The desk went pale and opaque; on the black space on the wall behind it the face of a man formed pumpkin fat, with a pumpkin smile. “Pelly?” Nrina said. “Yes, of course, it’s Nrina. This is my friend Viktor—you saw him before, of course.”
“Of course, but he was frozen then,” the pumpkin grinned. “Hello, Viktor.”
“Hello,” Viktor said, since it seemed to be expected of him.
Nrina went right on. “Your gillies are ready,” she told the man. “And a couple of the donors want to go back. When will you leave?”
“Six days,” the man said. “How many gillies?”
“Twenty-two, fourteen of them female. I hope I’ll see you before you go?”
“I hope so. Nice meeting you—I mean alive, Viktor,” Pelly said, and was gone.
“You see how it works? You can call anyone that way. Anyone in our orbits, anyway—it’s harder when they’re in space or on Newmanhome. Then you have to allow for transmission time, you see.”
But Viktor had no one to call. “What did he mean when he said he saw me when I was frozen?” he asked.
“That’s Pelly,” she explained. “He pilots spaceships. He’s the one who brought you and the others back from Newmanhome.” Then she said, remembering, “Oh, yes. He’s been to Nebo, too. If you’re so interested in it, you can ask him about it if we see him.”
With the clues Nrina had given him, Viktor managed to work the directory himself. The desk gave more than a “phone number.” It told him about Pelly: space captain; resident, generally, of Moon Gautama, but most of the time somewhere between the orbiting habitats and the other planets of the system.
He was poring over the views of Nebo again when Nrina came back, surprised to see him still bent over the desk. “Still at it, Viktor? But I’m tired; I’d like to rest now.” And she glanced toward the bed.
“There are a lot of things I still want to know, Nrina,” he said obstinately. “About Pelly, for instance. Why is he so fat?”
“So he can get around on Newmanhome, of course,” Nrina explained. “He has to have supplements to build up his muscles—”
“Steroids?” Viktor guessed.
Nrina looked pleased. “Well, something like that, yes. And calcium binders so his bones won’t break too easily, and all sorts of other things. You’ve seen how Dekkaduk looks? And he’s only been to Newmanhome a few times, collecting specimens—” She looked embarrassed. “Bringing back people for me, I mean.”
“Like me.”
“Well, yes, of course like you. Anyway, Pelly goes there all the time. It makes him look gross, of course, which is why I would never— Oh, Viktor, I didn’t mean it that way. After all, you were born like that.”
He let that pass. “And did Pelly really land on Nebo?”
“You mean in person? Certainly not. No one has done that for many years.”
“But people have landed there?”
Nrina sighed. “Yes, certainly. Several times.”
“But not anymore?”
“Viktor,” she said sensibly, “of course not. What would be the point? There’s air, but it’s foul; the heat is awful. And the gravity crushes you to walk there, Viktor—well, not you, no, but any normal person. It’s much stronger than on a Moon. It’s almost as bad as Newmanhome, but at least Newmanhome has a decent climate.”
“But Nrina! There may be people on Nebo. Some of my own friends landed there—”
“Yes, and never came back. I know. You told me,” Nrina said. “Isn’t that a good enough reason to stay away?”
“But somebody made those machines. Not human, no.”
“There’s no one there. We’ve looked. Just the old machines.”
“And have the machines been investigated scientifically?”
She frowned. “I don’t know what you mean by ‘scientifically.’ Some people were interested in them, yes. They even brought some small things back to study—I remember Pelly had a piece of metal he showed me once.”
Viktor inhaled sharply. “Can I see the things? Are they in a museum?”
But Nrina only laughed when he tried to explain what a museum was like, from his fading memories of the Los Angeles Art Museum and the La Brea Tar Pits. “Keep all those dirty things around? But why, Viktor? No one should keep trash. We’d just be choking on our own old worn-out things! No, I’m sure they were studied at the time. No doubt there are assay reports and probably pictures of them somewhere—you can use the desk to see what they look like, and I think a few people like Pelly might have a few little bits for curios. But we certainly don’t have a place where we keep such things, and besides—”
She looked suddenly harsh, almost as though both frightened and angry. “Besides,” she finished, “those hideous metal things are dangerous. That’s why no one lands there anymore. People got killed there!”
