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.