“No, not until the ground dries out a little,” Viktor agreed. “And we’ll have to do something here, too. I don’t suppose we can pave the street, but maybe we could plant grasses all around the village to hold the soil when it rains.”
“We can do that,” Jeren agreed, looking over Viktor’s shoulder. “Viktor? I think Balit’s waving to you.”
When Viktor turned, he saw it was true. When he trudged his way to the communications shack, the mud sucking at his feet at every step, the boy was bubbling with pleasure. “Viktor, come inside, please. Right away! I’ve just had a message from Moon Mary that I want you to see!”
There was no denying Balit’s excitement. Viktor supposed it would be another loving communication from Frit or Forta, or both of them; for those came almost every day.
It was neither Frit nor Forta. When the picture came on it was a cluster of Balit’s schoolmates, laughing and excited. They weren’t in their classroom. They were gathered around a plot of ground with bright-green, healthy-looking seedlings poking out of it. “See, Viktor? They did what you said,” Balit said proudly.
“What I said?”
“That we should have the soil analyzed. Pelly had some clods on the cryonics capsules he was bringing back, so I asked my school to take it on as part of their project.”
“What project?” Viktor demanded.
“They’ve taken on Newmanhome as a project,” Balit explained. “Not just the soil—that’s only part of it. But they had it tested to see what it needed, and then they added things. Look at the difference now!”
Viktor stared at him, incredulous. “One little class of kids did that?”
“They’re not just kids, Viktor—they’re as old as I am. Besides, Grimler helped.”
“Grimler? Markety’s wife?”
“Yes, of course. She’s there, too; you’ll see her in a minute. And it wasn’t just my class, anyway,” Balit declared. “All over the habitats there are schools that have Newmanhome projects. You wanted to know what I was doing with all the pictures I took? Half the schools in the orbits have been watching them. All the kids are getting into it, Viktor—and, look, there’s Grimler now!”
Indeed, there she was, slim as ever, looking radiant. “Pelly’s going to bring two tons of the ‘fertilizer’ stuff on his next trip, Balit. And, oh, has Markety told you the good news? He’s a boy,” she said, glowing with pleasure. “Perfectly healthy, and he is going to have Markety’s hair and eyes. Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Well, I’ll have to congratulate Markety,” Viktor said with warmth. “I’m delighted, only—” He was staring at the woman on the screen. “Had she had the baby already?” he asked, gazing at Grimler’s flat midsection. “I didn’t think there was time—”
“Oh,” Balit said, looking faintly repelled, “it isn’t born yet. I mean, honestly, Markety and Grimler certainly wanted to go back to the old ways, up to a point, but not for Grimler to have to bear it. No, the reason Grimler went back was so dear Nrina could remove it and check it for defects and so on, and then let it come to term properly; it’ll be a season or two yet before they have it.”
The boy turned off the picture. “Aren’t you pleased about all this, Viktor?” he asked anxiously.
Viktor thought about it. “Of course I am,” he said, when he was sure he meant it. “Only—”
“Only what, Viktor? Is something wrong?” And when Viktor didn’t answer Balit sighed. “Never mind. But, honestly, I think things are going to go a lot better now.”
As a matter of fact, they did. Not well enough to lift Viktor out of the shadowy depression that hung over him; well enough so that there was, actually, progress in the things that mattered to the community.
As soon as the ground was dry enough Viktor and Jeren found a spot that was level enough to suit Viktor’s strictures. It was protected by a rise just above it, which, he thought, would divert any future floods; and the gillies began grading it for planting at once.
Viktor was on the scene every day, prowling around worriedly when he wasn’t manning a shovel himself, trying to remember what things had been like. It was Viktor who decided they needed to heap up a berm of earth around the farm plot, to retain rainfall when it came, but needed also to gate it, so that if the rains were too heavy they could drain standing water off the plots. It was Viktor who demanded a catalogue of every decipherable label of stored genetic materials in the freezer, poring over them to see if he could figure out which might be plants they could use and which would turn out to be merely some peculiar subspecies of cactus or jungle creeper or moss that someone once had thought might sometime be useful, or at least desirable, somewhere—under some conditions—but could do nothing to feed them now.
