Viktor and Reesa were not that lucky. There was nothing amiable in the greetings they received; and, of course, they had no home to return to.
More accurately, they were home. The tunnels and caves their captors lived in were on the same site as the town of Homeport they had left. Most of them were, anyway. The central common halls, the power plant with its endless trickle of geothermal heat, the freezers it fed—they were all on the hillside that had been just beginning to be covered with houses when Newmanhome’s sun had begun to dim. The largest of the underground “towns”—the one belonging to the sect they called the Holy Apocalyptic Catholic Church of the Great Transporter—was under what had once been downtown Homeport. The Great Transporters weren’t the only more or less independent tribe (or nation, or religion—anyway, a separate enclave that these paltry few had insisted on subdividing themselves into). Allahabad and the Reformers were along the shore, due west of the old town. The Peeps (actually they called themselves the People’s Republic, and what their religion was exactly Viktor could not really tell) had even dug their warrens out under what had once been the bay, though now it was solid ice from bottom to top.
It wasn’t the geography that had changed for Reesa and Viktor. It was their home itself, the world they had lived in, that was gone.
The tunnel dwellers didn’t waste light on the mushroom farm—that was one of the big reasons for raising mushrooms—and when Viktor reported for work he stumbled around in the stinking dark until his eyes adjusted.
He hated the job. He had every reason to, but he had no choice about it. No one on (or under) Newmanhome was unemployed. Everyone had work, for long hours of every day—well, every day but one. They did get days off now and then. The Greats would not work on Sundays, the Reforms on Saturdays, the people from Allahabad on Fridays—these because their religions forbade it; and the Peeps had elected to consider Tuesday their day off because, although they had no comprehensible religion of their own, they had an obsessive need to make sure none of the others had any privileges they could not share.
Viktor and Reesa were special cases. As soon as it was determined that they not only were not members of any of the four sects (and, indeed, had never heard of them before their freezing), they were put in the newly invented category of stateless persons who were entitled to no days off at all. And the jobs they got were the jobs no adult wanted.
Viktor had thought his boredom on Ark’s long flight to Nebo was pretty close to intolerable. Now he looked back on it almost with longing, for his job on the “shit detail” was a good deal worse.
It wasn’t only labor that wasn’t wasted on Newmanhome. Nothing else was, either, not even excrement. When any person in the settlement had to relieve himself he followed strict procedures: Urine went into one vat, feces into another. The urine was processed to use its urea for nitrogen fertilizer for the underground crops. The feces became the most important constituent of the soil the crops were grown on.
Viktor got in on the ground floor. He was assigned to the unlovely task of spreading the fresh dung in a dark, unbearably malodorous cavern, where mushrooms grew on its surface and worms and dung beetles mined it for their nourishment. He wasn’t alone in the job. Reesa wasn’t with him, of course—they were kept mostly separate until such time as the Four-Power Council should decide their fate—but there were four other laborers assigned, one from each of the sects . . . and none of them older than Newmanhome twenty-two. Mooni-bet and Al-car, respectively Moslem from Allahabad and Reformer from the quarrelsome, allegedly Protestant-Christian sect, harvested worms and beetles to feed the chickens in the breeder pens—it meant scurrying around on top of the peatlike layers of excrement and scooping the little living things up with slitted spoon-like tools. Mordi, the Great Transporter girl, and Vandot, the boy from the People’s Republic, harvested mushrooms, which was easier still. And that left Viktor the hard labor of shoveling. The fresh loads of dung had to be spread onto the fields for the mushrooms to grow on. When they had produced a few crops and had aged enough to be fit for fertilizing other things, those sections had to be shoveled into wheeled vats, to be taken and mixed with soil for the lighted grain-growing caverns.
It wasn’t the work that Viktor minded most, not even the stink and the hostility of the children he worked with. It was not knowing—not knowing so many things! He didn’t know where Reesa was, he didn’t know what the blindingly bright thing they called the “universe” was. (Though he was beginning to have some very strange suspicions about that; relativistic effects were at work.) On a more immediate level, he didn’t even know what was being decided about his and Reesa’s future, and none of his co-workers wanted to talk.
It wasn’t just him. They didn’t even speak to each other very often. The hostility among the adults of the four sects was shared by the children, who worked in silent, disagreeable concentration. But children are children, and can’t stay silent forever.
The worms and dung beetles and mushrooms they harvested had to be carried out to the chicken farms or the food depots. One day when three of the children were away from the excrement chamber, dragging their hoppers of harvest to their destinations, the young girl from Allahabad ventured close to Viktor, looking up into his face.
“Hello,” he said, forcing a smile. “I’m Viktor. Which one are you?”
“I’m Mooni-bet,” she said, glancing fearfully at the doorway. Then she whispered, “Is it true? Were you really on old Earth? Did you actually see Mecca?”
Viktor stared at her, startled. “Mecca? No, of course not. I remember California pretty well, and maybe even a little of Poland—but I was as young as you when I left. And, until we left Earth, I didn’t get to do much traveling.”
She stared at him, wide-eyed. “You saw California? Where the movie stars and the oil sheikhs lived?”
“I don’t remember any sheikhs or movie stars,” Viktor said, amused, almost touched by the girl’s naïveté. “I mean, except on television—but I suppose you have the old tapes of that kind of thing, anyway.”
“We do not look at graven images,” the girl said sadly. “Not counting sometimes when we’re working in the bean fields, anyway—the Greats have screens there, but we’re supposed to turn away from them.”
She had stopped her bug catching and was just standing there, gazing curiously at him. Viktor rested on his spade, aware of a chance that might not come again. “Tell me, Mooni-bet, do you know where my wife is working?” She shook her head. “Or whether they are going to give us a room of our own?”
“That is in the hands of the Four-Power Council,” she explained. “You must ask your supervisor.”
“I’ve asked him,” Viktor said grumpily. His supervisor was the Great Transporter named Mirian. Mirian was not a communicative man, and he seemed to resent Viktor, probably as one more nasty chore added to his burden. “He just tells me to wait.”
“Of course he does. That is right. The Four-Power Council will perhaps discuss your situation when they meet.”
“And when will that be?”
“Oh, they meet all the time,” she informed him. “Except holidays, I mean—they meet on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. But when they will come to your case I do not know. They have much to discuss about important questions, for both the Peeps and the Reforms are now on overload.” She lowered her voice to a whisper as she spoke, looking around as though she were discussing something naughty. “I do not understand about that, but all is in the hands of Allah.”
“Oh, sure,” Viktor agreed. Then, as she started to turn away, he tried to prolong the contact. “Mooni-bet? Tell me one other thing, if you will. That very bright thing in the sky—”
“The universe, yes,” she said, nodding encouragingly.
“That’s what I mean. Why do you call it the universe?”
“It’s its name, isn’t it? The muezzins call it that,” she told him. “I don’t know why. I thought the universe was all around us, but they say that is no longer true.”
He blinked at her. “No longer true?”
The girl shook her head. “I don’t know what that means, only it is what we bow to in devotions. They say old Earth is there, along with everything else.” She paused, then added helpfully, “My father said when he was a boy it was much brighter. I don’t know what that means, either, only—” She broke off, then turned away. Over her shoulder she whispered, “They’re coming back! Don’t talk to me anymore, please!”