Read Online The World at the End of Time by Frederik Pohl - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Frederik Pohl
Tags: Fiction, General, Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction - General, Fiction - Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Non-Classifiable
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house. He wanted to stay there—if he could.
Thinking along these lines, Wan-To restlessly extended himself into the convection zone of his star. It was like a worried human getting up and pacing about his room. It also cheered him up, because that was one of his best places for play. There was pure pleasure in twisting the convective cells so that rising and falling ones hit each other head-on. Besides being fun in itself, like playing with Silly Putty or stroking a textured worry stick, he knew that it made pretty patterns on the surface of his star. He could stop heat transport in an area a thousand miles across that way, and so that part of the star’s surface would be what human astronomers called a “sunspot.” In that place a little patch of the star would cool a little. Not much. Only by a couple of thousand Kelvin, say, but enough so that to humans those areas looked dark by comparison. They weren’t really dark, of course. They were infinitely brighter than any human illumination, but everything around them was very much brighter even than that.
Abruptly Wan-To halted his play as a fresh fright struck him. The sunspots! If he played about in the convection zone, the sunspots he made would be visible! The patterns would not be the same as natural ones, and anyone looking at his star could see that someone was doing that to its surface!
Hurriedly, worriedly, Wan-To released his magnetic grasp on the pockets of hot gas. Delicately, fearfully, he extricated himself from the convection zone entirely. He could only hope that none of his competitors had happened to have a close-in optical surveillance of his star just then, and enough intelligence to figure out what he had revealed.
Then, when (a few dozen years later) enough time had passed for even a fairly distant colleague to have seen it and reacted to it if he were going to—and nothing dire had happened—Wan-To began to relax.
It was true that he couldn’t play in the convection zone anymore. That was a pity. It had been fun. But, on the other hand, a very satisfying thought had occurred to him:
Perhaps some of his competitors still did.
Wan-To then set certain observational procedures into operation, with particular emphasis on the optical frequency human beings called the color blue. While he was waiting for results, he paused to think seriously for a bit.
It had been a long time since Wan-To had seen his “parent”—the one who, like Wan-To, had created some copies of himself for company and, like Wan-To, then regretted it very much. Wan-To couldn’t even see the galaxy where he had been born anymore. It was on the far side of the core of the galaxy humans lived in, the one they called the Milky Way, and observation through the masses of gas clouds and dust and stars and other highly obscurant things was almost as difficult for Wan-To as it was for human beings. Earthly astronomers knew it was there, though. They had observed it, though sparsely, by radio, and deduced it, though uncertainly, by its effects on the motions of the bodies near it; they called it “Maffei 2.” Wan-To didn’t much want to see it. He had a pretty good idea of what it would look like if he did, for when he left it it was getting too hot to live in (in the vernacular, not the cosmological, sense), because the squabbling among his various relations had erupted into veritable cascades of stars wrenched open, spilling their guts into space.
He saw with regret that the same thing was beginning to happen here.
The fact that he didn’t want to see Maffei 2 didn’t mean he was incurious about the rest of the universe. Indeed, he was intensely curious; in fact, he had plans for a lot of it. He wanted to know what was happening, and he wanted to make sure that things happened his way.
For the two tasks of satisfying his curiosity and making things happen, Wan-To had four major tools at his disposal. In increasing order of importance, they were matter, photons,
Thinking along these lines, Wan-To restlessly extended himself into the convection zone of his star. It was like a worried human getting up and pacing about his room. It also cheered him up, because that was one of his best places for play. There was pure pleasure in twisting the convective cells so that rising and falling ones hit each other head-on. Besides being fun in itself, like playing with Silly Putty or stroking a textured worry stick, he knew that it made pretty patterns on the surface of his star. He could stop heat transport in an area a thousand miles across that way, and so that part of the star’s surface would be what human astronomers called a “sunspot.” In that place a little patch of the star would cool a little. Not much. Only by a couple of thousand Kelvin, say, but enough so that to humans those areas looked dark by comparison. They weren’t really dark, of course. They were infinitely brighter than any human illumination, but everything around them was very much brighter even than that.
Abruptly Wan-To halted his play as a fresh fright struck him. The sunspots! If he played about in the convection zone, the sunspots he made would be visible! The patterns would not be the same as natural ones, and anyone looking at his star could see that someone was doing that to its surface!
Hurriedly, worriedly, Wan-To released his magnetic grasp on the pockets of hot gas. Delicately, fearfully, he extricated himself from the convection zone entirely. He could only hope that none of his competitors had happened to have a close-in optical surveillance of his star just then, and enough intelligence to figure out what he had revealed.
Then, when (a few dozen years later) enough time had passed for even a fairly distant colleague to have seen it and reacted to it if he were going to—and nothing dire had happened—Wan-To began to relax.
It was true that he couldn’t play in the convection zone anymore. That was a pity. It had been fun. But, on the other hand, a very satisfying thought had occurred to him:
Perhaps some of his competitors still did.
Wan-To then set certain observational procedures into operation, with particular emphasis on the optical frequency human beings called the color blue. While he was waiting for results, he paused to think seriously for a bit.
It had been a long time since Wan-To had seen his “parent”—the one who, like Wan-To, had created some copies of himself for company and, like Wan-To, then regretted it very much. Wan-To couldn’t even see the galaxy where he had been born anymore. It was on the far side of the core of the galaxy humans lived in, the one they called the Milky Way, and observation through the masses of gas clouds and dust and stars and other highly obscurant things was almost as difficult for Wan-To as it was for human beings. Earthly astronomers knew it was there, though. They had observed it, though sparsely, by radio, and deduced it, though uncertainly, by its effects on the motions of the bodies near it; they called it “Maffei 2.” Wan-To didn’t much want to see it. He had a pretty good idea of what it would look like if he did, for when he left it it was getting too hot to live in (in the vernacular, not the cosmological, sense), because the squabbling among his various relations had erupted into veritable cascades of stars wrenched open, spilling their guts into space.
He saw with regret that the same thing was beginning to happen here.
The fact that he didn’t want to see Maffei 2 didn’t mean he was incurious about the rest of the universe. Indeed, he was intensely curious; in fact, he had plans for a lot of it. He wanted to know what was happening, and he wanted to make sure that things happened his way.
For the two tasks of satisfying his curiosity and making things happen, Wan-To had four major tools at his disposal. In increasing order of importance, they were matter, photons,
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