Viktor eased himself down to the blanket beside her, watching the sleepy little mouth of his son sucking absentmindedly at Reesa’s breast. He glanced after the disappearing Freddy.
“I thought priests were supposed to be celibate,” he said.
“Mind your own business,” Reesa told him. Then, relenting, she said, “I guess Freddy is. He just likes children. He’s real good about baby-sitting for me.”
“Doesn’t take after his brother, then,” Viktor observed, but the way Reesa’s face tightened told him not to pursue the subject. Anyway, a pistol-shot sound in the air and a gasp from the crowd marked the first of the fireworks. They quieted to watch the display as Freddy came stumbling back with three cups of wine. Viktor helped Reesa cover his sleeping little son, tucking him in next to her already sound asleep toddler. Viktor was beginning to feel really good. The fireworks were brilliant and lovely to look at, under the warm Newmanhome sky. And then, when they were over, they did the last few dances, ending with the sweet, slow Misirlou. Misirlou means “beloved” in Greek. Perhaps that was why, when the last dance was over, Viktor looked around. Neither Jake Lundy nor Billy Stockbridge was nearby, so he offered quickly, “I’ll help you get the kids home, if you want.”
Reesa didn’t object. Freddy looked annoyed but drifted away. The two of them shared the sleeping children, Viktor carrying the toddler and Reesa the baby, Yan, as they walked down the hill. They didn’t speak for a while, and then Viktor remembered a question on his mind. “What’s this astrophysics class all about?” he demanded.
“It’s just what your father said it is,” she said shortly. She looked at him with curiosity. “I noticed today you’re all sunburned,” she accused. “What do you do, lounge around on the deck all day to get that he-man tan for the girls? Do you want to wreck your skin?”
He refused to be diverted. “No, really,” he insisted. “Do you think knowing how to tell a Wolf-Rayet star from an ordinary O is going to help you get to be a space pilot—twenty years from now?”
“It might,” she said seriously. “And it might not be twenty years; Argosy has small spaceships ready to go, you know, and it’s due pretty soon now.”
“Sure, when Argosy lands,” Viktor scoffed. It was what everybody said when they didn’t have something they really wanted: it would certainly be somewhere in the third ship’s limitless treasure of stores. “What makes you think they won’t have their own pilots for their own ships?”
She shrugged. “We still have our own landers,” she pointed out. “We’ll have more fuel for them, once they get the freezers going. And anyway—” she hesitated, then plunged on. “Anyway, I think it’s good for your father to be doing something. He’s, uh, he’s drinking a lot these days, you know.”
“I do know,” Viktor said stiffly. As an afterthought, he added, “It’s his business.”
Reesa didn’t challenge that. They walked in silence for a moment, then Viktor said tentatively, “I thought if you weren’t doing anything, later this evening—”
She stopped and studied him, shifting the sleeping baby from one shoulder to the other. “What is it, this is Wednesday so it must be Reesa’s turn? Isn’t your girlfriend on the ship keeping you happy?”
“I only said—”
“I know what you said.” She started walking again, silent for a moment. Then, she said, “Well, why not? After all, it is your birthday.”
It took eight days to pump the grain out of the ship’s hold and reload it with the new cargo for the South Continent. Viktor had to be there for the last of it, because the last things winched aboard were fourteen pregnant cows and a wobbly but feisty bull calf. “Do cows get seasick?” Alice Begstine asked the handler.
The woman wiped her sweating forehead. “How do I know? Are you going to have rough weather?”
“I hope not, but you never know.”
“Well, then you’ll find out,” the woman said grimly. “Anyway, you’d better lash them down if you do. They could fall and break their legs or something.”
“It sounds like it’s going to be a fun trip,” Alice observed. And then, when they were actually putting out to sea and she was on the bridge next to Viktor, she said, “Shan was asking after you.”
“Oh, yeah,” Viktor said, concentrating on setting a course while the wind was fair. “I’m sorry about that. I meant to come and see him, but—how’s he doing, anyway?”
“He’s learning to talk,” Alice informed him.
“That’s wonderful,” Viktor said, guilty but pleased. “Well, it’s your watch. I think I’ll look around below. And then I think I’ll hit the teaching machines.”
The revived talk about space travel, at least, had been an interesting development of his leave, but on the whole it hadn’t been entirely a happy one. Viktor was beginning to worry a little about his family. His mother was certainly working too hard, and his father . . .
Well, Pal Sorricaine wasn’t the man he had been on New Mayflower anymore. He was drinking again. It was because of the pain of his missing leg, he said. But what Reesa said—not right away, but reluctantly, and after keeping silence for a while, and then only because she never lied to Viktor—was that the course in astrophysics was a joke. Oh, the story about starting space travel again soon—maybe—was true enough; the council had voted it a medium priority. But the real purpose of the course was simply to give Pal Sorricaine something to do. Viktor himself had seen that the machines did most of the real teaching. They were far more patient than Pal Sorricaine, and fairer. Especially with the younger students who had never studied astrophysics before. The teaching machines were not put off by teenage sulks, or cajoled by teenage flattery. Probably the younger ones got something out of the course, but the others—well, everybody liked Pal Sorricaine, and they were willing to go to a little trouble to please him.
Viktor felt a small, lasting ache at the thought of his father being humored.
And he felt a certain irritation with Reesa, too. Although she had seemed happy enough for them to spend much of his time ashore together, she hadn’t seemed particularly excited by his attentions. Nor had she tried to conceal from him (that same damned honesty!) that there were others more attentive, and more often around.
All in all, he was glad to be back at sea.
Even that, though, wasn’t as exciting as it once had been. When Viktor had first shipped out, as soon as he was big enough to do an adult’s job, everything had been thrillingly new. They hadn’t just cruised back and forth, as though on tracks; they had gone where, literally, no human had ever been before. They visited islands that they populated with earthworms, insects, algae, and flowering plants, as well as the seedlings that, they hoped, would one day be great forests of oak and apple and pine. Then they returned to those islands, a few Newmanhome years later, to seed them with second generations of fish and birds and small mammals—and a few years after that, with a couple of pairs of foxes to keep the rabbits down, and sheep to start earning the islands’ keep. He was too young to have been involved in the spreading of trace minerals in the soils of some of the lands, so that Earthly crops could grow, but he helped dig out the muck where recurrent marsh flooding had drowned thousands of years of colonizing plants, creating a sort of mulch that was almost as good as guano. He was even part of an expedition a hundred kilometers down the coast, once, when an explorer broke a leg in the jungle and had to be rescued from deep, ferny, swampy tangles of Newmanhome’s native vegetation.
All that was in Viktor’s apprentice days. His current job was crewing one of the giant grain ships that fed the growing city on the North Continent from the new farms on the South. Food for Homeport’s people could be grown nearer the city and a lot was. But clearing the tangled, ropy vegetation of that part of the North Continent was hard work. Worse, the stuff refused to stay cleared. The principal native vine was more tenacious than crab-grass or kudzu, and harder to kill. Its root systems went down a dozen meters and more, and the stuff was quite content to grow up right through a field of corn or soy from the vestiges of its roots.
At some point, the leadership council decided, a new city, or a dozen of them, would have to be planted in the hotter, wetter south. The location of their first town, Homeport, had been chosen at long range, from probe imaging and the hurried studies of the Ark officers as they were busy inserting themselves into orbit, and it had been a minor mistake. But, like many such mistakes, it perpetuated itself. Every new building that went up was one more inducement to stay there. The buildings couldn’t easily be moved.