He didn’t dignify the remark with an answer. He said firmly. “After Argosy gets here there’ll be spaceships again. Have to be. We’re not going to be stuck on one lousy little planet all our lives.”

“And we’ll be just about the right age,” Reesa agreed. “Where do you want to go? First, I mean?”

Then, of course, there was an argument. Neither of them wanted to bother with Ishtar: it was big—Jupiter-sized—but that meant no one was ever going to land on it, because it didn’t have any more of a surface to land on than Jupiter did. It didn’t even have Jupiter’s interesting retinue of moons, because gravitational interaction with giant Nergal seemed to have stolen them all away. Nergal was Viktor’s choice. “All those moons!” he said. “Some of them have to be decent, and anyway it’s a brown dwarf—nobody’s ever got near a brown dwarf before!”

“That’s what Tiss Khadek says,” Reesa said.

“Well, she’s right.”

“She’s always right,” Reesa told him, “or anyway says she is. She thinks she owns this place.”

Viktor snickered. The Iraqi astronomer from Ark, Ibtissam Khadek, was the granddaughter of the man who had run the first robot probe and named the planets after his “ancestral” Babylonian gods, as was his privilege. “The fact that you don’t like her doesn’t mean she’s wrong,” he told Reesa. “Where would you go?”

“I want to go to Nebo,” Reesa declared.

“Nebo!”

“Captain Rodericks thinks so, too. He says we ought to establish an outpost somewhere, and that’s the best place.”

Viktor said pityingly, “There are moons bigger than Nebo!”

But she was insistent. Nebo was the nearest planet to their new sun, the size of Mars but hotter than Mercury. “It’s got an atmosphere, Vik. Why does it have an atmosphere?”

“Who cares?” Viktor asked.

“I care. I want to know why . . .”   And the argument continued until the Stockbridge boys were back and they were nearly home. It was a fun argument. It made it seem as though they really were going to have the chance to get back into space, though both knew that the day when that would be possible would not come until they were a great deal older.

Funnily, one of the worst spats between Viktor and Reesa McGann came over the question of getting old—or, anyway, over just how old they were.

It started when they were sprawled on the spiky Newmanhome grass in the schoolyard, panting, just after finishing the morning’s calisthenics. What they all usually wore when they exercised was the plain white jockey shorts that were standard issue for all colonists as underwear; what was annoying Viktor that particular day was that Reesa had done ten more pushups than he had, and so he looked at what she was wearing and sneered, “Why are you wearing a top?”

She looked at him with understanding contempt. “I’m a girl,” she informed him.

She wasn’t the only female teenager to wear a shirt, but there weren’t many others. “You’ve got nothing to hide,” he pointed out.

She said, adult to child, “That’s not why I wear the top. I wear the top to show what I will have. Anyway,” she added, “I’m older than you are.”

It began with that. The argument went on for days. They had both been six when her ship, the New Ark, moved out of orbit. When Viktor’s Mayflower landed, they were both twelve—so Viktor insisted, because they had each spent the same length of time frozen, just about, and the same number of Earth years growing.

But, Reesa said with that superior old-timer sneer that made Viktor’s blood boil, he hadn’t calculated right. Mayflower was a tad faster than Ark, being a generation later, so she had spent less time in the freezer and more growing up.

“You’ve got that backwards!” Viktor howled in triumph. “You spent more time frozen!”

She scowled, flushed, and quickly backtracked. “But that’s not the important point,” she insisted. She had spent six more Earth years than he had on Newmanhome. That made her older, because Newmanhome had twice as many years, just about, as Earth in any given period of time.

Viktor strongly protested her arithmetic.

It was true, of course, that the Earth calendar didn’t match up well against the realities of Newmanhome. Newmanhome’s day, sunrise to sunrise, was about twenty-two and a half Earth hours; and it swung around its sun so fast that it only had about a hundred and ninety-eight of those days in each year. So a Newmanhome “year” was not much more than half an Earth (or “real”) year.

The discrepancy played hell with birthdays. That wasn’t much of a practical problem, but it made a major annoyance when you got into arguments like the one with Reesa McGann. Viktor’s birthdays were terminally confused, anyway. Everybody’s were, for how could you allow for a couple of stretches of freeze time? Of course, you could count back to time of birth. At any time the teaching machines could easily tell you the exact Earth day, year, and minute it was right then in Laguna Beach, California, U.S.A., Earth (or, in Viktor’s case, should they reckon from Warsaw, nearly a dozen time zones away?). But Reesa flatly refused to consider Earth standards applicable.

Viktor pondered over the question at school. It wasn’t just birthdays. Even worse was the question of holidays. Where in the Newmanhome calendar did you put Christmas, Ramadan, or Rosh Hashanah? But as it was birthdays that established the pecking order between him and Reesa, Viktor took time to do a lot of arithmetic on the teaching machine, and then he presented his teacher with a plan to recalculate everybody’s age in Home years.

Mr. Feldhouse squashed it firmly. “You haven’t allowed for relativistic effects,” he pointed out. “A lot of the transit time for both ships was at forty percent of the speed of light or better; you have to figure that in.”

So grimly Viktor put in some more of his precious few hours of spare time with the teaching machines . . . which Mr. Feldhouse approved, grinning, because it was wonderful math practice for the whole class.

 

Slowly, painfully slowly, the reinforced colony digested its new additions and began to incorporate the cargoes Mayflower had brought into their lives. Steel from the ship wouldn’t last them forever. Ore bodies existed, taconite mostly, but the surface outbreaks were limited and there wasn’t the manpower to dig deep mines.

That was where Marie-Claude Stockbridge’s machines came in, and that was when Viktor got closer to his life’s ambition—though, of course, Reesa spoiled it for him.

She came to Viktor’s tent early one morning and leaned in. “Get up,” she ordered. “If we get there first we can help Stockbridge with her Von Neumanns.”

Viktor pulled the sheet indignantly up to his chin and glared at her fuzzily. “Do what?” he asked.

“Help Marie-Claude Stockbridge,” she repeated impatiently. “They’ve given her the okay to send the machines out, and she’s going to need help—us, if you get off your dead ass and get there before everybody else does.”

That woke him up. “Get out of here so I can get dressed,” he ordered, suffused with joy, and pulled on his shorts and shoes in no time at all. He knew about the Von Neumanns, of course. Everybody did. They were going to be very important to the colony, but they’d had to take their turn, like every other very important project, until the utterly urgent ones of survival had been taken care of.

On the way to the machine shed Reesa explained. “Jake Lundy told me about it. He’s kind of got eyes for me, you know; he’s helping Stockbridge prepare the machines, and I think he liked the idea of having me around for a few days. So right away I thought of you.”

“Thanks,” Viktor said happily. He didn’t much care for Jake Lundy—five years older than Reesa or himself, a tall, muscular man who was already known to have fathered at least one child for the colony, though he showed no signs of wanting to marry. But Viktor could put up with Lundy—could even put up with Reesa—if it also meant being near Marie-Claude.

Then he stopped because what she was babbling on about had just reached him. He glared at her. “What did you say?”

“I said I think Stockbridge is kind of hot for Jake, too, you know? I mean, he’s a gorgeous hunk of man.” Then she paused to peer at him. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing’s the matter with me!” he snapped.

She walked around him, looking at him curiously from every side as he stood, mute and belligerent. “Oh, I get it,” she said wisely. “You’ve got a crush on Marie-Claude.”

“Shut your mouth,” he said, trembling.

She did her best to be patient with him. “But, Vik, that’s just normal, you know? You shouldn’t get pissed because she’s making it with a guy. She’s a woman, isn’t she?” She stepped back a pace before the look he gave her. “Hey, don’t get mad at me! I didn’t do anything!”

“Just shut up,” he blazed.

She looked at him thoughtfully, then led the way toward the machine sheds. But she couldn’t keep quiet indefinitely, and just before they got there she cleared her throat. “Viktor? Don’t get sore if I ask you something. When you were all on the ship, did you ever see Marie-Claude and her husband make love?”

“Don’t be disgusting!”

“Oh, Viktor,” she sighed. “Doing it isn’t disgusting. Watching somebody is, maybe, so the reason I asked—”

“I said shut up.”

And for a wonder she did, because his tone was really dangerous. But his internal pain didn’t heal.

 

Marie-Claude Stockbridge had in her charge a dozen prototypes of Von Neumann finder-homer machines, great, simpleminded automata that weren’t in any real way alive, but shared with living things the ability to forage in their environment, to ingest the kind of chemicals that they were made up of, and to replicate themselves, as people do when they have babies, by making copies of themselves to grow up and do the same thing all over again, generation after generation. And each had a “homing circuit,” like that of the freshwater salmon or the migratory birds, which would bring it back to the place it started from (or its ancestors had) when it was of a certain size, there to be dismantled and forged into whatever metal parts the colony needed.

They were ugly things, but they sure beat the hell out of digging holes in the ground.

The Von Neumann machines came in several varieties. There were digging kinds, that looked like iron bedbugs; there were swimming kinds, to exploit the thermal springs they hoped to find at the bottom of Great Ocean, that looked like chromium-plated versions of the sort of shell people picked up on Earthly beaches. They weren’t purely mechanical. The iron-miner, for instance, had a complex “digestive” system like the second stomach of a ruminant, where genetically tailored iron-concentrating bacteria helped extract the metal from the rock after the jaws of the Von Neumann miner had pulverized it.

What Reesa and Viktor and a couple of other drudges did was only to fetch and carry, to hoist the Von Neumanns in slings while Marie-Claude and Jake Lundy pried off their inspection hatches and checked their circuits, and to test the seals and make sure the mechanical parts were freed from their shipping constraints. It was hard, hot work. Viktor was stiffly ill at ease at first, eyes always on Marie-Claude and Jake Lundy to see if there was any visible affection going on between them; but in the pursuit of her specialty Marie-Claude was all business. And best of all, she was there. She was where he was hardly an arm’s length away, for hours at a time; and if she thought of him as a child she treated him as a colleague. Even Jake Lundy wasn’t so bad. His muscles were a big help when the massive machines needed hoisting or turning, but Viktor was getting pretty strong, too, and he was the one Lundy yelled for when something hard had to be done.

They worked from sunup to school, two or three hours every morning. Reesa was always the first one to tell Viktor it was time to leave, because Viktor had no incentive to leave Marie-Claude’s company for the schoolmaster’s—except one day. On that day Reesa disappeared into the backhouse for several minutes when work was through, and when she appeared she grabbed his arm, looking oddly triumphant. “Look at this, doofus,” she ordered, flushed and excited.

“We’re going to be late for class,” he complained. He wasn’t much annoyed. He was only irritated by the fact that she was touching him again—he tolerated with difficulty the fact that she was a touching, hugging kind of person, always wanting physical contact—until he saw what she was displaying for him. Then he recoiled from the scrap of stained white fabric in disgust. “Ugh! Gross!” he cried. “It’s your dirty underwear!”

Her face was rosy with pride. “Look at what it’s dirty with! That’s blood!” she crowed. “That means I’m a grown-up woman now, Viktor Sorricaine, and you’re still just a dumb little kid.”

