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know what we should do, Frit? We should ask Viktor to come and stay with us
for a while. Balit already asked me if we could; he was just thrilled at being
kidnapped by somebody from Old
Earth! I know Balit would love to show him off to his friends 
 Yes, dear, Frit said tolerantly.  But what would Viktor think of that? We
can t expect him to spend his time with a bunch of kids.
Viktor blinked, then said, suddenly hopeful,  I d really like to talk to you
about what s happened to the universe. If I wouldn t be any burden 
 Burden? Forta echoed.  No, certainly you wouldn t be a burden; we d love to
have you come home with us. And  He hesitated, then grinned modestly.   since
you re interested in dancing, shall I dance for you now? Frit s just finished
a new poem in honor of Balit s coming of age it s about growth and
maturity and I ve done the dance accompaniment.
 Please do, Viktor said. He was completely out of it, really. He was wholly
confused
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THE WORLD AT THE END OF TIME
Frederik Pohi
279
about what had been going on and what was to come. But he was game. He didn t,
after all, have many other options.
CHAPTER 25
When Wan-To became aware that a fresh burst of tachyons had struck his
receptors, he did not respond very quickly. (He didn t do anything very
quickly these days.) It took him a while to switch from one mode of activity
to another.
Torpidly, almost groaning in protest, he bestirred himself to see what this
latest batch of tachyons was like. Naturally, his detectors had recorded them
in case he wanted to examine them in detail though that was probably hardly
worth the trouble. Or wouldn t have been, if he had had anything more
worthwhile to do.
Wan-To was not excited about the event. He had lost the habit of excitement,
in this dead universe where there was no light, no X rays, no cosmic rays, no
anything but the distant purring, popping sound of the protons of his own star
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as they gave up the ghost. Even so, it wasn t unusual for batches of stray
radiation of one kind or another to reach him. Infrequent, yes
everything was infrequent these days. But not startling. Such things were
simply the showers of particles that were the ghosts of some immense stellar
catastrophes from long ago from the time when any immense event could still
happen, in this moribund universe.
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
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THE WORLD AT THE END OF TIME
Frederik Pohi
279
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. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]