“Of course,” the tutor said. “Perhaps it would be best to display it as a surround.” It disappeared from the desk, and at once an image sprang up all around Viktor. The image blotted out everything but itself, and it was almost all black. “You are looking,” the disembodied voice went on, “at every astronomical object that is visible from your present position. The habitats have been omitted.” Indeed, Viktor saw, there was the glowing cinder of Nergal. There, behind Viktor, the sun blazed—not very bright, he thought, but then they were much farther away than Newmanhome; perhaps it really had regained all of its luminosity. A couple of quite bright things had perceptible disks—some of Nergal’s moons, no doubt. He picked out a few smaller, bright objects—stars and a couple of planets . . .
Apart from that, nothing.
Nothing? Viktor sat up straight, staring around at the sparsely featured sky. “But where’s the universe?” he cried.
“You are referring to the optical concentration that was visible for some time,” the calm, disembodied voice said. “That began to dim one thousand three hundred years ago, Viktor, and by eight hundred years ago, it was no longer detectable at all. What you see is the universe, Viktor. There isn’t anything else.”
And then, with a sickening certainty, Viktor at last began to believe. It had indeed been four thousand years.
Two days later what Manett said came true. When Viktor and the others started toward the room with the sample tubes, ready to do their work of filling them, Manett appeared. He looked angry and frightened at the same time. “Forget it,” he said. “Nrina says she’s got enough from you guys. We—” He swallowed. “We’re leaving. All but Viktor, he stays here.”
“Leaving for where?” Korelto demanded, startled.
Mescro looked searchingly at his mentor’s face. “You’ve been fired,” he guessed accusingly.
“Shut up, Mescro!” Manett snarled. “Let’s go. There’s a bus waiting.”
“But—but—” Jeren cried, blinking as he tried to take the new situation in, “but we need to get ready!”
“For what? You’ve got nothing to pack,” Manett said cruelly. “Come on. Not you,” he added to Viktor, with poison in his voice. “Nrina wants to see you. Now.”
And thus, without warning, they were gone. Only Jeren tarried to shake Viktor’s hand sadly and to say good-bye. Viktor wasn’t even allowed to follow them to their “bus.”
Nrina was in the corridor, and she beckoned him to follow her. She was wearing a filmy rainbow-colored thing that might once have been called a negligee. It veiled, without hiding, the fact that under it she wore nothing at all, not even the cache-sex. Viktor averted his eyes, because there was something he really wanted to ask the woman, and her scanty attire made it difficult.
“It is very interesting to me that you were born on Old Earth,” she told him seriously as they walked. “Here, this is my home. You may come in.”
He followed her uneasily through a doorway. When they were inside she clapped her hands, and it closed behind them. It was not a large room, but it was prettily festooned with growing things, and there was a scent of flowers in the air. There was one of those desk things, of course, and soft pillows thrown about. The only other large bit of furniture in the room was a soft, cup-shaped thing, like the cap of a mushroom turned upside down.
It looked very much like a bed.
Nrina sat on the edge of the cup-shaped thing, which was large enough for her to stretch out in easily. She looked at Viktor appraisingly before she spoke. “Have you any questions for me, Viktor?” she asked.
Indeed he had—many, and a number that he didn’t quite want to ask. He fumbled. “I did—I did want to know something, Nrina. Is my, uh, my brain severely damaged?”
“Severely?” She thought for a moment. “No, I would not say ‘severely,’ ” she said at last. “Much of your memory has come back, has it not? Perhaps more will. The damage may not be permanent.”
“May not!”
She shrugged—it was a graceful movement, but with the extreme slimness of her body it made Viktor think of a snake slowly writhing in its coils. “What difference does that make?”
“It make a great difference to me!”
She thought that over, looking at him carefully. Then she smiled. “But it makes none to me, Viktor,” she pointed out. And she lay back on the bed, still smiling at him, but now with a wholly different expression.
He felt himself responding. Instinctively his hand went to the brand on his forehead.
“Oh,” she said, reaching out with her own hand to take his, “that is all right, Viktor. I have fixed myself so that I cannot be fertilized. But I do want to know, I want very much to know, how you people from Old Earth made love.”
CHAPTER 21
By now the universe was getting pretty old, and Wan-To was very nearly the age of the universe. There was a redeeming feature to that, though, because the older Wan-To got, the longer it took for him to become older still.
That wasn’t because of the relativistic effect of time dilation. It had nothing to do with the velocity of his motion. It was only a matter of energy supply. Wan-To was living on a starvation diet, and it had made him very slow.
When Wan-To was young or middle-aged—or even quite elderly, say when he had reached the age of a few hundred billion years—he aged quickly because he did everything quickly. Wan-To was a plasma person. It was the flashing pace of nuclear fusion that drove his metabolism; changes of state happened at the speed of the creation and destruction of virtual particles, winking in and out of existence as vacuum fluctuations.
That was how it had been, once.
It wasn’t that way anymore. Wan-To was almost blind now. He could not spare the energy for all those external eyes—but it didn’t much matter, because what was there to see in this sparse, dark, cold universe? He did keep a tiny “ear” open for the sounds of possible communication—though even “possible,” he knew, was stretching it. Who was there to communicate?
Wan-To’s physical condition in itself was awful. (How awful just to have a “physical” condition at all!) He was trapped. He was embedded in a nearly solid mass, like a man buried in sand up to his neck. It wasn’t impossible for him to move. It was only very difficult, and painful, and agonizingly slow.
He could have left. He could have cut himself loose from this corpse of a star to seek another. But there weren’t any others better than the one he was in.
The wonderful quick, bright phase of his existence was so far in the past that Wan-To hardly remembered it. (His memory, too, was a function of how much energy he had to spare for it. A lot of memory was, so to speak, shut down—“on standby,” one might say, to hoard what powers he had available.) The kind of energies to support that sort of life had disappeared. There wasn’t any nuclear fusion anymore, not anywhere in the universe as far as Wan-To could see or imagine. Every fusible element had long since fused, every fissionable one had fissed.
And so the stars had gone out.
All of them. Every last one. Stars were history; and history, now, had run for so many endless eons that even Wan-To no longer kept count of the time. But time passed anyway, and now the universe had lived for more than ten thousand million million million million million million years.
That was a number without much meaning even to Wan-To. A human would have written it as the number 1 followed by forty zeroes—10,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. He wouldn’t have understood it, either, but he could have juggled numbers around to give an idea of what it meant. He might, for instance, have said that if the entire age of the universe at the time when the human race first started thinking seriously about it—everything from the Big Bang to, say, the twentieth century on Earth—had been only one second, then on the same scale its present age was coming right up on something like fifty thousand billion billion years . . .
And, of course, that number wouldn’t have meant much, either, except that anyone could see it was a very, very long time.
If Wan-To had been of a philosophical bent, he might have said to himself something consoling, like, At least I’ve had a good run for my money. Or, You only live once—but if you do it right, once is enough.
Wan-To was not that philosophical. He was not at all willing to go gladly into that long, dark night. He would have resisted it with all his force . . . if he had known a way to do it . . . and if he had had enough force to be worth talking about to resist it with.