“Oh, yes,” Pelly said, beginning to fidget as he glanced around. “Nrina said you said things like that.”
“But don’t you see? It’s all linked together! The structures on Nebo, the Sorricaine-Mtiga objects, the foreshortening of the optical universe, the absence of all stellar objects but a handful now—”
“Viktor,” Pelly said, his voice good-natured enough but also quite definite, “I’m a space pilot, not a poet. Ask me anything about practical matters and I’m happy to talk as long as you like. But this—this—this sort of, well, mystical stuff, it’s just not what I’m interested in. Anyway,” he finished, holding up his empty glass, “we need refills now, don’t we? And they’re beginning to dance again—what say we join them?”
It took two more glasses of the mild, bubbly stuff before Viktor was ready to accept defeat. Ah, well, he told himself, it was too much to hope for real understanding from any of these people. All they cared about, obviously, was having fun.
But halfway through the second glass fun began to seem worth having even to someone on whom, alone, the burden of solving the riddle of the universe seemed to rest. Nrina was leading an open circle of scores of people, dancing around the guest of honor’s throne, laughing. She waved to Viktor to join them.
Why not? He swallowed the rest of the drink. Then he trotted to the line and took over Nrina’s position.
The fizzy drink probably had something to do with that. Viktor wasn’t in the habit of taking over a lead spot among strangers. Especially when, in this thistledown gravity, his steps were balloonlike rather than the macho stomps he liked best. Nevertheless, everyone followed as he led them, patiently but firmly, in a sort of loose, watered-down Hine Ma Tov—leaving out the tricky Yemeni figures, just step-bend and running steps, until everyone in the line had grasped it and was laughing and out of breath.
“That was nice,” Nrina told him breathlessly, throwing her arms around him at the end. “Kiss, Viktor!” And while they were kissing the proud father came up to them, beaming.
“Viktor! I didn’t know you were a dancer.” And before Viktor had a chance to be modest, the man was rushing on. “I’m Frit. I’m so glad Nrina brought you. We haven’t had a chance to meet, but I wanted to thank you for helping with Balit’s party.” He squeezed Viktor’s arm. “Imagine! None of his friends ever had a person from Earth carry them away! He’ll be the envy of his whole cohort.”
“It was nothing,” Viktor said graciously. Nrina patted his shoulder affectionately and strolled away. Viktor hardly noticed. He was staring in fascination at Frit’s mustaches. At close range they were even more of a marvel; they extended beyond his shoulders on both sides, and although Viktor was sure he had seen one of them bent in the mock scuffle it was now repaired and stood as proudly as before. They did not at all match Frit’s hair, either. At a distance Viktor had thought the man was wearing a white cap, but it was actually close-cropped white kinks, like the standard image of an old Pullman porter, though Frit’s skin was alabaster.
“You must meet Forta,” Frit went on, beckoning to the—well, Viktor thought, I guess you would say to the other father, though how all that worked out he couldn’t imagine. “This is Viktor, dear,” Frit told his mate. “Nrina says he’s very interested in the stars and all.”
“Yes, she told me,” Forta said, demurely offering his shoulder to hug. “Do you know what we should do, Frit? We should ask Viktor to come and stay with us for a while. Balit already asked me if we could; he was just thrilled at being kidnapped by somebody from Old Earth! I know Balit would love to show him off to his friends—”
“Yes, dear,” Frit said tolerantly. “But what would Viktor think of that? We can’t expect him to spend his time with a bunch of kids.”
Viktor blinked, then said, suddenly hopeful, “I’d really like to talk to you about what’s happened to the universe. If I wouldn’t be any burden—”
“Burden?” Forta echoed. “No, certainly you wouldn’t be a burden; we’d love to have you come home with us. And—” He hesitated, then grinned modestly. “—since you’re interested in dancing, shall I dance for you now? Frit’s just finished a new poem in honor of Balit’s coming of age—it’s about growth and maturity—and I’ve done the dance accompaniment.”
“Please do,” Viktor said. He was completely out of it, really. He was wholly confused about what had been going on and what was to come. But he was game. He didn’t, after all, have many other options.
CHAPTER 25
When Wan-To became aware that a fresh burst of tachyons had struck his receptors, he did not respond very quickly. (He didn’t do anything very quickly these days.) It took him a while to switch from one mode of activity to another.
Torpidly, almost groaning in protest, he bestirred himself to see what this latest batch of tachyons was like. Naturally, his detectors had recorded them in case he wanted to examine them in detail—though that was probably hardly worth the trouble. Or wouldn’t have been, if he had had anything more worthwhile to do.
Wan-To was not excited about the event. He had lost the habit of excitement, in this dead universe where there was no light, no X rays, no cosmic rays, no anything but the distant purring, popping sound of the protons of his own star as they gave up the ghost. Even so, it wasn’t unusual for batches of stray radiation of one kind or another to reach him. Infrequent, yes—everything was infrequent these days. But not startling. Such things were simply the showers of particles that were the ghosts of some immense stellar catastrophes from long ago—from the time when any immense event could still happen, in this moribund universe.
But this time . . . This time . . .
This time it was the most exciting thing that had happened to Wan-To in a very long time indeed. Although he could hardly believe it at first, he was soon certain that this was no random burst of particles. It was a message.
It was a wonder that Wan-To could read the message at all. The coded pulses were of the very lowest-energy tachyons—therefore almost the fastest of all—and yet they had taken a long time to reach him (so vast had the always-expanding universe become, in ten to the fortieth years). They had to have been transmitted with considerable power, too. Wan-To knew this to be true not merely because of the distance they had traveled, but because he observed that the tachyons had not been transmitted in a tight, economical beam. They had been broadcast.
Broadcast! So the sender hadn’t known where he was! But they were definitely meant for Wan-To—the opening pulses said so.
That fact was as much of a thrill to Wan-To as the first ecstatic sight of a sail on the horizon to any shipwrecked mariner. Impossible though it was to believe, even now, in this terminal coma of the universe, there was someone somewhere who had something to say to him.
But what was this message?
To find that out was a labor requiring much energy out of Wan-To’s slender store, as well as a great deal of long, hard concentration. The message had come in very fast. The whole burst had taken only a matter of seconds, and it had been many ages since Wan-To had been able to operate at that speed. He had almost forgotten what it was like to do things at the speed of nuclear reactions. In order to interpret the message at all, he had to slow it down by orders of magnitude and ponder its meaning bit by bit.
Then, too, although the message had been stored automatically for examination at his own pace, the poverty of Wan-To’s resources meant that even the basic storage was sketchy. Some sections of the message seemed to be missing. Some of the content was doubtful. Wan-To found it necessary to reactivate large parts of his “mind” from inactive storage to help in puzzling out what the message meant, and that in itself was a considerable drain on his meager strength.
But, in the final analysis, he didn’t need to read it all. The signature alone was enough to tell him nearly all there was to know.
It had come from that long-forgotten idiot, the one he had charged with sending a little flock of stars on a wild-goose chase—Matter-Copy Number Five.
Five’s stars were still alive.
Those long-ago stars had been careening through space so fast that time dilation had frozen them nearly immobile. They had not aged. They hadn’t rotted into decay with the rest of the universe.
In a universe where everything else had decayed into stagnant death, they were still young . . . and bursting with power!