He looked around apprehensively, to see if anyone was observing this, but the others were still hard at work. He understood what she was showing him. What he didn’t understand was why. Of course he knew what menstruation was, because the teaching machines had been quite specific about all the physiological details of sex. But, as far as the female reproductive systems were concerned, the overriding impression Viktor had come away with was that it was messy. Viktor wasn’t a male chauvinist pig. At least, he didn’t think he was. He didn’t consider himself superior to females simply because of gender. What he thought about sexual dimorphism was mostly charitable compassion for the nasty predicaments females found themselves in every month, and the even worse ones that confronted them in childbearing.

It had never occurred to him that any female would boast about it.

“That means I could have a baby!” Reesa chortled.

“Not without some guy to help you,” Viktor pointed out defensively.

“Oh,” Reesa said, starry-eyed, “there isn’t going to be any problem with that.”

 

And the colony grew.

Even while Marie-Claude was turning loose the first few of her Von Neumanns, her fingers crossed in the hope that they wouldn’t break down, that they would work the way they were supposed to, that they would find their way back as they should—even then the construction workers were finishing the great steel skeleton of the vast rectenna that, very soon, would deliver the first Mayflower-generated microwave power to the colony. A model steel plant was half done, ready for the first of Marie-Claude’s Von Neumanns to come back with raw metal. And wells were being sunk into the hot water that underlay the hills behind the town they were beginning to call Homeport. When those geothermal wells were beginning to produce electricity there would be plenty to spare, enough to run the immense freezers whose foundations were being dug, to store all the samples still on Mayflower and Ark.

That wasn’t all. Real homes were being built, with a lottery every week to see which half-dozen lucky families would get to move out of their tents into something with walls. The beamed broadcasts from Earth still came in, all the hours of every day, along with the regular reports from New Argosy, now more than halfway to Newmanhome; but people watched them now only for entertainment, not with the hopeless yearning of the first years.

It was a time for—well, not for rejoicing, exactly, because there were still endless years of hard work ahead. But at least it was a time when the three thousand and more (every day more) human beings could look back on how much had been accomplished, and look around at the farms and the docks and the sprawling town with satisfaction that the planet was being tamed to their needs.

Of course, they hadn’t yet seen any new strange objects in the sky.

 

Fifth (Navigator) Officer Pal Sorricaine had no ship to be an officer of anymore, and nowhere to navigate anyway.

It meant a considerable comedown for him. He was still a kind of astronomer, of course. But the flare star was only a memory, which meant there was nothing much to do about that still-troubling puzzle, and anyway there wasn’t much he could have done about solving it. There weren’t any decent-sized telescopes on the surface of Newmanhome. Mayflower’s sensors were still operating, but they weren’t telling anybody anything they didn’t already know, except for some peculiar readings from the innermost planet, Nebo. There was a little group of interested people who got together to talk about it from time to time, Sorricaine and Frances Mtiga and the Iraqi woman, Tiss Khadek. They spent hours trying to find in the datastores some suggestion of why the hot little planet had an atmosphere, and what the gamma radiation that seemed to come from parts of its surface might mean, but there was nothing in previous astronomical history to help. It didn’t seem very urgent, even to them. No one thought the readings were important enough to spend scarce man-hours on, not while the rectenna was still unfinished and the new food warehouses were still almost empty.

So Pal Sorricaine did odd jobs.

It was the kind of work the kids did when not in school. Unskilled work. Hard labor, sometimes, and in inconvenient places. He was away from the community two or three days at a time, with a team of other men similarly among the technologically unemployed. They spent their time collecting the low-priority cargo pods that had fallen at the inconveniently far perimeter of the drop zone, or even outside it. They sledged them into the city; not only hard work, but not even very interesting.

Pal Sorricaine didn’t seem to mind. He took on the job of cartography when he was out in the wildwoods, searching for lost pods, and his maps became the best the community had. When he was home he was cheerful. He took his turn at minding Baby Weeny. He was loving to his wife and affectionate to Viktor. It was puzzling to Viktor that his mother seemed to worry about her husband. But when he asked her about it she simply laughed and said, “It’s a kind of a problem for your dad, Viktor. He was one of the most important men on the ship. Now he’s sort of—well—general labor, you know? When things get more settled and he can do real astronomy again . . .”

She let it trail off there. Viktor didn’t bother to ask her when she thought things would be that settled. Of course, she didn’t know any more than he did. Maybe the only right answer would have been “never.” But that night, when his father returned with the tractor team, four great pods of steel bumping and scraping behind them, he seemed content enough. Pal was in a good mood, anxious to hear about what had been going on in the town while he was away, and bursting with a couple of pieces of gossip he had brought back from long night talks with the other men. “Do you know what Marie-Claude’s been doing?” he asked his wife, chuckling. “She’s pregnant, that’s what!”

Viktor dropped the spoon he was trying to feed his baby sister with. “But—her husband’s dead!” he cried, appalled at the news.

“Did I say anything about a husband?” Pal Sorricaine asked good-naturedly. “I just said she’s going to have a baby. I didn’t say she was getting married. I guess she likes the idea of being a merry widow.”

“Pal,” Viktor’s mother said warningly, looking at her son. “Don’t make it sound awful, Pal. Marie-Claude’s a good person, and besides we need more babies.”

Pal grinned at her. “So it’s all okay with you? You wouldn’t mind if I, uh, volunteered to help out along those lines next time?”

“Pal,” she said again, but the tone was different; she was almost laughing. “What’s the matter, aren’t I keeping you happy?”

His father grinned and began to mix a cocktail. Halfway through, he paused and looked thoughtfully at his son. Then he glanced at his wife and added more of the gin—it was real gin, almost the last they had—to the mix. “You’re old enough to try one now, Vik,” he said kindly.

In pain and misery, Viktor took the plastic tumbler and gulped a mouthful. The juniper stung the inside of his nasal passages; the alcohol scorched the inside of his mouth. He swallowed and coughed at the same time.

“Viktor!” his mother cried in alarm. “Pal!”

But Pal was already beside his son, arm around his shoulder. “It’s better if you just sip it a little at a time,” he said, laughing.

Viktor was having none of that. He wrenched free and, as soon as he could postpone a cough long enough to swallow, downed the rest of the drink. Fortunately, there wasn’t much of it; his father had measured out only a junior-sized amount for his son’s first official cocktail.

Viktor wasn’t short of willpower. He used it all. He managed to strangle the coughing fit, though his voice was hoarse while he was reassuring his mother that, really, he was absolutely all right. His throat burned. His eyes were watering. His nose still stung. But there was a warmth, too, that started in his chest and spread through his whole body.

It almost seemed to numb his stark interior pain. It was, really, not a bad sensation at all. Was that why people like his parents drank this stuff?

Now that his mother had realized her son wasn’t dying she was sipping her own drink, but not in any relaxed or jovial manner. Her gaze stayed on Viktor. Pal Sorricaine tried to jolly her out of it, without much success. Viktor ignored them both. He sat hunched over the empty tumbler, staring into it as he turned it in his hands, as he had seen an actor in a transmitted Earth film do when he, like Viktor, discovered the woman he loved had been bedding another man.

Viktor was crushed.

For Marie-Claude to make love with her husband had been bad enough. This was incomparably worse. There was a sudden knot of physical pain in Viktor’s stomach, like a stab wound. Even the warm, ginny glow didn’t stop the pain.

His mother turned from studying her son to face her husband. “Pal,” she said seriously, “we’ve got to talk to Viktor.”

Viktor felt the tips of his ears burning with resentment. He refused to look up. He heard his father sigh. “All right,” Pal Sorricaine conceded. “I guess it’s about time. Viktor? Vik, listen to me. Are you—” He fumbled for the right words. “Uh, all right?”

Viktor raised his head to give his father the cold stare of a stranger. “Sure I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I mean about, you know, Mrs. Stockbridge,” his father persisted. He looked more embarrassed than Viktor had ever seen him, but determinedly sympathetic. “Son, I didn’t mean to say anything that would get you upset. Do you understand that? Listen, it’s only natural for a b—for a young man to be attracted to an older woman, especially when the woman is as sexy and—” He caught his wife’s look just in time. “When she’s as nice a person, I mean, as Marie-Claude. There’s nothing wrong about that. I remember, when I was sixteen, there was a dancer in the ballet school at the Warsaw Opera, about twenty, so thin and graceful—”

He stopped, on the verge of another unexpected precipice. He carefully avoided looking at his wife. She regarded him thoughtfully but didn’t speak.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” his son said severely.

Viktor had never spoken to his father that way before. He stood up, testing for dizziness, and headed with precise, careful steps for the door. He left Pal Sorricaine biting his lip behind him. His son’s glare had looked pretty nearly like hatred, and Pal Sorricaine had never expected that sort of emotion from the son he had always loved and cherished, and thought loved him back.

 

Outside Viktor paused, leaning against the door.

Because they had been one of the lucky families in the lottery they had two rooms now, two cubicles together, in the long row that lined the muddy street, joined like ancient American tourist cabins. Behind him, through the thin film windows—last and longest use for the remaining scraps of light-sail/parachutes—he could hear his parents muttering to each other.

But, queerly, there were people muttering to each other in the street, too. They were standing in clumps, faces uplifted to the summery Newmanhome sky. Viktor instinctively glanced up himself. In the starlight he could make out that there were patches of warm-weather convection clouds obscuring much of the moonless heavens, but there were hundreds of stars shining through the gaps, too.

Well, there always were clouds and stars, weren’t there? Why were these people staring so? True, one star, all by itself, seemed quite bright, almost as bright (Viktor dimly remembered) as the planet Venus from Earth, brighter than any Newmanhome star had ever seemed . . .

With a shock he saw that the star was getting brighter.

How strange! And it kept on getting brighter still, almost Moon bright, bright enough to throw a shadow; and Viktor realized that it had been that incredibly bright all along. What had deceived him was that he had seen it only through a clump of cloud at first. When the last fringe of cloud had rolled away it was a blue-white beacon in the sky, brighter, Viktor was sure, than any possible star should be—

And he went running back into the house, stumbling but now suddenly cold sober, to shout to his parents that another nearby star had gone flare.

 

After that, there was no objection to Pal Sorricaine becoming a full-time astronomer again. Pressed though the colony was for able-bodied workers, everyone agreed that this second Sorricaine-Mtiga object definitely needed to be studied. Pal was released from his scavenging duties, Frances Mtiga from her school, Jahanjur Singh from his work as an accountant for the stores comptroller, and Ibtissam Khadek from the guidance systems for the rectenna.

The difficulty came when the four of them asked, no, demanded, that the colony instruct the orbiting crews to put aside other work in order to make the observations only they could make, with the ship’s sensors that were the only eyes the colony had for investigating what was going on in space.

It took a full-scale colony meeting to decide—more than three thousand people crowding around the open-air platform where the speakers urged their cases.

When Pal Sorricaine heard that the decision would go to a meeting he swore and poured himself a drink. That meant it would go by majority vote, and Pal Sorricaine, like a lot of Mayflower people, thought the majority was unfair. The second shipload had begun by outumbering the first, 1,115 to 854—but then the first colonists had had six Earth years to make more babies, so the combination of the colonists from New Ark and their Home-born offspring now totaled 1,918, while Mayflower’s total had only reached a little over 1,300. Of course the newborns weren’t old enough to vote, but who was, exactly? At what age did the franchise begin? And by what sort of calculation?

