The resemblance between those stars and his own could not be an accident. Some one of his copies had deduced enough of what Wan-To’s home star was like to start a systematic campaign of destruction. Someone’s searching fire was specifically directed at him.
The option of flight was always open to him. He could quit this star and move to another. He could choose an unlikely one, he thought; maybe a little red dwarf, or one of those short-lived Wolf-Rayet kind of things. Neither was attractive as a permanent home—the dwarf star too confining, the huge infant star too unstable. But that was exactly the reason why no one would look for him there.
But—getting there! That was the problem! It meant abandoning the concealment of his star and launching himself as a pure pattern of energy, as naked and unprotected as any molting Earthly crustacean, across the interstellar void. The danger would not last for long. He would not be easy to spot. There was a good chance that he could make the journey and be safely hidden before one of his sibs detected his presence. He calculated the odds on survival as at least a hundred to one.
That one chance in a hundred was too much to take. Especially, Wan-To thought with pleasure, as he had a few tricks still up his sleeve.
So for some little time Wan-To was quite busy. He was making another copy of himself.
Practice, Wan-To was sure, made perfect. This time he was going to make the exact person he intended, without any possibly dangerous traits. Also, he schemed, with certain memories carefully excised; this copy would never cause him any trouble.
In order to do all that, Wan-To had to scan every part of his memory stores. Copy a pattern here, strike one out there; it was a lot like an earthly computer expert trying to adapt a program for, say, air traffic control to become one for, perhaps, ballistic missile defense. It took a long time, for there were billions of years of memories in Wan-To’s store, and during all that time Wan-To could not permit himself any interruptions at all. So he turned off most of his scanning systems, muted the attention calls from his relations, even shut down his communication with the doppel on the planet Nebo. (As it happened, this was too bad in some ways, but Wan-To didn’t know that.) He devoted himself entirely to the construction of the new being, and when its patterns had been completed he activated it with pride and hope.
The new being stirred and looked around. “Who are you?” it asked. And, almost in the same moment, “More important, who am I?”
“I am Wan-To, whom you love and wish well,” Wan-To told it. “Your name is also Wan-To.”
“But we can’t both have the same name! Can we?”
“We do, though,” Wan-To informed him. “Of course, just between the two of us you should have a different name, otherwise it would be very confusing, wouldn’t it? So, just for the two of us—let me see—yes, I think we will call you ‘Traveler.’ ”
“That isn’t a proper name,” Traveler complained. “Does it mean I am going to go somewhere?”
“How clever you are,” Wan-To said with pride. “Yes. You are going to leave this star and take up residence in another one, far away.”
“Why?”
“Because no star is big enough for two like us,” Wan-To explained. “Don’t you feel cramped? I do. We’ll be much happier when you have a star of your own.
Traveler thought that over for a time. “I don’t feel happy at all,” he said. “I feel very confused. Why is that, Wan-To? Why don’t I remember why you made me?”
“You’re still very young,” Wan-To said promptly. “Naturally you are still learning. But to develop properly you will have to go to a star of your own, and you are going to do that right away.”
“I am?” the copy wailed. “But, Wan-To, I’ll be lonely!”
“Not at all!” Wan-To cried. “That’s the best part, Traveler! See, as soon as you leave here you will activate your communications systems—do you know where they are?”
“Yes,” the copy confirmed after a moment. “I’ve found them. Shall I do that now?”
“No, no!” Wan-To said hastily. “Not now! When you’re on your way. You will call all your new friends, who are waiting to meet you—Haigh-tik and Pooketih and Mromm. You will simply say to them, ‘Hello, this is Wan-To calling.’ ”
“Is that all I say?” the copy asked doubtfully.
“No,” Wan-To said judiciously. ‘‘You will also want to tell them exactly where you are. That information you will also find in your stores if you look. And then—and this is the most important part, Traveler—then you will forget that I exist. You will be Wan-To.”
“I don’t know how to do that,” the copy wailed.
“You don’t have to,” Wan-To assured him comfortably. “You’ll find that I’ve already arranged that; once you leave this star you won’t remember anything about it, or me. And then,” he promised grandly, “your new friends will tell you everything you need to know. They will answer all your questions. Now go, Traveler. And I wish you a happy journey.”
When Wan-To’s last remaining sensor informed him of a vector boson blast a few light-years away, he began to feel more at ease. They had taken the decoy. The zapping of G-3 stars would stop.
Now all he had to do was wait until the others had wiped themselves out . . . perhaps, he thought, for quite a long time.
Like Viktor and Reesa, in another place and time, he did not then know just how long that time would be.
CHAPTER 14
By the time Viktor got his eyes well open he almost wanted to close them again. Even the long, still sleep of the freezers was better than this madhouse! First it was Reesa, shaky, fearful, trying to explain things to him—
“We’re about to land on Newmanhome. These people found us and thawed us out . . .”
And then it was a man in a kilt, bearded and belligerent. “If you want him landed, get him awake, do you hear me? There’s no time to waste!”
And then there were “these people” themselves. He managed to pry his sticky eyelids apart far enough to see “these people” for himself. None were familiar. Every one was a stranger, and strange to look at. There was the tall, olive-skinned man who wore the kilt, bare-chested and bare-legged in spite of the chill. There was another man, beardless, with a page-boy bob of sparse blond hair, who wore a ragged red pullover that came down to his knees, showing something like red tights underneath. Reesa herself wore an all-black outfit, like jogging sweats—cottony-flannelly pants and blouse, with a cowl covering most of her face. Another woman had the same outfit, except that instead of being black her sweatsuit was striped gray and white, like a prison uniform. “Who are ‘these people’?” Viktor croaked.
His wife’s face disappeared, and the angry, hostile countenance of a bearded man in the same all-black took her place. “I’m Mirian,” the man said savagely, “and we’ve saved your worthless life. You’ve been frozen here for hundreds of years.”
“I warned you we should have left them that way,” called the woman in the prisoner stripes.
Mirian disregarded her. “You’re awake,” he told Viktor, “and you’re coming down with us.”
“Down?” Viktor murmured dazedly. “Down where?” But nobody was answering him. There were eight or ten people in the old cryonics deck, and they were all busily rigging one of the pods for a drop. Reesa came over to him, wobbly and worried, holding out a set of the black sweats.
“Put these on,” she begged. “If you’re not ready I think they’ll just leave us here!”
“Leave us here?” Viktor blinked. “Then why did they bother to come to save us?”
There was a sudden bark of unfriendly laughter from the man who called himself Mirian. “Oh, we didn’t come to get you. We need this ship. We didn’t even know you were here till we opened this pod up, looking for something to eat.”
“And we should’ve left them frozen,” the woman in red insisted. “Now what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to drop them,” the man in the kilt said belligerently. “Mirian, too. He woke them up; he takes them away, before they get in our way anymore.”
“Not me!” Mirian shouted. “I’m part of this team, Dorro!”
“You’re dropping with them,” the kilted man snapped, “because I say so, and I’m the captain.”
“You Greats are all alike,” the woman sneered, but she turned to finish rigging slings in the pod.
Viktor turned helplessly to his wife. She shook her head, helping him knot the drawstrings of his sweats. “They only woke me half an hour ago, Vik. I don’t know much more than you do. They wanted Ark—I’m not sure if it’s for the antimatter fuel, so they can replenish the generators on Mayflower, or maybe to use it to explore the rest of the solar system—”