The World At The End Of Time Part 7

Even with the hideous antifungal mask, she was very beautiful.

"Viktor," she said, "I didn't know you were here. I'm sorry about your mother."

"But we've got to get your dad to the hospital," Billy added.

"They've got more important things to do than looking after drunks," Viktor said contemptuously-and was startled to see the quick flare of anger that twisted Billy Stockbridge's face. But it was his mother who spoke, already by Pal Sorricaine's side, lifting an eyelid with her thumb, feeling his sweating forehead.

"Viktor. Your father isn't just drunk. He's got acute alcohol poisoning. He could die. Help Billy get him to the hospital."

What Viktor would not have done for his father he could not refuse Marie-Claude. He pulled a blanket off his parents' bed and rolled the old man into it. Billy helped, glowering. The filth was already staining the blanket as Viktor picked Pal Sorricaine up and threw him over his shoulder. The filth didn't matter. It was only one more insult added to the rancor that was already overflowing. "I'll be back," he said, and carried his father out the door, Billy Stockbridge trailing glowering behind.

When Viktor got back from getting his father admitted-only to a pallet on the ground, because all the beds were full of the dying-Marie-Claude had thrown open the windows, scrubbed up the worst of the filth, and cleared off the litter of bottles and dirty clothes. She had even made a pot of tea. She poured a cup for Viktor as he sat down.

She seemed pale, silent, drawn, abstracted. But all she said was, "Is your father going to be all right?"

Viktor shrugged. "They're treating him, anyway." Actually, even the doctor who finally came to see them had had no hesitation about admitting Pal Sorricaine, once he had felt his pulse. Lying on the ground and wholly unaware, the snoring man had been washed, bedded, and stuck with IVs to replenish his lost liquids and electrolytes before Viktor left. The doctor said it would be at least forty-eight hours before Pal would be able to go home. (Strange that even yet people said "forty-eight hours," as though it were a natural unit of time.) "Billy wanted to stay with him a while," Viktor added.

Marie-Claude nodded in that weary, absent way, as though she were thinking about something else entirely-though with the antifungal mask covering most of her face there wasn't much he could tell about what she was thinking, anyway. "Billy is very fond of your father," she mentioned.

Viktor gaped at her. "For G.o.d's sake, why?"

She didn't seem surprised at the question. "Why shouldn't he be? Pal is a good man, Viktor. You're too hard on him. He's had trouble adjusting, and there's his leg, and then your mother's sickness . . ." She said it all flatly, like a comment on the weather. Her voice was as pallid as what he could see of her face.

There was something wrong with Marie-Claude. For a moment the natural fear flashed though his mind-the sickness?- sickness?-but no, he rea.s.sured himself, it couldn't be that. The sick ones were unmistakable, the gasping struggle for air, the cyanosed complexion. None of that applied to Marie-Claude. Still, Viktor looked at her with concern.

"Are you all right?" he demanded.

She looked at him questioningly and then seemed to shake herself. She poured more tea for him, thoughtfully. "n.o.body's all right now, are they? But I'll be fine." Then, without warning. she said. "Viktor. Why don't you marry Theresa McGann?"

There was a swallow of tea halfway down Viktor's throat. He gagged. "You talk like my mother," he got out, strangling.

"Then your mother talks sense to you. I'll speak for her, since she can't anymore. You ought to have a real family, not just leave a puppy here and there. Marry Theresa. Or somebody. Why not?"

"Because," he said-boldly, bitterly, "the only woman I want to marry will go to bed with anybody on Newmanhome, except me."

She looked at him in puzzlement.

Then, for the first time, he saw a crinkling at the corners of the eyes, just visible above the mask. She was almost smiling. She put her hand on his. "Dear, dear Viktor," she said with affection. "Do you have any idea how grand you've been for my morale, all these years?"

He s.n.a.t.c.hed his hand away. "d.a.m.n you, don't patronize patronize me!" he grated. me!" he grated.

"I don't mean to," she said apologetically. She studied him thoughtfully for a moment. Then she closed her eyes, as though in resignation. When she opened them again she said, "Have you finished your tea? Then let's close the windows and lock the door. I'm a lot too old to marry you, Viktor. I'm too old for an affair with you, too, I mean for any long time. But if you really want us to make love-once-well, why not?"

