice if they could all have lived together in peace …

But, things being as they were, he had to protect himself. Even if it meant blowing up every star in the galaxy but his own.