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.