It wasn’t much of a door—Moon Mary’s buildings did not have very strong walls, since they didn’t need them to keep out cold or heat; it was light, pierced wood, as might have been in Earth’s old tropics, and it opened to Balit’s touch.
It wasn’t much of a class, either—eight kids, mostly girls—and it didn’t seem to be exactly a classroom. It looked rather like the guest lounge of a small motel at first, a bedroom-sized chamber with hassocks and couches strewn before a collection of child-sized teaching desks, but as Balit led Viktor in the room darkened.
“We’ll have to wait a minute,” Balit apologized. “They’re starting a viewing. I don’t know what it is, though—” And then, all around the children, a scene sprang into life, three-dimensional, seeming natural size, full color. “Oh, look, Viktor! They’re doing it specially for you! They’re showing Old Earth!”
If it was really Earth, it was not an Earth Viktor recognized. He seemed to be standing on a sort of traffic island in the middle of a large street, and it was by no means empty. Thousands, literally thousands, of people were riding bicycles toward him in a dense swarm that spilt in two just before they reached him, and came together again on the other side. They wore almost uniform costumes—white shirts, dark blue trousers—and they were almost all male. And Oriental. There was no sound, but to one side was a huge marble building set in a sort of park, and on the other what looked like a hotel and office buildings.
“I don’t know where this is supposed to be,” Viktor apologized.
Balit looked embarrassed. “But they said it was Earth,” he complained. “Wait a minute.” He bent to whisper to the little girl nearest him. “Yes, this is Earth, all right. It is a place called Beijing, around the year one thousand nine hundred sixty, old style.”
“I was never in Beijing,” Viktor said. “And anyway—” He stopped there. What was the use of telling these children that they were not off by a mere few thousand miles, but by several centuries? He settled for, “It’s very nice, though. But can we turn it off?”
Then Viktor had the floor. The teacher sat there smiling, leaving it all to the children to ask questions, and that they did. About Old Earth. (People rode horses? If they made love did they really have babies out of their bodies? And what, for heaven’s sake, was a “storm”?) About the Sorricaine-Mtiga objects (Oh, they must have been exciting to see!), and about his near-death in orbit around Nebo (Something tried to kill you? Really take away your life?), and about Newmanhome and the Big Bang and the reasons why there were so few stars anymore anywhere in the sky.
That was where Viktor began to wax really eloquent, until Balit, speaking for all of them, said gravely, “Yes, we see, Viktor. The stars that blew up, the sun going dim, the changes on Nebo, the disappearance of all the other stars—we see that as they all happened at the same time, or close enough, they must be connected. But how?”
And all Viktor could say was, “I wish I knew.”
That night Balit was telling his parents excitedly about the hit Viktor had made with his classmates. “Viktor was almost killed by those things on Nebo,” the boy said, thrilled. “Frit? Can I go to Nebo sometime?”
“What, and get killed?” Frit teased.
Forta was stretching and bending at his bar, but he panted, “No one goes to Nebo, Balit, dear. It’s worse than Newmanhome! You couldn’t even stand up there.”
“Pelly can,” the boy objected. “He gets injections, and then he’s almost as strong as Viktor.”
Frit looked shocked. “Balit! No. Those injections destroy your figure. Do you want to bloat those pretty legs so they look like balloons? No offense,” he added hastily, catching Viktor’s eye. “But, Balit, you couldn’t ever really dance that way, you know.”
“I might not want to be a dancer, Frit,” his son told him.
Forta straightened up abruptly in the middle of a long stretch. He blinked worriedly at his son. “Well, of course,” he began, “what you do in your adult life is entirely up to you. Neither Frit nor I would think of trying to prevent you from anything you really wanted to do, once you were grown—”
“But I am grown,” Balit told him seriously. “It’s almost time for me to have the mark off my forehead. Then I could even marry if I wanted to.”
Frit cleared his throat. “Yes, of course,” he said, tugging at one of his mustaches. “However—”
He paused there, looking at Viktor in a way Viktor understood at once. A guest must not involve himself in family affairs.
“I think I’ll go back to my desk,” he said.
But what he wanted was not there. Viktor began to think that nothing he found was going to scratch his itch of curiosity. The more he found, the more he realized there was not much to find on the subjects he cared about.
There was plenty in the files on the history of the human race after the Reforms had put him back in the freezer. They had had a war about the destruction of Ark, of course—each sect blaming the other. They had (as Viktor counted them up) a war every two or three years anyway, on one pretext or another. It was easy enough to see why they were so combative. Viktor could imagine the lives of the bare few thousand of them, near starving in their icy caves, wounded by events that they had never expected and that they could not explain—there was no future for them. Of all the things they lacked, the one in shortest supply was hope.
It was astonishing to Viktor that they had somehow found the resources and the will to dispatch a handful of rickety, improvised ships to Nergal. That was heroic. It was very nearly superhuman; it meant long years of savage discipline, starving themselves and denying themselves for that one last, supreme effort. He marveled at their progress since then—now so many teeming millions, living in such luxury! It wasn’t the numbers that made him wonder, of course. The increase was not surprising, since they’d had several thousand years to do it in. You only have to double a population ten times—ten generations will do it easily, if there’s plenty of food and no saber-toothed tigers to keep the surplus down—to multiply it by a thousand.
Nor was it surprising that in the course of that mighty effort they threw some unneeded junk overboard—junk with names like astronomy and astrophyics and cosmology.
And their descendants, the soft, pretty Nrinas and Fortas and Frits, had never seen any reason to revive them.
Except for little Balit. Balit wanted to hear everything Viktor had to say—about the universe itself (especially about the way it had been, in the old days, when there really was a whole universe outside their own little group), about Old Earth, about Newmanhome in the days of its burgeoning glory. It was Balit who came to Viktor with the news that Pelly had landed on Newmanhome. “Maybe he can help you access the old files, Viktor,” Balit said helpfully, glancing at his fathers—who, for some reason, were politely saying nothing at all.
“Could he really do that?”
“We can call him to ask,” Balit said, now not looking at his fathers at all. “I know how much you want to get that data.”
Forta cleared his throat. “Yes, we all know that,” he observed.
“But it would be interesting to me, too,” Balit protested. “I like it when Viktor talks about those old things.”
Forta said, loving but firm, “It’s your bedtime, Balit.”
“Then Viktor could tell me a bedtime story,” Balit pleaded. Viktor surrendered. He followed the boy to his bath and sat with him as, damply clean, Balit rolled himself into the soft, gauzy bedclothes and looked up at him expectantly.
Viktor found himself moved by the situation, so familiar, so different. It made him think of telling stories to his own children long ago on Newmanhome, and before that hearing his father tell them to him ages past on the ship. He reached out to stroke Balit’s warm, fuzzy head.
“Shall I tell you about the beginning of the universe?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, Viktor! Please!”
Obediently Viktor began. “Once upon a time there was nothing, not anything anywhere, except for one little point of matter and energy and space. There weren’t any stars. There weren’t any galaxies. There wasn’t even any space yet, really, because space hadn’t been invented.”
“What did that point look like, Viktor?” the boy asked drowsily.
“I don’t know. Nobody knows, Balit. It was just a—an egg, sort of, that held inside itself the possibility of everything that now exists, or ever did exist, or ever will exist. And then that egg hatched. It exploded. Do you know what that explosion was called, Balit?”