Viktor didn't see Marie-Claude after that, not for a long time. For the whole next day he went around grinning to himself. He was just about the only person in the colony smiling that day. People looked at him with surprise and sometimes with anger. He was reliving every moment and touch of that wonderful copulation. Marie-Claude in bed was what he had been dreaming of since before even p.u.b.erty, and the reality was not in any way a letdown. They had been careful with each other's gauze masks, kissing through them, with all their foul smell and taste, and in every other way they had been wild. She had responded to him with gasped and choked cries, and at the end, when she sobbed and cried out, she had dissolved into shaking tears.

Viktor was startled and worried and did not, just then, know why.

She didn't show up at the ma.s.s funerals when his mother, with forty-two others, was being put under the ground. (Even there Viktor could hardly help an invisible smile now and then, even while he cried.) That was just as well. There was a nasty-and completely unexpected-quarrel at the grave site. It concerned religion, of all things. The Moslems didn't want to have their dead buried with the unbelievers, and once the Moslems made that clear, some of the other sects began muttering, too. It took all of Captain Bu's bellowing to restore order. Then a rancorous emergency town meeting was called that night, people shouting at each other through tears and gauze masks, before it was decided that future burials could be segregated by religion.

It was there that Freddy Stockbridge, coming up to offer a prayer for his mother for him, filled in the missing piece in the puzzle of Marie-Claude. Yes, she had been strangely abstracted that day. Her own husband, that forgotten man, the man who, when Viktor remembered his existence at all, he had thought of with the contemptuous pity of the seducer for the cuckold-that man had himself died only hours before Amelia Sorricaine-Memel.

Viktor had bedded the widow before the man's corpse was cold.

But Marie-Claude was true to her word. She didn't turn to Viktor to take her dead husband's place. She boarded a ship for Archipelago West as soon as one sailed. Months later Viktor heard that she was marrying a molecular biologist bereft at the same time as herself.

When Pal Sorricaine got out of the hospital he was shaky and, beyond the gauze face mask, pale. He confronted his son steadily enough, though. "I just couldn't handle it, Viktor," he said.

Viktor turned away from cleaning the house-the smaller children were back in their home again, and he had been the only one to take care of them. He said to his father, just as steadily, "That's c.r.a.p. You've been a drunk for years. You've just been getting worse, that's all."

His father flinched. "That's what I meant, Viktor. Your mother dying was just the last straw. I haven't been able to handle my life for a long time now. Being here-missing a leg-so much to do, and not much that I'm able to do to help. Vik, I just don't feel like I've got a place place here." here."

Viktor studied his father. He had never seen him look so-was the right word "defeated"? No, the word that fit best was pointless." Pal Sorricaine did not seem to have any point or purpose to his life.

Viktor lifted the lid of the stewpot and sniffed. Dinner could be served when Edwina came back with the littler kids; it was ready now. "Eat something," he growled, putting a plate in front of his father. The man accepted instruction obediently, pushing his mask aside for each spoonful of broth and meat and potatoes. Pal Sorricaine didn't seem to want to prolong the conversation. He simply did as he was told, without comment.

To his son, that was scary. "But you've got your cla.s.s," Viktor said abruptly.

Pal shook his head, going on eating. "There's nothing left for me to teach them, Vik."

"But your observatory-"

"Viktor," his father said patiently, "every one of those kids can run the telescope as well as I can. Billy can run it better. He's been the one who's been commanding the Mayflower Mayflower instruments for months." He began to look interested for the first time. "Billy's done a series of observations of Nebo that would make a doctoral dissertation for him back on Earth, Viktor. There are some pretty funny levels of high-energy radiation coming from around there-nothing I would have expected. Nothing I can account for, and, Viktor, I don't even know where to begin to look anymore. But Bill keeps working at it. He's very bright. You'd be interested in that, Vik; I'll ask Bill to show you. He's always eager to oblige. You know, he sort of took care of me when I was, well, under the weather." instruments for months." He began to look interested for the first time. "Billy's done a series of observations of Nebo that would make a doctoral dissertation for him back on Earth, Viktor. There are some pretty funny levels of high-energy radiation coming from around there-nothing I would have expected. Nothing I can account for, and, Viktor, I don't even know where to begin to look anymore. But Bill keeps working at it. He's very bright. You'd be interested in that, Vik; I'll ask Bill to show you. He's always eager to oblige. You know, he sort of took care of me when I was, well, under the weather."

