On Quinn’s thirteenth birthday—she was then the equivalent of a healthy Earthly seven-year-old—her father was just returning from Christmas Island with a shipload of evacuees; the Archipelago wasn’t fit for human beings anymore. He was anxious to be there for the birthday, but storms had delayed them. It was a nasty trip: high waves, three hundred refugees in space that really wasn’t meant to hold more than a quarter of that, and most of them seasick most of the way. As he entered the harbor at Homeport snow was falling, and the whole city was covered in white.
He hurried to his house and found Quinn happily making a snowman, while the little girl’s aunt, Edwina, stood by. Edwina was a grown-up young woman now, with a family of her own. They kissed, but Viktor was frowning. “I didn’t expect to see you here,” he said. After Edwina had married Billy Stockbridge, Pal’s disciple, the two of them had emigrated to South Continent, where there was a need for workers in drilling geothermal wells.
“They closed the project down,” Edwina said. “The way the weather’s going, it wouldn’t have been producing power in time to save any of the crops.”
Viktor nodded soberly. South Continent had been the first part of Newmanhome’s inhabited areas to feel the effects of the cooling sun. Winter came early. The vast farmlands were fertile as always, but when a killing frost came the farms died. “Where’s Reesa?”
“Don’t get too cold,” Edwina called to Quinn and her own children, who nodded without looking up from their work.
“Reesa? Oh, Jake came by for her a couple of hours ago. They’re taking Father’s refresher course; I expect Billy’s there, too.”
Viktor frowned. Of course, Jake Lundy had to be accorded some sort of status—would you call him a friend of the family? Well, of some parts of the family, since he was the father of one of Edwina’s children, too. (The man was really excessively active, Viktor thought.) It was quite normal for him to come around to see his daughter, but Viktor hadn’t known he was spending time with his daughter’s mother again. “What refresher course?” he asked.
“Dad’s course. The one he’s giving on space piloting. No, not astrophysics this time; I said piloting. They’re using the old trainers.”
“For what?” Viktor demanded, astonished.
“What else could you use them for but practicing space piloting?” his sister asked witheringly. “Don’t ask me, anyway. You’d know more about that sort of thing than I would, and it’s just an idea of Dad’s.”
Her contemptuous tone made Viktor blink in surprise. Edwina had always been Daddy’s girl. She had consistently taken Pal Sorricaine’s side against Viktor—probably, Viktor believed, because she had been too little to be aware of what was going on when their mother died. He said, as tactfully as he could, “I thought you liked Dad’s ideas—whatever this one is.”
“It’s not my business, is it?” she replied with a shrug. “I think the kids ought to come in now,” she fretted. “Vik? We’re going to have a birthday party for Quinn right at sundown—they ought to be back by then. But I’d really appreciate it if you could take the kids out of the way until then, so I can get things ready.”
“Sure,” Viktor said, still looking at her with that inquiring gaze.
She flushed and then said angrily, “Oh, what the hell. They can do what they want, but I don’t have to like it. What’s the point? What’s happening is obviously Divine will!”
What Viktor really wanted to do was to find out what his father’s “refresher course” was all about, but since it was Quinn’s birthday, after all, that would have to wait. As a good father/uncle, he took Quinn and Edwina’s three littler ones on a tour of his ship as she lay at dockside.
It was one of his better ideas. The children were thrilled. There were serious stinks in the passenger holds, where the work crews were doing their best to sluice them clean after the nasty voyage and only beginning to make a dent in the filth, but the bad smells only made the children giggle and complain. Then he took them down into the engine room, where the hydrogen turbines provided the force to spin the ship’s rotors against the wind. That was a different kind of stink, oil and hot metal, and the big machines were very satisfying to look at for young children.
