When they had finished with the day's production Viktor paused as he slipped out of his cloak. "Could you do anything you wanted to to them?" he asked. "I mean, could you give a baby six toes? Or two heads?"
Dekkaduk gave him an unforgiving look. "Thank you," he said, "for reminding us how primitive you are. Of course we could, but we never would. Who would want it?"
Even Nrina sighed. "Sometimes you are almost too odd, Viktor," she complained.
When Nrina at last pronounced Viktor's brain as cloudless as it was likely to get ("You will not remember everything, Viktor, and you will seem to remember some things that never really happened … but only a little, I think"), he began to think seriously about his future.
The big question, of course, was what future did he have in this place?
Reason told Viktor that the fact that he had any future at all was a great, big plus. He took some comfort from that. Anyway, he didn't need a lot of comforting, for making love to Nrina was a grand aspirin for all aches of the soul. Sometimes his trick memory would throw up a sudden misplaced image. Then he found himself thinking of lost Reesa, with a kind of melancholy ache that nothing was ever going to heal. That didn't last, and meanwhile Nrina was there. She was willing and adventurous in bed, and when they were not making love she was—well, much of the time—affectionate, kind, and friendly.
It was true that she was simply not interested in some of the things that mattered to Viktor. The mystery of what had happened to the universe, for instance. Of course, she pointed out, there should be plenty of material on just about everything somewhere in the teaching files, if Viktor wanted to use them. He could even use her own desk, she added—when she wasn't using it herself, of course. When Viktor complained that the mentor didn't seem able to turn up the really interesting stuff, Nrina even took time to try to instruct him in some of the desk's refinements.
The desk really was a desk—sort of. At least, it looked like a kind of old-fashioned draftsman's table. It was a broad, flat rectangle, tipped at an angle, with a kneeling stool before it and a kind of keypad in the lower left-hand corner. The symbols on the keys meant nothing at all to Viktor, but Nrina, leaning gently over his shoulder and smelling sweetly of her unusual perfume and herself, showed him how to work the pads. "Can you read the letters, at least?" she asked.
"No. Well, maybe. I think so," he said, squinting. "Some of them, anyway." The written language had not changed a great deal, but it had become phonetic; the alphabet had eleven new letters. Nrina rapidly scrolled down to "cosmology," after getting Viktor to try spelling it in the new alphabet.
Nothing appeared in the screen.
"That is quite strange," she said. "Perhaps we're spelling it wrong." But though they tried half a dozen different ways, the desk obstinately refused them all. Nor was it any more help with "time dilation" or "relativistic effects" or even "quantum mechanics."
"What a pity," Nrina sighed. "We must be doing something wrong."
"Thanks," Viktor said glumly.
"Oh, don't be unhappy," she said, cajoling. Then she brightened. "There are other things you can do," she said. "Have you ever tried calling anyone? A person, I mean? I have to call Pelly anyway. Here, let me show you how to call."
"You mean like a telephone?"
"What is 'telephone'? Never mind, I'll show you." She tapped the keypad, got a scroll, stopped it at that name, and tapped the name. As Viktor opened his mouth she said quickly, "This is my personal directory—there's also a general one which I will show you how to use, but I don't use the big one when I don't have to. Would you? Wait a minute, here he is."
The desk went pale and opaque; on the black space on the wall behind it the face of a man formed pumpkin fat, with a pumpkin smile. "Pelly?" Nrina said. "Yes, of course, it's Nrina. This is my friend Viktor—you saw him before, of course."
"Of course, but he was frozen then," the pumpkin grinned. "Hello, Viktor."
"Hello," Viktor said, since it seemed to be expected of him.
Nrina went right on. "Your gillies are ready," she told the man. "And a couple of the donors want to go back. When will you leave?"
"Six days," the man said. "How many gillies?"
"Twenty-two, fourteen of them female. I hope I'll see you before you go?"
"I hope so. Nice meeting you—I mean alive, Viktor," Pelly said, and was gone.
"You see how it works? You can call anyone that way. Anyone in our orbits, anyway—it's harder when they're in space or on Newmanhome. Then you have to allow for transmission time, you see."
But Viktor had no one to call. "What did he mean when he said he saw me when I was frozen?" he asked.
"That's Pelly," she explained. "He pilots spaceships. He's the one who brought you and the others back from Newmanhome." Then she said, remembering, "Oh, yes. He's been to Nebo, too. If you're so interested in it, you can ask him about it if we see him."
With the clues Nrina had given him, Viktor managed to work the directory himself. The desk gave more than a "phone number." It told him about Pelly: space captain; resident, generally, of Moon Gautama, but most of the time somewhere between the orbiting habitats and the other planets of the system.
He was poring over the views of Nebo again when Nrina came back, surprised to see him still bent over the desk. "Still at it, Viktor? But I'm tired; I'd like to rest now." And she glanced toward the bed.
"There are a lot of things I still want to know, Nrina," he said obstinately. "About Pelly, for instance. Why is he so fat?"
"So he can get around on Newmanhome, of course," Nrina explained. "He has to have supplements to build up his muscles—"
"Steroids?" Viktor guessed.
Nrina looked pleased. "Well, something like that, yes. And calcium binders so his bones won't break too easily, and all sorts of other things. You've seen how Dekkaduk looks? And he's only been to Newmanhome a few times, collecting specimens—" She looked embarrassed. "Bringing back people for me, I mean."
"Like me."
"Well, yes, of course like you. Anyway, Pelly goes there all the time. It makes him look gross, of course, which is why I would never— Oh, Viktor, I didn't mean it that way. After all, you were born like that."
He let that pass. "And did Pelly really land on Nebo?"
"You mean in person? Certainly not. No one has done that for many years."
"But people have landed there?"
Nrina sighed. "Yes, certainly. Several times."
"But not anymore?"
"Viktor," she said sensibly, "of course not. What would be the point? There's air, but it's foul; the heat is awful. And the gravity crushes you to walk there, Viktor—well, not you, no, but any normal person. It's much stronger than on a Moon. It's almost as bad as Newmanhome, but at least Newmanhome has a decent climate."
"But Nrina! There may be people on Nebo. Some of my own friends landed there—"
"Yes, and never came back. I know. You told me," Nrina said. "Isn't that a good enough reason to stay away?"
"But somebody made those machines. Not human, no."
"There's no one there. We've looked. Just the old machines."
"And have the machines been investigated scientifically?"