"Eat your dinner," Viktor commanded sourly. He didn't want, for a whole complex of reasons, to hear any more about the virtues of Billy Stockbridge.

Because of the epidemic everything was delayed, disorganized, generally screwed up. Viktor's ship had unloaded in record time, but the cargo of machines and chemicals for the return trip was late. The ship's sailing was put off.

The day before it finally sailed Viktor looked up Reesa McGann. She had their son with them, as well as her toddler by Jake Lundy. As a matter of fact, there were twenty-two infants under her care, because she was trying her luck with a day-care job. "What happened to s.p.a.ce piloting?" he asked.

She didn't even smile. It wasn't much of a joke; she didn't have to say that obviously there weren't going to be any s.p.a.ce-piloting jobs around now because the epidemic had pushed everything back to the edge of bare survival.

Then, without at all planning it, he found himself saying, "Reesa, my mother told me just before she died that I ought to marry you. So did-someone else."

"Who else?" she asked curiously. When he didn't answer, she said, "They're right, of course. You ought to."

He blinked at her, surprised and amused. "Do you want me to?"

She thought that over for a moment while she propped a bottle for one of the younger ones under her care. Then she said, "Yes, no, and maybe. Yes, first: s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g at random and making babies with different people is kind of kid stuff. There's a time to settle down, and both you and I are right about at that time. Then, no: You've been h.o.r.n.y for Marie-Claude Petkin since you were in diapers yourself. There's no point thinking about marrying you until you get her off your mind."

Viktor flushed, half angry, half laughing. She stopped there. "You didn't tell me what the maybe was," he protested.

"Well, isn't that obvious? If you ever get over having the hots for Marie-Claude, then maybe I'll still be around. Give me a call if you do, okay?"

He grinned at her-unwilling to take the discussion seriously, trying to keep it light and jocular. "I have to be the one who calls? You won't call me?"

"Viktor," she said earnestly, "I've been been calling you since we were both school kids. I just keep getting a busy signal." calling you since we were both school kids. I just keep getting a busy signal."

It turned out Viktor was going to another funeral-Alice's older child had died, along with all those thousands, and so had her mother-and so, as it also turned out, he wasn't going to have a ready-made bunkmate that trip. Alice was going to stay home with Shan for a while.

The funeral was worse than the one the day before. The town meeting had settled very little when it had authorized separate burials for Moslems. Kittamur Haradi was a Moslem, all right, but he was a Sunni. Sunni. He didn't want his late wife buried with the Shi'ites. So a separate, smaller ditch was dug for the second Moslem sect. He didn't want his late wife buried with the Shi'ites. So a separate, smaller ditch was dug for the second Moslem sect.

And then the community's chief working rabbi (there were only two) got the segregationist fever, declaring that Jewish burials should be in a place of their own, where a star of David could be erected.

Viktor couldn't see the sense of it. When the bodies were laid into their great, shallow pits they all looked much the same. At least, he thought, with what remained of his identification as a Christian who hadn't been to a service since the landing, the Catholics and all the Protestants, even the Quakers and Unitarians, had all raised no objection to a common grave for their dead.

Not then, anyway.

That night he let his father persuade him to come and see what Billy Stockbridge had been doing. It wasn't just that he thought it might be interesting, although he did; it was a way of keeping some sort of contact with the old man. Not making up, exactly. But not building the wall between them any higher, at least.

They didn't go to the observatory, they went to the little cubicle under the radio dish that Pal Sorricaine had begged for an astronomy center. But Billy wasn't there. "I don't know where he could have got to," Pal Sorricaine said, frowning. "Everything's so mixed up with all the deaths-I haven't really talked to him for weeks. Well, let's see what he's got. I think that's his current program that he left up. Let me take a look . . ."

He stumped over to the console and sat down to study the screen, first cursorily, then frowning.

