He placed his order and vanished; he reformed in the Glass Square. All around him Rubble Point flickered with light. The world. What was left of the world. Maintained flickeringly against the Infinite Dark Mass all around, beyond the perimeter. It took enormous energy to maintain the bubble of Rubble Point against the pressure from outside. It flickered, but it continued to exist.
And beyond this silver bubble, ashes and darkness.
Here at Rubble Point, at the end of time and the imminent end of space, where entropy was programming the heat-death of the universe, only ten thousand humans remained to mark the place where life and intelligence and dreams of empire had lived.
In the Centers that ringed the Glass Square the on-duty Supervisors manipulated energy to keep the barriers solid against the Infinite Dark Mass.
And he had jeopardized all this. with a moment’s self-indulgence. What power had that loathesome young man in the shoppe already. possessed to make friend Lhayne throw all this—and Ahna—into jeopardy?
He shivered, knowing it was not yet finished, not by any possible wish or hope.
And he suddenly had the chill feeling that this might be the last time he saw Ahna. He hurried to the vaults.
Ahna was there, behind glass. The erg-gauge was not even one-fourth filled. He stared at it for the longest time, trying to wish it full… the red line pressed against the very top of the counter… but it was nonmanipulable: it remained less than one-fourth filled.
He looked in at Ahna, sleeping. He could not detect the rise and fall of her chest. But she was only sleeping.
She had been sleeping for three hundred years.
He stared in at her, waiting for her to realize he was here, to open her eyes and smile with a wondrous mouth too large to be called correct for her slim face. But she only slept and though he tried to bring back the exact sound of her voice, he only heard words, a conversation between himself and himself in the empty places of his memory.
“How long will your new piece take?”
“I think a week.”
“I’ll miss you.”
“Come and see me.”
“Not this time, please, Lhayne.”
“I won’t be in pain.”
“Yes, but you look as if you’re in pain. I can’t bear it.”
“I have to create, Ahna.”
“You know I understand. But it hurts me to see you.”
“They have to see. They need to remember what it was like to be just human beings, not gods. ‘Fire and Sleep’ will be my best work. They won’t be able to reject it, or ignore it.”
“But you burn.”
Sleeping. Here at Rubble Point the last thousand of the ten thousand humans who had survived the ages slept in their vaults, waiting for those who loved them to buy their release from induced catalepsy. Here at Rubble Point the surviving ten thousand had taken their stand against the moment when the last planet fell into the last sun, and the last sun was swallowed by the Infinite Dark Mass. Here at Rubble Point, where everything came to an end until the universe could be reborn and begin again its stately pavan toward nothingness, the ten thousand had rescued a piece of the space-time substance and made it a world of survival. They had taken the energy of entropy itself, the heat that flows during the thermodynamic process, the heat entropy provides as criteria for spontaneous chemical changes and thus chemical equilibrium, the energy that still exists but is lost for the purpose of doing work… the entropic heat generated in quantifiable time, a piece of a second, a chunk of a minute, a slice of an hour… and they had used it to maintain their bit of a world, Rubble Point, against the voracious appetite of the Mad Conqueror, Entropy, eating everything till it swallowed itself, leaving nothing but the Infinite Dark Mass that would inevitably explode from its own engorgement of time and space.
They had used what they could steal from the past to maintain their world. But each one of the nine thousand who lived and survived in the world of Rubble Point used a carefully calculated amount of antientropic energy, gauged in ergs, of course. And there was x amount allocated simply to maintain Rubble Point’s existence against the pull of the Infinite Dark Mass. Those who had been unfortunate enough to be placed in the vaults, to be wakened only when there was sufficient anti-entropic energy available for their maintenance could do no other than wait.
Wait: for energy to be brought forward to the end of time from all of the past that still lived in the megaflow. Wait: for those who had a stake in their revival to earn their freedom. Wait: for loved ones to journey into the dangerous past to steal minutes, hours, days. Wait: for the anti-entropic heat-energy to be generated by pivotal events that the nine thousand created in the past, events programmed by those who danced their dance here at Rubble Point, at the end of time.
Ahna slept, waiting.
And her erg counter was less than one-fourth filled.
He stood before the vault, staring in at her sleeping features. A sleep more than merely sleep; endless if he could not trade worthless trinkets for vital energy. The powerstone, for instance. A trinket. A child’s plaything here at Rubble Point. But to a young man whose present was codified as March 21, 1967… a heart’s desire.
The ten thousand bartered at the very best rate of interest. Caveat emptor. They traded toys for time. Time against the onrush of nothingness; time as heat-energy; time as a weapon, the only weapon that could halt the Mad Conqueror, Entropy. What was it the young man had said? What’s in it for you?
Everything.
Survival. Existence. Life. Being. Everything.
Purchasable only in The Shoppe of Wonders.
“She’ll be a long time coming out,” said a voice beside him. Lhayne heard the voice, but was too overcome with the sight of Ahna, too mortified by what he had done, too sunk in his own thoughts of the past, the present, the hopelessness of a future without her to comprehend what had been said.
He looked the wrong way. Then he looked to his left and saw the old woman. She had obviously chosen to remain an old woman, had not bothered reassembling herself into a younger body. “I beg your pardon,” he said.
“I see her counter’s way down,” the old woman said, moving closer to the erg counter and scrutinizing it very carefully. “My son’s in the next vault. I come here every chance I get. I know he can’t hear me but I come and stand and talk to him; I tell him it won’t be much longer.”
Lhayne looked around at the next vault. The erg counter was only a hair below full. How long had this old woman been working to buy her son’s freedom? She looked five thousand years old.
“All he needs is one little boost and I can get him out,” she said. There was a tone beneath the tone in her voice. “You know, such a little boost wouldn’t make much difference to you, and your lady. She has such a long way to go….”
He knew what she wanted. They hung around the vaults night and day. Beggars of time.
“Leave me alone,” he said, turning back to Ahna’s lovely sleeping face.
“You wouldn’t keep a mother from her only son, would you? I can see what a good person you are, how much you love your lady….”
“Get away from me, you thug!” he screamed.
The old woman snarled something obscene and her atoms began to shift. She re-formed. She was younger than Lhayne, and wickedly beautiful, with a hunger in her face that he knew could only be assuaged by the man in the vault.
“You’d better let me take that boost,” she said, the hunger in her face distorting her beautiful features. “Or I’ll make you sorry you ever lived!”
It was idle malevolence, utterly without possibility of being implemented. They were immortal, replenishable, inviolate against assault. But she had clearly gone mad, and the sight of the naked lunacy terrified Lhayne. He had seen other examples of this imprisoned madness. They were all going crazy, out here where time and space came to an end and the pressure from outside could be felt as filth on the skin. He wondered if what he had done with that foul little young man in the shoppe was his most recent manifestation of insanity.