Sorricaine went to the meeting grimly determined to battle out the voting age question. But this time the line wasn’t drawn between the two ships’ people. The question split both factions almost down the middle. There was one side—headed by Pal Sorricaine and his little group, along with Captain Rodericks from the first ship and Marie-Claude Stockbridge—who insisted that the star had to be studied with all the resources possible. There was another side that included Reesa McGann’s parents, but also Sam and Sally Broad from Mayflower and a lot of others from both ships, who were even more emphatic that the orbiting crews had all they could handle to finish converting the drive engines to MHD microwave generation, and didn’t the others understand the colony needed that power?

They all settled in for a long town-meeting argument. Even allowing only three minutes to each speaker meant long hours of debate. Worse, they were unproductive hours. Men and women debating policy were not planting crops or putting up houses or exploring the planet.

It took them an hour just to decide, by raucous voice vote, how many could be allowed to speak. The decision was a hundred—three hundred minutes—five hours of talk; and, even though some of the lottery winners immediately turned their times over to allies more articulate and convincing than themselves, a lot of those three-minute talks amounted only to saying, over and over, “The safety of the colony is threatened!”

What they couldn’t agree on was which threat—whether the threat from the sky was more dangerous than the threat of postponing the arrival of beamed power from the ship.

It ended badly for Pal Sorricaine. He and his colleagues got their observing time, but with a bad condition. The allotment of ship time was to become effective only after the ten Newmanhome days of additional work it would take for the microwave installation to be completed.

By then the flare was still bright, but not as bright; the vital first spectra had been missed. Sorricaine, Mtiga, and the others did what they could with the data that began to flood down on them, but they learned nothing they hadn’t known before. The star had somehow pulled itself apart, and no one could guess why.

The star continued to dominate the night sky for more than a hundred Newmanhome days. Then Pal Sorricaine filed his last report to the distant Earthly astronomers, gave up his privileges, and went resentfully back to laboring, mourning the lost chance.

At least he wasn’t reclaiming lost pods any more. The last of them had been found and brought in; someone else had done that for him. He found other jobs. He drove a tractor on the farms; he sailed to an island a hundred miles south of the colony, to seed it with earthworms and Earthly clover to prepare it, one day, for crops; he shifted goods in the storehouses with a forklift . . . and that was the job that did him in, for one day he stacked the sacks of seed potatoes too high, and the lift overturned.

There was not enough of Pal Sorricaine’s right leg left to save when they got him to the hospital.

It was a torment to him that, in the next year, there were two new flare stars, two months apart. “I think we didn’t pick a good part of the galaxy to colonize,” he told his son, wincing as he tried to find a comfortable position for the stump of his right leg. “Pieces of it keep blowing up.” And then he asked his teenage son, please, to save his liquor allotment for him—to help, he said, with the unremitting pain.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 5

 

 

Wan-To’s interest in the Sorricaine-Mtiga objects (which, of course, he never called by that name) was becoming pretty nearly frantic. He saw a lot more of them than Pal Sorricaine did, because he saw them a lot faster. He didn’t have to wait for creeping visible light to bring him the information. His Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pairs relayed the images instantly. The things were popping up all over.

However, he was beginning to have hope. The results from his blue-light studies were beginning to come in.

Blue light was particularly good for looking for starspots. Although the spots seemed relatively dark, they were quite bright enough to be seen by Wan-To’s great and sensitive “eyes”—particularly if you looked in the blue. Because the spots were cooler than the areas around them, their gases were ionized in a somewhat different way; and it was the spectral lines of the singly ionized calcium atoms—the ones that had lost just one electron—that stood out in blue.

When Wan-To found blue-light images that were not natural he knew just what to do. He summoned up the necessary graviphotons and graviscalars and hurled them in a carefully designed pattern at that star.

That would have been quite a wonder to human physicists, if they could have known what Wan-To was doing. It would have been a marvel for them if they could even have detected any of those particles, though they had sought them as long, and as unsuccessfully, as any medieval knight had sought the Holy Grail.

It was in the early twentieth century that Theodor Kaluza and Oskar Klein formulated the human race’s first decent model of how gravity worked. It wasn’t a wholly successful model. There was still a lot to learn. But it managed to relate electromagnetism and gravity as manifestations of a higher-dimension space-time in ways that seemed to fit together pretty well—in ways, in fact, that Wan-To had understood for many billion years. His own understanding of gravitation was more or less a Kaluza-Klein model, though with considerable important amendments. He understood that the three basic mediating particles of the gravitational interaction between masses were what human scientists of the Kaluza-Klein faith would call the vector bosons—the graviton, the graviphoton, and the graviscalar. His command of them was perfect. With the resources of his star to draw on, he could generate any or all of those particles at will. He often did—in copious amounts. He found them all very useful.

He didn’t bother much with the simple graviton. That was the uncomplicated spin-2 particle that seemed to pull masses together at even infinite distances—the only one that Isaac Newton, for instance, would have understood. Of course, the graviton was highly important in holding stars together and keeping galaxies rotating around their common center, but you couldn’t do much with it. The others were rarer, and more fun, especially when you wanted to attack a colleague’s star. A dose of graviphotons, the spin-l repellers, would churn up the star’s insides in a hurry; no organized system of Wan-To’s kind could survive inside a star that was tearing itself apart that way. Alternatively, or better still, in addition, he could pull at the star from outside with one of the other particles. The more useful of those was the spin-0 graviscalar, which pulled matter and energy toward it just as the humble graviton did, but only over finite distances. The graviscalar was a very local kind of particle.

The great virtue of the graviscalar, in other words, was that it couldn’t be detected by Wan-To’s enemies unless they were right on the spot—and then they wouldn’t be in any position to do anything about it.

 

When Wan-To saw his target star erupt—very satisfyingly—he began to relax.

Nothing could have survived in that utter holocaust, of course. Wan-To was pleased. He wondered which of his competitors he had killed.

It would, he thought, surely have been one of the dumber ones. The others—the ones he had first made, the ones who were almost as smart as Wan-To himself—would, like Wan-To, have figured out that they shouldn’t give their locations away by playing in the convection zones. But at least one was gone—one possible threat, but also, of course, one possible promise of companionship.

Philosophically, Wan-To turned his mind to his next step.

There was no help for it. It would be matter. He was going to have to work with nasty matter.

Wan-To had made copies of himself before. That was why he was having his current problems, in fact—if he hadn’t wanted company he would have been alone and, therefore, safe. There was no particular problem in preparing a pattern of himself for occupying another star. He knew exactly how to organize inanimate plasma into a living, reasoning being like himself, because he had himself always at hand as a model.

Working with cold, dead, tangible matter—that was another problem entirely. He had done that, too—well, there wasn’t much Wan-To hadn’t tried, in the ten or so billion years he had been alive. Once he had made a nonplasmoid copy of himself to live in a cold, diffuse cloud of interstellar gas, once even out of solid matter, on an asteroidal body orbiting the star he had occupied at the time. Both were disgusting failures. The gas-cloud doppel was terminally slow—it simply had too little energy to work with to be any kind of real company. The one made of matter was just matter, and thus repellent to Wan-To; he had obliterated it after a mere century or two.

But at least he knew how to do the job.

The distance of the star system he was working on didn’t present any problem. He had long ago planted an Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky set in each of the places where he now wanted them to be. (Wan-To always planned ahead.) The problem was that matter was no fun to manipulate. In Wan-To’s opinion it was slow, it was unfamiliar, and it was pretty nasty stuff all around. What made the work even harder was that he wasn’t there, so he had to perform all the complicated operations involved through the limited signals that could be carried through an ERP pair. In human terms, it was like a paraplegic trying to play a Space Invaders video game with the kind of controller that responded to puffs of his breath, or like a cardiac surgeon trying to snip and stitch and ream a dammed-up ventricle into shape with a flexible probe that snaked up through the blood vessels from the femoral artery in the patient’s crotch.

The limitations of the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pair made it all harder, of course. The ERP effect was a probabilistic, quantumlike event.

That meant that there was no guarantee that the message received at one end would be identical to the one that had been transmitted at the other. In fact, it almost certainly wouldn’t be.

Naturally Wan-To and his brethren knew how to deal with that problem. Parity checks and redundancy: If the parity check showed nothing wrong, then the message was possibly intact. Then it was compared with the same message transmitted three times. Majority ruled.

All that meant in the long run was that it took longer than it should to carry on a conversation—not because of travel time, but because of processing.

But Wan-To didn’t have an alternative.

He didn’t want to construct another plasma intelligence. That could well attract attention. Matter would not; beings like Wan-To didn’t pay much attention to matter, and there was little chance that any of his feuding relatives would see what was going on on this little satellite of the stellar system he had chosen. He had plans for that system and its neighbors. To make the plans work, he needed some very potent particle-generators.

It would have been possible to create the particle-generators directly, but Wan-To was cleverer than that. What he was constructing wasn’t the generators, it was a sort of little Wan-To, a matter analogue of himself, which when completed would do the job of constructing the generators and running them as long as necessary, in just the ways that Wan-To desired.

That little matter Wan-To wasn’t anything like an exact copy of himself, of course, and it certainly didn’t have all of his powers. What Wan-To was building was only a kind of servomechanism. It had exactly as much intelligence as it needed to do what Wan-To wanted it to do, and no more. It would do what Wan-To himself would have done—up to the limits of its powers, anyway. But by human standards those powers were vast.

Working with solid-phase matter was even a kind of intellectual challenge. So he was pleasantly occupied at his task, like a human terrorist whistling as he puts together his time bomb, and happily contemplating the success of his plans, when a signal reached him.

 

It was wholly unexpected, and it came through one of his ERP complexes. It wasn’t an alarm, this time. He experienced it as a sound—in fact, as the sound of a name—Haigh-tik.

That was Wan-To’s “eldest son”—which was to say, the copy of himself he had made first and most completely. As a natural consequence, that was the relative who gave Wan-To the most concern; if any of the eight intelligences he had produced was capable of doing their creator in, Haigh-tik was the one.

So Wan-To paused in the labor of creating his matter analogue and thought for a moment. He knew Haigh-tik very well. He didn’t want to talk to him at that moment. It was tempting to start a conversation, in the hope that Haigh-tik would inadvertently say something that would give away his location. The trouble with having a little chat was that Haigh-tik was as likely as Wan-To himself to learn something. But there was a better possibility, Wan-To reflected. He knew quite a lot about Haigh-tik’s habits—including what sort of star he preferred to inhabit.

So Wan-To took time to study some of the fairly nearby stars.

Of course, he had done that before—many times, over all the billions of years he had existed, because looking at the outside universe was one of his principal recreations. He saw them quite clearly. In fact, he saw everything quite clearly for, though Wan-To’s eyes were no more than patches of sensitive gas, they worked extremely well. What they looked at, they saw. They could trap a single photon, and remember it, and add it to the next photon that came in from that source. And it didn’t matter how long the next photon took to arrive.

