Free The World at the End of Time by Frederik Pohl

that slow, gross, clumsy stuff—matter.
    It was easy enough for Wan-To to make things out of ordinary matter, but he mistrusted the stuff. It was completely foreign to his everyday life. He used it only when there was no alternative. And yet, when he thought over his options, it began to look as though this were one of the times when no good alternative could be found.
    Although his mind—you wouldn’t really want to say his “brain,” because there wasn’t much of Wan-To but brain—although his mind, that is to say, was very widely dispersed about the fabric of the star he lived in, the messenger neutrinos flashed their signals about as fast as any animal dendrites in a human skull. It didn’t take him long to decide that, this time, the employment of a certain amount of matter was his best strategy.
    What helped him to that decision quickly was a sudden urgent signal—his “senses” perceived it as something between the ringing of a loud alarm bell and the sting of a wasp—from one of his ERP pairs.
    The signal told him that another nearby star had just gone flaring to its death.
    That meant that his siblings were still shooting at him with their probing fire. Sooner or later those random shots would find him . . . and so it was time for Wan-To to act. It was war!
    It is civilians who get the worst part of wars. Wan-to can’t be blamed for what happened to the innocent bystanders in this one, though, since he had no idea there were any.
     
     
     
    CHAPTER 4
     
     
    The innocent bystander named Pal Sorricaine was now (biologically) in his sixties. That was a lot, compared to his wife’s biological thirty-eight, but he still had youth enough to do his duty by the colony. Accordingly, when Viktor was (again biologically, anyway) fourteen, his mother provided him with a sibling.
    Viktor had some trouble welcoming the thing. It was female. It was also tiny and noisy at all hours of the day and night; and, in Viktor’s view, it was very ugly.
    For reasons Viktor could not understand, the wretched look of the thing didn’t seem to worry his mother. It didn’t put his father off it, either. They held it and fondled it and fed it, just as though it were beautiful. They didn’t even appear to mind the bad smells it made when it fouled itself, as it did often.
    Its name was Edwina. “Don’t call her an ‘it,’ either,” Viktor’s mother commanded. “Call her by her name.”
    “I don’t like her name. Why couldn’t you call her Marie or something?”
    “Because we picked Edwina. Why are you so crazy about the name Marie?”
    “I’m not crazy about it. I just like it.”
    Amelia Sorricaine-Memel gave her son a thoughtful look but decided not to press the matter. “Marie’s a pretty name,” she conceded, “but it isn’t hers.”
    “Ed- wee- na,”Viktor sneered.
    His mother grinned at him. She rumpled his hair fondly and offered a compromise. “You can call her Weeny if you want to, because she is kind of weeny. Now let me show you how to change her diaper.”
    Viktor gazed at his mother with teenage horror and despair. “Oh, God,” he moaned. “As if I didn’t have enough to do already!”
     
    In fact he had plenty to do. Everybody did. Building a new colony wasn’t just a challenge. It was work, and every colonist had to face the facts of frontier life.
    The first fact of Viktor’s new life had been the dwelling he and his parents were given to live in. It was a long, long way from the beach house in Malibu. It was bigger than the cubicle on Mayflower, but that was all you could say for it. It wasn’t even a cubicle. It was a tent. More accurately it was three tents run together, each made out of several plies of the light-sail/parachute material, and all they had to furnish it with was a couple of beds—pallets, really; they had no springs—and some metal cupboards brought down from Mayflower. (Even those they would have to give up, they were warned, as soon as wood equivalents could