“Go on, Viktor,” she said encouragingly. “You were saying about the stars that are moving at nearly light speed—ours and eleven others, right?”
He stared at her. “You knew that?”
“The Peeps told me, yes,” she said. “They say it’s been like that for three hundred years, almost, except that it used to be brighter than it is now.”
“Well, shit,” he said angrily. “If these people knew that, why wouldn’t the Greats tell me?”
She looked at him absently for a moment. Then she nodded. “I forgot you were with the Greats,” she said. “They don’t believe in it. I mean, they don’t believe in asking questions about why. They go by their Bible. If there’s anything that isn’t in the Third Testament, they don’t want to discuss it at all.”
“But—” he began, and then stopped. What was there to say? He was fuming inside, but there was no point in burdening Reesa with his anger against these people and their folly, especially when she herself was staring unhappily into space.
It took that long for Viktor to realize there was something else on his wife’s mind.
“What is it?” he demanded. “Are the Peeps giving you a hard time?”
She looked at him in surprise. “No harder than anyone else, really.”
“Then what’s the matter with you?”
She looked at him blankly, then shook her head. “It’s just—” She hesitated. Then, looking away, she finished. “It’s just that I keep—wondering, Viktor.”
“Wondering about what?”
“I wonder if Quinn had a happy life,” she said, and would say no more.
It was a long, silent time before the door to the council chamber opened, and Mirian came out.
He came over to them. “You are granted asylum,” he said grudgingly. “The council has just made its decision.”
“But—but—but I thought we’d appear before them!” Viktor exclaimed.
Mirian looked at him curiously. “Why would the council want you to do that? What could you tell them that they don’t already know, from the transcripts of your questioning?”
“I wanted to talk about the universe!” Viktor shouted. “My father was an astrophysicist—I learned from him! The way that thing looks in the sky has to mean that our whole group of stars is traveling very close to the speed of light, and I want to help to figure out why!”
Mirian looked suddenly gray. “Shut your face,” he hissed, glancing around. “Do you want the freezer again? Most of us are on overload now, you know—if the orbital power plant doesn’t start working soon there’ll be a hell of a big freezing bee! No, count your blessings, Viktor. The council thinks you two might be helpful in launching the rockets for the fuel transfer—that’s a break you don’t deserve. Don’t screw it up by talking blasphemy!”
CHAPTER 17
Wan-To’s first few thousand years in the galaxy that was his new home went like the twinkling of an eye, and he was busy all the time. There was so much to do!
None of it was really difficult for him, of course. There was nothing he hadn’t done many times before—this was, after all, his twentieth or thirtieth star, not to mention that he was now on his third galaxy. He had had plenty of practice, and so he knew exactly what to do first and precisely how to do it.
The first two things were to sniff out every corner of his star and to rebuild his external eyes. That didn’t take very long. A century or two, and he was already at home. Wan-To had chosen an F-9 star this time—a little bigger and brighter than most of those he had preferred before, but he felt he deserved the extra energy, which was to say the extra comfort.
Then, of course, he had to check out the rest of this new galaxy. That necessarily took quite a lot longer. It meant creating a few thousand Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pairs and sending them off to other parts of the galaxy, so he could keep an eye on everything that was going on in the new territory he had claimed.
Wan-To couldn’t help feeling a certain tension during that period. After all, a galaxy is a big place. The one he had chosen had nearly four hundred billion stars, with a well-defined spiral structure—a pretty desirable neighborhood, and how could he be sure that some undesirable element didn’t lurk somewhere in it?
But as the reports from his widespread ERPs began to arrive, they all came up empty. As far as he could tell, which was pretty far, every object in this galaxy was simply obeying the dumb natural laws of physics. There were no unwelcome signs of tampering. No unexplained patterns in the photospheres of any of the several billion stars he was able to examine in detail, no radiation coming in to any of his sensors that wasn’t explained by the brute force of natural processes.
Wan-To began to relax. He had found a safe new home! Like any ancient mountain man, coming across a verdant Appalachian valley for the first time, he saw that it was his to clear and plant and harvest and own, and he might easily, like one of them, have said, This is the place.
He was secure.
It was only after he was well settled in, with all his sensors deployed and all their reports reassuring, that it occurred to Wan-To to ask the next question:
Secure for what?
Wan-To mused over that question for a long time. He was not religious. The thought of a “religion” had never crossed Wan-To’s mind, not once in all the billions of years since he had first become aware that he was alive. Wan-To could not possibly believe in a god, since Wan-To, to all intents and purposes, was the most omnipotent and eternal god he could have imagined.
Nevertheless, there were occasional troubling questions of that sort that passed through Wan-To’s vast mind. A human philosopher might have called them theological. The most difficult one—it was hard for Wan-To even to frame it—was whether there was any purpose in his existence.
Naturally, Wan-To was well aware of one overriding purpose of a kind—self-preservation, the one imperative that governed all of Wan-To’s plans and actions. Nothing was ever going to change that; but once it occurred to him to ask what he was preserving himself for he could not quite see an answer.
The troubling question kept coming back to him.
Perhaps it was just that Wan-To was passing through what humans called “a mid-life crisis.” If so, it had come upon him early. Wan-To wasn’t anywhere near middle-aged. He was hardly past the adolescence of his immensely long span of existence, for he wasn’t then much more than twelve or fifteen billion years old.
Wan-To didn’t spend all his time brooding over the meaning of it all. He had plenty to do. Just investigating every corner of his new galaxy, first to seek possible enemies, finally just to know it, took quite a while—there were, after all, those four hundred billion stars, spread over some trillions of cubic light-years of space. Over a period of a few millions of years he studied the data coming from the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pairs he had planted at strategic locations in the arms, in the core, in the halo, everywhere in the galaxy that looked interesting. A lot of it was interesting indeed—coalescing gas clouds heavy with the approaching birth of new stars, supergiants exploding into density waves that impregnated other clouds, black holes, neutron stars . . . He had seen them all before, of course, but each one was just a little different, and generally intensely interesting.
Then that permanent itch of curiosity that needed always to be scratched drove his investigations farther into space. His galaxy was his own, uncontested; but Wan-To well understood that one little galaxy was very small stuff indeed in the vast scale of the expanding universe.
When he looked out on the distant rest of the universe he could not see that it had changed much in the few billion years of his investigations. There was a certain tendency for the distant blue fuzzies to turn greenish—they were farther away now, and receding relatively faster. And he saw that some of the older galaxies, even a few quite nearby, were beginning to show signs of senile decay. They were shrinking and losing mass—“evaporating” is the word that would have occurred to a human being. Wan-To understood the process very well. When any two stars happened to wander close to each other in their galactic orbits—as was bound to happen, time and again, in eternity—they interacted gravitationally. There was a transfer of kinetic energy. One picked up a little velocity, the other lost some. Statistically, over the long lifetime of a galaxy some of those stars would keep on adding speed and others would lose some—the faster-moving ones would sooner or later be flung clear out of their parent galaxy, while the slower ones would spiral hopelessly down toward collapse in the center, forming mammoth black holes. Such a process didn’t happen rapidly—not in a mere few billion years, that was to say.