He looked at her with a sudden shock. “What are you telling me?” he demanded. “Do you want to stop our, uh, our—”
She let him flounder without an ending to the sentence. When it was clear he couldn’t find one, she shook her head affectionately. “Come to bed,” she ordered. “It’s late.”
He obeyed, of course. And when they had made love, and Viktor rolled over to get some sleep, it seemed that it was only minutes before Nrina was poking at him.
It must have been later than he thought, because she was fully dressed, gauzy work robe over her cache-sex, hair pinned up out of the way. “Get up, Viktor,” she ordered.
He craned his neck to blink at her. “What? Why?” It wasn’t uncommon for Nrina to have to get up early to work, but she didn’t usually insist on his own rising.
She looked serious. “I want you to go to Newmanhome with Pelly,” she told him.
He gaped at her. “Newmanhome?”
“He is leaving tomorrow,” she said.
Viktor rubbed his eyes. He was having trouble taking in what she had said. “Are you angry because of the money?” he asked plaintively.
“No. Yes, but that isn’t why. It is simply time for it to be over, that’s all.”
“But—but—”
“Oh, Viktor,” she sighed. “Why are you being so difficult? You didn’t think I would pair with you permanently, did you?”
Pelly’s ship was as impressive inside as out—only a chemical rocket, to be sure, but a huge one. Viktor was impressed all over again at the richness of a society that could afford to build such vast, sophisticated machines for so little purpose.
To Viktor’s surprise, Frit, Forta, and Balit turned up at the launching, Forta and Frit almost weeping as they kissed their son. It looked exactly like a farewell. “Balit!” Viktor cried. “What is this?”
“I’m coming with you,” the boy said simply. Incredulous, Viktor turned toward the parents—and recoiled from the anger in their eyes.
“Yes, he is going to join you, Viktor,” Frit said bitterly. “We have discussed it all night, but Balit insists. He is freed now; how can we stop him? But I cannot forgive you, Viktor, for putting these ideas in his head.”
CHAPTER 27
In the middle of that feebly expiring universe, Wan-To suddenly felt almost young again. There was still nuclear fusion going on somewhere!
Then the last of the ancient memories fell into place, and his next thought was to curse himself.
He had been such a fool. Why hadn’t he thought ahead? Why hadn’t he planned for this? It would have been so easy for him to do this same trick on any scale he liked, to send whole galaxies of stars off in the long-term storage of fast-as-light travel, so that he would have billions upon billions of them ready for his use in this time of his need!
For that matter, why hadn’t he built some sort of homing impulse into the matter-doppel’s instructions, so that they could have returned to normal space nearby?
The list of charges Wan-To could make against himself had suddenly become almost endless, but he gave up on them as common sense reasserted itself. Self-recrimination wasn’t really Wan-To’s style. Anyway he had more exciting things to think about.
Yes, yes, the memories were clear. There were twelve stars, and they were still alive! Still even young! And all his!
True, they had been somewhat depleted by the drain of energies that had been needed to send them hurtling across the universe, and certainly they were now a terribly long way away—but they were his. He searched eagerly through his specific memories of that offhand action. There was not much there, but he was certain that some of them had billions of years yet to go even on the main sequence—then they would be long-lived dwarfs for much longer than that.
Cheerful for the first time in many eons, Wan-To began the task of planning how to make use of this wholly unexpected new gift.
CHAPTER 28
Landing on Newmanhome again was a thrill for Viktor Sorincaine. For one thing, it was real spaceflight! The vessel was a real spaceship landing shuttle, and Pelly let him sit in the copilot seat as they brought it in. Just being on Newmanhome was an even greater thrill; it was home again. His real home. The place where he belonged—even though, shockingly, the place was no longer anything like the green and promising land he had grown up in. (Nothing green had lived through Newmanhome’s ages of ice. Nothing was alive anywhere at all on Newmanhome, except what the habitat people had put there.) Yet Viktor even had friends there! Jeren was waiting eagerly for him, shy and dumb and devoted; and Korelto. Even surly Manett managed to grumble a greeting as he clasped Viktor’s shoulder. His eyes, though, were fixed on little Balit as the boy was helped out of the lander and onto a carrying chair. “He’s really Frit and Forta’s kid?” Manett whispered. “He actually came with you? Fred! Then maybe something’s really going to happen around here after all!”
“Sure things are going to happen!” Jeren rumbled loyally. “Viktor’s here now!” Then he wheedled, “But leave him alone, you guys, all right? He needs time to get settled in, doesn’t he? Now, look, Viktor, I fixed up a place for you. I can take you there any time. Are you hungry? I could make some rabbit stew—real rabbits, Viktor; we’ve got a whole flock of them breeding now . . .”
Viktor hardly heard any of that. He was gazing around at the planet he had left. It wasn’t all depressing. Although the hills were brown and bare, the bay was clear blue. So was the sky, with cotton-ball clouds dotted out over the ocean. And there was definitely a certain amount of life on Newmanhome again. Human life, anyway. Practically the planet’s whole population—nearly sixty people!—had come to greet the new arrivals, like the citizens of any frontier town gathered at the railroad station to see the train come in.
“I’d better help Balit,” Viktor said—to no one in particular, to all of them. He hurried over to where the boy was painfully levering himself into the sedan chair, with a pair of squat, husky gillies standing ready to take up the carrying rods. Balit looked up at him, trembling—partly with the effort of holding his head straight in Newmanhome’s gravity, to be sure, but also with sheer excitement.
“This is wonderful, Viktor,” he breathed. And then he fumbled a metal case from his pouch. “Hold still, please.”
Viktor allowed his picture to be taken, then ordered parentally, “Put your hat on. You don’t know what sunburn can be like; you’re not used to it.” As the boy obeyed, Viktor looked up. Pelly was escorting a lean habitat man over to join them. The man was hobbling on two canes, and he had a blue beret pulled down almost to his eyes. A woman, as tall and thin as himself but almost as pretty as Nrina, limped after them.
“Viktor,” said Pelly, “this is Grimler, and her husband, Markety. They’re the ones who sent you the data you asked for.”
“Tried to anyway,” the woman said, giving Viktor a hug of greeting. “I hope it was some use for you—I admire you so much, you know.”
While Viktor was still blinking in surprise at that, the man was going on. “It’s harder from the actual stores,” Markety apologized. “You’ll see. We can take you there any time you like.”
“Any time,” the woman echoed hospitably. “Do you want to go up there now?”
“Oh, yes,” Viktor said.
It was a good thing they had built the datastore and the freezers adjacent to the power plant up in the hills instead of in Homeport itself. There wasn’t any Homeport anymore. At least, there was nothing left of it that was visible. The place where the city of Homeport had once been was now at the bottom of the bay.
The bad thing, however, was that a hill was still a hill. To go up it took work.
Balit, Grimler, and Markety didn’t even try to climb it themselves; that was what the gillie litter bearers were for. Their squat bodies were solid muscle; Nrina’s arts had seen to that. Viktor envied them. His own muscles, softened by so many months in the soft gravity of habitat and Moon Mary, complained of the task of lifting a human body so far. Halfway up, Viktor had to pause to catch his breath.
When he looked around for familiar landmarks there weren’t any. “I don’t see the power plant buildings,” he protested.
From beside him, Korelto said reasonably, “Of course you don’t see them, Viktor. They got buried.” He wasn’t out of breath at all—of course, Viktor reflected, he’d had more time to get in shape on Newmanhome.
“But the plant’s still running,” Jeren assured him. “You can hear it if you listen, and the buildings are still there. And lots of the things in them are still okay. Come on, it’s just another twenty minutes or so.”