And then, when the deceleration had slowed enough so that the great light flare that had been all the light of the universe should have resolved itself into a surrounding sphere of stars and galaxies again . . . it didn’t.
Five was filled with what a human would have described as terror. Things were not the way they should be! The universe had become very strange!
The doppel thought long and hard, and saw only one way out for it.
First it summoned up all its strength to create a flood of low-energy, high-velocity tachyons. It impressed on them a message, keyed to Wan-To’s own preferred tachyon band. It shut down almost all of its equipment to divert the energies left into broadcasting that message, over and over.
Five had no idea whether Wan-To would ever receive that last somber message. It was not even sure that Wan-To still existed anywhere, and certainly Five didn’t have even a hint of a clue as to where that “anywhere” in this suddenly immensely scattered universe might be.
Then Five did the only thing left for it to do.
If Five could not serve Wan-To, there was no reason for it to exist any longer. Maybe, even, if it had served Wan-To badly (as it feared), it no longer deserved to exist.
So when all its accumulated energy had been used up and its last message had gone out, Five, in its equivalent of an agony of shame, performed its equivalent of ritual suicide. It shut itself off.
CHAPTER 20
Viktor knew he was waking up when he discovered that he was dreaming—there are no dreams in the brain of a corpsicle. What he was dreaming was about flying, and about pain.
The pain was very definite and unpleasant. It was not a nice dream, and he was glad, though very fuzzy in his mind, when he woke up.
Viktor was aware that he was definitely awake then, because when he tried to open his eyes, they were stuck. He had to strain to squint out of them. “Mom?” he asked of the thin, amused woman who was leaning over him. “Mom, are we there yet?”
He realized right away that that was foolish of him. The woman definitely wasn’t his mother—wasn’t anything like his mother, really. She was very tall and painfully thin, and she had great, round eyes. Viktor saw the eyes quite clearly, although he was having some annoying trouble in seeing anything else. His own eyes did not seem to want to focus clearly, and his head . . . his head hurt like hell.
The woman turned and said something quick, liquid, and murmurous. It was not in any language Viktor knew, although parts of it came close to making sense—as English might have sounded, perhaps, if it had been cooed by pigeons. She was speaking to someone Viktor could not see very well. Then she reached down and touched the side of Viktor’s head, as though pointing something out to the unseen person.
It was probably a gentle touch, but it didn’t feel that way. It told Viktor right away his dream of pain had not been entirely a dream.
The woman’s touch exploded through his head like a hammer blow, dizzying him. He jerked away from that probing finger—and found that the dream of flying was not altogether an illusion, either. He moved so easily, with so little force dragging at his body, that he knew that he couldn’t be on Newmanhome. In fact, he couldn’t be on any planet at all; he didn’t weigh enough.
Viktor let himself fall gently back, hazily pondering the problem. The woman and the other person—a man’s voice, not so much cooing as harshly gargling the sounds—were carrying on a conversation in the language that Viktor could not quite comprehend. If he wasn’t on a planet, he thought, he was probably on a ship. What ship? Not Ark, certainly; there was nothing left of Ark but droplets of condensed metal, if any of Ark was left at all. Not old Mayflower, either, he was sure of that. There was nothing on Mayflower like this amber-walled room with its soft clouds of pastel light drifting across the ceiling. Some things looked somewhat familiar—the thing he was lying on, for instance. It was very much like the shallow pan that corpsicles were thawed in, and he caught a quick glimpse of several others like it in the room. They were occupied. There was a human body in each, and warming radiation flooding down on them: he was not the only person being brought back to life, he thought, pleased with his cleverness at observing that.
But where was all this happening?
And what was hurting him so much? As the explosion of pain in his skull dwindled again he became aware of two other hurting places—a mean, burning sensation in his right leg below the knee, and a sharper, smaller, but still very painful, hurt in his buttock. None of it made any sense to Viktor. Nothing else did, either. “Sense” was beyond him; he was dazed, confused, disoriented, and he was even having trouble remembering. On all the evidence, he was quite sure he had just been thawed out from a time in the freezer. But he remembered, or thought he remembered, that he had been frozen before. More than once, he thought, and which time was this? He reasoned that it couldn’t have been the times when he was facing a long interstellar flight, because he had been a child then. He wasn’t a child anymore, of course. Was he? And who was this woman, who was now coaxing him to lie down again?
The name “Reesa” crossed his foggy mind, but he didn’t think this woman was she—whoever “Reesa” was.
He shook his head to try to dispel the confusion. That turned out to be a bad mistake; the pain burst through him again. But he felt the need to demonstrate his wakeful competence at once, like someone waked in the middle of the night by the telephone who instantly protests he wasn’t asleep. He licked his lips, getting ready to speak.
“I don’t feel very well,” he said, forming the sentence with care.
Funnily, the words didn’t come out right. It was more like an animal growl than a voice. He discovered that his throat, too, was extraordinarily sore.
The woman looked amused again and gestured to the man with her in the room. The man, Viktor saw, was quite normal-looking—neither as wraithfully thin nor as tall—but he wore what the woman wore, a sort of gossamer gown. He turned out to be quite strong. He pushed Viktor back down, holding him so that the woman could do something to him again.
The woman leaned close to Viktor. With her came a fragrance half like flowers, half like distant wood smoke.
Her nearness made Viktor suddenly aware that he was quite naked. The woman didn’t seem to notice, or at least to care. She peered into his eyes. She touched the base of his throat with an instrument that glittered like metal but was soft and warm to the touch, while she studied a tiny, dancing firework display of color at the instrument’s base.
Then she pulled down his lower lip. Instinctively he tried to twist his head away—again that explosion of pain!—but the man in the filmy gown gripped his head roughly, holding it immobile while the woman touched the damp, tender inside of Viktor’s lip with some other kind of thing, and Viktor went quickly and helplessly to sleep.
When he woke up again he was alone in the room. Even the other resuscitation pans were empty.
His head still hurt, but the other pains were gone—well, not gone entirely, but now they were only little annoyances rather than agony. When he sat up he saw that his right calf, from knee to ankle, was encased in some sort of a pale pink sausagelike contrivance. He puzzled over that for a while, poking at it with a finger. He didn’t understand it. He didn’t understand much of anything at all; everything seemed so complicated. The way he felt, he thought, was almost like being drunk.
He tried to recollect how he had got here. There was a memory of being told he had to go back in the freezer . . .
Yes, that was true, he was pretty sure. It wasn’t a comforting thought, though. He had a vague memory about freezing, something that someone had told him—was her name Wanda?—long before. It did not do to be frozen too many times. That he was sure of, though what it meant was very unclear.
He heard a man’s voice growling something from the doorway, and when he looked around it was the fellow in the gown, looking at him. “You’re awake,” the man said—wonderfully, in words that Viktor understood. “Stay there. I’ll see if Nrina wants to look at you.”