But this time … This time …
This time it was the most exciting thing that had happened to Wan-To in a very long time indeed. Although he could hardly believe it at first, he was soon certain that this was no random burst of particles. It was a message.
It was a wonder that Wan-To could read the message at all. The coded pulses were of the very lowest-energy tachyons—therefore almost the fastest of all—and yet they had taken a long time to reach him (so vast had the always-expanding universe become, in ten to the fortieth years). They had to have been transmitted with considerable power, too. Wan-To knew this to be true not merely because of the distance they had traveled, but because he observed that the tachyons had not been transmitted in a tight, economical beam. They had been broadcast.
Broadcast! So the sender hadn't known where he was! But they were definitely meant for Wan-To—the opening pulses said so.
That fact was as much of a thrill to Wan-To as the first ecstatic sight of a sail on the horizon to any shipwrecked mariner. Impossible though it was to believe, even now, in this terminal coma of the universe, there was someone somewhere who had something to say to him.
But what was this message?
To find that out was a labor requiring much energy out of Wan-To's slender store, as well as a great deal of long, hard concentration. The message had come in very fast. The whole burst had taken only a matter of seconds, and it had been many ages since Wan-To had been able to operate at that speed. He had almost forgotten what it was like to do things at the speed of nuclear reactions. In order to interpret the message at all, he had to slow it down by orders of magnitude and ponder its meaning bit by bit.
Then, too, although the message had been stored automatically for examination at his own pace, the poverty of Wan-To's resources meant that even the basic storage was sketchy. Some sections of the message seemed to be missing. Some of the content was doubtful. Wan-To found it necessary to reactivate large parts of his "mind" from inactive storage to help in puzzling out what the message meant, and that in itself was a considerable drain on his meager strength.
But, in the final analysis, he didn't need to read it all. The signature alone was enough to tell him nearly all there was to know.
It had come from that long-forgotten idiot, the one he had charged with sending a little flock of stars on a wild-goose chase—Matter-Copy Number Five.
Five's stars were still alive.
Those long-ago stars had been careening through space so fast that time dilation had frozen them nearly immobile. They had not aged. They hadn't rotted into decay with the rest of the universe.
In a universe where everything else had decayed into stagnant death, they were still young … and bursting with power!
CHAPTER 26
Moon Mary was a natural moon—well, a formerly natural moon, now terraformed and made lovely. Along with the myriad habitats it orbited around the brown dwarf, Nergal. "Forta needs a moon's gravity," Frit explained on the way. "Dancers have to have a lot of muscles, you know! If he can dance here he can dance anywhere—well, not on a planet, or anything like that, but on any of the other moons or the habitats. The exercise will be good for your leg while it heals, too."
"Besides, we've got a lot of data in our store," Forta put in hospitably. "I'm sure you'll find all sorts of interesting things in it."
And Balit said with excitement, "Look over there, Viktor! That's Moon Mary. Watch how we come in—oh, Viktor, I do love being in space!"
Viktor did watch. It was worth watching. They didn't simply "land." Moon Mary was not left wide open to the universe; it couldn't be, since it didn't have enough gravitation to hold a breathable air. To land, their little ship had to slide through an opening that appeared magically in the atmosphere-holding, radiation-shielding forcefield that kept the people who lived on Moon Mary safe.
As soon as Viktor stood up his bad leg told him he wasn't in habitat minigravity any more. It hurt when he put his weight on it. He winced.
But this was more like it! It wasn't a habitat, it was practically a planet. The buildings stuck up on the surface, as they ought to; and there was a real sky.
Actually the sky wasn't real at all, for if you had subtracted the force shield what remained would have been terrible. The shield diminished the intensity of the ruddy glow of Nergal. It might also, Viktor thought critically at first, have diminished their capacity to extract "solar" energy from Nergal, but it turned out they didn't need that. Moon Mary was packed with geothermal energy, easily extracted through steam wells. The satellite was so close to its primary, immense Nergal, that it was under constant gravitational flexing and stress from Nergal's great mass, and so its interior was constantly being heated by friction, compression, and strain.
Of course, experience had taught Viktor that there was a black lining to every silver cloud. He found what the bad side of Moon Mary's geothermal activity was very quickly. They were hardly out of the spaceport when Viktor felt the ground shudder beneath him. Balit giggled. Forta smiled tolerantly, and Frit explained, "Just an earthquake, Viktor. We have them all the time."
"But we're used to them," Forta added. "Truly, there's no danger."
When Viktor saw that his hosts lived in a pencil-thin tower thirty stories high, he swallowed. They took a glass-walled elevator, which slid rapidly up the outside of the tower, letting him see just how far they were soaring above the hard ground. In the elevator he swallowed again, and was glad when it slowed gently to their floor and Forta politely opened the door for him. Once inside their apartment everything was reassuringly stable. They seemed to have the whole floor to themselves. All the rooms except the sanitary facilities were outside rooms—which meant they had curved walls and large windows looking out on the parklike gardens outside, with red Nergal hanging huge over half the sky. He allowed them to point out the room that would be his, and he kept Forta and Balit company as they pulled meals out of their freezer and set the table—until another sudden shiver of the whole structure made him grab for the back of a chair.
"You'll get used to it, Viktor," Balit said, trying not to show amusement. "We're quite safe here."
"All our buildings are designed for this sort of thing," Forta added.
It took a while for Viktor to believe it, but it was true enough. Of course, he knew that the problem of earthquakes had even been solved back on Earth itself, in the pre-Toyota Japan of the nineteenth century and earlier. Since earthquakes could knock buildings down, you didn't want any building that might fall on you and crush you to death. Those early Japanese found a satisfactory solution for their time: Build everything out of the flimsiest material you can find—and don't smoke in bed.
But when the twentieth century came along those lessons didn't apply anymore. Technological man had possessions. A home needed to be a place to store the possessions, as well as a place to sleep and eat. Preindustrial Japan had handled that by having as few possessions as possible, and those light and sturdy. Their grandchildren, however, lived in Toyota-, Sony-, Nissan-Japan, and they wanted more. They wanted to own a large number of tangible things, even if they were large and heavy. They wanted homes that could house their washer-dryers, stereos, Jacuzzis, king-sized beds with innerspring mattresses, radar ovens, food processors, and VCRs. They wanted flush toilets. They wanted built-in garages and electronic stoves.