A human astronomer on, say, Mount Palomar would have been wild with jealousy. A Palomar astronomer might take an interest in a particular star, or a particular remote galaxy, and turn his 200-inch mirror on it for a whole night’s observation. If the night sky were really cloudless—and if the cars and filling stations down the hill and the streetlights of San Diego didn’t pollute the seeing with too much extraneous light—he might get twelve whole hours on a single charge-coupled plate. He wouldn’t do that very often, of course, because there were too many other astronomers clamoring for time to gaze at their own precious objects.

Twelve hours!

But Wan-To’s eyes could soak up photons from the faintest object for a thousand years. And if a thousand years wasn’t long enough, why, then those eyes would stay unwinking on that single object for a million.

Nor were they limited to the so-called visible frequencies. All the frequencies were visible to Wan-To. He could “hear” a lot at radio frequencies, particularly when studying the great gas clouds, some of them a thousand light-years across, up to hundreds of thousands of solar masses. In the clouds, atomic hydrogen shouts at 1.4 gigahertz; molecular hydrogen is mute. But there are other compounds in the molecular clouds that speak right up: Carbon monoxide is noisy; so is formaldehyde; so is ammonia. He could easily pick out, in the clouds, the things that dirtied them with single molecules and clumps of silicates (rock) and carbon (graphite, charcoal, diamonds) all frozen over with water ice. If radio and optical studies weren’t good enough, he had high-energy X rays and gammas that went right through dust.

He saw everything.

On Earth, the early stargazers named the bright points of light they saw overhead at night. The Arabs of the Dark Ages did it best. They had dry air and thus clear night skies, and no power plants or oil refineries to dirty the air, or illuminated highways or shopping malls to fill it with unwanted glow. Before Galileo invented the telescope they could see as many as three thousand stars, and they gave most of them names.

Wan-To could see many more stars than that. One way or another, he could see just about every star in his own galaxy (which at that time was also Earth’s)—roughly two hundred and thirty-eight billion of them, depending on which giants had just gone supernova and collapsed into black holes and which new ones were just beginning to shine. He didn’t bother to give them names. Type, distance, and direction were good enough for him—but he knew them all, and most of those in the Magellanic Clouds and quite a few in M-31 in Andromeda as well. And he also “knew” just about all the external galaxies this side of the optical limit, too, right down to the “blue fuzzies.” He was himself a catalogue far better than Harvard or Draper or the Palomar Sky Survey.

So to survey just the nearest stars didn’t take Wan-To long at all. After all, there were only about twenty thousand of them.

The important thing was that he had a piece of useful information about Haigh-tik. Haigh-tik was known to prefer young stars, probably of the kind Earthly astronomers called T-Tauri objects. Therefore Wan-To sought ordinary-looking stars with a strong lithium emission at 660.7 nanometers.

He found three that were close enough to be possible residences for his undutiful son.

Giving his equivalent of a humorous shrug, Wan-To zapped them all. In one sense, he thought, that was a waste of two stars, at least. Still, there were plenty of stars, and anyway, in just a little while—no more than a million years or so—they would have settled down from being wrung out and so be habitable again if wanted.

After he had sent the instructions on their way he went back to his other project, feeling more cheerful. A dozen other stars had flared up and died while he was working. If Haigh-tik had been the one directing that probing fire, maybe he was now out of the game.

But whoever it was, Wan-To did not want him to know he had missed.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 6

 

 

On Viktor Sorricaine’s forty-first birthday— Well, it probably wasn’t exactly his birthday, although it was the 38th of Spring, and Viktor, carefully calculating back in Newmanhome years, had long before chosen that date as a base point for his age—Anyway, when he reached that birthday he was the equivalent of twenty, in Earth years. A man grown. Old enough to vote. On Newmanhome he was also definitely a man grown and old enough for any adult activity at all. He had fathered two small babies to prove it.

He didn’t have a wife to go along with the two children, but that wasn’t anything special on Newmanhome. Almost everybody past puberty was producing kids for the colony, whether they were married or not. Even his own father had helped the baby boom along again. By the time little Edwina Sorricaine was fourteen (Newmanhome years; Earth equivalent, about seven) she had two younger brothers and was beginning to learn how to change a diaper on her own. The human population of Newmanhome stood at more than six thousand. Two thirds of them were younger than Viktor, which was probably why Viktor had seniority enough to have risen to be the pilot of an oceangoing cargo ship. Where he really wanted to be was in space, of course, but there weren’t any of those jobs open. Nor was he quite senior enough to be an airman. But ship’s pilot was still pretty good.

He was certainly grown up enough to be married, if he had been inclined that way. His mother frequently reminded him of that fact. “Reesa’s a nice girl,” she would say, sometime during the days he spent at home, between his voyages to the farms on South Continent or the new tree plantations on the islands in Archipelago West. Or in her letters she would tell him how young Billy Stockbridge—now, would you believe it, twenty-six (Newmanhome) years old and pretty nearly grown up himself—had begun playing his guitar to accompany Reesa McGann’s flute in duets and, although there was that great difference in their ages, people didn’t take those things as seriously in the new world, and wasn’t it about time that he, Viktor, made up his mind?

He had made it up, long ago.

Viktor had never stopped dreaming of Marie-Claude Stockbridge. In spite of the fact that she laughed at him when, once, he tried to kiss her. In spite of the fact that he was despondently aware that she had become pregnant four times in thirteen Newmanhome years, by three different men. In spite of the fact that, although all that was bad enough, she had just made it worse still by marrying the father of her latest two.

The name of the cur she married was Alex Petkin. It infuriated Viktor that Petkin was at least eight Newmanhome years younger than his bride—or, as Viktor saw it, not all that much older than himself, for God’s sake, and if Marie-Claude had wanted to rob the cradle why the hell couldn’t she have robbed his?

In Viktor’s view, his own two children were beside the point. He was only doing what everybody else was. On Newmanhome, kids were supposed to experiment before they settled down. Naturally, such kids’ experiments frequently produced more kids.

Getting laid now and then was one thing. Getting married was another matter entirely. To marry, in Viktor’s lexicon, necessarily meant to love. He did not feel he had been in love with either of the mothers of his children. Certainly he was quite fond of Alice Begstine, the mother of his four-year-old. Alice was a ship’s navigator who was also frequently not only his bedmate but his shipmate on the long voyages across the Great Ocean. Undoubtedly, he was very used to Reesa McGann, who had borne him his newest one, still an infant. But he had never associated either Alice or Reesa with the word “love.”

That word was reserved for Marie-Claude—ah—Petkin. In spite of the fact that she had gone and married a stripling still in his fifties, who was quite unlikely to become enfeebled with age in time to do Viktor Sorricaine any good.

Since Viktor was not an idiot, he no longer really expected that was ever going to happen. His own father, crippled as he was, much older than the cur, Petkin, was a permanent testimonial to middle-aged male vigor. At least, the toddler Jonas and little Tomas, sucking his knuckles in his crib, surely were.

None of that mattered to Viktor. Marie-Claude was still the woman Viktor made love to, tenderly and copiously, in every night’s drowsy imagining just before he drifted off to sleep in his bed—no matter whom he happened to be sharing the bed with.

 

Crossing Great Ocean took four or five weeks each way, depending on the winds, plus a week or two loading and unloading at each end. It came to more than a quarter of a Newmanhome year for each round trip. Things happened fast on Newmanhome, and every time Viktor came back to the growing city they called Homeport everything was changed.

As Viktor’s ship sailed into Homeport on the morning of that 38th of Spring the broad bay glistened in the sunlight. Fleecy clouds drifted overhead. The breeze was warm, and Viktor saw lots of progress in the colony. The new grain elevator for the docks had been completed since he had sailed away, and up on the hill the two microwave rectennae loomed behind the new geothermal power plant, the second antenna already half covered with its wire net. That was good; the colony was getting plenty of electrical power at last.

It was Alice Begstine’s turn to supervise the unloading of the ship. So as soon as they were docked Viktor leaped off, waved farewell to Alice and headed toward the new houses on the edge of town. He was looking forward to spending his birthday with his youngest child, Yan—and maybe with Reesa, the little boy’s mother, if she seemed to be in a friendly mood.

She wasn’t home. Freddy Stockbridge was sitting in her front room, reading his prayer book, while Reesa’s two children napped.

Viktor looked at him with suspicion, but all he said was, “Hello, Freddy.” Viktor wasn’t sure how to take Freddy Stockbridge, who had decided, of all things, that what he wanted to be was a priest. “What are you doing here?”

The question was really “Why aren’t you working?” and Freddy answered it that way. “They made today a secular holiday,” he said, sounding aggrieved. “They call it First Power Day. They’re having some kind of an anniversary celebration up at the power plant.”

“Another damn holiday,” Viktor said, trying to make friendly conversation. Landing Day, Mayflower Day—every major event in the colony’s history had to be commemorated, it seemed, though Viktor rather liked the thought of his own birthday being a planetwide day off.

“Another darned secular holiday,” Freddy corrected him. “It isn’t really fair, you know. Would you believe they won’t let us have Good Friday off? Or even All Saints’ Day, although they close the schools the day before for Dress-Up Night?”

“I’ll sign your petition,” Viktor promised, lying. “Is Reesa up there?”

Freddy shrugged, already back in his prayer book. “I guess so,” he said, not looking up.

“Thank you very much,” Viktor said, snapping the words off because Freddy was irritating him. Viktor thought of looking in on his parents, who at least would remember that it was his birthday, but he was curious about what Reesa was doing, and why she had left his child to a baby-sitter—Freddy Stockbridge, at that!

The only way to settle that was to ask her, so, still irritated, he trudged up the hill.

There was a crowd there, all right, five or six hundred people at least. Captain Bu Wengzha was up on a flag-bedecked platform, making a speech, though most of the people were picnicking on the grass and hardly listening to the captain at all. What the speech seemed to be about was electrical power, and Reesa was nowhere in sight.

“. . . this wonderful geothermal power plant,” Captain Bu was saying, “has delivered energy for us for one year now without interruption and, God willing, will go on doing it for a thousand years to come. That is God’s gift to us, my friends, limitless energy from the geothermal heat under our feet. Let us praise His name! And let us thank, too, the skills and painstaking labor of our comrades who have given so unstintingly of themselves to create this wholly automatic technological marvel, which supplements the flood of energy being beamed down to us by that sturdy ship, New Mayflower . . .”

Viktor listened for only a second—not very interested, though a little surprised to hear the old ship’s captain sounding so godly—then turned off his ears. He spotted a young woman holding a baby, listening patiently to the captain. He nudged her. “Valerie? Have you seen Reesa?”

The young woman glanced at him. “Oh, hi, Vik. No, not lately. Is she helping them get ready for the dancing over there?”

She was looking toward a group setting up a plank dance floor on the grass. Viktor nodded thanks. “I’ll go look.”

Captain Bu’s amplified voice followed him as he stepped among the picnickers to the dance committee. “. . . and by this time next year, they promise, all of our cryonic facilities will be complete on this very spot, along with liquid-gas generators to refuel our shuttles so that our heroic friends in orbit above us can have the regular relief they rightfully . . .”

She wasn’t hammering down the flat boards for the dancing, either. Viktor buttonholed the nearest worker he recognized. “Wen, have you seen Reesa?”

The young man blinked at him. “Oh, she’s not here,” he assured Viktor. “I think she’s up at the observatory.”