"But this isn't Nebo," he said, scratching absently at his gauze mask with one hand, rubbing his stump with the other. "Look at this. Bill's been doing stellar spectrometry-lots of it. See here, he's been taking observations on a bunch of bright stars; here's Betelgeuse, here's Fomalhaut, here's- Wait a minute," he said suddenly. He scowled at the screen. "Look at that."

Viktor looked obediently, trying to remember what he knew about stellar spectra. What he mostly remembered was that you couldn't tell much just by glancing at them; you needed careful comparisons against standards to see anything meaningful. "Look at what?" he asked.

"The absorption lines are all mixed up," Pal Sorricaine complained. "Look at the hydrogen alphas! See, Bill's got two sets of spectra for each star, one's recent, the other's a year or two ago. Their frequency shifted! Not much; it could even be an instrument screwup . . ." He stared at the screen, gnawing his lip under the mask. Then he said, "No. Bill's a better observer than that. He wouldn't get them all wrong. Something systematic is going on."

Viktor said, not quite understanding, "Are all the stars screwed up?"

"No! Look at this nearby bunch-stars within five or six light-years. They haven't changed. But these more distant ones- But that's impossible!" he cried angrily.

"What's impossible?"

"Look, d.a.m.n it! Here, everything in this direction is red-shifted-all these others are blued. And that couldn't happen, Viktor, not possibly. Unless-" d.a.m.n it! Here, everything in this direction is red-shifted-all these others are blued. And that couldn't happen, Viktor, not possibly. Unless-"

"Come on, Dad! Unless what?" Viktor demanded, angry and uneasy.

Pal Sorricaine shook his head. "Let's find Billy," he growled, and Viktor heard with alarm the worry in his father's voice.

They didn't find Billy Stockbridge. Billy found them. He was coming up the hill, very fast, when he saw them coming down. When Pal Sorricaine started his angry questioning, Billy just shook his head. "Come into the observatory," he said. "Let me show you."

And inside the little observers' room he sat down at the keypad without another word. "This is an old star photograph," he explained over his shoulder as a sky view appeared on the screen, a negative, black dots on a white background. "Now I'm superimposing one I just took." The number of stars suddenly doubled and then began to move about as Billy worked over the keypad. "Just a moment till I get them registered . . ." The stars abruptly coalesced, as far as Viktor could see, but Billy was busy setting up another program.

Then he leaned back as the image began to pulse, like a fast heartbeat, twice a second. "Now look," he ordered.

Viktor glanced at his father, silently staring at the screen with his brows screwed together in perplexity-or worry? "I am looking," Viktor said, annoyed. "I don't see anything, but- hey! Isn't that one jumping back and forth? And that one, too-and that over there . . ."

"My G.o.d," Pal Sorricaine said softly.

Billy nodded grimly. "In this segment of the sky I've found twenty-three stars that show movement on the blink comparator. As soon as I made those Doppler measurements I had to make an optical observation. The Dopplers were right. Look again, Viktor. Look at the ones on the edges of the screen. This one-" He put a finger on a large dot near the left edge. "-and this little one over here on the right. Wait a minute, I'll slow the blinks down."

And when he did, Viktor saw that as the dot on the left jumped left, the dot on the right jumped right. "They're all moving away from the middle!" he cried. And then, on second thought, "Or toward it?"

"Away is right," Billy told him soberly. "That's why I picked this frame to show you. The ones we see moving are the nearest stars-some of them, anyway-the ones with the largest parallax. They're all in motion."

Viktor stared at him in silent consternation. "But they can't be!"

And from behind him his father said, "You're right, Viktor. They're not moving. But somehow or other-and G.o.ddam rapidly, too-all of a sudden we we are!" are!"

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 a.s.sume 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. 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. 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-a.s.suming 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 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. 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 cl.u.s.ter and announced his name-that is, he made the sound that pa.s.sed 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 ba.s.so-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. n.o.body 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 pa.s.sed 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 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 s.p.a.ce around them to isolate them and speed things up. 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 s.p.a.ce around them to isolate them and speed things up.

He wondered if Haigh-tik and the others would really a.s.sume that Wan-To himself was in one of those cl.u.s.ters, 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.