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they want, and then they mix them up with other strains to get the kind of
genes they need for for whatever they need them for, anyway. That s not my
department. Nrina s told me all about that, but I guess I didn t listen.
Anyway, that, he said, preening himself,  is one way we have an advantage
over the women.
We guys can produce a million sperms a day. Women can maybe do one ovum a
month, if they re lucky, so if they want genes from a female they just do it
the hard way, from tissue samples. He peered in a friendly manner at Viktor,
who wasn t smiling.  What s the matter, you afraid you can t make your million
a day?
Viktor shook himself.  I no. Nothing, he said.
But it hadn t really been nothing. It had been a quick flare-up of unexpected
and quite unjustified hope, quickly blighted. No. There was no point in hoping
along those lines.
Because that one little corner of his mind had suddenly come clear, like the
desk that had showed him Nergal, and he had remembered Reesa.
For the next few days of Viktor s new life he thought of Reesa almost
constantly while he was falling asleep, while he was just coming awake, while
he was donating his sperm samples, while he was eating, while he was trying to
learn the new language all the time. But he could think of her only as you
think of the dead. Of the long dead, at that.
278
THE WORLD AT THE END OF TIME
Frederik Pohi
279
He wondered, in an abstracted sort of way, if Reesa had had a happy life after
his freezing. He wondered if she had missed him, or if she had reconciled
herself sooner or later to his loss and, say, married someone else. Someone
like Mirian, perhaps. She would have been a prized sort of wife for a Great
Catholic, Viktor thought, because she was quite capable of being sexually
active but no longer of complicating his life by becoming pregnant.
He told himself that he hoped she had married. He hoped she d been happy as
happy as anyone could be in that world, anyway.
He didn t go so far as to hope she hadn t missed him. And he did miss her,
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certainly he did. But it was a sort of remote, somehow well-aged pain. As soon
as he had heard the present date he had almost felt the quick, irrevocable
shifting of gears in his mind. That history was ancient.
No one could mourn for four thousand years.
The curtain had come down on the first two acts of his life. He was just
beginning Act
Three.
It might not be the life he wanted . . . but it was the only life he had left.
Viktor forced himself to plunge into studying the language of these frail,
remarkable people who had brought him back to life. It wasn t easy. The fog
around his brain made everything difficult, but there was help for him.
The biggest help was the desks.
They were actually like his old teaching machines, he saw. They provided him
with hours on end of conversation with the image of a friendly, helpful, wise
teacher talking to him from the desk.
The teacher was certainly not real.
Viktor knew that; it was a computer-generated, three-
dimensional picture, and the fact that it looked like an amiable (if
exceptionally skinny) young man did not deceive him. It was real enough to
correct his accent, straighten out his grammar, and provide him with the
translation of every word and thought he needed.
The others who had been revived with him were, of course, busy at the same
thing. Only
Jeren, the gentle giant, was finding the process as hard as Viktor. Jeren was
not a bright man. It wasn t freezer burn in Jeren s case. The man had just
been born with a few slow linkages in his brain. Even with the cobwebs that
cluttered his own mind, Viktor was far quicker than Jeren.
All the same, it was Jeren who became Viktor s friend.
The little weasel Mescro was too busy trying to make a friend of Manett to pay
attention to anyone who had no power, and he had attached Korelto to himself.
It was Jeren who helped
Viktor when he stumbled, Jeren who brought Viktor food in those first days
when Viktor was too weak, or too dazed, to get up for it. He stood chastely by
Viktor, eyes averted, while Viktor performed the rite of masturbation, and
helped him back to bed when he was done. And he sat by
Viktor, talking when Viktor felt like talking, silently watching while Viktor
dozed.
Jeren was a big man taller than Viktor, far taller than most of the people of
Newmanhome s Ice Age. He was solid, too, a hulking bear of a man, with a voice
that was deep but so soft it was almost inaudible. He seemed to try to stay
out of everyone s way. When he spoke to anyone he averted his eyes, so as not
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