Then there was another room, quite small, but large enough for their needs. It held her own bed. That one looked terribly flimsy to Viktor; it was cantilevered out from the wall, and it did not look to Viktor as though it was built to stand very vigorous activity in it. (He was wrong about that, he discovered. The habitat’s low gravity helped.) There wasn’t any kitchen, exactly. There was a room with a cupboard that was a sort of a freezer and fridge, and another that was a sort of a microwave oven. (That was all they needed. These people, Viktor found, didn’t ever fry or broil anything—especially not hunks of dead animal flesh.) That was where Viktor ate most of the time—Nrina sometimes, too, though often enough she was off somewhere else, with whom Viktor never knew. That was not a problem in any practical way. There was always plenty to eat. Once Viktor learned how to handle the heating apparatus he always found stews and porridges and soups and hashes ready in the fridge, and sherberts in the freezer, and any number of different kinds of fresh fruits—always fresh, always perfect, too; though some of them were wholly unfamiliar to Viktor, and a few were perfectly foul to his taste. He wondered who replenished them. Certainly not Nrina!
Nor was Viktor idle. Not really idle, he told himself, he was in fact very busy learning about this new life he had been given. He had the freedom to roam where he would on the habitat. He used that freedom, too, except when his leg was hurting too badly. That wasn’t often anymore, but there were days when the pain was acute all day long. Then it hurt all the time, when it wasn’t itching; sometimes it both itched, like a bad sunburn, and hurt, like a new scald.
Those days weren’t a total waste, because he could spend them hunched over the communicator desk, learning all he could. But when the leg was no more than mildly annoying, he preferred to walk around.
You couldn’t see much of the habitat at any one time, because everything was inside. There weren’t many large open spaces. There certainly wasn’t ever any sky, for a ceiling was never very far overhead. Strangely, much of the place was bent. The longest corridors were straight as laser beams, but the ones at right angles to them had perceptible upward curves.
The place was like a rolled-up version of—well, of Homeport, say. Of any city spread out on its land, except that this one had been rolled around and joined in a kind of tube. Everything Viktor saw was in the outer skin of that tube. That was why those transverse hallways were always curved. Viktor discovered that if he went all the way around one—it wasn’t really far, a twenty-minute walk at most when his leg wasn’t bothering him—he would come right back to his starting point.
What was in the middle? Machinery, Nrina told him when he asked her. They were lying together in her cantilevered bed, nibbling on sweet little plums, both quite relaxed. The machinery, she said, was all different kinds. The core of the habitat was where they kept the air cleaners (to filter out the wastes and replenish the oxygen), and the temperature regulators, and the generators for electrical energy, and the communications equipment, and the data machine files—and, in short, everything that was needed to make the habitat comfortably habitable. All tidily out of sight. She yawned, pitching a plum pit on the floor and nestling cozily close to him.
But Viktor was wide awake. It was all a wonder to him. Technologically wonderful, of course, but also wonderful to think of starved, poverty-stricken refugees from old Newmanhome building all these things—enough of them to hold three hundred million people!
“Well, they didn’t build them all at once, Viktor,” Nrina pointed out reasonably, stretching her long, slim legs (“slim” now to Viktor’s mind—no longer “skinny”) and yawning again. “Once they got a good start it was easy enough. There were plenty of asteroids to mine for materials, and Nergal gave off a lot of heat, as long as you got close enough to it. Of course, now that the sun’s back in business we wouldn’t need to stay around Nergal anymore—but why would we bother to move?”
“Well, to a planet,” Viktor began. “Newmanhome, for instance. They say it’s warmed up now—”
“Planets!” she scoffed. “Planets are nasty. Certainly, now that Newmanhome is pretty well thawed out people can survive there, but who would want to?”
I would, Viktor thought, but he wasn’t sure he meant it, so all he said was, “Some people might.”
