It was not enough for Wan-To to make the decision to cut himself loose from the decay of his dying star and go off to revel in the hot energies of those distant, invisible suns. Making the decision was quick enough. The hunt for the “how” of doing it was much longer.
Wan-To knew the starting point, of course. He would have to reconstitute himself as a pattern of tachyons. Fast tachyons, which fortunately were low-energy ones. It was a pity, he reflected, that he couldn’t use the extreme minimum-energy tachyons that were the fastest of all. Unfortunately, that was impossible; the minimum-energy tachyons couldn’t carry enough information to encompass all of Wan-To. No matter. The ones that were available would do the job. He would copy himself onto a tachyon stream and make his way to this unexpected oasis of life among the desolation.
There wouldn’t be much difficulty in finding his way to the little cluster of surviving stars. The sensors had not only transcribed the message; they had very accurately recorded the direction it came from. All he had to do was backtrack. Once he got anywhere near that little cluster of living stars they would be easy enough to find, for they would be bright beacons of light, the only light in a dark and entropied-out universe—beacons of hope for Wan-To.
Unfortunately, even low-energy tachyons took energy to make. That meant some pretty drastic economies for Wan-To. For quite a long time—some tens of thousands of years, he calculated—he would have to shut most of himself down. He would have to eliminate every possible activity except those barely necessary to keep him alive in a sort of standby state, so that he could hoard that pitiful trickle of energies from dying protons, storing it up to use in one prodigal burst that would send him to his resurrection.
Then even the trip itself would take measurable time. Even with the highest velocity tachyons that could do the job, say those moving at some large exponent of the speed of light, it would surely be a matter of some thousands of years. How many thousands he could not say until he got there; the location he had was only a direction. It gave no hint of distance, but there was no doubt that in this sprawled-out emptiness the distance would be considerable.
But, oh!, at the end of that immense journey . . . Wan-To had never felt such anticipatory joy. It was almost enough—no, he told himself, of course it was far more than enough—to make up for the great pain of what he had to do to prepare himself for it. For that was no less than the amputation of large parts of his memory, of his knowledge—of huge sections of everything that made up what was left of Wan-To himself. They were excess baggage. However treasured, they could not be taken along. Like any desperate refugee, Wan-To had to sacrifice everything that was merely dear to him for what was wholly essential.
CHAPTER 30
When Pelly’s ship brought Reesa to her waiting husband on Newmanhome she did not come alone.
Of course, the only person Viktor saw in those first moments was Reesa herself—familiar Reesa, dear Reesa, loved and lost and restored Reesa. When she came out of the lander she was as warm and solid in his arms as she had ever been, in spite of everything. But the ship was heavily laden. Dekkaduk was on the same lander, with all his equipment to revive corpsicles on the spot and heal whatever had happened to them in their icy millennia—those who could be healed at all, anyway. So were Balit’s grandparents, come to visit from their manufacturing habitat, grotesque in their temporary muscles but excited as teenagers at what they were doing.
Pelly’s lander had to make three trips to bring down all the cargo that time. There wasn’t room in his spaceship’s hold for everything. Some of their larger, ruder, sturdier things had made the voyage from Nergal strapped to the outside of Pelly’s ship. It was a slow trip, and cranky piloting for Pelly, with all that added mass. It wasn’t just Dekkaduk’s defrosting clinic. The grandparents had not come empty-handed, but with thirty tons of equipment from their factory habitat, seeds of a machine shop to begin working the treasures the Von Neumanns had patiently brought back to Homeport. Nor did Markety’s wife, Grimler, want their son growing up in a world without conveniences. So she had provided, among other things, three additional wheeled vehicles and small aircraft—now at last the people on Newmanhome could explore more of their reborn world!
For Viktor, falling peacefully asleep that night with Reesa breathing gently on his shoulder as she slept by his side, it was not just another day, it was the start of a new calendar, the beginning of another new life—and maybe, he thought, the best of them all.
In the second year of that private new calendar the human population of Newmanhome passed a thousand—nearly a hundred of the newcomers being people just arrived from the habitats, young ones mostly—and Grimler’s baby was born out of its test tubes and brought to join them, and Jeren found a wife. In the third year Jeren’s son added to the population—now nearly doubled again—and the machines that Balit’s grandparents had brought had built the machines that built the machines that were now building vehicles and pumps, earthmovers and cranes, engines and appliances made on Newmanhome itself. The new farm plots withstood the worst of the drenching spring rains and flourished, and Newmanhome was feeding itself. And in the third year . . .
In the third year Balit went back to his home on Moon Mary— “Only for a short visit, Viktor,” he said earnestly. “Believe me, I’ll be back—” and almost as soon as he had arrived he was sending messages to Viktor. “Come to see us here, please. With Reesa, of course. Everyone’s excited about the idea of seeing you!”
And, of course, on Pelly’s next trip back to Nergal Viktor and Reesa went with him.
For Reesa, of course, it was all a wonderful new thrill. She had never seen the spindly, graceful homes of Moon Mary—had hardly seen even the habitat where Nrina had coaxed her back to life, for as soon as she had been well enough she had been on her way to Newmanhome and Viktor.
It was more than a tour. It was very close to a Grand Procession. They were met on Moon Mary by more than a thousand people. Frit and Forta were in the very foreground, of course, taking turns to hug Viktor and Reesa when Balit left either long enough to give them a chance. Nrina was there, too—as she pressed herself fondly against Viktor he glanced worriedly at Reesa’s face; but Reesa only put her own arms around the slim woman, and if there was any jealousy there, or resentment, it never came to the surface. Some of the others Viktor recognized, or almost recognized—Balit’s old schoolmates, some of the friends and family members from Balit’s coming-of-age party—but there were hundreds, many hundreds, more he did not know at all. “I have some surprises for you, Viktor,” Balit said proudly, pulling a slim young woman out of the throng. “This is Kiffena. Do you remember her? She was in my class when you visited, and we’re going to be married.”
She came willingly enough to Viktor, who naturally put his arms around her. He did not remember her out of the gaggle he had met at Balit’s school, but she was certainly a pretty little thing. As he hugged her in greeting he was surprised to feel the corded muscles in her lean body—preparing for Newmanhome? Yes, of course, that would be it, he thought; Balit had promised he would be back, and certainly it would not be alone. Grinning, Viktor slapped the boy—no, the man now, certainly—on the back. To the girl he said, “You’ll be a wonderful couple.”
“We know you’ll be very happy,” Reesa said.
Then the girl moved her lips for a moment and said, “We know we will be happy, too.”
Viktor blinked at her in astonishment, for she hadn’t spoken in the tongue of the habitats, but in old English. She grinned. “I had to learn it for my work,” she said, half-apologetically.
“Well, she really is a surprise, Balit,” Viktor said. “And a very nice one, too. Congratulations.”
Balit looked astonished. “Oh, no, Viktor. Kiffena isn’t the surprise. Kiffena is the one who’s going to tell you the surprise—one of the surprises, anyway. But let’s go home now, please? After dinner we can talk in peace.”
Frit and Forta had prepared a handsome meal. “Nothing elaborate,” Frit said modestly, handing around grapes the size of a baby’s fist, “for it’s just family, you know.”
“I’m really honored to be a member of this family,” Reesa said, and took Frit’s hand to kiss it before she let him go on with the grapes. “Balit’s been a really good friend to us on Newmanhome, and—” Suddenly she was startled, almost panicked, as the room swayed under her. “Dear God! What’s that?”