And then, reluctantly, she went to the desk and showed him what had happened, more than a century before. A ship landing on Nebo. People coming out of it, grotesque in metallized film suits to keep out the heat and helmets to give them air to breathe; they approached one of the mauve pyramids, half-buried in the shifting sands of Nebo. They were trying to drill a way in—
And then it exploded.
Of the pyramid itself nothing at all was left; it simply was vaporized. No more of the people. A few fragments of nearby objects, blasted in the explosion, littered the sands.
When he looked up he saw that Nrina had averted her eyes. “Turn it off,” she ordered. “Those people were killed.”
He surrendered. She came closer, smiling down at him. “That’s better,” she said softly, leaning against his shoulder.
He didn’t resist. He didn’t encourage her either. “All right, Nrina, I see what happened, but it doesn’t tell me anything. What are those machines?”
“But no one knows that, Viktor,” she said patiently. “And it isn’t very interesting.”
“It is to me! I want to know what they were there for—who built them—how they work. All this ‘what’ stuff is very interesting, of course, but can’t I ever find out a ‘why’?”
“Why what, Viktor?” she asked kindly, stroking his stubbly cheek. “Wouldn’t you like to grow a beard? Most men do, if they can.”
“No, I don’t want to grow a beard. Please don’t change the subject. I mean I want to know why things happen—the theoretical explanation behind the things I see.”
“I don’t think those words mean anything,” she said, frowning. “I understand ‘theory,’ of course. That is the background of genetics, the rules that tell us what to expect when, for instance, we strip a certain nucleotide out of a gene and patch in another.”
“Yes, exactly! That’s what I mean! What I’m looking for is something on astronomical theory.”
Nrina shook her head. “I have never heard of any ‘astronomical’ theories, Viktor.”
When Viktor came home from a ramble Nrina was waiting for him. “I have something to show you,” she said mysteriously, pleased with herself. “Come into my room.”
There she surprised him. She opened a compartment in the wall. It revealed itself as a little cage, with something moving beyond the wire mesh. Nrina reached into it and drew out something tiny and soft.
It moved comfortably in her hand. “Tell me, Viktor,” she said, hesitating as though worried at what his answer might be. “Have you ever seen one of these things before?”
“Of course I have!” He let her give him the furry little thing. “It’s a kitten!”
“Exactly,” she said triumphantly, observing as he stroked its fur. “Does it enjoy that?” she inquired.
“Most cats do. Where did you get it? I thought they were extinct!”
She looked gratified. “Indeed they were,” she said, graciously acknowledging the remarkable nature of her feat. “I made it. There were some frozen specimens of feline sperm Pelly found when he brought you back.” Experimentally she stroked the kitten as Viktor had done. Viktor could hear nothing, but the nerve endings of his hand informed him of the creature’s silent, tiny purr. “It’s always a worry,” she said, “when you don’t have any female genetic material for a new species. Oh, it’s easy enough to structure an artificial ovum, but when the animal is something you’ve never seen before you have to wonder if you’ve got it exactly right.”
Viktor stroked the soft, wriggly little thing and handed it back to her. “I’d say that looks like the rightest little kitten I’ve ever seen,” he pronounced.
She accepted the compliment gracefully. “I’m going to give it to a little boy I know.” Carefully she returned it to its cage, closing the door.
Viktor shook his head, marveling. “I knew you designed children. I knew you created intelligent gorillas—”
“Gillies, Viktor.”
“—intelligent gillies for servants. I didn’t know you could make just about anything you could imagine.”
She considered that for a moment. “Oh, not anything,” she decided. “Some things are physically impossible—or, anyway, I could make them, but they wouldn’t survive. But this is the most interesting part of my work, Viktor. It’s why anyone bothers to go to Newmanhome, really. There’s a whole biota in those freezers on Newmanhome, you know. We don’t know half of what’s there. Even when there’s a label we can’t always be sure of what’s inside, because they got pretty sloppy about keeping records for a while. So when I have a chance I match up sperm and ova—when I can—or find some related genetic material that I can tinker into being cross-fertile. Like this.”