It was a great pity, in Wan-To’s view, that there were so many stars.
Although only a tiny fraction of them had managed to become “alive”—and then only because he or one of the others had made them so—sometimes he would have preferred to be the only one there was.
It wasn’t that Wan-To didn’t enjoy company. He did, very much, but he didn’t like paying the price for it. He could see, now, that he had made some serious mistakes in indulging his desire for companionship. It had been a dumb idea to create siblings. For that matter, it had been a dumb idea the first time it had been done, long ago and very far away, and what made Wan-To sure of that was that in that particular case he had been one of the ones that had been created.
Still, Wan-To could understand how his unfortunate progenitor had felt, because no one liked being entirely alone. Creating companions hadn’t worked out well this time. The ones he had already made weren’t much company anymore, because few of them dared communicate with any of the others in the present uneasy situation. But it was still an attractive idea. It was just that next time he would have to do it in a different way. It would be quite all right, he thought, to have more of his kind around—provided the others were just a little less strong, smart, and competitive than himself.
When they weren’t, they were dangerous.
Stars generally live a very long time. So would Wan-To; in fact, he could easily outlive most stars by quite a lot. He intended to see that he did; in fact, he meant to make his life last about as close to forever as possible.
The difficulty with that plan was that it wasn’t entirely up to Wan-To. The companions he had created had their own views on the subject. Indeed, at least one of them was doing his best to murder Wan-To at that very moment.
CHAPTER 2
One of those “human beings” Wan-To had never heard of was a boy named Viktor Sorricaine. Of course, Viktor had never heard of Wan-To, either; their paths had never crossed in Wan-To’s long life and Viktor’s so far fairly short one.
On Viktor’s twelfth birthday (or, you could say, his one hundred and fifteenth), he woke up, sweating and itchy, to stare into someone’s eyes. “Mom?” he asked fuzzily. “Mom, are we there yet?”
It wasn’t his mother looking down at him. It was an old woman he had never seen before. She didn’t hold herself like an old woman, bent-backed and tottering. She stood straight and her eyes were clear, and she looked at Viktor in a way that made him uneasy—sad and amused, tolerant and angry, all at once. He thought she looked as though she knew everything there was to know about Viktor Sorricaine, and forgave him for it. She was definitely old, though. Her hair was thinning, and her face was terribly lined. “You don’t remember me, do you, Viktor?” she asked, and sighed to show that she forgave him for that, too. “I’m not surprised. I’m Wanda. Your mother will be here in a moment, so don’t worry. We’ve just had a little problem.”
“What kind of problem?” Viktor asked, rubbing his stinging eyes, too polite to ask her what it was she thought he should have remembered.
“Your dad will take care of it,” the woman said. Viktor couldn’t press her, because she had already turned away to call for someone to help her get Viktor out of the shallow saucer kind of thing he was lying in.
Viktor was beginning to wake up. Certain things were clear to him at once. He knew that he was still on the interstellar ship New Mayflower, from the fact that he weighed so little. That meant that, no, they hadn’t arrived yet. He knew what the pan he was lying in was, because he had expected all along that sooner or later he would find himself in one like it. It was the warming pan where frozen passengers were thawed back to life when the journey was through. But since it seemed the journey wasn’t through, what could be the reason for waking him now?
He allowed himself to be helped up and was badly surprised to find that the help was needed; his young limbs were shaky. He let himself be tugged, like a skiff towed by a motorboat—only the old woman who said her name was Wanda was the motorboat—to a shower cubicle. There the woman gently stripped off his thin freezer robe to bathe him. It was a rougher bath than he was used to. There were many decades of dried perspiration and dead skin for the warm jets to flush away, but that was what they were for. They did their job, and the hissing, gulping suction pumps sucked the wastewater away.
By the time he came out he knew exactly where he was. He was in the ship’s sick bay.
Viktor knew all about the sick bay. He had seen it from time to time, had in fact spent several boring hours there before it was time for his family to be frozen, when the last of his baby molars had had to be helped out so his adult ones would come in straight. The old woman patted him dry. He let her. He was more interested in what was going on in the warming pan he had awakened in. Two little kids, no more than four or five years old, were in it now, huddled in each other’s arms under the bath of directed infrared and microwave as they warmed. The pan around them was filled with the thick, milky liquid that kept them oxygenated through perfusion until their lungs began to work, and their limbs were already beginning to move with tiny random twitches. He even recognized the kids: Billy and Freddy Stockbridge, the sons of his dad’s navigation partner—two nasty little bits of business if he’d ever seen any.
By the time he was dressed in tunic and shorts and had drunk two enormous glasses of something sweet and hot, his mother came hurrying in from the next chamber, white robe fluttering behind her. “Are you all right?” she asked anxiously, reaching out for him.
He allowed her to give him a quick kiss, then fended her off with dignity. “I’m fine,” he said. “Why aren’t we there?”
“I’m afraid there was a little complication, Vik,” she told him, her voice uneasy. “There’s something wrong with the flight plan, so they’ve got your father up to straighten it out. It’ll be all right.”
“Sure it will,” he said, surprised. There wasn’t really any doubt in his mind about that; after all, the man who was in charge of straightening such things out was his father.
“Marie-Claude’s up, too,” she said fretfully, touching his forehead as she used to do when she thought he might have a fever. “Between the two of them they’ll have it all cleared up, but I’ve got to go help out. Are you sure you’ll be—”
“I’m sure,” he said, exasperated and a little embarrassed at being treated like a child.
The old woman interrupted. “Vik needs to eat and get himself oriented, Mrs. Sorricaine-Memel,” she said. “I’ll see that he’s all right; you go ahead.”
Amelia Sorricaine-Memel looked at her curiously, as though trying to place her, but only said, “I’ll be back again as soon as I can.”
When she was gone, the old woman took Viktor’s hand. “You’re supposed to go in the treadmill for a few minutes,” she told him. “Then the doctors will check you over. Do you want to do that now?”
“Why not?” he asked, shrugging. “But I’m hungry.”
“Of course you’re hungry,” she said, laughing a little. “You always were. You stole my chocolates when I was on the teaching machines, and your mother took away your candy for a week.”
Viktor frowned at the woman. It was true that he had stolen chocolates and been punished for it, but the child he had stolen them from had been Wanda Sharanchenko, the tiny blond daughter of one of the engineering officers, two years younger than himself. “But—” he began.
The woman nodded. “But that was a long time ago, wasn’t it? More than a hundred years, while you were a corpsicle. But it’s me, all right, Viktor; I’m Wanda.”
The ship New Mayflower wasn’t “there.” It wasn’t even close to the “there” they were aiming for. According to the original flight plan there was to be more than twenty-eight years of deceleration time left before they would be at the planet they were meant to colonize.
But, unbelievably, it seemed that the original flight plan was wrong.
Wanda tried to explain it to Viktor as she led him to the huge rotating barrel that was the ship’s treadmill, spun at nine revolutions a minute to simulate enough of normal Earth gravity to prevent calcium migration and muscle loss.