It was as disconcerting for Viktor as it had been for Wan-To to step back and look at his life like that. It made him wonder what the point was.
Viktor could not help feeling that there had to be some kind of point, or at least purpose, to it. After all, he had come close enough to losing his life often enough. He counted up: Three times frozen, three times successfully thawed without harm. He had taken three good cuts at those 180-to-1 odds; in fact, as far as the third time was concerned, you couldn’t really figure any realistic odds at all. They might have floated in space forever without being found, if it hadn’t been for someone coveting the old interstellar ship enough to spend prodigally of scarce resources to get it—and for Mirian succumbing to one of the few generous impulses in an ungenerous world when he revived them.
For what purpose? When you survived so much for so long, shouldn’t there be a reason?
It couldn’t be just to shovel excrement, or, as Reesa had been doing, breeding cockroaches in offal to feed fish. Could it be to help Tortee in her plan? Because if that was it, Viktor told himself skeptically, whoever arranged purposes had picked a loser this time: there was no way old Ark could be turned into the kind of space battleship that could win a firefight with whatever it was on the planet of Nebo that killed people.
On the other hand—
On the other hand, Tortee was gone, and Tortee’s computers were right there in the room with him.
There might be a purpose to his life, after all! Galvanized at the thought, Viktor leaped out of bed.
When, minutes, later, Reesa came shivering back into the bedroom skimpily wrapped in a towel, he hardly looked up.
She stopped abruptly, astonished. “Viktor! What are you doing with those machines?”
He glanced at her blankly. “What do you think I’m doing? That woman’s got a data linkage—all the data banks from Ark and Mayflower, the copies are still intact! Now I’m looking for later stuff, trying to find out what kind of research anyone’s done on that fireball they call the universe.”
“Are you out of your mind?” she demanded. “We can’t push Tortee too hard, Viktor. If you use her things without permission . . .”
He focused on her, his expression suddenly wrathful. Then, slowly, he relaxed. “Oh, hell,” he said. “You’re right, of course. But, my God, Reesa, this is the most important thing that ever happened! Just from the little bit I’ve been able to dig up so far, I’m pretty sure my first guess was right. Somehow or other, we’ve been picking up speed. Lots of speed; nearly the velocity of light! And that fireball is the universe, all right, but we’re traveling so fast that all the light from it is concentrated in front of us!”
“Yes, Viktor. I see how important that is to you. But the most important thing is to stay on Tortee’s good side,” Reesa said firmly.
“Oh, Christ,” Viktor said in disgust. “She’s loopy, you know. She isn’t even doing what the council ordered—they think they’re going to get power out of Ark, and she wants to send it out to fight a war!”
Reesa was practicing patience. “Dear Viktor, that’s their business, not ours. They told us to work for her, so we’ll do what she tells us to do.”
“Even if she’s out of her mind? And—” He suddenly noticed that Reesa was shivering. “Hey,” he said. “don’t catch pneumonia on me!”
She pulled the towel tighter around her, looking demure. “Shall I get dressed?” she asked, but the mere fact that she had asked determined the answer; and, besides, he was suddenly aware that he was even barer than she, and equally cold.
“Well, not right away,” he said. “Why don’t you—we, I mean—why don’t we get back under the covers for a while?”
“Let’s just remember we have to leave time to change the sheets,” Reesa said practically; but then, when they were under the covers, spooned back to front with his arm over her, she waited for him to move or to speak. He didn’t.
“You’re thinking about that fireball,” she said into the pillow.
“I can’t help it, Reesa. I—I wish I’d paid more attention to my father when I had the chance. He would have known more about it. This would have been the most interesting thing in the world to him.”
“I never doubted it was interesting, Viktor,” Reesa said gently, “and I understand how you feel about solving it.”
“It’s not just like solving a puzzle! It’s important to everybody. It has something to do with what’s going on on Nebo, too, I’m sure of it!”
“That’s possible, Viktor. I don’t see how, but I’m willing to believe it. All the same, Vik, I wouldn’t try to convince Tortee, if I were you. All Tortee wants is to get Ark flying again, with guns blazing. And she’s got troubles of her own. She’s the one who wants to colonize Nebo, and she’s got the Great Catholics behind her—but whether they’ll stay that way depends on how fast she can show some kind of results. And the others—well, the Peeps are the ones who talked the council into trying to use the fuel for microwave power, and there’s talk in Allahabad that colonizing another planet’s a good enough idea, but it shouldn’t be Nebo.”
“Where then?” Viktor asked, startled.
“They’re not very clear on that. Some of them think that since Ark’s an interstellar ship basically they should try another star. Others have ideas about the moons of Nergal—they claim there ought to be enough heat from the brown dwarf to make something possible.”
“Shades of Tiss Khadek,” Viktor said, thinking. “Well, maybe that ought to be investigated, too. But that fireball—”
“Viktor, Viktor,” his wife said gently. “If you play your cards right you’ll have plenty of chances to see what you can find out about the fireball. In your spare time. When Tortee isn’t looking. But don’t push it, because she doesn’t want to hear.”
“I know, but—”
“Viktor. Did you know that both the Reforms and Allahabad are on overload, and the Peeps would be, too, if they hadn’t been lucky enough to lose six or seven people last week? That means the whole colony has more people than they’re allowed. So last week in Allahabad they froze three people for profaning shrines, and they’re still eleven over their proper number.”
“Profaning shrines! My God, Reesa, what kind of people are we living with?”
“We’re living with people on the edge of starvation, Viktor. That’s what you have to remember. All the time.” She hesitated. “Do you know what else I heard? Some of the Peeps don’t think even the freezers should be kept going. They’re revolutionary idealists—they think they are, anyway—and they’ve got some pretty nasty ideas. They think they might as well thaw out some of the freezers without reviving them.” She paused.
Viktor blinked at the back of her neck. “Why would they do that?” he demanded.
“Fodder,” she said briefly. “Protein sources. To feed to the chickens and the gerbils, to turn the corpses into useful food.”
“My God!” Viktor repeated, appalled.
“So go slow, my darling, please.” She was silent for a moment, reaching up to put her hand over his as it cupped her breast. Then she said, “Viktor? Now that I’m all sweet and clean, do you think you’d like to get me all sweated up one more time while we still have the use of the bed?”
And of course that was the best idea she’d had yet . . . only at the end of it, when she was shuddering and moaning, there was a timbre to the sounds his wife made that reached through to Viktor, even at the peak of his own orgasm.
He had heard sounds like those before.
Not from Reesa. He had heard them from Marie-Claude in their one coupling, when her husband had died. Like Marie-Claude, Reesa was weeping even as they made love.
She didn’t say anything in words. Neither did he. Only, when they were dressed again and making up the old woman’s bed afresh, she stopped and looked at him. “We have to make the best of things, Viktor,” she said harshly.
“Yes,” Viktor agreed; and that was the end of it. Neither of them needed to mention the names of lost Shan and Yan and Tanya, and little Quinn.
Making the best of things wasn’t easy. In this starved world there was hardly a “best” to aim for.
The project they were on promised more problems than rewards. Viktor had known all along that Tortee’s plans were going to be exceedingly difficult. He hadn’t known just how close they were going to be to outright impossible.
To begin with, there was the task of repairing Ark from what was left of Mayflower. How were they going to manage that? They didn’t have an orbiting shipyard to do it in; they didn’t have the big tools to do the job; they didn’t have the shuttles to launch the tools they did have into orbit. They didn’t even have the plans of the ships to work from. Those records might still be in the files somewhere, the stored data fiches that no one had looked at for a hundred years; but it would take a hundred years more, Viktor estimated, to find them again.