“It is for one person,” she said—rather sharply, he thought. It made him suddenly uncomfortable.
“Well, if you want,” he said awkwardly, “I guess I could take the baby now and then, I mean when I’m in port.”
She shook her head. “That’s no good for him. He needs a home. I think what I need is a husband.”
Now Viktor was definitely ill at ease, not to say alarmed. “Husband? Really? Would you want to, uh, I mean, would you be satisfied to just make love to one guy for the rest of your life?”
“As in marriage?” She thought that over seriously for a moment, then turned and faced him squarely. “Is matrimonial fidelity important to you, Viktor?”
He was beginning to feel trapped. “I—” He hesitated, pondering what he was saying, and what it might mean. “I think so,” he said at last.
“Well, I probably could,” Reesa said. “Yes, I’m just about sure I could—if I were married, I mean.”
It was quite true that they couldn’t see any change in the color of the stars, not with the naked eye, but the changes were there nevertheless. In one direction starlight was blue-shifted, in the other red. And the shifts grew, week by week.
Pal Sorricaine had something to do now. He and Billy Stockbridge spent all their time poring over the spectrograms, checking every possible reference to anything that might bear on the subject in the datastores—coming up empty, but still driven to go on trying to figure out what the hell was happening to their little pocket of space.
The spectral shifts didn’t affect the nearest of the stars; they had established that early on. There were about a dozen of those within a volume of space some six light-years across—including the burnt-out cinder of one of the old “Sorricaine-Mtiga” flares. Their spectrograms were unchanged. Newmanhome’s own sun was nowhere near the center of that volume, but nearly on one edge—so Sorricaine was scathing in answering the colonists who (how superstition did feed on the unexpected!) muttered that it was their blasphemous temerity in colonizing across space that had somehow changed things.
No, it just had happened (somehow!) that a volume of space had disengaged itself from the rest of the galaxy. Either their little group of twelve stars and all their associated planets, moons, and orbiting junk was (somehow!) beginning to hurry in the general direction of the Virgo clusters . . . or the rest of the galaxy was (again somehow—no one could think of any mechanism that might make any of this happen) hurrying away from it.
Of course, all this was terrifying.
At least, it was terrifying if you let yourself think about it. It was impossible. Fundamental natural law—law that was rock-solid at the bottom of scientific knowledge, the elements of motion that had been engraved in granite by Isaac Newton and confirmed by everybody since him—was simply being violated.
To think seriously about that was to realize that as a scientist you knew nothing at all. Science was simply wrong.
But how could that be?
The people who lived on Newmanhome couldn’t question science. Science was what had brought them there! They weren’t Third World peasants or stock-herders. They were chemists, engineers, physicists, geneticists, mineralogists, agrotechnicians, mathematicians, doctors, metallurgists—nearly every adult who had boarded either of the two colony ships had had advanced degrees in some scientific field, and every day they were earnestly passing on that knowledge, and that mind-set, to their children.
The result was that there was a burning dichotomy in every head on Newmanhome that simply could not be resolved.
The only way to survive it was not to think about it at all—as long as they could manage that, anyway. After all, the rest of their world was still behaving the way it should. True, there were still those unexplained emissions from the scorched surface of the planet Nebo, but Nebo was a long way away. On the surface of Newmanhome, in the orbiting hulks above it, everything stayed normal. The crops flourished.
And, best news of all, the health teams finally found a microorganism that could flourish in the human system and destroy the spores of the plague. So everyone’s gauze masks came off.
But when the communications from New Argosy turned from shock to panic, through forlorn hope to despairing realization that it never would land on Newmanhome, because Newmanhome was accelerating away from the ship faster than it could possibly hope to catch up—then it all became very personal.
When Viktor and Reesa married at last—it was the 43d of Spring in Colony Year 38—the bridal party was loud and happy for the joyous occasion. But that night, out on their balcony for a last sip of wine before they went to bed, Viktor gazed for a long time at the stars. It was a clear night. They could see the spark that was Mayflower sliding across the southern horizon, on its umpty-thousandth orbit.
“Should we volunteer?” Viktor asked his bride.
She didn’t have to ask him what he meant. She knew. The colony had at last considered itself strong enough to spare liquid-gas fuel for a rocket. Finally a new crew of volunteers would soon be going into space to relieve the weary orbiting crew, to let them after all these years come down and set foot on the planet they had crossed twenty-odd light-years of space to inhabit.
“Maybe next time. When the children are a little bigger,” she said, her hand in his as they looked up. “Viktor? Do the stars look any different to you now?”
It was a question they went on asking each other. Viktor squinted thoughtfully at the constellations. He said at last, “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
Behind them little Yan came out on the balcony. His fingers were in his mouth, reaching with his other hand to clutch at Reesa’s dress but with his eyes fixed on Viktor. Behind him his older half sister, Jake Lundy’s daughter Tanya, was quietly playing. Yan wasn’t used to seeing his parents together. He was hardly used to seeing Viktor at all, because, although Viktor had spent an hour or two, at least, with the child every time his ship was in port, Yan had seen more of a good many other men.
Viktor picked the boy up. Yan didn’t resist, but he didn’t let go of Reesa’s skirt, either, rucking it up until, laughing, his mother pulled the little fingers loose.
“Why,” Viktor said wonderingly to his son, “we’re a family now, aren’t we?”
Reesa studied his face. “Do you like being a family?” she asked—a serious question, wanting a trustworthy answer.
“Of course I do,” Viktor said quickly, and then nodded twice to show he really meant it. “We’re a great family. All of us,” he added. “Yours and mine and ours—would you mind if we had Shan with us?”
“I wouldn’t, but I think Alice wouldn’t like it. Still, she’s at sea a lot, and really she shouldn’t be taking the boy along. He needs school.” She stopped there, but in a way that suggested there was a sentence or two unsaid.
“What is it?” Viktor asked, puzzled.
She stroked Yan’s small head. “I guess you aren’t going to stop going to sea yourself,” she said, not looking at him.
“No, why should I? It’s my job, and—” Then a light broke over him. “Reesa, are you worried about me shipping out with Alice?”
“I’m not worried.”
But she was certainly concerned. Viktor could see that clearly enough. “I suppose I could get a different ship,” he offered, thinking that there were a lot of things involved in being a family that were going to take some getting used to.
“If you want to,” she said.
He didn’t say that the question was what she wanted; he had learned that much about being a family already. “That way I could be here when Alice was at sea some of the time, so it would make sense to have Shan with us,” he pointed out.
“That would be good,” she said, gazing at the stars. “Well, if you’ll put Tanny back to bed—I’ve got to be a cow for the baby—I’ll come in in a few minutes. We might as well consummate our marriage, again.”
The life of the colony went on. When Viktor Sorricaine, honeymoon over, shipped out again for South Continent, he discovered some of the disadvantages of being a family. The ship’s radio operator was an unattached young woman named Nureddin, and normally he would probably have expected to wind up in bed with her. Now it didn’t seem right. By the time he got back to the colony he was gladder to see his wife than he had expected, even. She hadn’t wasted any time. She was a quarter of a Newmanhome year pregnant by then, with a year and a bit still to go, her belly quite definitely rounded out, her movements a little clumsy—but not in bed.