“Some silly people do,” she admitted. “There are a few odd ones who seem to enjoy poking through the old records, and of course we need someone to pick over the freezers to find whatever organisms are left that might supply useful DNA. I don’t call that living, Viktor.” And she went on to explain why it certainly wasn’t any kind of life she could stand for herself. The gravity! Why, on Newmanhome they had to move around in wheelchairs most of the time, even if they’d taken the muscle-building and calcium-binding treatments that would let them stand it at all. (As, it turned out, Dekkaduk had—thus those incongruous knots of muscle.) That much gravity certainly wasn’t good for anybody. Not to mention the discomfort. No, it wasn’t at all the kind of life she personally could tolerate.
And then, stroking his thigh, she interrupted herself. “Hold still a minute, Viktor,” she ordered, leaning over to poke at his leg. “Does that feel all right?”
He craned his neck to peer at the pink sausage casing. “I guess so. I almost forget it’s there.” But reminded, he was aware of the smell. The wrapping was porous, to let the wound breathe as it healed, and odors did leak out.
Nrina didn’t seem to mind them. “I’d better take another look,” she decided. And then, “Oh, no, I’m meeting Kotlenny; well, Dekkaduk can do it. Go over and tell him to give you an examination.”
Dekkaduk was waiting for him when Viktor got to the examining room. His expression was hostile.
It was no worse than Viktor had expected. Dekkaduk did not seem to be a friendly man. Their first meeting had been when Dekkaduk had tattooed the fertility warning on Viktor’s forehead; all right, that was just a duty, and if it had been painful probably that couldn’t be helped. But ever since the time they had taken DNA samples from Nrina’s corpsicles, along with the departed Manett, Dekkaduk had given every sign of despising the man from Old Earth.
“Ouch!” Viktor exclaimed, as Dekkaduk peeled the dressing off his leg. (That might not have been on purpose. Still, removing the dressing didn’t hurt when Nrina did it.) Then as the full aroma of the healing wound floated to his nostrils, Dekkaduk muttered furiously to himself and ostentatiously turned the room’s ventilation higher. (Well, it did stink. But that much? Nrina didn’t appear to find the smell intolerable, after all.)
Dekkaduk hurt him (Viktor kept count) eight different times in the course of a two-minute examination. Even the healing, cleaning spray he used to cover the pink new flesh stung bitterly (Nrina’s hadn’t), and when he was through and the leg was rebandaged Dekkaduk simply said, “You’re healing. Go away now.”
Viktor went. Once away from Dekkaduk’s touch the leg hardly hurt at all anymore. As he strolled along the corridor he was thinking of possible explanations for the man’s hostility. It could, of course, be just his nature. Dekkaduk might simply have interests of his own and regard this rude survivor from prehistoric ages, Viktor Sorricaine, as an irritating irrelevance.
But there was another possibility that Viktor thought likely. What if Dekkaduk were not only Nrina’s assistant, but her lover? More likely ex-lover—and jealous. It was a quite plausible theory, Viktor thought. It was even one that gave him a certain amount of satisfaction, because there was enough rude, prehistoric carnality in Viktor’s genetic predispositions to allow him to enjoy beating out another male for a mate.
He had been walking without paying much attention to where he was going. He passed other people from time to time. Some he had met before, even spoken to; he was beginning to be on nodding terms, at least, with some of Nrina’s neighbors, and as he got used to the stretched-out, willowy shapes of these people he began to notice individual differences.
At first they had all looked alike, like members of some famine-stricken basketball team. Then he began to distinguish among them. Some were darker than others. Hair color varied from so pale and fine that it seemed almost transparent to coarse strands like charcoal-colored knitting wool. Both men and women might have facial hair, though women’s was usually only a pair of narrow sideburns. Quite a few of the people struck Viktor as downright ugly—noses that were splayed, hooked or reduced to the size of a shirt button; teeth that seemed too big for their mouths, or, in one particular case, a woman with vampire incisors that lay against her lower lip. (She had seemed more willing to be friendly than most. Viktor had not encouraged her.)