The solar power plant the university maintained outside of the city limits was evidently for teaching, thank goodness, rather than research. It wasn’t working, but that was because it hadn’t been completely reassembled for the nth generation of engineering students. I took a mechanic and an engineer out there, and after we found the plans, it only took us a day to reconstruct it and two days to carefully take it apart.
Then we moved the pieces to the dormitory and reassembled it on the roof, and started charging fuel cells. People weren’t too happy about all of the electricity going into batteries when it could be giving them light and heat, but first things first. (My mother and father were always talking about “power to the people.” A good thing they weren’t here to agitate.)
We got two delivery vans running–I guess we should have called them “scavenger” vans–and raided a plumbing supply depot and a hardware store for the things we needed to get running water in the dorm. We basically pumped water from the river, presumably clean, up to a collapsible swimming pool on the roof, which served as a holding tank. That gave us gravity-fed plumbing for the kitchen and the dormitory’s first floor, complete with hot water, since it was only a matter of finding the right adapters to run the water through a heater. Still no toilets, since the dorm used conventional “flash and ash” disposal, completely sanitary but requiring truly huge amounts of power. There wasn’t enough water to convert to the ancient kind of plumbing I grew up with, and I don’t know what you could safely do with the effluent anyhow. I remember big sewage plants, but I’m not sure how they did what they did. So we kept using slit latrines, a simple design from an army manual, and Sage was researching for more permanent solutions.
The fourth ship, Number Two, came into orbit after twelve days and landed without incident. Its passengers all got second-floor rooms, except for Cat. Ami Larson really needed someone sympathetic; she was grieving over Teresa and feeling guilty for having abandoned her and their daughter. Cat had been het since she came to Middle Finger, but she’d been lesbian all her life before that. Which was probably less important than having twenty years’ more experience than Ami, in love and loss, and a patient ear.
So she was next door, which shouldn’t have bothered me–would it have, if Cat had been an old boyfriend? Maybe it was the long period of their lives (only about a year in real time) that was theirs alone, which I could never share–when I had been out of the picture, presumed dead.
Of course all of us first-generation veterans who’d been home had been switched to het, as a condition for coming to Middle Finger and jumping in the gene pool. Teresa showed how effective that was. And I knew Charlie had had at least one fling with a guy, maybe for old time’s sake. Boys will be girls and girls will be boys, we used to say, in my unenlightened youth.
Mark kept searching for more information at the OIC, but had found nothing new. He also spent days prowling around the spaceport, but in neither place was there any record of collapsar-jump messages from Earth, either before or after the disaster. They were evidently kept secret from hoi polloi; the sheriff had no idea where they might be. Of course, even if we did find messages and there were none from Earth after the Day plus ten months, it wouldn’t prove anything. There wasn’t anyone here to receive.
(In fact, we could be getting messages from Earth every hour, via collapsar, and never know it. The transmitter comes tearing out at a velocity much higher than Mizar’s escape velocity, since the small collapsar’s in a tight orbit around Mizar. It whips by MF at fifty or a hundred times the planet’s escape velocity, and sends its message down in a burst, and goes off for parts unknown. It’s only about the size of a fist, so it’s almost undetectable if you don’t know the frequency it’s using.)