"Oh," Balit said, looking faintly repelled, "it isn't born yet. I mean, honestly, Markety and Grimler certainly wanted to go back to the old ways, up to a point, but not for Grimler to have to bear it. No, the reason Grimler went back was so dear Nrina could remove it and check it for defects and so on, and then let it come to term properly; it'll be a season or two yet before they have it."
The boy turned off the picture. "Aren't you pleased about all this, Viktor?" he asked anxiously.
Viktor thought about it. "Of course I am," he said, when he was sure he meant it. "Only—"
"Only what, Viktor? Is something wrong?" And when Viktor didn't answer Balit sighed. "Never mind. But, honestly, I think things are going to go a lot better now."
As a matter of fact, they did. Not well enough to lift Viktor out of the shadowy depression that hung over him; well enough so that there was, actually, progress in the things that mattered to the community.
As soon as the ground was dry enough Viktor and Jeren found a spot that was level enough to suit Viktor's strictures. It was protected by a rise just above it, which, he thought, would divert any future floods; and the gillies began grading it for planting at once.
Viktor was on the scene every day, prowling around worriedly when he wasn't manning a shovel himself, trying to remember what things had been like. It was Viktor who decided they needed to heap up a berm of earth around the farm plot, to retain rainfall when it came, but needed also to gate it, so that if the rains were too heavy they could drain standing water off the plots. It was Viktor who demanded a catalogue of every decipherable label of stored genetic materials in the freezer, poring over them to see if he could figure out which might be plants they could use and which would turn out to be merely some peculiar subspecies of cactus or jungle creeper or moss that someone once had thought might sometime be useful, or at least desirable, somewhere—under some conditions—but could do nothing to feed them now.
Viktor kept himself busy. Harshly he told himself that the absence of hope was no reason at all to stop trying. Funnily, it seemed to work.
Whenever there was some good development, whenever Viktor found himself tempted to optimism again, he tried his best to quell the feeling. He didn't want hope. He didn't want the disappointment that hope would bring. He was often the only dour face in an assembly of smiles. Jeren, Balit, Korelto—even Manett and Markety, in their own very different ways—they were all charged up with the excitement of bringing a whole planet to a new birth. Viktor tried not to be. After all, he knew exactly what that was like, for he had lived through it once already, in those first frontier days, thousands of Newmanhome years before.
"But don't you see, Viktor?" Balit said reasonably, in a break between work sessions. "That just means that you, of all people, ought to know that everything we're hoping for can really happen!"
Viktor didn't answer. There was no point in telling the boy the other things he knew—for example, how great the differences were. When the ships from Earth had landed on Newmanhome the colonists they carried had been chosen people. They had been trained and equipped for the job. They had all of Earth's technological knowledge base transported with them to fall back on. More than that, they were all young, and full of the juices of hope—and, most important of all, the planet they conquered wasn't a corpse. It was already a fully living world with an existing biota of its own.
And none of that was true now.
So Viktor refused to hope. When Manett, glowing, told him that Dekkaduk was going to bring them a whole revivification system for the remaining corpsicles in the deep freeze, Viktor's congratulations were perfunctory. When Markety bashfully begged permission to name his forthcoming son after him, Viktor refused to be touched. When Balit announced with delight that a dozen schools had clubbed together to launch a new space telescope—maybe even to settle the question of whether Gold's planets had any possible inhabitants—Viktor's heart trembled for a moment, but he quelled it.
But when Balit came shouting his name—
When Balit came shouting for Viktor, what he was saying was, "Come quickly! She's called! It's Nrina!" And when Viktor came stumbling out of his workroom, rubbing his eyes, it wasn't just Balit. Markety was there, face transfigured with excitement, calling, "Go to the communications shack right away, Viktor!" And Jeren was there, blinking back tears, babbling, "I wasn't sure, Viktor! I thought it was her, but I didn't want to say." And Balit was saying, "And there was freezer damage, so Nrina wouldn't let us tell you until she was sure it would be all right—"
But then, when Viktor got to the communications shack, finally daring to hope, his heart in his throat, the face that looked out at him from the screen was the well-remembered one, and what she was saying was, "Hello, dear Viktor. They didn't like me any better than they liked you, you see, so they popped me in the freezer, too … and, oh, Viktor, I'm all right now, and I'm coming home."
CHAPTER 29
The eons of stagnation were over for Wan-To. He was not merely busy—busier than he had been for at least some sextillions of sextillions of years—he was in an absolute fury of action.
It might not have seemed that way to a normal Earth human being—if there had been such a person to observe him, if observation of Wan-To had been possible in the first place. Wan-To had no way to move fast anymore. A single thought took him weeks. To make a plan required centuries. If the imaginary Earth human could have known what Wan-To was up against, the spectacle might have reminded him of a some Earthly watchmaker, feverishly trying to assemble the most delicate of clockwork in a desperate rush to save his life—and trying to do it, moreover, while he was submerged neck-deep in quicksand. For that was how it was for Wan-To. At every step he was impeded by the thick, suffocating medium of the dead star he inhabited. Actually Wan-To was worse off than even the drowning watchmaker, because at least the watchmaker retained his memories, while the particular skills Wan-To needed now were no longer part of his active consciousness. They had been "put away" long before. That was one part of the price Wan-To had had to pay for continued existence in the feeble energies left to him in the dying star, for to save energy he had long ago had to download immense portions of himself and his memories into a kind of standby storage. So first of all he had to find and reawaken those parts; it was as though the watchmaker had to find his instruction manual before he could fit the first gear to its bearing.
It was not enough for Wan-To to make the decision to cut himself loose from the decay of his dying star and go off to revel in the hot energies of those distant, invisible suns. Making the decision was quick enough. The hunt for the "how" of doing it was much longer.
Wan-To knew the starting point, of course. He would have to reconstitute himself as a pattern of tachyons. Fast tachyons, which fortunately were low-energy ones. It was a pity, he reflected, that he couldn't use the extreme minimum-energy tachyons that were the fastest of all. Unfortunately, that was impossible; the minimum-energy tachyons couldn't carry enough information to encompass all of Wan-To. No matter. The ones that were available would do the job. He would copy himself onto a tachyon stream and make his way to this unexpected oasis of life among the desolation.
There wouldn't be much difficulty in finding his way to the little cluster of surviving stars. The sensors had not only transcribed the message; they had very accurately recorded the direction it came from. All he had to do was backtrack. Once he got anywhere near that little cluster of living stars they would be easy enough to find, for they would be bright beacons of light, the only light in a dark and entropied-out universe—beacons of hope for Wan-To.