Viktor was having as good a time as the children were, but when he stopped to think he wasn’t quite at ease. It wasn’t so much that Reesa seemed to be getting unexpectedly friendly again with Jake Lundy—that was a minor irritation, sure, but Viktor wasn’t really jealous. It wasn’t even that the outlook for the colony was grim and getting worse; they had all had to factor that prospect into their lives long since. What was mostly on Viktor’s mind was his younger sister, Edwina. It was getting obvious that Edwina was attracted to a new sort of cult that had grown up on Newmanhome. The cult wasn’t exactly a religion. It wasn’t any sort of conventional one, anyhow; it cut across the various sects. As far as Viktor could tell it was more mystical than religious: Its adherents seemed to believe that whatever had made the stars flare and then some of them move, and their own sun begin to dim, was, if not God, at least a supernatural power; and perhaps they shouldn’t thwart it. Viktor knew it had made some stormy scenes in Edwina’s marriage. Billy’s point of view was that if they didn’t thwart—whatever it was—they would all die; Edwina’s seemed to be that if that was what the Divine wanted them to do, then that was all right, too.
It was not only the weather that was turning bad on Newmanhome. Everything else seemed to be going sour, too.
When he brought the kids back to Edwina’s home Reesa was there before him, helping to set the table with paper favors. She wasn’t alone. Billy, Pal Sorricaine, and Jake Lundy were in one corner of the living room, having a private drink. Reesa looked up and nodded to Viktor as he came in, but her attention went mostly to the children. “You go in and get cleaned up,” she scolded her daughter. “You shouldn’t be seeing any of this until it’s ready, anyway.” And then she lifted her lips to Viktor for a kiss.
It wasn’t much of a kiss. He was aware of Jake Lundy gazing benignly at them and it made him uncomfortable. “Can I help?” he asked, as much to reproach the other men as to make a genuine offer of service.
“You already did by taking the kids off our hands,” Reesa said absently, gazing around. “Oh, the presents!” she said, remembering. “I’ll go home to get them. Take your coat off, Viktor. Bily’ll give you a drink if you want it.”
The drink was applejack with apple juice. When Viktor had one he looked challengingly at his father. Pal Sorricaine shook his head. “Just the juice, Vik,” he said, holding up his glass. “Taste it if you want to, but I can’t afford to drink now. There’s too much to do.”
“What, exactly?” Viktor asked. “What’s this about giving refresher courses in space navigation? Do you still think they’ll let you take a ship to Nebo?”
“They should,” his father told him seriously. “There’s still anomalous radiation coming from there, and I’m positive it has something to do with what’s happened—it started when everything else started, and that’s no coincidence.”
He paused to light a thin cigar. “But they won’t, of course,” he finished. He didn’t have to say why; the subject had been debated at length. Most of the colonists thought it was a waste of scarce resources—New Mayflower couldn’t be used, because it was their source of microwave energy, and even New Ark might be needed for something else, sometime. And a lot of the rest were filled with that silly antiscience feeling that had been growing—the “Divine will” people, like Edwina.
“What’s going to happen,” Billy Stockbridge said, “is that we’re going to get some new fuel for the microwave generators. Mayflower’s antimatter is running out. We can’t get along without the microwave power.
“But we’re digging more geothermal shafts,” Viktor objected.
Billy shrugged. “Maybe when all the shafts are down and the generators are installed we won’t need microwave anymore, but that’s years away. So we’re going to cannibalize Ark.” Viktor blinked at him uncomprehendingly. “For fuel,” Billy explained. “New Ark still has some residual antimatter left over from its trip. We can tow Ark to meet Mayflower in orbit and transfer its fuel to add to Mayflower’s.”
“Holy shit,” Viktor said, his glass forgotten in his hand. But when he thought about it, it made sense, if one didn’t mind taking risks. Certainly transferring the reserve fuel would be hard, dangerous work. They would be handling Ark’s highly lethal, extraordinarily touchy remaining antimatter store in ways that had never been intended—but if the project worked it would give Homeport extra years of life, even if the sun continued to cool.