The grain could, easily enough. Great Ocean was generally placid, and the prevailing winds were strong enough to drive a grain ship’s rotor sails without at the same time raising storm waves big enough to be a nuisance. Navigation was no problem. Viktor’s navigating talents were largely wasted. There were no icebergs to collide with, because there wasn’t any ice. There were few other ships, and hardly ever any nearby; there were very few reefs or shoals. In fact there was no bottom closer than three hundred meters for the next week’s sailing. The signals from the derelict interstellar ships in orbit gave them accurate positions at all times, so between ports the crew was largely honorary.
So Viktor and his shipmates did what everybody on Newmanhome did when they had leisure time. They watched TV, most of it rebroadcast by the orbiting ships from transmissions from distant Earth. (That didn’t make them homesick. Watching the stories about crime and violence and overcrowded cities made them grateful not to be there.) Or they made some more babies. Or they tuned in on the transmissions from the third ship, New Argosy, late because of the funding squabbles but now well on its way—and, oh so eagerly awaited! It held so many things they didn’t have—grand pianos, and a submarine, and even a complete installation for making more antimatter with a prefabricated near-Sun solar-power satellite—and, wow, what they could do then!
Or they studied.
In Viktor’s case, after hearing what the Homeport council had decided, study came first. He spent half his waking hours at the ship’s teaching machine, going over and over the fundamentals of orbital transfer and astrogation and celestial mechanics. He didn’t seriously believe he would ever get into space, even to help deploy the antimatter manufactury when it arrived. But even an outside chance was worth fighting for. And he even did some refresher studying on his father’s particular interest, astrophysics and cosmology. It wouldn’t ever be important to him, in any way. He was sure of that—wrong, as it turned out later, but sure. Nevertheless it was interesting.
The people of Newmanhome didn’t usually think hard about being happy to be where they were; they had gotten used to it, even the ones who remembered anything else. It was as good a planet as they hoped, and better than they had feared. There was no such thing as “continental climate” on Newmanhome. The biggest continent was smaller than Australia and looked more like a fat question mark than a more or less symmetrical blob. There wasn’t much in the way of seasons, either. They’d given up the idea of “months” in their new calendar; they divided the year into Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, with fifty-odd days in each of the divisions, but there was less difference between Winter and Summer than between two successive weeks in most Earthly climates. An axial tilt of only six degrees and a nearly circular orbit disarmed the cycle of seasons; Newmanhome was more like Hawaii than like Chicago or Moscow.
The shorter day helped even things out weatherwise, too. The night didn’t have time to cool down as much as on Earth, so extremes of temperature were moderated still more. And the Newmanhome day was close enough to Earth’s twenty-four hours that even the people who were grown up when they landed had long since readjusted their diurnal rhythms.
There was plenty of native life on Newmanhome, but not a single native animal to compete with human beings and their stocks. There were things that almost seemed like animals, because they moved about during the day, but they sank roots at night. There were things that ate other things, like terrestrial saprophytes and carnivorous plants, but they all photosynthesized, as well.
Some of the plants were warm-blooded or warm-sapped—and some of the mobile eating things liked to eat the warm ones. That was as close to a danger as the colonists had found. If one of the free-ranging predators, particularly the marine ones, found a sleeping human being, it was likely enough to try to eat him. The predators fed by lancing the prey with hollow things like thorns and injecting digestive saps, then sucking back the resulting soup when it was done. The process didn’t work on human beings. Their tissues resisted the lysing enzymes of the predator plants, and anyway after the first itching stab or two the human prey would certainly wake up and go somewhere else. But they could get a hell of a painful wound in the process, and sometimes people died.
Sometimes people died from other causes, too. They were a young population, there on Newmanhome, and deaths were rare. But they happened. Drowning. Accident. Even once or twice the great scandal of a murder and suicide in a quarrel. But Newmanhome was benign to its colonists. Certainly people wore out early from hard work, and there were always those handicapped older ones who had come out of cryonic suspension with a kind of freezer-burn that slowed them down, or limited their abilities, but otherwise people were pretty healthy. The only diseases they encountered were the ones they had brought with them, and years of selection, therapy, and prophylaxis had kept those diseases few.
Until the first week of Winter in the thirty-ninth Newmanhome year of the colony.
There was no warning of trouble.
The harvest was the most bountiful yet in the grain fields of South Continent. Viktor and his first mate, Alice Begstine, had had a good time while the ship was loading. They had borrowed a rolligon and gone exploring in South Continent’s high country, beyond the farm lands. The ship’s cook, who was one of Alice’s other part-time lovers, had elected to stay ashore that trip, so she and Viktor bunked together on the voyage, enjoying it, too—though Viktor still secretly fantasized about Marie-Claude sharing his bed. They even, halfway home, saw a Von Neumann nautilus swimming sturdily toward their port beside them, to turn itself in. It was one of the first to have accumulated enough metal to trigger its return reflexes. It looked to have at least fifty chambers, each one bigger than the one before it in its spiral shell. “It’s got to be a ten-tonner,” Alice guessed. Viktor couldn’t doubt it. Ten tons of valuable heavy metal soaked up from the thermal springs at the bottom of Great Ocean—what was the point of mining, when you could send the roving Von Neumann automata out to do the job for you? And the holds bulging with grain. And the colony growing. And new lands being explored—why, things were really going splendidly!
So they thought, right up to the moment of landing at Homeport.
As Viktor’s ship slid gently in to mate with the floating dock he saw his father standing there, waiting for him.
That was a surprise. As he finished the docking drill, Viktor saw with a critical eye that his father was freshly shaved, but his hair was shaggy; he wore a clean, pressed blouse, but the cuffs of his pants were mud stained, though the streets were dry. Viktor easily read the meaning of the signs.
His father had been drinking again.
The ship was lashed to the floating dock. The huge snout of the grain pipe swung over the deck, slipped down through the open hold, and began snuffling up the cargo. Viktor picked up his kit bag, slung it over his shoulder, and swung himself down to the dock. His father, standing right where he landed, said at once, “Your mother’s sick.”
Just like that. No “Hello, son,” or even, “I’ve got some bad news for you.” Just “Your mother’s sick,” and a thumb jerked to the waiting tandem bike.
Amelia Sorricaine-Memel was sick, all right. The first thing the doctors told him, as gently as they could—but they had very little time to be gentle or considerate just then—was that they were pretty sure she was dying.
It wasn’t pneumonia or emphysema or the flu. It was something the surveyors had brought back from Continent Delta, way on the other side of the planet, just really being explored for the first time.
What they brought back was a mold. It had thrived there as a parasite on some of the warm algal organisms of the tidal flats, but it had found a new home in human lungs. For the algae of the littoral it was a benign enough parasite. All it did was slow down their growth a little. For humans it was worse. It killed.
Viktor’s mother lived seventeen painful hours after he reached her bedside. She was wheezing and strangling for breath the whole time, even when they put a mask over her face to give her oxygen, even when they put her in a hyperbaric chamber under enough pressure to force the oxygen into her lungs. Even when they drenched the air she breathed with antifungals strong enough to threaten her life.