Forta dimpled. “Not really. We wanted to talk to you, after Balit was asleep.”
Faint alarm bells sounded in Viktor’s head. “Is something wrong?” he asked.
“Not really wrong, no, Viktor,” Frit said honestly. “It’s just that we’re a little bit concerned about Balit.”
“About Balit’s future,” Forta amplified.
Frit nodded. “We’ve always hoped he would want to become an artist of some sort—a dancer, perhaps, like Forta.”
“He wouldn’t have to be a dancer, as long as it was something that used his creative ability. Nrina thinks he has real talent as a gene worker,” Forta added. “That’s a kind of art, too, of course.”
“But lately he’s been so—well, so excited about these stars and things of yours, Viktor,” Frit finished.
Viktor took a sip of his wine, feeling the strain between the obligations of a good guest and that burning need to know. “Balit’s a very intelligent boy. He’s really interested in science, too,” Viktor said. “I think he could be good at it.”
“Yes, we’re sure he could, Viktor,” Forta said reasonably. “But what kind of a life would Balit have if he confined his talents to ‘science’? Nobody’s a ‘scientist.’ People will think he’s odd.”
“In my time it was a highly honored profession,” Viktor said defensively—and, he thought, not entirely truthfully; for it depended on which “time” he was talking about. Certainly the icy Newmanhome of the four warring sects had offered few honors to scientists.
“In your time,” Forta repeated. His tone wasn’t exactly disdainful, but the best you could say was that it was forgiving. “Anyway, Viktor, it’s not creative, is it? There’s nothing new for him to do—you said yourself, all this sort of ‘science’ thing was well known thousands and thousands of years ago.”
“Not all of it, no. No one really understood what happened to our stars! Even the parts that were understood then—the basic astrophysics and cosmology—nobody seems to know anything about them now. They need to be rediscovered.”
Frit said earnestly, “But don’t you see the difference? Rediscovery, Viktor dear, is not the same as creation, is it? You can’t blame us for wanting something grander for our boy.”
“Oh, Frit,” Viktor said, despairing, “how can I make you understand? What could be grander than answering the question of what happened to the entire universe? Maybe Balit can discover that! He’s interested. He’s smart. He simply doesn’t have the education. First he needs a grasp of cosmology and nuclear decay and—”
“No one knows those things anymore, Viktor. Truly. They simply aren’t interesting to us.”
“But they must be on record somewhere,” Viktor said, clutching at straws. “I know the data banks in Ark and Mayflower had all that material—”
“They don’t exist anymore, Viktor. What was left of them must have been salvaged for structural materials thousands of years ago.”
“But they were copied onto the files on Newmanhome.”
Frit gave Forta a meaningful look. “Yes, Newmanhome,” he said.
Forta sighed. For some reason the thought of the files on Newmanhome seemed to make him uncomfortable. “Well,” he said, “we’ll see what we can do.”
“I hope I can repay you,” Viktor said.
Forta gave him a strange look. “That’s all right,” he said, sounding insincere. Then, “Do you know a lot of stories like the Big Bang one you were telling Balit?”
“Oh, dozens,” Viktor told him, aware for the first time that the parents had been listening in. In fact he did. In fact he had all the stories his father had told him still well in mind—the story of the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle that fueled the stars, the story of the death of massive stars in supernovae and the birth of pulsars and black holes, the stories of Kepler’s Laws of Motion and of Newton’s, and of Einstein’s superseding laws, and of the rules of quantum mechanics that went beyond even Einstein.
“Yes, of course,” Forta said, yawning. “Those are very interesting. I know Balit loves to hear about them—”
“But not all the time, please, Viktor,” Frit finished. “If you don’t mind.”
Then the long-awaited transmission came in from Newmanhome, and it was not at all what Viktor had expected.
To begin with, of course it wasn’t Pelly calling—the space captain had to be halfway back to Nergal by now. The face on the screen was a man wearing a sort of floppy beret, pulled down almost to his eyebrows; he was a habitat person, all right, but he was actually wearing clothes. “Viktor,” he began without preamble, “I’m Markety. I’m just here for a short time, but I’ve managed to collect some of the material for you. Give my respects to Forta, please—he is one of my heroes, as I am sure he knows. Here’s the material.”
Eagerly Viktor watched the screen on the desk as new pictures began to appear. Puzzledly he stared at them. After months he knew what sort of thing the desk produced when interrogated; these were quite different. They were simply a series of—well, photographs! The first batch was pictures of bits and pieces of machinery, some of it the same shiny lavender metal as the keepsake Balit proudly kept by his bedside, some of unidentifiable materials that could have been steel or glass or ceramic. It dawned on Viktor that they were the odds and ends that had been salvaged from the surface of the planet Nebo—but there was no explanation for any of them, no hint of what they might be for, or what studies might have been made of them.
The next batch was more puzzling still.
It had to do with astrophysics, all right, but it was not data displayed from a computer file. It was pictures—pictures of pages of manuscript, or log books, or even a few pages from a book here and there. They seemed to have been taken from the freezers.
They were all fragmentary—a couple of pages of something, without beginning or end; the pages themselves as like as not torn or frayed or spotted into illegibility. Some of them made Viktor blink. Some of it went so far back that his father’s own observations were there.
For a while at least, someone had been faithful at keeping records. (Billy Stockbridge, perhaps, loyal to Pal Sorricaine to the last?) There were spectrograms of the sun as it cooled; of the star burst as it grew; of the dozen stars that still remained in their sky—dimmer than before, but not swallowed into the star burst.
None of them were anything like the spectrograms Pal Sorricaine had so doggedly gleaned of the stars that had flared and died all about them. The Sorricaine-Mtiga objects were still unique.
None of the spectrograms made any sense to Viktor, either. The dead observers had left their own speculations, but none of them was convincing. None of them explained what it was that had stolen most of the stars out of the sky. And they were all so very old that there was nothing at all about the fireball that had dominated the sky for so long.
When Balit came back from school Viktor was still puzzling over the transmission. He displayed it all over again for Balit, but repetition didn’t make it clearer. Balit didn’t do any homework that night. He and Viktor ate quickly and returned to the desk. It was the objects from Nebo that seemed most fascinating to the boy. “But what can they be?” he asked, not for the first time, and, not for the first time, Viktor shook his head.
“The only way to find out is to investigate them. Somebody made them, after all—somebody from Gold, or somewhere else, but still some person. They can be opened up.”
Balit shivered. “People did try, Viktor. More than twenty of them were killed.”
“People die for a lot less important reasons,” Viktor said roughly. “Naturally it would have to be done with a lot of precautions. Systematically. The way people used to defuse bombs in wars.
“What are ‘wars,’ Viktor?”
But Viktor refused to be sidetracked. They pored over the material until it was late and Balit, yawning, said, “I don’t know if I understand, Viktor. Are our stars the only ones still alive, anywhere?”
“That’s the way it looks, Balit.”
“But stars live forever, Viktor,” the boy said drowsily.
“Not forever. For a long time—” Viktor stopped, remembering a joke. He laughed as he got ready to tell it. “There used to be a story about that, Balit. A student is asking his astronomy teacher a question: ‘Pardon me, professor, but when did you say the sun would turn into a red giant and burn us all up?’
“The professor says, ‘In about five billion years.’
“So the student says, ‘Oh, thank God! I thought you said five million.’ ”
But Balit didn’t laugh. He was sleeping. And as Viktor carried the boy to his bed, he wasn’t laughing, either.
Viktor sought out the one of Balit’s parents at home. He found Frit painting something on a large screen. “I’m sorry I kept him so late. We got to talking about why all these things had happened—”