Wan-To definitely did not want that done.
Then, of course, for lesser tasks he had the whole spectrum of photons at his disposal, too—radio, heat, visible light, gamma rays, X rays, even gravitons. All of these were useful, for different things, but they were all so terribly slow. None of them could move faster than that old 186,000 miles a second.
Still, they could be very handy when used in the right way, especially the range of particles that mediated the force of gravitation. With them, it wasn’t hard for Wan-To (or his brethren) to zap a star. Even human beings could have done it, if they had had access to the necessary gravitons, graviphotons, and grayiscalars, and in all those supplies Wan-To was immensely rich. If you flooded a target star with the right particles you could pull it right out of shape. All that held any star together was gravitational force. When stretched on the particle rack, the core bubbled and fountained like a geyser, and no structure inside it could survive.
Wan-To could imagine that happening to his own comfortable home very easily, and the thought gave him the creeps.
Finally, Wan-To could use that slow, gross, clumsy stuff—matter.
It was easy enough for Wan-To to make things out of ordinary matter, but he mistrusted the stuff. It was completely foreign to his everyday life. He used it only when there was no alternative. And yet, when he thought over his options, it began to look as though this were one of the times when no good alternative could be found.
Although his mind—you wouldn’t really want to say his “brain,” because there wasn’t much of Wan-To but brain—although his mind, that is to say, was very widely dispersed about the fabric of the star he lived in, the messenger neutrinos flashed their signals about as fast as any animal dendrites in a human skull. It didn’t take him long to decide that, this time, the employment of a certain amount of matter was his best strategy.
What helped him to that decision quickly was a sudden urgent signal—his “senses” perceived it as something between the ringing of a loud alarm bell and the sting of a wasp—from one of his ERP pairs.
The signal told him that another nearby star had just gone flaring to its death.
That meant that his siblings were still shooting at him with their probing fire. Sooner or later those random shots would find him . . . and so it was time for Wan-To to act. It was war!
It is civilians who get the worst part of wars. Wan-to can’t be blamed for what happened to the innocent bystanders in this one, though, since he had no idea there were any.
CHAPTER 4
The innocent bystander named Pal Sorricaine was now (biologically) in his sixties. That was a lot, compared to his wife’s biological thirty-eight, but he still had youth enough to do his duty by the colony. Accordingly, when Viktor was (again biologically, anyway) fourteen, his mother provided him with a sibling.
Viktor had some trouble welcoming the thing. It was female. It was also tiny and noisy at all hours of the day and night; and, in Viktor’s view, it was very ugly.
For reasons Viktor could not understand, the wretched look of the thing didn’t seem to worry his mother. It didn’t put his father off it, either. They held it and fondled it and fed it, just as though it were beautiful. They didn’t even appear to mind the bad smells it made when it fouled itself, as it did often.
Its name was Edwina. “Don’t call her an ‘it,’ either,” Viktor’s mother commanded. “Call her by her name.”
“I don’t like her name. Why couldn’t you call her Marie or something?”
“Because we picked Edwina. Why are you so crazy about the name Marie?”
“I’m not crazy about it. I just like it.”
Amelia Sorricaine-Memel gave her son a thoughtful look but decided not to press the matter. “Marie’s a pretty name,” she conceded, “but it isn’t hers.”
“Ed-wee-na,” Viktor sneered.
His mother grinned at him. She rumpled his hair fondly and offered a compromise. “You can call her Weeny if you want to, because she is kind of weeny. Now let me show you how to change her diaper.”
Viktor gazed at his mother with teenage horror and despair. “Oh, God,” he moaned. “As if I didn’t have enough to do already!”
In fact he had plenty to do. Everybody did. Building a new colony wasn’t just a challenge. It was work, and every colonist had to face the facts of frontier life.
The first fact of Viktor’s new life had been the dwelling he and his parents were given to live in. It was a long, long way from the beach house in Malibu. It was bigger than the cubicle on Mayflower, but that was all you could say for it. It wasn’t even a cubicle. It was a tent. More accurately it was three tents run together, each made out of several plies of the light-sail/parachute material, and all they had to furnish it with was a couple of beds—pallets, really; they had no springs—and some metal cupboards brought down from Mayflower. (Even those they would have to give up, they were warned, as soon as wood equivalents could be carpentered from the native vegetation. Until the new mines and smelters were fully operational, metal was precious.)
The second fact was time, also in short supply. In fact, there wasn’t any of it. Every one of the skimpy daylight hours was filled—if not with work (farmhand, construction helper, general laborer; the kids who landed from Mayflower were at once put to work at whatever they could do), then with school. School wasn’t any fun, either. Viktor was shoved into a class with thirty-two other kids of about his age, but they weren’t a congenial lot. Half of them were from the first ship, seasoned and superior in the ways of the new planet, and very aware of their superiority, and the other half were greenhorns like himself. The two kinds didn’t get along.
That situation the teacher would not tolerate. He was a tall, one-armed man named Martin Feldhouse, chronically short of breath. Short of patience, too. “There won’t be any fighting in this school,” he decreed, coughing. “You have to live together for the rest of your lives, so start out doing it. Line up in size places for your buddies.”
The students stood up and reluctantly milled into order. Viktor wasn’t sure how to take Martin Feldhouse; he had never seen a human being who was missing an arm before. The thing about Feldhouse was that he had gotten himself crushed under a truck of gravel out at the pit. Back on Earth, or even on the ship, he would have been patched up in no time. Not here. In this primitive place, at that early time, he had been too far from the medical facilities for immediate attention, and so when he got to the clinic the arm was too far gone to be saved, though the injuries to his chest and internal organs had been repaired. More or less repaired. Except for the persistent cough, anyway. When all his disabilities were added up the total pointed to the only job he was still fit for, so now he was a schoolteacher.
“Now count off,” Feldhouse decreed. “When I point to you, say where you come from—Ship, or Home. You first!” And he pointed to the tallest boy, who promptly announced that he was Home, and so was the girl next behind him, but the one after that was from Mayflower and so she was paired with the first boy.
When they got down to Viktor his “buddy” was a girl named Theresa McGann. They looked at each other with speculative hostility, but took their seats together as instructed, while Feldhouse looked on the four unpaired planet-born children. “You four belong to me,” he declared. “The rest of you are going to work together. You from the Ship, you teach your buddies as much as you can remember from what you got out of the teaching machines. You from Home, you teach geography and what the farms are like and everything else about what it’s like here—what is it, what’s your name?’’
“I’m Viktor Sorricaine,” Viktor announced, putting his hand down. “Why do you call this place ‘Home’?”
“Because that’s what it is,” the teacher explained. “That’s the first thing you all have to learn. This planet’s name is Enki, according to the astronomers, but its right name is Newmanhome. We call it Home for short. From now on you only have one home, and this is it.”
It had taken eight months for the last of the corpsicles in New Mayflower to be thawed, oriented, and paradropped to Newmanhome’s surface. Most of that time was spent tearing the crew and cargo sections of the ship apart to make them into the modules that would carry everybody and everything down, and assembling the light-sail-parachutes and streamers that would keep the landing from being a catastrophe. The colonists already there welcomed the new arrivals, to be sure. They welcomed the cargoes each brought down even more. For that matter, the empty modules themselves were fallen upon with joy; each one, when emptied, contributed nearly half a ton of precious steel.