Stung, Mouche cried, “I don’t know how it ended up, Papa. I don’t know anything about the Questioner.”
“Well, boy, let me tell you, you’d be sorry if words of yours reached her ears! As for Roquamb III, well, she took care of those poor souls. Imagine what that would be like. The whole world dying around you, and you knowing it was your fault!” Papa glared at him for a moment, then started down the road again, leaving Mouche thoroughly confused and not much enlightened. He’d been told something about the Questioner at school, but at the moment, Mouche couldn’t remember what.
He decided to talk about something else during the rest of the trip, something with no danger to it. The dust puffing up between his toes gave him inspiration.
“Why do we have to walk everywhere, Papa? Or go behind a horse? Why don’t we have engines? Like in the books?”
“Interstellar travel is very expensive,” said Papa, grateful for the change of subject. “Our ancestors on our Motherworld saved up for centuries to send off our settlement, and the settlers had to pick and choose carefully what they would bring with them. They brought just enough rations to keep them until the first crops could be harvested. They brought seed and fertilized stock ova and an omni-uterus to grow the first calves and foals and piglets and lambs, and an incubator to hatch the first chickens.
“Our population was small and our first generations tended flocks and herds and planted crops and cut wood and quarried stone, and the next generation built up the towns, and searched for metal ores and rare biologicals to build up our trade. Then came sawmills along the river, and then the first smelter and the little railroad that runs from the mines to Naibah, and so on. Now we are almost ready to become industrial.”
“It sure seems slow,” mumbled Mouche.
“Well, it’s been slower for us than for some, partly because we have so few women, and partly because Newholme has no coal or oil. We hadn’t exactly counted on that. Every other planet that’s had life for millions of years has had fossil fuels, but not Newholme.”
“I know,” Mouche muttered. He really did know all this; he’d learned it in school. Sometimes he thought it would be easier if the schools didn’t talk about life on Old Earth or on the older settled worlds where people had replicators and transporters and all the robotic industries to support them. If he didn’t know there were any such things as transporters and replicators, walking to Sendoph or working in the garden wouldn’t seem so hard. It would just be natural.
That night was a good supper, better than any they’d had in a long time. The next day, too, as though Papa could not let him go without stuffing him first. Like a goose, Mouche thought. Off to the market, but fattened, first. Between these unexpectedly lavish meals, he had time to say good-bye to most everything that mattered. The pigs. The geese. The milk cow and her calf. With the money paid for Mouche, the family could get by without selling the heifer calf, and when she grew, they would have more milk to sell. With the money paid for Mouche, the mill could be repaired, and there’d be money coming in from grinding the neighbor’s grain and pressing their grapes and olives. With the money paid for Mouche …
It was only fair, he told himself, desperately trying to be reasonable and not to cry. If he’d been a girl, he’d have brought in a great dowry to Eline and Darbos. Just as the money paid for Eline had gone to her family, so money paid for a daughter would go to this family. But that would be honorable, which this was not. Buying a Hunk was honorable enough, it was only selling one that wasn’t. Still, getting a good bid for a girl was just good sense. Why should getting a good bid for a boy be different?
Mouche said farewell to pasture and woodlot and barn, farewell to the cat and her kittens, allowed the freedom of the loft and a ration of milk in return for ridding the granary of the Newholmian equivalent of mice. And finally he went to Duster’s grave and knelt down to say good-bye, dropping more than a few tears on old Duster who had been his best and only friend, who had died in such a terrible way. He could have had one of Duster’s pups from the neighbors—Old Duster had been an assiduous visitor next door—but there had been no food to feed another dog, said Mama. Well. Duster had left a numerous family behind. He was g’Duster, for sure, and long remembered.