29

Life brims with ironies—so he had noticed. You fear death, only to discover that immortality is scarier; celebrate inventions, only to learn they are the byproducts of their emissions; smoosh multi-legged arthropods, only to find that one of them is your best friend.

And now he was experiencing yet another cosmic incongruity. Younger than any thanatosphere resident anywhere, he was outracing them all to the fate they dreaded most.

Boredom assailed him, crushed down on him, haunted him ceaselessly. Three days before, it had changed from a nuisance into a burden; two days before, from a burden into a torment.

So that now, on the fifth day, it dogged him through every pacing footstep in the small white room where he had been taken after his appearance at the Blurggit meeting.

How he yearned to look at something apart from the walls, floor, ceiling, bunk and rudimentary bathroom that made up his surroundings. How he anticipated the moment, every few hours, when a small gap opened by the floor and his food and water slid robotically in.

His food consisted of pastrami sandwiches. His thoughts concerning these ran as follows: There were—he was almost sure—no cows in this region of space. There had been, however, pastrami sandwiches on the trimaran, one of which he had not eaten. So the Blurggit must have replicated it.

But if they cared about his diet, why didn’t they care about his sanity? Were they giving him a taste of the Great Tedium? Or had they somehow forgotten him, returned to their dormant state, and left him to pace this room for the next hundred years?

Of course, there was also the chance he had not been abandoned, that he was only being stored. On the first day, this was a certainty. On the second, an expectation. On the third, a hope. And on the fourth, a lingering wish, doused with time.

So that now he was stunned when the room’s portal unsealed and four Blurggit crowded in.

Well, at first he was stunned. Then he was inappropriate—jumping on the four and hugging them, even though they clearly wanted no part in such a greeting and weren’t happy to see him at all.

They held themselves stiffly and refused to say even one word while pushing him out of the room and into the corridors of the thanatosphere.

Then they continued to push him, toward a colossal pair of doors.

He started to panic. For these doors were so high, not to mention broad and massive, that he guessed they were slabs of hull and that his escort was, as the saying went, “showing him the door.” But if so, then why was that escort still with him, as the monsters growled open? And why, beyond them, was he seeing not space, not stars, but . . .

A room of some kind. A vast enclosure filled, top to bottom, with . . .

With vats!

There had to be thousands of them—hundreds of thousands. All neatly arranged. In rows that rose into freestanding walls. Walls that extended into the silent distance.

And within each vat, clearly visible through its transparent skin, hung a dormant Blurggit.

* * *

As the pushing resumed, sending him through the doors and into the vault, there was no denying he’d made another false assumption. Since, obviously, something as large as the thanatosphere did not exist solely for School 357359. Obviously it housed many such schools, each of which took turns using the river, the pool and the meeting room, while the rest stayed here.

Though the question remained, why was he here? And why, now that he was, were his companions jostling him onto a levitating platform?

That lifted them up a cliff face of containers.

And came to a stop halfway up.

Was he supposed to observe something? Trying to, he concentrated on the vats in front of him and noticed that each had two parts. There was a rectangular frame and inside it a transparent ovoid, or pod.

And inside that floated a Blurggit, its arms, legs and tail bobbing to some imperceptible vibration.

It was as if, after hatching from eggs originally, these beings had returned to them so as to hatch again. And yet, because of its frame, each vat resembled equally an egg and a casket.

Apart from that, however, there seemed to be nothing to notice. Certainly nothing that would explain why he was in front of these vats rather than some others. Insofar as he could tell, they were all exactly—

Or maybe they weren’t. Maybe one of them was a bit different.

The empty one now sliding out and opening up.

Hands grabbed him—stubby three-fingered hands that were, even so, quite capable of seizing and lifting. Vainly he tried to resist—equally vainly to argue against being dragged through a century with School 357359. It would be useless, he cried, to set him to his challenge then. By then, humanity would be gone, the 276 other species likewise. But it did no good. He was in the vat. They were shutting the top.

What could he do? Flail? Yell? Pound? He tried all three, then floated, having lost the use of his limbs. His brain was shutting down too, though for a time it spilled out random thoughts, and even answered a nagging question.

Namely, why Parties That Never Ended were called by that name.

To outsiders, of course, it made no sense. But to the partyers, he now realized, time spent unconscious in a vat flashed by like no time at all.

So, for them, each emergence bumped into the next, and all .....linked...............together....................................into...............

.....................one.................................................................................

...........................................................................ongoing...............