“The observatory,” Viktor said, not meaning to sound disparaging. He had always thought of the “observatory” as a rather pointless hobby of his father’s. “What does she think she can see in broad daylight?”

“No, they’re not looking through the telescope. It’s the space course. You know, the astrophysics course they’re having for space pilots—it was on the bulletin boards weeks ago.”

“For space pilots?” Viktor was suddenly alert. “I wasn’t here weeks ago!”

“Oh, have you been away?” Wen asked. “I thought you’d know. After all, it’s your father that’s giving it.”

 

A course for space pilots! And given by his own father! Viktor was more irritated than ever as he climbed swiftly toward the little plastic dome on the peak of the hill. If there was any hope of anybody getting into space again, why hadn’t he been told?

Viktor knew, of course, that his father still had a few people interested in astronomy hanging around him. Not very many. There wasn’t any reason for anyone to be very interested, for the most exciting things in the Newmanhome sky, the flare stars, had stopped coming. There had been eight of them over a dozen Newmanhome years, then the flares had stopped.

That had left Pal Sorricaine high and dry, because the whole team of investigators into the “Sorricaine-Mtiga objects” had been disbanded. There was no longer anything for them to do. Jahanjur Singh had been co-opted by the power teams to help design transmission facilities to the new colonies on Christmas Island and the South Continent, and Fanny Mtiga had emigrated to South, with her family, to start a new career in farming. “Don’t go!” Pal had pleaded. “You’re wasting your skills! Stay here, help me.”

“Help you do what, Pal?” she asked, patiently enough. “If there’s another flare I’ll see it on South, won’t I? And I’ll get the same reading from the Mayflower instruments. And anyway, they’ve all been about the same—”

“We owe it to our profession! Back on Earth—”

“Pal,” she said gently, “back on Earth they’re seeing it all for themselves now, aren’t they? Some of those flares were closer to them than to us, and they’ve got a lot better instruments.”

“But we were the first to report!”

She shook her head. “If they elect us to the Royal Society we’ll hear. Meanwhile what the colony really needs is food. Give me a call if anything comes up—to the South Continent.”

So she had gone; and Pal Sorricaine had stayed and driven the half-dozen people who constituted his group of disciples to help him with such projects as cataloguing the nearby stars so they could have better names than they had ever been given on Earth.

Then Pal had an inspiration. He wheedled the council into letting them divert a little effort into casting some low-expansion glass blanks, then set his acolytes to grinding a mirror. It took forever to finish, but when it was done and silvered and mounted in a tube Pal Sorricaine and his class had a real telescope, right there on the surface, with which to look at their new neighbors in space: the six other planets, their dozens of moons, and the largest of the asteroids.

Of course, it was all pretty pointless in any serious astronomical sense. Any real astronomy would be done by the optics on the orbiting hulks, which still worked perfectly. The few crew members still up there, desultorily running the microwave generators and going slowly ape from loneliness, didn’t bother to tend the sensors, but they didn’t need tending. Even back on Earth, astronomers in Herstmonceux, England, had routinely operated instruments in the Canary Islands or Hawaii by remote radio control; telescopes didn’t need a human hand on the controls. But Pal was determined to force his students to look at the skies. Though the 30-centimeter was far from perfectly curved, and the sky over the hill it was mounted on was frequently obscured by clouds, at least his students could step out of the little dome and, with their naked eyes, see the stars and planets they had just seen huger or brighter inside.

And there were some pretty things to see. Sullen, red Nergal was always fascinating: it leered at you in the sky and awed you in the telescope. Three of the asteroids were naked-eye objects, once you knew where to look for them—if you had good eyes. The corpses of the former flare stars were always worth looking at, just to remind you to ponder about their mysteries. There were double stars, a fair number of comets, a gas nebula lighted from within by newborn stars—Pal Sorricaine loved to look at all of them and communicated his feeling to his students.

 

Nobody was using the little mirror when Viktor came puffing up to the observatory—not in broad daylight. The class wasn’t even inside the little dome. There was a teaching machine, its screen hooded against the sunlight, and a dozen or so people were gathered around it, looking at the rainbow colors of a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of stellar types.

Viktor saw Reesa sitting there cross-legged on the spiky Newmanhome grass, sharing a blanket with Billy Stockbridge. That was displeasing; he hadn’t really taken his mother’s remarks seriously. He was no more pleased to see Jake Lundy in the class. Viktor didn’t really like Jake Lundy—hadn’t since they had first met, in the long-ago school days when Lundy was the older kid sometimes stuck with supervising the young ones, and something of a bully. It didn’t help that Jake, a little older than Viktor, had managed to land one of the coveted jobs as aircraft pilot, instead of being stuck with a surface ship. It also happened to be true (as Viktor knew) that Jake Lundy was the father of Reesa’s older child—not that that had anything to do with Viktor’s feelings about the man, of course.

When Viktor approached the group his father paused in his lecture long enough to give him a combination of a welcoming nod and a peremptory gesture to take a seat. Viktor sat near enough to Reesa so that she could talk to him if she wanted to, yet far enough away that he wasn’t obviously seeking conversation. She gave him a quick, absent smile and returned to the lesson.

Viktor’s father wasn’t looking well. Though his artificial limb was a high-tech device as close to the real thing as any machine could be, he limped as he moved around the teaching machine, and his voice was hoarse as he explained the natural sequence of star types Hertzsprung and Russell had described centuries earlier. It seemed to Viktor that the old man’s hands were shaking, too. But he paid attention to the lecture, and when it was finished and Pal Sorricaine asked for questions, Viktor’s hand shot up.

“What’s this about space piloting?” he demanded.

The dozen students grinned tolerantly at him.

“If you’d stay around Homeport you’d know these things, Viktor,” Pal said. “We’ll have rocket fuel soon, from the gas-liquefying plants they’re building for the freezers. The council decided weeks ago that as soon as New Argosy arrives we’ll start space exploration again. So I volunteered to give a refresher course on astrophysics, for anyone who wants to try for astronaut training.”

“Why astrophysics, though?” Viktor asked his father. “I mean, why not something useful, like navigation?” It seemed to him a natural and harmless question, but his father scowled.

Pal rubbed his lips. “It’s my course, Viktor,” he said, his voice hostile. “If you don’t want to take it, go away.”

Unexpectedly, a female voice spoke up. “But I think your son is right, Pal,” the woman said, and stood up on the far side of the crowd. It was Ibtissam Khadek, looking older than Victor remembered her, and quite determined. “We know that your personal interest is in such things as theoretical cosmology and your so-called Sorricaine-Mtiga objects,” she went on, looking around for support, “but for most of us here, what we want is to go into space. To explore this whole solar system, of which we know so little—and to do it now, please. In my case, before I am too old to be accepted for a ship’s crew.”

Pal Sorricaine looked astonished, and then resentful, and then surly. “There’s nothing to keep you from starting a course of your own, Tiss,” he pointed out.

The astronomer shook her head. “We shouldn’t be competing,” she said sweetly. “We should be working together, don’t you think? For instance! When my grandfather first described this system, he of course marked Enki”—how like the woman, Viktor thought, to insist on calling familiar Newmanhome by its Babylonian name!—“as the most habitable planet, but he specifically listed the brown dwarf, Nergal, as the one most important to observe. It’s our plain duty to take a good look at it, for the sake of science!”

“We’re looking at Nergal all the time,” Pal Sorricaine protested. “We’ve got millions of pictures. Ark’s instruments are covering it routinely.”

“I am not speaking of routine,” Khadek cried. “I am speaking of a dedicated mission.”

“But why Nergal?” Jake Lundy put in. “For that matter, why don’t we look at Nebo? I think that’s even more interesting, because we all know it’s been changing! Your grandfather said it had almost no water vapor in its atmosphere, but now it’s so clouded we can hardly see the surface—why is that?”

“You are right,” Tiss Khadek conceded graciously. “Of course we should do both. But, I think, Nergal first—after all, it is the first brown dwarf anyone has had the chance to observe.”

Viktor started to open his mouth to get into the discussion, but Reesa’s warm hand pulled him toward her. “Look what you’ve started!” she whispered, while the argument raged around them. “Why did you come here?”

“I’ve got as much right to be here as you do,” he whispered hotly back, and then was compelled to add, “Anyway, I was looking for you. I, uh, I thought I’d spend a little time with Yan today. I mean, it’s my birthday.”

“Of course it is,” she said testily. She looked at him closely, then nodded. “I’m going back to feed the kids as soon as this is over, then I’ll bring them back up here for the fireworks and the dancing . . . if you want to come.”

“All right,” Viktor agreed—and then saw that his father had quelled the discussion and was looking at him dangerously.

“We’re going on with the class now,” Pal Sorricaine said loudly. “Anybody has anything to say on any other subject, we can take that up after the lesson. Now! Are there any questions about stellar evolution?”

 

Viktor walked his father back to their home—helped him, actually, because the old man’s artificial leg was giving him trouble again, and besides he had disappeared into the dome for a moment by himself before he was willing to leave. Viktor didn’t have to ask his father the reason. He could smell it on the old man’s breath.

“Dad?” Viktor offered, halfway down. “I’m sorry if I messed up your class.”

His father gave him a discouraged look. “That’s all right,” he panted gruffly. “Ouch!” He stopped to rub his thigh, then put a hand on Viktor’s shoulder and limped on. “It’s not you,” he said. “It’s that Tiss Khadek mostly. She keeps trying to get the whole bunch fired up about her pet Nergal.” He winced. “Would you mind if we didn’t talk right now? This is hard work—”

“Of course, Dad,” Viktor said, but not happily. It was difficult, looking at this shrunken old man, to remember the strong man with the laughing blue eyes who had tossed him in his arms on New Mayflower. When at last they got to his parents’ home, Pal Sorricaine sank wearily into a chair.

Viktor was shocked to see even more weariness on his mother’s face. Nevertheless she greeted him joyously—put up her face to be kissed, told him he looked as though he wasn’t eating enough, and winked that there was a surprise waiting for him. He didn’t have to guess at the surprise. He knew his mother would have seen the ship in dock and would long since have baked a cake for his birthday.

But she was beginning to look tired and, well, almost old. When he said something she said firmly it was just that she’d had a hard day. The two new children drained a lot of her energy, coupled with the demands of her job—it was a busy time for agronomists, she told him. “Agronomists?” Viktor repeated, startled. “I thought that was just your, you know, kind of hobby.”

“It started out that way, Vik,” she sighed. “But I’ve switched over. I did have undergraduate courses, you know, and—well, feeding people seemed more important than building more machines. And now, with new cultivars to clone and test every time someone starts planning to plant a new microenvironment, they need all the help they can get.”

“And then she helps me, too,” his father put in, looking slightly recovered.

Viktor blinked. “Teaching your course?” he guessed, incredulous.

“No, of course not teaching my course. Except in a way, maybe—I mean, she’s been helping to download the data banks from Ark and Mayflower. We’ve set up new storage by the power plants and the freezers, so in case anything happens to those ships—”

“Nothing can happen to the ships,” Viktor said, shocked.

“Something might,” his father said firmly. “Then we’d be screwed for fair. Do you know how long it would take to get everything retransmitted from Earth? But we’ve already got most of the astrophysical files duplicated here,” he finished, looking pleased for the first time. “That was a big job. Do you know, I think that calls for a drink.”

