So Pal Sorricaine did odd jobs.
It was the kind of work the kids did when not in school. Unskilled work. Hard labor, sometimes, and in inconvenient places. He was away from the community two or three days at a time, with a team of other men similarly among the technologically unemployed. They spent their time collecting the low-priority cargo pods that had fallen at the inconveniently far perimeter of the drop zone, or even outside it. They sledged them into the city; not only hard work, but not even very interesting.
Pal Sorricaine didn’t seem to mind. He took on the job of cartography when he was out in the wildwoods, searching for lost pods, and his maps became the best the community had. When he was home he was cheerful. He took his turn at minding Baby Weeny. He was loving to his wife and affectionate to Viktor. It was puzzling to Viktor that his mother seemed to worry about her husband. But when he asked her about it she simply laughed and said, “It’s a kind of a problem for your dad, Viktor. He was one of the most important men on the ship. Now he’s sort of—well—general labor, you know? When things get more settled and he can do real astronomy again . . .”
She let it trail off there. Viktor didn’t bother to ask her when she thought things would be that settled. Of course, she didn’t know any more than he did. Maybe the only right answer would have been “never.” But that night, when his father returned with the tractor team, four great pods of steel bumping and scraping behind them, he seemed content enough. Pal was in a good mood, anxious to hear about what had been going on in the town while he was away, and bursting with a couple of pieces of gossip he had brought back from long night talks with the other men. “Do you know what Marie-Claude’s been doing?” he asked his wife, chuckling. “She’s pregnant, that’s what!”
Viktor dropped the spoon he was trying to feed his baby sister with. “But—her husband’s dead!” he cried, appalled at the news.
“Did I say anything about a husband?” Pal Sorricaine asked good-naturedly. “I just said she’s going to have a baby. I didn’t say she was getting married. I guess she likes the idea of being a merry widow.”
“Pal,” Viktor’s mother said warningly, looking at her son. “Don’t make it sound awful, Pal. Marie-Claude’s a good person, and besides we need more babies.”
Pal grinned at her. “So it’s all okay with you? You wouldn’t mind if I, uh, volunteered to help out along those lines next time?”
“Pal,” she said again, but the tone was different; she was almost laughing. “What’s the matter, aren’t I keeping you happy?”
His father grinned and began to mix a cocktail. Halfway through, he paused and looked thoughtfully at his son. Then he glanced at his wife and added more of the gin—it was real gin, almost the last they had—to the mix. “You’re old enough to try one now, Vik,” he said kindly.
In pain and misery, Viktor took the plastic tumbler and gulped a mouthful. The juniper stung the inside of his nasal passages; the alcohol scorched the inside of his mouth. He swallowed and coughed at the same time.
“Viktor!” his mother cried in alarm. “Pal!”
But Pal was already beside his son, arm around his shoulder. “It’s better if you just sip it a little at a time,” he said, laughing.
Viktor was having none of that. He wrenched free and, as soon as he could postpone a cough long enough to swallow, downed the rest of the drink. Fortunately, there wasn’t much of it; his father had measured out only a junior-sized amount for his son’s first official cocktail.
Viktor wasn’t short of willpower. He used it all. He managed to strangle the coughing fit, though his voice was hoarse while he was reassuring his mother that, really, he was absolutely all right. His throat burned. His eyes were watering. His nose still stung. But there was a warmth, too, that started in his chest and spread through his whole body.
It almost seemed to numb his stark interior pain. It was, really, not a bad sensation at all. Was that why people like his parents drank this stuff?
Now that his mother had realized her son wasn’t dying she was sipping her own drink, but not in any relaxed or jovial manner. Her gaze stayed on Viktor. Pal Sorricaine tried to jolly her out of it, without much success. Viktor ignored them both. He sat hunched over the empty tumbler, staring into it as he turned it in his hands, as he had seen an actor in a transmitted Earth film do when he, like Viktor, discovered the woman he loved had been bedding another man.
Viktor was crushed.
For Marie-Claude to make love with her husband had been bad enough. This was incomparably worse. There was a sudden knot of physical pain in Viktor’s stomach, like a stab wound. Even the warm, ginny glow didn’t stop the pain.
His mother turned from studying her son to face her husband. “Pal,” she said seriously, “we’ve got to talk to Viktor.”
Viktor felt the tips of his ears burning with resentment. He refused to look up. He heard his father sigh. “All right,” Pal Sorricaine conceded. “I guess it’s about time. Viktor? Vik, listen to me. Are you—” He fumbled for the right words. “Uh, all right?”
Viktor raised his head to give his father the cold stare of a stranger. “Sure I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I mean about, you know, Mrs. Stockbridge,” his father persisted. He looked more embarrassed than Viktor had ever seen him, but determinedly sympathetic. “Son, I didn’t mean to say anything that would get you upset. Do you understand that? Listen, it’s only natural for a b—for a young man to be attracted to an older woman, especially when the woman is as sexy and—” He caught his wife’s look just in time. “When she’s as nice a person, I mean, as Marie-Claude. There’s nothing wrong about that. I remember, when I was sixteen, there was a dancer in the ballet school at the Warsaw Opera, about twenty, so thin and graceful—”
He stopped, on the verge of another unexpected precipice. He carefully avoided looking at his wife. She regarded him thoughtfully but didn’t speak.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” his son said severely.
Viktor had never spoken to his father that way before. He stood up, testing for dizziness, and headed with precise, careful steps for the door. He left Pal Sorricaine biting his lip behind him. His son’s glare had looked pretty nearly like hatred, and Pal Sorricaine had never expected that sort of emotion from the son he had always loved and cherished, and thought loved him back.
Outside Viktor paused, leaning against the door.
Because they had been one of the lucky families in the lottery they had two rooms now, two cubicles together, in the long row that lined the muddy street, joined like ancient American tourist cabins. Behind him, through the thin film windows—last and longest use for the remaining scraps of light-sail/parachutes—he could hear his parents muttering to each other.
But, queerly, there were people muttering to each other in the street, too. They were standing in clumps, faces uplifted to the summery Newmanhome sky. Viktor instinctively glanced up himself. In the starlight he could make out that there were patches of warm-weather convection clouds obscuring much of the moonless heavens, but there were hundreds of stars shining through the gaps, too.
Well, there always were clouds and stars, weren’t there? Why were these people staring so? True, one star, all by itself, seemed quite bright, almost as bright (Viktor dimly remembered) as the planet Venus from Earth, brighter than any Newmanhome star had ever seemed . . .
With a shock he saw that the star was getting brighter.
How strange! And it kept on getting brighter still, almost Moon bright, bright enough to throw a shadow; and Viktor realized that it had been that incredibly bright all along. What had deceived him was that he had seen it only through a clump of cloud at first. When the last fringe of cloud had rolled away it was a blue-white beacon in the sky, brighter, Viktor was sure, than any possible star should be—
And he went running back into the house, stumbling but now suddenly cold sober, to shout to his parents that another nearby star had gone flare.
After that, there was no objection to Pal Sorricaine becoming a full-time astronomer again. Pressed though the colony was for able-bodied workers, everyone agreed that this second Sorricaine-Mtiga object definitely needed to be studied. Pal was released from his scavenging duties, Frances Mtiga from her school, Jahanjur Singh from his work as an accountant for the stores comptroller, and Ibtissam Khadek from the guidance systems for the rectenna.