“Pick him up, Viktor,” Nrina commanded, laughing breathlessly in pursuit. “Go on, do it! You’re much stronger than any of us, so you can be the one to carry him away!”
What made Viktor follow her order was that the boy seemed to acquiesce. He moved toward Viktor, smiling tentatively and holding out his arms.
And so Viktor Sorricaine, four thousand years out of his time, found himself in the act of kidnapping a child on a manmade habitat that circled the brown dwarf, Nergal. Well, why not? he thought wryly. Nothing else made sense! Why should this?
The band of kidnappers broke off their battle and flocked after Viktor, shouting in triumph while the despoiled parents watched proudly after them. The whole abducting mob hurried into one of the entranceways. Then Nrina told Viktor to put the boy down. “I’ll take care of him from now on,” she said indulgently. “Did you meet Viktor, Balit? He was frozen for a long time, you know. He was actually on Old Earth—imagine! He’ll tell you all about it at the party, I’m sure.”
“Hello, Viktor,” the boy said politely, and then looked plaintively at Nrina. “Is it going to hurt, Aunt Nrina?”
“Hurt? Of course it won’t hurt, Balit,” she scolded indulgently. “It’ll take five minutes, that’s all. Then it will all be over. And besides, you’ll be asleep while I’m doing it. Now, come to the operating room—and, oh, I’ve got the most wonderful coming-of-age present for you!”
An hour later the party was in full swing. Balit was sitting on a kind of throne on top of the buffet table, a glass of wine in his hand, Nrina’s gift purring gently in his lap, and a garland of flowers on his head, while his captors and his parents and several dozen other people who had shown up from nowhere drank and ate and joked and sang and congratulated Balit on his new status as a man.
Viktor had never seen a young boy look more pleased, though he noticed that Balit did from time to time surreptitiously reach down to touch his genitals, as though to make sure they were still there.
They were. As good as new. It was simply that through Nrina’s quick and expert minor surgery, they were no longer capable of producing live sperm. “It’s what every male does when he gets close to puberty,” Wollet explained heartily, refilling Viktor’s glass. “That way he doesn’t have to worry about, you know, making someone really—what was the word?—yes, pregnant.” He gazed fondly at his daughter, who was teasingly stroking the kitten in Balit’s lap—and a little of Balit, too. “It makes the girls a little jealous,” Wollet said. “They have a coming-of-age party, too, of course, but they don’t have the jolly old fighting and the kidnapping and the carrying away, and that’s what makes this kind of party so special. Don’t you agree?”
“Oh, yes,” Viktor said politely. “Uh, Wollet? That mark on the boy’s forehead . . . ”
“The fertility mark, yes. What about it? Oh, I see you’ve got one, too. Well, Balit shouldn’t have intercourse now for a few weeks, you know, until any live sperm in his tract dissipate, then they’ll take the brand off. Hasn’t Nrina told you all this? I guess she would do you, too, if you asked her to—I mean, now that you’re not donating anymore. Oh, here comes Pelly!”
Viktor was not at his best, greeting the bloated-looking space captain; he was not used to the fact that everyone he met seemed to know all about the state of his genital system. All he could say was, in a rush, “Pelly, I really want to talk to you—”
“About Nebo. I know,” the man growled good-naturedly. “Nrina warned me you would. Let’s get out of this noise, though. Suppose we pick up a couple of drinks, and then we can go over there and sit by the edge of the pond.”
It wasn’t just Nebo that Viktor wanted to talk about, but Pelly was easy. He seemed almost to admire Viktor—well, naturally enough, he explained. “You, Viktor—you’ve really traveled! All the way from Old Earth—all I’ve ever done is cruise around this little system.”
So it wasn’t just the fizzy, faintly tart, mildly fruity drinks they were putting away that made Viktor feel good. He had become used to being a curiosity, but it had been a long, long time since he had felt himself admired. He glanced back at the coming-of-age party, which was increasing and multiplying as random passersby came by and joined in and stayed. Nrina was showing Balit how to feed the kitten out of the improvised bottle she had made; Frit, from the top of the banquet table, was declaiming a poem.
“Nrina said you had some artifacts you’d picked up from Nebo,” Viktor said.
Pelly shook his head. “Oh, no, not me. I mean, I didn’t pick the things up personally—I’ve never landed on Nebo, and I never will. But I do have this thing—I carry it around to show people.” He fumbled in his pouch and handed Viktor a bit of something that was metal-bright, but a pale lavender in color.
Viktor turned the thing over. It was astonishingly light, for metal: a rod about the size of his finger, tapering to round at one end, the other end cracked and jagged. “Is it hollow?” he asked, hefting it.
“No. It’s what you see. And don’t ask me what it’s for, because I don’t know.” Pelly restored it to his pouch, then had a change of mind. “I know, I’ll give it to Balit for a coming-of-age present! There are plenty more of these things—not here, of course, but on Newmanhome.” He peered keenly at Viktor and the moon face split in a smile. “I’m going back there in a few days, you know.”
“Really? to Newmanhome?”
“To tell the truth,” Pelly admitted, “I’m looking forward to it. I’m generally happier on the ship than I am here—maybe because I’m pure, you know. I mean,” he explained, “nobody tinkered with my genes before I was born. Not much, anyway, outside of, you know, getting rid of genetic diseases and that sort of thing. I probably wouldn’t even have needed the muscle builders and things to be on Newmanhome, except for growing up on a habitat—but I was always a lot heavier than the other boys.”
“I didn’t know there were any like you anymore,” Viktor said.
“There aren’t many. Maybe that’s why I like space. Maybe I take after the ones who originally came here, you know. You’ve seen their ships! Can you imagine the courage of them— What’s the matter?”
“I haven’t seen those ships. I wish I could.”
“Oh, but that’s easy enough,” Pelly said, grinning. From his shoulder bag he pulled out a flat board, glassy-topped, like the teaching desks. He touched the tiny keypad. “There it is,” he said ruefully. “Pathetic, isn’t it?”
Viktor bent over to study the picture. “Pathetic” was the right word—a single hydroxy-propelled rocket, tiny in the screen but certainly not very large in any case. It was orbiting with ruddy Nergal huge below it, and as Pelly manipulated the keypad to move the scene forward in time the ship was joined by another, and another—more than a dozen in all, linking together in a sprawling mass of nested spaceships. Viktor could see years of history happening in minutes as the ships deployed solar mirrors and began to reshape themselves. “That was the first habitat,” Pelly told him. “Altogether only eight hundred people made it to Nergal—that was all they could build ships for; the rest, I guess, just stayed there and died. Things got better when they began constructing real habitats out of asteroidal material, but for a long time they damn near starved. Then, once there was some sort of plague, and most of the ones around then died of that.” He swept his arm around the scene about them. “Did you know that all of us are descended from exactly ninety-one people? That’s all that were left after the plague. But then it began to get better.” He flicked off the screen and looked at Viktor, seeming a little abashed. “Does all this bore you?”
“Oh, no!” Viktor cried. “Honestly, Pelly, it’s what I’ve been trying to find out ever since Nrina thawed me out! Listen, what about the time-dilation effect?”
Pelly blinked politely. “I beg your pardon?”
“The basic question, I mean. The reason all this happened in the first place—the way our little group of stars took off at relativistic speeds. I’ve been trying to figure it out. The only thing I can think is that we were traveling so fast that time dilation took over—for a long time, Pelly, I can’t even guess how long—long enough so that all the stars went through their life cycles and died while we were traveling.” Viktor stopped, because Pelly’s eyes were beginning to glaze.