And they had one . . . except that his father had two. And Viktor began to understand what put those worry lines on his mother’s face. It wasn’t just hard work. What was aging her was worry about her husband.

 

Viktor was glad enough for the little birthday party and the company of young Edwina and the two brats, but he was even more glad when he got away.

When he got back to the top of the hill it was dusk, and the dancing had already begun. Viktor searched the dancers. They were in a double circle of couples, men and women singing softly to themselves in Spanish as the three-piece fiddle-guitar-and-drum band played something with a Mexican lilt. It was a corrido, and Viktor saw Reesa in the inner circle, holding right hands at shoulder height with—hell, yes! He scowled. It was Billy Stockbridge again.

But Reesa was not the only young woman among the dancers. When the next tune started Viktor grabbed a pretty young tractor driver and whirled her through a square dance. And then he was caught up in the fun of the dancing itself. He hardly noticed when he found himself with Reesa as his partner, swinging her around wildly, her laughing and panting, leaning against his arm around her waist. They did the krakowiak—hop, click heels, stamp; they did the macho Greek dances and the slow Israeli ones. When Reesa sat out one dance to nurse the baby, Yan, Viktor didn’t even miss her, though when it was over he came to where she was sitting on the blanket, the baby at her breast. It was only a little annoyance that Freddy Stockbridge was sitting there, too. Freddy wasn’t dancing. He wasn’t reading his prayer book, either, because it was too dark for that, but Viktor noticed with irritation that Freddy had put on a clerical collar for the occasion.

Reesa looked up at Viktor, her face flushed and happy. “They’re going to start the fireworks in a minute,” she said. “Why don’t you sit with us? Freddy, go get us some wine.”

Viktor eased himself down to the blanket beside her, watching the sleepy little mouth of his son sucking absentmindedly at Reesa’s breast. He glanced after the disappearing Freddy.

“I thought priests were supposed to be celibate,” he said.

“Mind your own business,” Reesa told him. Then, relenting, she said, “I guess Freddy is. He just likes children. He’s real good about baby-sitting for me.”

“Doesn’t take after his brother, then,” Viktor observed, but the way Reesa’s face tightened told him not to pursue the subject. Anyway, a pistol-shot sound in the air and a gasp from the crowd marked the first of the fireworks. They quieted to watch the display as Freddy came stumbling back with three cups of wine. Viktor helped Reesa cover his sleeping little son, tucking him in next to her already sound asleep toddler. Viktor was beginning to feel really good. The fireworks were brilliant and lovely to look at, under the warm Newmanhome sky. And then, when they were over, they did the last few dances, ending with the sweet, slow Misirlou. Misirlou means “beloved” in Greek. Perhaps that was why, when the last dance was over, Viktor looked around. Neither Jake Lundy nor Billy Stockbridge was nearby, so he offered quickly, “I’ll help you get the kids home, if you want.”

Reesa didn’t object. Freddy looked annoyed but drifted away. The two of them shared the sleeping children, Viktor carrying the toddler and Reesa the baby, Yan, as they walked down the hill. They didn’t speak for a while, and then Viktor remembered a question on his mind. “What’s this astrophysics class all about?” he demanded.

“It’s just what your father said it is,” she said shortly. She looked at him with curiosity. “I noticed today you’re all sunburned,” she accused. “What do you do, lounge around on the deck all day to get that he-man tan for the girls? Do you want to wreck your skin?”

He refused to be diverted. “No, really,” he insisted. “Do you think knowing how to tell a Wolf-Rayet star from an ordinary O is going to help you get to be a space pilot—twenty years from now?”

“It might,” she said seriously. “And it might not be twenty years; Argosy has small spaceships ready to go, you know, and it’s due pretty soon now.”

“Sure, when Argosy lands,” Viktor scoffed. It was what everybody said when they didn’t have something they really wanted: it would certainly be somewhere in the third ship’s limitless treasure of stores. “What makes you think they won’t have their own pilots for their own ships?”

She shrugged. “We still have our own landers,” she pointed out. “We’ll have more fuel for them, once they get the freezers going. And anyway—” she hesitated, then plunged on. “Anyway, I think it’s good for your father to be doing something. He’s, uh, he’s drinking a lot these days, you know.”

“I do know,” Viktor said stiffly. As an afterthought, he added, “It’s his business.”

Reesa didn’t challenge that. They walked in silence for a moment, then Viktor said tentatively, “I thought if you weren’t doing anything, later this evening—”

She stopped and studied him, shifting the sleeping baby from one shoulder to the other. “What is it, this is Wednesday so it must be Reesa’s turn? Isn’t your girlfriend on the ship keeping you happy?”

“I only said—”

“I know what you said.” She started walking again, silent for a moment. Then, she said, “Well, why not? After all, it is your birthday.”

 

It took eight days to pump the grain out of the ship’s hold and reload it with the new cargo for the South Continent. Viktor had to be there for the last of it, because the last things winched aboard were fourteen pregnant cows and a wobbly but feisty bull calf. “Do cows get seasick?” Alice Begstine asked the handler.

The woman wiped her sweating forehead. “How do I know? Are you going to have rough weather?”

“I hope not, but you never know.”

“Well, then you’ll find out,” the woman said grimly. “Anyway, you’d better lash them down if you do. They could fall and break their legs or something.”

“It sounds like it’s going to be a fun trip,” Alice observed. And then, when they were actually putting out to sea and she was on the bridge next to Viktor, she said, “Shan was asking after you.”

“Oh, yeah,” Viktor said, concentrating on setting a course while the wind was fair. “I’m sorry about that. I meant to come and see him, but—how’s he doing, anyway?”

“He’s learning to talk,” Alice informed him.

“That’s wonderful,” Viktor said, guilty but pleased. “Well, it’s your watch. I think I’ll look around below. And then I think I’ll hit the teaching machines.”

The revived talk about space travel, at least, had been an interesting development of his leave, but on the whole it hadn’t been entirely a happy one. Viktor was beginning to worry a little about his family. His mother was certainly working too hard, and his father . . .

Well, Pal Sorricaine wasn’t the man he had been on New Mayflower anymore. He was drinking again. It was because of the pain of his missing leg, he said. But what Reesa said—not right away, but reluctantly, and after keeping silence for a while, and then only because she never lied to Viktor—was that the course in astrophysics was a joke. Oh, the story about starting space travel again soon—maybe—was true enough; the council had voted it a medium priority. But the real purpose of the course was simply to give Pal Sorricaine something to do. Viktor himself had seen that the machines did most of the real teaching. They were far more patient than Pal Sorricaine, and fairer. Especially with the younger students who had never studied astrophysics before. The teaching machines were not put off by teenage sulks, or cajoled by teenage flattery. Probably the younger ones got something out of the course, but the others—well, everybody liked Pal Sorricaine, and they were willing to go to a little trouble to please him.

Viktor felt a small, lasting ache at the thought of his father being humored.

And he felt a certain irritation with Reesa, too. Although she had seemed happy enough for them to spend much of his time ashore together, she hadn’t seemed particularly excited by his attentions. Nor had she tried to conceal from him (that same damned honesty!) that there were others more attentive, and more often around.

All in all, he was glad to be back at sea.

 

Even that, though, wasn’t as exciting as it once had been. When Viktor had first shipped out, as soon as he was big enough to do an adult’s job, everything had been thrillingly new. They hadn’t just cruised back and forth, as though on tracks; they had gone where, literally, no human had ever been before. They visited islands that they populated with earthworms, insects, algae, and flowering plants, as well as the seedlings that, they hoped, would one day be great forests of oak and apple and pine. Then they returned to those islands, a few Newmanhome years later, to seed them with second generations of fish and birds and small mammals—and a few years after that, with a couple of pairs of foxes to keep the rabbits down, and sheep to start earning the islands’ keep. He was too young to have been involved in the spreading of trace minerals in the soils of some of the lands, so that Earthly crops could grow, but he helped dig out the muck where recurrent marsh flooding had drowned thousands of years of colonizing plants, creating a sort of mulch that was almost as good as guano. He was even part of an expedition a hundred kilometers down the coast, once, when an explorer broke a leg in the jungle and had to be rescued from deep, ferny, swampy tangles of Newmanhome’s native vegetation.

All that was in Viktor’s apprentice days. His current job was crewing one of the giant grain ships that fed the growing city on the North Continent from the new farms on the South. Food for Homeport’s people could be grown nearer the city and a lot was. But clearing the tangled, ropy vegetation of that part of the North Continent was hard work. Worse, the stuff refused to stay cleared. The principal native vine was more tenacious than crab-grass or kudzu, and harder to kill. Its root systems went down a dozen meters and more, and the stuff was quite content to grow up right through a field of corn or soy from the vestiges of its roots.

At some point, the leadership council decided, a new city, or a dozen of them, would have to be planted in the hotter, wetter south. The location of their first town, Homeport, had been chosen at long range, from probe imaging and the hurried studies of the Ark officers as they were busy inserting themselves into orbit, and it had been a minor mistake. But, like many such mistakes, it perpetuated itself. Every new building that went up was one more inducement to stay there. The buildings couldn’t easily be moved.

The grain could, easily enough. Great Ocean was generally placid, and the prevailing winds were strong enough to drive a grain ship’s rotor sails without at the same time raising storm waves big enough to be a nuisance. Navigation was no problem. Viktor’s navigating talents were largely wasted. There were no icebergs to collide with, because there wasn’t any ice. There were few other ships, and hardly ever any nearby; there were very few reefs or shoals. In fact there was no bottom closer than three hundred meters for the next week’s sailing. The signals from the derelict interstellar ships in orbit gave them accurate positions at all times, so between ports the crew was largely honorary.

So Viktor and his shipmates did what everybody on Newmanhome did when they had leisure time. They watched TV, most of it rebroadcast by the orbiting ships from transmissions from distant Earth. (That didn’t make them homesick. Watching the stories about crime and violence and overcrowded cities made them grateful not to be there.) Or they made some more babies. Or they tuned in on the transmissions from the third ship, New Argosy, late because of the funding squabbles but now well on its way—and, oh so eagerly awaited! It held so many things they didn’t have—grand pianos, and a submarine, and even a complete installation for making more antimatter with a prefabricated near-Sun solar-power satellite—and, wow, what they could do then!

Or they studied.

In Viktor’s case, after hearing what the Homeport council had decided, study came first. He spent half his waking hours at the ship’s teaching machine, going over and over the fundamentals of orbital transfer and astrogation and celestial mechanics. He didn’t seriously believe he would ever get into space, even to help deploy the antimatter manufactury when it arrived. But even an outside chance was worth fighting for. And he even did some refresher studying on his father’s particular interest, astrophysics and cosmology. It wouldn’t ever be important to him, in any way. He was sure of that—wrong, as it turned out later, but sure. Nevertheless it was interesting.

