“You’ll be lovely,” Frit said with pride. He smiled at their son, politely silent as the grown-ups talked. “Don’t you think Forta could make a lovely star dance?”
“He always does,” Balit said loyally, but keeping his eyes on Viktor.
Forta sighed. “But I’m afraid we’re not giving our friend Viktor what he wants. There just isn’t much of that sort of thing in the current files.”
Viktor pricked up his ears. “Are there others?”
“Of course there’s always the old data banks on Newmanhome,” Frit said, looking surprised. “Only they aren’t very convenient, you know. Because they’re old. And they aren’t here.”
“Can I access them?” Viktor demanded.
Frit looked at him with the expression of a host whose guest has just requested a bigger bedroom, or a rare brand of tea. “I’m not sure if I know how you could do that,” he said, thoughtfully. “Forta?”
“I suppose it’s possible, Viktor,” Forta said doubtfully. “They go back a long time, though, all the way back to when everybody still lived on Newmanhome. When we built the habitats, thousands of years ago, everything was shiny new, you know, and the data-retrieval systems were all redesigned. The ones we use now aren’t really compatible with the ones on Newmanhome, and besides, there’s hardly anyone there.”
“On Newmanhome?” Viktor repeated.
Forta nodded. “It’s a nasty place to live, with everything weighing so much. People don’t like to go there—except funny ones like Pelly,” he added laughingly. “So the old records might as well not exist, don’t you see?”
Balit, watching their guest with concern, squirmed away from his parent’s fondly patting hand. “We do have the paintings, Viktor,” the boy piped up.
And when Viktor looked inquiringly at Balit’s parents, Forta said with pride, “Yes, of course. There are some wonderful paintings of the star burst, for instance. It was still in the sky, oh, up to six or eight hundred years ago. Then it just gradually began to fade, and then the sun came back.”
“That must have been an exciting time,” Frit said wistfully. “Of course, we weren’t born then.”
Forta thought that over. “I don’t know if I’d say ‘exciting,’ exactly. I know people did talk about it, quite a lot, once they noticed it. And there was the art. I remember my mother taking me to—whose performance was it? I think it was Danglord’s—yes, that’s what it was. It was a dance play about the sun returning. I was just a child, hadn’t even had my coming-of-age party yet, but—” He smiled bashfully at Viktor. “It was certainly important to me. I think Danglord’s play was what made up my mind to be a dancer myself.”
As the family’s guest expert on the care and feeding of primitive organisms, it was Viktor who had to show them how to thaw out a little of the frozen cat-milk substitute Nrina had made for them, and how to hold a bottle so the kitten could drink out of it. “She’ll be eating solid food soon,” he promised. “Then she won’t be so much trouble. Meanwhile, what have you done about a cat box?”
Then he had to explain what a cat box was for, and help them improvise one out of a tray from the cooking room, and fill it with soil from the garden, and show them how to put the little animal in it and stroke her and encourage her until she finally did what she was put there to do.
At least he was useful for something, Viktor thought.
After a final glass of wine Frit escorted him to their guest room. “It’s not actually a guest room,” Frit explained, showing Viktor where the sanitary facilities were and the drawers to store his clothes. “It’s going to be Balit’s room, now that he’s liberated—but of course he’s happy to have you use it for your stay,” Frit added hastily.
“I don’t like to put him out,” Viktor said politely.
“You aren’t putting anyone out! No, we want you here, dear Viktor. In fact, it was Balit’s idea. He’ll stay in his own old room, where he’s quite content. But this one, you see,” Frit added with pride, “is an adult room. You’ll have your own desk—you can use it as much as you like, of course. I think you’ll be quite comfortable,” he finished, looking around like any hostess. Then he grinned, a little embarrassed. “Well, I don’t see any harm in telling you. We’re going to be redecorating Balit’s old room. We’ve ordered another baby from Nrina. She’ll be a little girl—we’re going to call her Ginga—and of course she won’t be born for a long time yet, so Balit will be quite all right in that room.”
It wasn’t until Frit was long gone and Viktor had undressed and climbed into the soft, warm bed that it occurred to him that he should have said “Congratulations.”
The ground shook again that night. Viktor woke, startled, to find something warm and soft near his toes. It mewed in protest when he moved.
He got up, grinning, and stroked the kitten back to sleep as he sat on the edge of his bed, thinking. Alone in the bedroom, Viktor admitted to himself that he was a little uncomfortable. He knew why.
He wasn’t really easy in his mind to be moving into a house of gays.
Viktor was quite certain that he was not at all prejudiced against homosexuals. He’d known plenty of them, one time or another. He’d worked with them, shipped with them—they weren’t any different than anybody else, he considered, except in that one particular way. But that way wasn’t anyone’s business but their own, and certainly it didn’t matter in any real sense as long as you didn’t get involved with them.
The trouble was, living with them seemed to be getting pretty involved.
It reassured Viktor that the household didn’t seem much different than any other. Forta and Frit had their own bedroom. Balit had his; Viktor had the one Balit would graduate into. Nothing was, well, bizarre about the household. Not really. If Forta would sometimes kiss the back of Frit’s neck as he passed behind his chair, and if Frit would slip an arm around Forta’s waist while they stood together—well, they did love each other, didn’t they?
What was most important, neither of them showed any indication at all of loving Viktor. Not that way, anyway.
The boy, Balit, almost did. He certainly acted loving, but there wasn’t anything sexual about it. Balit sat next to Viktor when they ate their meals, and kept Viktor company while he fruitlessly hunted for what he never found on the information machines. It was Balit who marked which foods and drinks Viktor seemed to enjoy and made sure there were more of them at the next meal. He always seemed to be there, watching Viktor, whenever he was not asleep or at school.
“It’s a kind of hero worship,” Forta explained. The dancer was working at his bar, stretching those long, slim legs even longer, with one eye on the kitten waking on the floor between them. Viktor realized with surprise that Forta was being a cat. “This will work, I think,” Forta said with pleasure, giving it up as the kitten curled up to drowse again. “What were we saying? Oh, yes. Please don’t let Balit bother you. But the thing is that you were the one who actually carried him away for his freeing ceremony; that’s a big thing for a young boy.”
“He’s no trouble at all,” Viktor protested. “I like having him around.”
“Well, it’s obvious he likes you.” Forta sighed. “I mean, he likes you as a person, not just because of what you did. As a matter of fact—” Forta hesitated, then smiled. “Actually, Balit wondered if he could ask you to come to his school. If you wouldn’t mind. He’d like to show you off. I know it wouldn’t be much fun for you, spending an hour or two with a bunch of little kids staring and asking you all kinds of questions—but you can’t blame them, Viktor. You were born on Old Earth. They aren’t likely to see anybody like you again.”
“I’d be glad to,” Viktor promised.
The school was no more than a hundred yards from Balit’s home, in the middle of a grove of broad-leafed trees that hung with fruit and blossoms interchangeably. (There weren’t any seasons on Moon Mary. Plants grew and bloomed when they felt like it, not when the weather changed. The weather never changed.) Red Nergal hung in the eastern sky, where it always hung in their position on Moon Mary’s surface. At their distance it loomed no larger than Earth’s moon, but Viktor could feel the heat from it. And in the west was one bright star. “There used to be thousands and thousands of stars,” Viktor told the boy, who nodded in solemn appreciation.
“Things must have been so much nicer then,” he sighed. “We go in there, Viktor. That’s the door to my class.”