Viktor yelped. So did the other three. They were looking straight down onto something immense and redly glowing, like a bed of mottled coals.
Viktor couldn’t help himself. He reached out blindly and caught the arm of the big man named Jeren. Jeren was shaking, too, but he held on to Viktor as they all stared down. Viktor felt himself falling into that glowing hell—no, not falling, exactly; what he felt was that ruddy Nergal was swimming up toward him, drowning him.
Manett’s voice came to him from far away. “That’s what they call the brown dwarf. They moved here while the sun was cold, and we’re living in a habitat around it. A habitat is kind of like a big spaceship, you know? Only it doesn’t go anywhere, it just stays in orbit. That’s where everybody’s been living for the last few thousand years, when it was so cold before the old sun came back.”
“The sun came back?” one of the others cried out, astonished, but Viktor hardly heard. He was staring down, transfixed. He knew, part of him knew, that he wasn’t really being swallowed by that glowing pyre; it was, he told himself, only part of the “freezer burn,” the numbness in his head that was like a gauze scrim slipped between himself and the world. But he could feel himself swaying.
“Hey,” he heard Jeren’s worried voice say. “Something’s wrong with this guy.”
Manett’s face appeared before Viktor. He looked disgusted. “You’re relapsing,” he accused. “You’d better get to bed.”
Viktor tried to focus on him and failed. “All right, Daddy,” Viktor said.
When he woke again his throat felt less like sandpaper, but his other parts were worse. Nor was his mind much clearer. He had a confused memory of being wakened and ordered to masturbate again into one of the soft, crystalline plastic vials, and of men’s voices around him when he slept, but it was all hopelessly cloudy.
The voices were still going on. He lay trying to follow what they were talking about, with his eyes closed. Manett’s voice drowned out the others. He was saying smugly, “You know what they want. They want you to jerk off into bottles. That’s why they brought you up here, for sperm. It’s like cross-breeding animals, you know? They’ve been out here for thousands of years and they want to get some lost genes back into the pool. Oh, it isn’t just you guys. There are a couple of dozen of us real men around in one habitat or another that they’ve thawed out already. Not counting the stiffs—there’s maybe a hundred of those stashed away in Nrina’s cryonics place, waiting until she needs them.”
“Is that where we were?” somebody asked.
“In the freezer? Of course that’s where you were, where else? Nrina thaws out a few guys at a time for samples, then mostly they get sent away when she’s through with them. But I stay here. I’m the only one on this habitat permanently. Nrina kept me to help her out, you know?”
Viktor heard a leering, sycophantic chuckle from one of the others. It sounded like Mescro. Then Manett’s voice picked up again. “They collect a batch of corpsicles from the freezers on Newmanhome and bring them here. Nrina takes cell samples from each, then she thaws out the ones that look interesting. You know that jab on your asses?” Viktor remembered the bandage clearly enough. “Well, that’s where she gouged out a piece to get a DNA sample.”
“I don’t remember that part,” one of the others objected—Jeren, Viktor thought.
“ ’Course not. How could you? You were frozen—that’s why it made such a big hole.” Manett pulled down the waistband of his skirt to display the spot on his own hip where only a puckered little dimple still showed. “Don’t worry, it heals up. Then after she checks the sample out, if your genes look interesting, she thaws you out and turns you over to me.”
“Is that why they tattooed us, to show we’re like gene donors?” Korelto asked.
Manett laughed. “You think they need a tattoo to show that? Don’t you see what they look like—skinny as skeletons? No, they can tell that much just by looking at us. That mark,” he said, sounding prideful, “is kind of a like a warning, you know? It tells all the women that we’re still potent sperm donors. All the other males around here have that stuff turned off as soon as their balls start working. They can make love, all right—believe me, it’s one of their favorite things! But they don’t produce sperm. The women don’t want to get pregnant, you know.”
“But if they don’t get pregnant, then how—”
“You mean babies? Sure they have babies, only they do it in a test tube, like. That’s what Nrina does in her laboratory. They match up the sperm and the ovum in a kind of an incubator and they carry it to term, and when the baby’s ready they pull it out and put it in a nursery. Listen, these people don’t do anything that hurts. Or even makes them sweat—except for fun,” he added, grinning. “Don’t worry about it. If they ever decide they’ve got enough of your DNA they’ll fix you, too, and then they’ll take the mark off your forehead and you can plow right in.”
Jeren, who was somewhat slow of thought, had just gotten to the question that interested him. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Are you saying that, you know, some of these women might want to . . .”
Manett looked smug. “Has happened,” he announced.
“Even the cute one that thawed us out?”
Manett scowled. “Never mind about her,” he said darkly. “Change the subject.”
“Sure, Manett,” Mescro said, grinning. “Only I notice you don’t have the tattoo any more, and I was just wondering—”
“I said change the subject!” Manett roared. And then, as he saw Viktor trying to sit up, he said, “Oh, look, sleeping beauty’s awake. What do you want, Viktor?”
“Well,” Viktor said, trying to get the words out in spite of the sudden, almost breathless feeling that had hit him, “is it all men? I mean, if these people are so hungry for different genetic traits, don’t they thaw out women, too?”
“Hell, no. Why would they do that? They don’t really use the sperm, you know. It’s just easy for them to work with, so they just extract the gene fragments they want, and then they mix them up with other strains to get the kind of genes they need for—for whatever they need them for, anyway. That’s not my department. Nrina’s told me all about that, but I guess I didn’t listen. Anyway, that,” he said, preening himself, “is one way we have an advantage over the women. We guys can produce a million sperms a day. Women can maybe do one ovum a month, if they’re lucky, so if they want genes from a female they just do it the hard way, from tissue samples.” He peered in a friendly manner at Viktor, who wasn’t smiling. “What’s the matter, you afraid you can’t make your million a day?”
Viktor shook himself. “I—no. Nothing,” he said.
But it hadn’t really been nothing. It had been a quick flare-up of unexpected and quite unjustified hope, quickly blighted. No. There was no point in hoping along those lines.
Because that one little corner of his mind had suddenly come clear, like the desk that had showed him Nergal, and he had remembered Reesa.
For the next few days of Viktor’s new life he thought of Reesa almost constantly—while he was falling asleep, while he was just coming awake, while he was donating his sperm samples, while he was eating, while he was trying to learn the new language—all the time. But he could think of her only as you think of the dead. Of the long dead, at that.
He wondered, in an abstracted sort of way, if Reesa had had a happy life after his freezing. He wondered if she had missed him, or if she had reconciled herself sooner or later to his loss and, say, married someone else. Someone like Mirian, perhaps. She would have been a prized sort of wife for a Great Catholic, Viktor thought, because she was quite capable of being sexually active but no longer of complicating his life by becoming pregnant.
He told himself that he hoped she had married. He hoped she’d been happy—as happy as anyone could be in that world, anyway.
He didn’t go so far as to hope she hadn’t missed him. And he did miss her, certainly he did. But it was a sort of remote, somehow well-aged pain. As soon as he had heard the present date he had almost felt the quick, irrevocable shifting of gears in his mind. That history was ancient.
No one could mourn for four thousand years.