The people of Newmanhome didn’t usually think hard about being happy to be where they were; they had gotten used to it, even the ones who remembered anything else. It was as good a planet as they hoped, and better than they had feared. There was no such thing as “continental climate” on Newmanhome. The biggest continent was smaller than Australia and looked more like a fat question mark than a more or less symmetrical blob. There wasn’t much in the way of seasons, either. They’d given up the idea of “months” in their new calendar; they divided the year into Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, with fifty-odd days in each of the divisions, but there was less difference between Winter and Summer than between two successive weeks in most Earthly climates. An axial tilt of only six degrees and a nearly circular orbit disarmed the cycle of seasons; Newmanhome was more like Hawaii than like Chicago or Moscow.

The shorter day helped even things out weatherwise, too. The night didn’t have time to cool down as much as on Earth, so extremes of temperature were moderated still more. And the Newmanhome day was close enough to Earth’s twenty-four hours that even the people who were grown up when they landed had long since readjusted their diurnal rhythms.

There was plenty of native life on Newmanhome, but not a single native animal to compete with human beings and their stocks. There were things that almost seemed like animals, because they moved about during the day, but they sank roots at night. There were things that ate other things, like terrestrial saprophytes and carnivorous plants, but they all photosynthesized, as well.

Some of the plants were warm-blooded or warm-sapped—and some of the mobile eating things liked to eat the warm ones. That was as close to a danger as the colonists had found. If one of the free-ranging predators, particularly the marine ones, found a sleeping human being, it was likely enough to try to eat him. The predators fed by lancing the prey with hollow things like thorns and injecting digestive saps, then sucking back the resulting soup when it was done. The process didn’t work on human beings. Their tissues resisted the lysing enzymes of the predator plants, and anyway after the first itching stab or two the human prey would certainly wake up and go somewhere else. But they could get a hell of a painful wound in the process, and sometimes people died.

Sometimes people died from other causes, too. They were a young population, there on Newmanhome, and deaths were rare. But they happened. Drowning. Accident. Even once or twice the great scandal of a murder and suicide in a quarrel. But Newmanhome was benign to its colonists. Certainly people wore out early from hard work, and there were always those handicapped older ones who had come out of cryonic suspension with a kind of freezer-burn that slowed them down, or limited their abilities, but otherwise people were pretty healthy. The only diseases they encountered were the ones they had brought with them, and years of selection, therapy, and prophylaxis had kept those diseases few.

Until the first week of Winter in the thirty-ninth Newmanhome year of the colony.

 

There was no warning of trouble.

The harvest was the most bountiful yet in the grain fields of South Continent. Viktor and his first mate, Alice Begstine, had had a good time while the ship was loading. They had borrowed a rolligon and gone exploring in South Continent’s high country, beyond the farm lands. The ship’s cook, who was one of Alice’s other part-time lovers, had elected to stay ashore that trip, so she and Viktor bunked together on the voyage, enjoying it, too—though Viktor still secretly fantasized about Marie-Claude sharing his bed. They even, halfway home, saw a Von Neumann nautilus swimming sturdily toward their port beside them, to turn itself in. It was one of the first to have accumulated enough metal to trigger its return reflexes. It looked to have at least fifty chambers, each one bigger than the one before it in its spiral shell. “It’s got to be a ten-tonner,” Alice guessed. Viktor couldn’t doubt it. Ten tons of valuable heavy metal soaked up from the thermal springs at the bottom of Great Ocean—what was the point of mining, when you could send the roving Von Neumann automata out to do the job for you? And the holds bulging with grain. And the colony growing. And new lands being explored—why, things were really going splendidly!

So they thought, right up to the moment of landing at Homeport.

As Viktor’s ship slid gently in to mate with the floating dock he saw his father standing there, waiting for him.

That was a surprise. As he finished the docking drill, Viktor saw with a critical eye that his father was freshly shaved, but his hair was shaggy; he wore a clean, pressed blouse, but the cuffs of his pants were mud stained, though the streets were dry. Viktor easily read the meaning of the signs.

His father had been drinking again.

The ship was lashed to the floating dock. The huge snout of the grain pipe swung over the deck, slipped down through the open hold, and began snuffling up the cargo. Viktor picked up his kit bag, slung it over his shoulder, and swung himself down to the dock. His father, standing right where he landed, said at once, “Your mother’s sick.”

Just like that. No “Hello, son,” or even, “I’ve got some bad news for you.” Just “Your mother’s sick,” and a thumb jerked to the waiting tandem bike.

 

Amelia Sorricaine-Memel was sick, all right. The first thing the doctors told him, as gently as they could—but they had very little time to be gentle or considerate just then—was that they were pretty sure she was dying.

It wasn’t pneumonia or emphysema or the flu. It was something the surveyors had brought back from Continent Delta, way on the other side of the planet, just really being explored for the first time.

What they brought back was a mold. It had thrived there as a parasite on some of the warm algal organisms of the tidal flats, but it had found a new home in human lungs. For the algae of the littoral it was a benign enough parasite. All it did was slow down their growth a little. For humans it was worse. It killed.

Viktor’s mother lived seventeen painful hours after he reached her bedside. She was wheezing and strangling for breath the whole time, even when they put a mask over her face to give her oxygen, even when they put her in a hyperbaric chamber under enough pressure to force the oxygen into her lungs. Even when they drenched the air she breathed with antifungals strong enough to threaten her life.

Probably the antifungals did threaten it. They probably took it, in fact, because when she died her face was pink again, instead of the cadaver blue of oxygen starvation. But she was just as dead.

Amelia Sorricaine-Memel wasn’t the only one to die. Twenty-eight hundred of the colonists died in sixty days, just under half the population of Newmanhome, before the frantic biologists discovered—not a cure, no, but an antifungal agent that, sopped onto a gauze mask, killed the spores before they could get into the respiratory system. The agent smelled like rotting manure, but that was a small enough price to pay for the survival of human life on Newmanhome.

It wasn’t just human life that was at risk. All the carefully bred and preserved livestock—fish excepted, actually, but all the sheep, goats, cattle, dogs, horses, deer—had to be forcibly fitted with halters and masks of their own. They all fought it, but they survived—

All but the cats.

No one could make a cat leave a wet gauze mask in place over its mouth and nose. They maintained the cat tradition to the extinction of the species: the cat who has no master and acknowledges no law but its own, even if it dies for it. Die they did.

 

When Viktor got back to his parents’ home he pushed open the door and stopped.

The place reeked of stale beer and vomit. His father was sprawled beside the bed, snoring raggedly, impossible to wake. He had fouled himself, and there were stains of urine and vomit on bed and floor. He had taken his artificial leg off and lay with it clasped in his arms, like a beloved woman.

It was not the first time Viktor had seen his father drunk, but it was a long way the worst. Viktor would not have believed that he could have felt such hatred for the old man. He did not fear that his father was dying. He almost wished it were true. He set his kit bag down on the table, pushing aside empty bottles, and stood over the drunken man, listening objectively to the rattling, choking sounds of the snores.

You dirty old bastard, he thought.

A shadow from the doorway made him turn, and there was Billy Stockbridge peering in, his mother behind him.

Even at that moment Viktor felt a tingling shock in his groin at the sight of Marie-Claude. She had cut her hair short since the last time he had seen her, and there was a certain soft thickening of the flesh under her chin that he didn’t remember seeing before. She was wearing a short, thin dress that did nothing to flatter her—the kind housewives put on to clean their kitchens—and she was carrying a bucket and a mop.

Even with the hideous antifungal mask, she was very beautiful.

“Viktor,” she said, “I didn’t know you were here. I’m sorry about your mother.”

“But we’ve got to get your dad to the hospital,” Billy added.

“They’ve got more important things to do than looking after drunks,” Viktor said contemptuously—and was startled to see the quick flare of anger that twisted Billy Stockbridge’s face. But it was his mother who spoke, already by Pal Sorricaine’s side, lifting an eyelid with her thumb, feeling his sweating forehead.

“Viktor. Your father isn’t just drunk. He’s got acute alcohol poisoning. He could die. Help Billy get him to the hospital.”

What Viktor would not have done for his father he could not refuse Marie-Claude. He pulled a blanket off his parents’ bed and rolled the old man into it. Billy helped, glowering. The filth was already staining the blanket as Viktor picked Pal Sorricaine up and threw him over his shoulder. The filth didn’t matter. It was only one more insult added to the rancor that was already overflowing. “I’ll be back,” he said, and carried his father out the door, Billy Stockbridge trailing glowering behind.

 

When Viktor got back from getting his father admitted—only to a pallet on the ground, because all the beds were full of the dying—Marie-Claude had thrown open the windows, scrubbed up the worst of the filth, and cleared off the litter of bottles and dirty clothes. She had even made a pot of tea. She poured a cup for Viktor as he sat down.

She seemed pale, silent, drawn, abstracted. But all she said was, “Is your father going to be all right?”

Viktor shrugged. “They’re treating him, anyway.” Actually, even the doctor who finally came to see them had had no hesitation about admitting Pal Sorricaine, once he had felt his pulse. Lying on the ground and wholly unaware, the snoring man had been washed, bedded, and stuck with IVs to replenish his lost liquids and electrolytes before Viktor left. The doctor said it would be at least forty-eight hours before Pal would be able to go home. (Strange that even yet people said “forty-eight hours,” as though it were a natural unit of time.) “Billy wanted to stay with him a while,” Viktor added.

Marie-Claude nodded in that weary, absent way, as though she were thinking about something else entirely—though with the antifungal mask covering most of her face there wasn’t much he could tell about what she was thinking, anyway. “Billy is very fond of your father,” she mentioned.

Viktor gaped at her. “For God’s sake, why?”

She didn’t seem surprised at the question. “Why shouldn’t he be? Pal is a good man, Viktor. You’re too hard on him. He’s had trouble adjusting, and there’s his leg, and then your mother’s sickness . . .” She said it all flatly, like a comment on the weather. Her voice was as pallid as what he could see of her face.

There was something wrong with Marie-Claude. For a moment the natural fear flashed though his mind—the sickness?—but no, he reassured himself, it couldn’t be that. The sick ones were unmistakable, the gasping struggle for air, the cyanosed complexion. None of that applied to Marie-Claude. Still, Viktor looked at her with concern.

“Are you all right?” he demanded.

She looked at him questioningly and then seemed to shake herself. She poured more tea for him, thoughtfully. “Nobody’s all right now, are they? But I’ll be fine.” Then, without warning. she said. “Viktor. Why don’t you marry Theresa McGann?”

There was a swallow of tea halfway down Viktor’s throat. He gagged. “You talk like my mother,” he got out, strangling.

“Then your mother talks sense to you. I’ll speak for her, since she can’t anymore. You ought to have a real family, not just leave a puppy here and there. Marry Theresa. Or somebody. Why not?”

“Because,” he said—boldly, bitterly, “the only woman I want to marry will go to bed with anybody on Newmanhome, except me.”

She looked at him in puzzlement.

Then, for the first time, he saw a crinkling at the corners of the eyes, just visible above the mask. She was almost smiling. She put her hand on his. “Dear, dear Viktor,” she said with affection. “Do you have any idea how grand you’ve been for my morale, all these years?”

He snatched his hand away. “Damn you, don’t patronize me!” he grated.

“I don’t mean to,” she said apologetically. She studied him thoughtfully for a moment. Then she closed her eyes, as though in resignation. When she opened them again she said, “Have you finished your tea? Then let’s close the windows and lock the door. I’m a lot too old to marry you, Viktor. I’m too old for an affair with you, too, I mean for any long time. But if you really want us to make love—once—well, why not?”

