“All right, I guess, Aunt Nrina,” the boy piped up. “Of course, I haven’t had much time, helping Viktor and all.”
“I believe that,” she agreed ruefully. “He does take a lot of time, doesn’t he? But he’s worth it.” And she blew them both a kiss and was gone, and she hadn’t said a word about his coming back to her.
Nor did she in the days that followed. Nor did Pelly call back. When Viktor grumbled to Balit the boy said, “He’s probably on his way home now, Viktor. But I’m sure he got your message to those other people.”
“Then why don’t they answer?” Viktor demanded. The boy shrugged, and Viktor’s temper rose. “I could understand it if it was all lost! It’s wonderful that it hasn’t been lost, but you tell me they’ve had power all along, the geothermal generators have kept right on working, so the data’s there, only nobody ever wants to look at it!”
“Please don’t get excited, Viktor,” Balit pleaded.
“I can’t help it. Doesn’t anybody care?”
“I care, Viktor. Really, though, you should be more calm.” Balit hesitated, then said with determination, “Do you know what I think, Viktor? I think you are building up too many tensions.”
Viktor gave him a hostile look. “What tensions are you talking about?”
Balit’s expression seemed to show he was sorry he’d brought the subject up, but he took the plunge. “Why don’t you have a sexual partner, Viktor?” he asked with determination.
Viktor flushed. He was taken aback. “I—” he said. “I, uh—” He was having trouble responding; the last thing he had expected was to have to discuss his sex life with this child. He managed to get out, “Well, if I did, it wouldn’t be, uh, safe for the woman—”
“Because you are potent, yes, of course,” Balit agreed earnestly. “That can be fixed, just as it was for me. In a few days the rest of my residual sperm will be resorbed and my brand removed, and then I can have sexual intercourse freely again, just as you could.”
“Wait a minute,” Viktor said, staring at the boy. “Again?”
Balit looked puzzled. Then he said, in a self-deprecating way, “Of course, before I was mature it was only with young girls. For practice, as we say—though I did enjoy it very much. Soon it will be with real women. It can be for you, too, Viktor, if you want it. It doesn’t hurt a bit,” he added encouragingly, “well, except for a little bit, right at first. You know, you don’t have to have a wife. You don’t have to agree to a pairing right at first; hardly anybody does that.”
“So it seems,” Viktor growled, thinking of Nrina.
The boy’s puzzled look returned, but he just asked curiously, “Have you ever done that, Viktor? Paired, I mean?”
“Sure I have,” Viktor replied. Then, more slowly, he said, “I was married for a long time. Her name was Reesa—Theresa McGann—but she’s dead now.”
Fascinated, Balit went on, “And did you and this Reesa Theresa McGann have actual children together? I mean, born out of her body?”
“Yes, we did,” Viktor said shortly. His discomfort was growing. It was not often that he thought of those long-dust members of his family, and it felt as though thinking of them now was likely to begin to hurt.
“And did you love her?” Balit demanded.
Viktor looked at the boy. “Yes!” he shouted. And realized again, quite a lot too late, that it was very true.
Time passed slowly for Viktor. He spent a lot of time in his room, waiting for the message from Newmanhome that might answer all his questions, but it never came.
There was no point in calling Pelly again, because the space captain was well on his way back to Nergal. Viktor hesitated about trying Markety or Grimler, whoever they were, but finally impatience won over hesitation and he placed a call to each of them.
There were no answers to those, either. Balit counseled patience. Balit himself was always patient with Viktor, when Viktor was gloomy or stormy; but Viktor’s patience was running out. He spent more and more time with the desk, searching out every scrap of information he could find that bore at all on anything astronomical.
None of it was any help.
There was plenty of data, to be sure, on the universe as it was—nothing on how it came to be that way. For a while Viktor interested himself in the atlas of the skies. There wasn’t much of it: their own planets, just as he had known them in his first years on Newmanhome, the habitats, Nergal itself.
Their paltry group of surrounding stars had been studied, after a fashion—long enough to give them names, not much more. There was one group of four stars usually called “the Quadrangle”—their names were Sapphire, Gold, Steel, and Blood, taken, Viktor supposed, from the way they looked in the sky. There was Solitary—all off by itself in its part of the sky; a natural enough name. There were the binary pair, now called Mother and Father, with a period of about eight hundred years. There was Neighbor, the nearest star at less than three light-years distance, but an uninspiring little K-8.
Then there was Milk. Viktor studied the pale glow of Milk carefully, because it was the corpse of one of the stars that had flared in his own long-ago skies. The desk could tell him little, for no one lately had seemed to care why stars were different in color, and certainly no one had thought much about stellar evolution. But Viktor was nearly sure that what they saw wasn’t the star itself anymore, but the shell of expanding gases it had thrust out of itself, now lit from within.
Then he discovered that someone, sometime in the past, had taken the trouble to look a little more closely at all those stars and had found out that Gold had six detectable planets.
Planets! And yellow Gold was a G-4—close enough to their own stellar type, indeed to the type of Earth’s own sun.
Was it possible that someone had lived on one of Gold’s planets?
By the time he could talk to Balit again he was bubbling with excitement. “It all fits together, Balit!” he cried. “There’s a planetary system, not very distant at all. Suppose there’s life on one of those planets, Balit!”
“You mean people like us?” Balit asked, wide-eyed.
“I don’t know about that, Balit. Probably not very much ‘like’ us, if you mean two arms, two legs, two eyes—I don’t have any idea what they might look like. But like us in that they’ve developed intelligence. And technology! Why not? They might even be a little farther along in science and technology than the human race ever was—it wouldn’t have to be very far to make a big difference!”
“With spaceships, you mean?”
“Exactly! With interstellar spaceships. Suppose these Golden aliens, for purposes of their own—and how could we ever guess what their purposes might be? Suppose they decided to move a little furniture around. A dozen stars or so, for instance. Suppose they sent a crew to Nebo to build the machines that would take the energies of our sun, and use them to propel these few stars at high speed across the universe. Don’t you see, Balit? It explains everything!”
“And if we studied the things on Nebo very carefully we might know how to do things like that ourselves? Or at least know why?”
“Exactly!” Viktor cried in triumph.
But the triumph didn’t last, for a guess was only a guess, and there was no way to test his hypothesis. He spent more and more time in his room, fruitlessly going over the data, wishing for word from Newmanhome. He was gazing at the pale point of light that was the star Gold, when Frit tapped on the door. He was carrying the kitten, and he had an apologetic look. “Balit forgot to feed her, and now he’s in bed,” Frit said. “Can you help?”
“Sure,” Viktor said, not very graciously. The kitten was big enough to eat regular food now. “I’ll come out. You don’t have to carry her,” he added. “Put her down; if she’s hungry she’ll follow us.”
Frit politely set the cat on the floor and led the way. To Viktor’s surprise, Forta was in the “kitchen”—that was the only way Viktor could think of the room—sipping a glass of wine and looking expectant. Viktor found the little container of scraps of food, opened it, and set it on the floor. The kitten strolled over, sniffed at it, and then looked up at him. He smiled. “She’s just being polite,” he said. “That’s what she wanted. See, she’s eating now.”
As he turned to leave, Forta said, “Why don’t you have a glass of wine with us, Viktor?”
Viktor perceived that it wasn’t just a casual invitation. He sat down and let Forta fill a glass for him before he said, “You didn’t really need me to feed the cat, did you?”