Viktor kept himself busy. Harshly he told himself that the absence of hope was no reason at all to stop trying. Funnily, it seemed to work.
Whenever there was some good development, whenever Viktor found himself tempted to optimism again, he tried his best to quell the feeling. He didn’t want hope. He didn’t want the disappointment that hope would bring. He was often the only dour face in an assembly of smiles. Jeren, Balit, Korelto—even Manett and Markety, in their own very different ways—they were all charged up with the excitement of bringing a whole planet to a new birth. Viktor tried not to be. After all, he knew exactly what that was like, for he had lived through it once already, in those first frontier days, thousands of Newmanhome years before.
“But don’t you see, Viktor?” Balit said reasonably, in a break between work sessions. “That just means that you, of all people, ought to know that everything we’re hoping for can really happen!”
Viktor didn’t answer. There was no point in telling the boy the other things he knew—for example, how great the differences were. When the ships from Earth had landed on Newmanhome the colonists they carried had been chosen people. They had been trained and equipped for the job. They had all of Earth’s technological knowledge base transported with them to fall back on. More than that, they were all young, and full of the juices of hope—and, most important of all, the planet they conquered wasn’t a corpse. It was already a fully living world with an existing biota of its own.
And none of that was true now.
So Viktor refused to hope. When Manett, glowing, told him that Dekkaduk was going to bring them a whole revivification system for the remaining corpsicles in the deep freeze, Viktor’s congratulations were perfunctory. When Markety bashfully begged permission to name his forthcoming son after him, Viktor refused to be touched. When Balit announced with delight that a dozen schools had clubbed together to launch a new space telescope—maybe even to settle the question of whether Gold’s planets had any possible inhabitants—Viktor’s heart trembled for a moment, but he quelled it.
But when Balit came shouting his name—
When Balit came shouting for Viktor, what he was saying was, “Come quickly! She’s called! It’s Nrina!” And when Viktor came stumbling out of his workroom, rubbing his eyes, it wasn’t just Balit. Markety was there, face transfigured with excitement, calling, “Go to the communications shack right away, Viktor!” And Jeren was there, blinking back tears, babbling, “I wasn’t sure, Viktor! I thought it was her, but I didn’t want to say.” And Balit was saying, “And there was freezer damage, so Nrina wouldn’t let us tell you until she was sure it would be all right—”
But then, when Viktor got to the communications shack, finally daring to hope, his heart in his throat, the face that looked out at him from the screen was the well-remembered one, and what she was saying was, “Hello, dear Viktor. They didn’t like me any better than they liked you, you see, so they popped me in the freezer, too . . . and, oh, Viktor, I’m all right now, and I’m coming home.”
CHAPTER 29
The eons of stagnation were over for Wan-To. He was not merely busy—busier than he had been for at least some sextillions of sextillions of years—he was in an absolute fury of action.
It might not have seemed that way to a normal Earth human being—if there had been such a person to observe him, if observation of Wan-To had been possible in the first place. Wan-To had no way to move fast anymore. A single thought took him weeks. To make a plan required centuries. If the imaginary Earth human could have known what Wan-To was up against, the spectacle might have reminded him of a some Earthly watchmaker, feverishly trying to assemble the most delicate of clockwork in a desperate rush to save his life—and trying to do it, moreover, while he was submerged neck-deep in quicksand. For that was how it was for Wan-To. At every step he was impeded by the thick, suffocating medium of the dead star he inhabited. Actually Wan-To was worse off than even the drowning watchmaker, because at least the watchmaker retained his memories, while the particular skills Wan-To needed now were no longer part of his active consciousness. They had been “put away” long before. That was one part of the price Wan-To had had to pay for continued existence in the feeble energies left to him in the dying star, for to save energy he had long ago had to download immense portions of himself and his memories into a kind of standby storage. So first of all he had to find and reawaken those parts; it was as though the watchmaker had to find his instruction manual before he could fit the first gear to its bearing.