 

Viktor didn’t see Marie-Claude after that, not for a long time. For the whole next day he went around grinning to himself. He was just about the only person in the colony smiling that day. People looked at him with surprise and sometimes with anger. He was reliving every moment and touch of that wonderful copulation. Marie-Claude in bed was what he had been dreaming of since before even puberty, and the reality was not in any way a letdown. They had been careful with each other’s gauze masks, kissing through them, with all their foul smell and taste, and in every other way they had been wild. She had responded to him with gasped and choked cries, and at the end, when she sobbed and cried out, she had dissolved into shaking tears.

Viktor was startled and worried and did not, just then, know why.

She didn’t show up at the mass funerals when his mother, with forty-two others, was being put under the ground. (Even there Viktor could hardly help an invisible smile now and then, even while he cried.) That was just as well. There was a nasty—and completely unexpected—quarrel at the grave site. It concerned religion, of all things. The Moslems didn’t want to have their dead buried with the unbelievers, and once the Moslems made that clear, some of the other sects began muttering, too. It took all of Captain Bu’s bellowing to restore order. Then a rancorous emergency town meeting was called that night, people shouting at each other through tears and gauze masks, before it was decided that future burials could be segregated by religion.

It was there that Freddy Stockbridge, coming up to offer a prayer for his mother for him, filled in the missing piece in the puzzle of Marie-Claude. Yes, she had been strangely abstracted that day. Her own husband, that forgotten man, the man who, when Viktor remembered his existence at all, he had thought of with the contemptuous pity of the seducer for the cuckold—that man had himself died only hours before Amelia Sorricaine-Memel.

Viktor had bedded the widow before the man’s corpse was cold.

But Marie-Claude was true to her word. She didn’t turn to Viktor to take her dead husband’s place. She boarded a ship for Archipelago West as soon as one sailed. Months later Viktor heard that she was marrying a molecular biologist bereft at the same time as herself.

 

When Pal Sorricaine got out of the hospital he was shaky and, beyond the gauze face mask, pale. He confronted his son steadily enough, though. “I just couldn’t handle it, Viktor,” he said.

Viktor turned away from cleaning the house—the smaller children were back in their home again, and he had been the only one to take care of them. He said to his father, just as steadily, “That’s crap. You’ve been a drunk for years. You’ve just been getting worse, that’s all.”

His father flinched. “That’s what I meant, Viktor. Your mother dying was just the last straw. I haven’t been able to handle my life for a long time now. Being here—missing a leg—so much to do, and not much that I’m able to do to help. Vik, I just don’t feel like I’ve got a place here.”

Viktor studied his father. He had never seen him look so—was the right word “defeated”? No, the word that fit best was pointless.” Pal Sorricaine did not seem to have any point or purpose to his life.

Viktor lifted the lid of the stewpot and sniffed. Dinner could be served when Edwina came back with the littler kids; it was ready now. “Eat something,” he growled, putting a plate in front of his father. The man accepted instruction obediently, pushing his mask aside for each spoonful of broth and meat and potatoes. Pal Sorricaine didn’t seem to want to prolong the conversation. He simply did as he was told, without comment.

To his son, that was scary. “But you’ve got your class,” Viktor said abruptly.

Pal shook his head, going on eating. “There’s nothing left for me to teach them, Vik.”

“But your observatory—”

“Viktor,” his father said patiently, “every one of those kids can run the telescope as well as I can. Billy can run it better. He’s been the one who’s been commanding the Mayflower instruments for months.” He began to look interested for the first time. “Billy’s done a series of observations of Nebo that would make a doctoral dissertation for him back on Earth, Viktor. There are some pretty funny levels of high-energy radiation coming from around there—nothing I would have expected. Nothing I can account for, and, Viktor, I don’t even know where to begin to look anymore. But Bill keeps working at it. He’s very bright. You’d be interested in that, Vik; I’ll ask Bill to show you. He’s always eager to oblige. You know, he sort of took care of me when I was, well, under the weather.”

“Eat your dinner,” Viktor commanded sourly. He didn’t want, for a whole complex of reasons, to hear any more about the virtues of Billy Stockbridge.

 

Because of the epidemic everything was delayed, disorganized, generally screwed up. Viktor’s ship had unloaded in record time, but the cargo of machines and chemicals for the return trip was late. The ship’s sailing was put off.

The day before it finally sailed Viktor looked up Reesa McGann. She had their son with them, as well as her toddler by Jake Lundy. As a matter of fact, there were twenty-two infants under her care, because she was trying her luck with a day-care job. “What happened to space piloting?” he asked.

She didn’t even smile. It wasn’t much of a joke; she didn’t have to say that obviously there weren’t going to be any space-piloting jobs around now because the epidemic had pushed everything back to the edge of bare survival.

Then, without at all planning it, he found himself saying, “Reesa, my mother told me just before she died that I ought to marry you. So did—someone else.”

“Who else?” she asked curiously. When he didn’t answer, she said, “They’re right, of course. You ought to.”

He blinked at her, surprised and amused. “Do you want me to?”

She thought that over for a moment while she propped a bottle for one of the younger ones under her care. Then she said, “Yes, no, and maybe. Yes, first: Screwing at random and making babies with different people is kind of kid stuff. There’s a time to settle down, and both you and I are right about at that time. Then, no: You’ve been horny for Marie-Claude Petkin since you were in diapers yourself. There’s no point thinking about marrying you until you get her off your mind.”

Viktor flushed, half angry, half laughing. She stopped there. “You didn’t tell me what the maybe was,” he protested.

“Well, isn’t that obvious? If you ever get over having the hots for Marie-Claude, then maybe I’ll still be around. Give me a call if you do, okay?”

He grinned at her—unwilling to take the discussion seriously, trying to keep it light and jocular. “I have to be the one who calls? You won’t call me?”

“Viktor,” she said earnestly, “I’ve been calling you since we were both school kids. I just keep getting a busy signal.”

 

It turned out Viktor was going to another funeral—Alice’s older child had died, along with all those thousands, and so had her mother—and so, as it also turned out, he wasn’t going to have a ready-made bunkmate that trip. Alice was going to stay home with Shan for a while.

The funeral was worse than the one the day before. The town meeting had settled very little when it had authorized separate burials for Moslems. Kittamur Haradi was a Moslem, all right, but he was a Sunni. He didn’t want his late wife buried with the Shi’ites. So a separate, smaller ditch was dug for the second Moslem sect.

And then the community’s chief working rabbi (there were only two) got the segregationist fever, declaring that Jewish burials should be in a place of their own, where a star of David could be erected.

Viktor couldn’t see the sense of it. When the bodies were laid into their great, shallow pits they all looked much the same. At least, he thought, with what remained of his identification as a Christian who hadn’t been to a service since the landing, the Catholics and all the Protestants, even the Quakers and Unitarians, had all raised no objection to a common grave for their dead.

Not then, anyway.

That night he let his father persuade him to come and see what Billy Stockbridge had been doing. It wasn’t just that he thought it might be interesting, although he did; it was a way of keeping some sort of contact with the old man. Not making up, exactly. But not building the wall between them any higher, at least.

They didn’t go to the observatory, they went to the little cubicle under the radio dish that Pal Sorricaine had begged for an astronomy center. But Billy wasn’t there. “I don’t know where he could have got to,” Pal Sorricaine said, frowning. “Everything’s so mixed up with all the deaths—I haven’t really talked to him for weeks. Well, let’s see what he’s got. I think that’s his current program that he left up. Let me take a look . . .”

He stumped over to the console and sat down to study the screen, first cursorily, then frowning.

“But this isn’t Nebo,” he said, scratching absently at his gauze mask with one hand, rubbing his stump with the other. “Look at this. Bill’s been doing stellar spectrometry—lots of it. See here, he’s been taking observations on a bunch of bright stars; here’s Betelgeuse, here’s Fomalhaut, here’s— Wait a minute,” he said suddenly. He scowled at the screen. “Look at that.”

Viktor looked obediently, trying to remember what he knew about stellar spectra. What he mostly remembered was that you couldn’t tell much just by glancing at them; you needed careful comparisons against standards to see anything meaningful. “Look at what?” he asked.

“The absorption lines are all mixed up,” Pal Sorricaine complained. “Look at the hydrogen alphas! See, Bill’s got two sets of spectra for each star, one’s recent, the other’s a year or two ago. Their frequency shifted! Not much; it could even be an instrument screwup . . .” He stared at the screen, gnawing his lip under the mask. Then he said, “No. Bill’s a better observer than that. He wouldn’t get them all wrong. Something systematic is going on.”

Viktor said, not quite understanding, “Are all the stars screwed up?”

“No! Look at this nearby bunch—stars within five or six light-years. They haven’t changed. But these more distant ones— But that’s impossible!” he cried angrily.

“What’s impossible?”

“Look, damn it! Here, everything in this direction is red-shifted—all these others are blued. And that couldn’t happen, Viktor, not possibly. Unless—”

“Come on, Dad! Unless what?” Viktor demanded, angry and uneasy.

Pal Sorricaine shook his head. “Let’s find Billy,” he growled, and Viktor heard with alarm the worry in his father’s voice.

 

They didn’t find Billy Stockbridge. Billy found them. He was coming up the hill, very fast, when he saw them coming down. When Pal Sorricaine started his angry questioning, Billy just shook his head. “Come into the observatory,” he said. “Let me show you.”

And inside the little observers’ room he sat down at the keypad without another word. “This is an old star photograph,” he explained over his shoulder as a sky view appeared on the screen, a negative, black dots on a white background. “Now I’m superimposing one I just took.” The number of stars suddenly doubled and then began to move about as Billy worked over the keypad. “Just a moment till I get them registered . . .” The stars abruptly coalesced, as far as Viktor could see, but Billy was busy setting up another program.

Then he leaned back as the image began to pulse, like a fast heartbeat, twice a second. “Now look,” he ordered.

Viktor glanced at his father, silently staring at the screen with his brows screwed together in perplexity—or worry? “I am looking,” Viktor said, annoyed. “I don’t see anything, but— hey! Isn’t that one jumping back and forth? And that one, too—and that over there . . .”

“My God,” Pal Sorricaine said softly.

Billy nodded grimly. “In this segment of the sky I’ve found twenty-three stars that show movement on the blink comparator. As soon as I made those Doppler measurements I had to make an optical observation. The Dopplers were right. Look again, Viktor. Look at the ones on the edges of the screen. This one—” He put a finger on a large dot near the left edge. “—and this little one over here on the right. Wait a minute, I’ll slow the blinks down.”

And when he did, Viktor saw that as the dot on the left jumped left, the dot on the right jumped right. “They’re all moving away from the middle!” he cried. And then, on second thought, “Or toward it?”

“Away is right,” Billy told him soberly. “That’s why I picked this frame to show you. The ones we see moving are the nearest stars—some of them, anyway—the ones with the largest parallax. They’re all in motion.”

Viktor stared at him in silent consternation. “But they can’t be!”

And from behind him his father said, “You’re right, Viktor. They’re not moving. But somehow or other—and goddam rapidly, too—all of a sudden we are!”

 

 

 

CHAPTER 7