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body it
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THE WORLD AT THE END OF TIME
Frederik Pohi
279
made Viktor think of a snake slowly writhing in its coils. What difference
does that make?
It make a great difference to me!
She thought that over, looking at him carefully. Then she smiled. But it
makes none to me, Viktor, she pointed out. And she lay back on the bed, still
smiling at him, but now with a wholly different expression.
He felt himself responding. Instinctively his hand went to the brand on his
forehead.
Oh, she said, reaching out with her own hand to take his, that is all
right, Viktor. I have fixed myself so that I cannot be fertilized. But I do
want to know, I want very much to know, how you people from Old Earth made
love.
CHAPTER 21
By now the universe was getting pretty old, and Wan-To was very nearly the age
of the universe. There was a redeeming feature to that, though, because the
older Wan-To got, the longer it took for him to become older still.
That wasn t because of the relativistic effect of time dilation. It had
nothing to do with the velocity of his motion. It was only a matter of energy
supply. Wan-To was living on a starvation diet, and it had made him very slow
.
When Wan-To was young or middle-aged or even quite elderly, say when he had
reached the age of a few hundred billion years he aged quickly because he did
everything quickly. Wan-To was a plasma person. It was the flashing pace of
nuclear fusion that drove his metabolism; changes of state happened at the
speed of the creation and destruction of virtual particles, winking in and out
of existence as vacuum fluctuations.
That was how it had been, once.
It wasn t that way anymore. Wan-To was almost blind now. He could not spare
the energy for all those external eyes but it didn t much matter, because what
was there to see in this sparse, dark, cold universe? He did keep a tiny ear
open for the sounds of possible communication though even possible, he knew,
was stretching it. Who was there to communicate?
Wan-To s physical condition in itself was awful. (How awful just to have a
physical
condition at all!) He was trapped. He was embedded in a nearly solid mass,
like a man buried in sand up to his neck. It wasn t impossible for him to
move. It was only very difficult, and painful, and agonizingly slow.
He could have left. He could have cut himself loose from this corpse of a star
to seek another. But there weren t any others better than the one he was in.
The wonderful quick, bright phase of his existence was so far in the past that
Wan-To hardly remembered it. (His memory, too, was a function of how much
energy he had to spare for it. A lot of memory was, so to speak, shut down on
standby, one might say, to hoard what powers he had available.) The kind of
energies to support that sort of life had disappeared. There wasn t any
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nuclear fusion anymore, not anywhere in the universe as far as Wan-To could
see or imagine. Every fusible element had long since fused, every fissionable
one had fissed.
And so the stars had gone out.
All of them. Every last one. Stars were history; and history, now, had run for
so many
278
THE WORLD AT THE END OF TIME
Frederik Pohi
279
endless eons that even Wan-To no longer kept count of the time. But time
passed anyway, and now the universe had lived for more than ten thousand
million million million million million million years.
That was a number without much meaning even to Wan-To. A human would have
written it as the number 1 followed by forty zeroes 10,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. He wouldn t have understood it, either,
but he could have juggled numbers around to give an idea of what it meant. He
might, for instance, have said that if the entire age of the universe at the
time when the human race first started thinking seriously about it everything
from the Big Bang to, say, the twentieth century on Earth had been only one
second, then on the same scale its present age was coming right up on
something like fifty thousand billion billion years . . .
And, of course, that number wouldn t have meant much, either, except that
anyone could see it was a very, very long time.
If Wan-To had been of a philosophical bent, he might have said to himself
something consoling, like, At least I ve had a good run for my money. Or, You
only live once but if you do it right, once is enough.
Wan-To was not that philosophical. He was not at all willing to go gladly into
that long, dark night. He would have resisted it with all his force . . . if
he had known a way to do it . . . and if he had had enough force to be worth
talking about to resist it with.
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