The World at the End of Time by Frederick Pohl

Author:Frederick Pohl [Pohl, Frederick]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-05-01T18:21:21+00:00

Viktor slept badly that night, in his barracks with forty other unattached male Greats sniffling and snoring and muttering in their sleep all around him, and the next day at his loathsome job was no better than the last.

Even the children seemed to have second thoughts about their undisciplined behavior of the day before. When Viktor asked Mooni-bet if she had seen Reesa the girl hung her head. She looked worriedly to see if anyone was listening, then whispered,

“We are on overload now, Viktor. She has been moved to the Peeps.”

And then, when Viktor tried to ask Vandot, the boy from the People’s Republic snapped at him. “We are here to work, not to chatter like religious fanatics.”

“Watch your mouth!” the girl from the Reformers snarled at him.

“I only say what is true,” Vandot muttered. “In any case, I know nothing of your wife, Viktor. It is not my business. Nor is it yours; because your duty is to pay us all back for reviving you from—” He hesitated, not willing to say the word. “For reviving you,” he finished. “Now get to work.”

Viktor didn’t answer that. It wasn’t because he had been ordered by a child. He hadn’t quite figured out what an answer to that sort of remark ought to be. It was true that he was alive. That is to say, his heart pumped, his eyes saw, his bowels moved. Even his genital organs were still in working condition, at least he thought they would be if he were allowed to be with Reesa long enough, in enough privacy, to test them out.

But was that really a “life”?

It was certainly a kind of life, but Viktor could not believe that it was the only life he was ever going to have again. It was not at all his life.

His life had been on a very different Newmanhome, with very different friends, family, and job. Especially job. Viktor Sorricaine’s job had never been simply the thing he put hours into in order to keep himself fed. Viktor’s job had been his profession. His position. His skills. It was the thing he could organize his life around, the thing he was. And Viktor Sorricaine could not recognize himself as a shoveler of human dung. He was a trained pilot! More than that, he was at least an amateur, thanks to his father’s endless lecturing, of such things as astrophysics—the very person these people needed to investigate this eerie ghost in the sky that they called the universe. That was what Viktor Sorricaine was . . .

From which it followed that this chilly, weary dung shoveler wasn’t the real Viktor Sorricaine, and this life was not his.

And when Mooni-bet came near him again in her gathering of dung beetles, he spoke to her, not keeping his voice down. “I do have a complaint, Mooni-bet,” he told her. “I’m being wasted here. I have skills that ought to be used.”

The girl looked at him desperately. “Please,” she whispered, looking over her shoulder.

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