Jeron was lucky. He was not one of the first-born. He was in the third cohort. The infancy of the twenty-one babies in the earlier cohorts was less athletic, but a great deal more chancy, because none of the parents involved really knew what they were doing. By the time Jeron was well and truly toilet-trained, his main task had been decided for him: it was staying out of the way. Or, actually, just staying alive.
What made Jeron's childhood athletic was his spooky Uncle Ski, whose specialty back home had been astrophysics and who now devoted himself to the attainment of satori through child-rearing. Uncle Ski wasn't dead, like Uncle Will Becklund; but he sure was spooky. Aunt Eve was given the physical care of the babies. Uncle Ski took charge of their spiritual growth, which involved a great deal of running and slashing and hiding. Between times, when he was not being taught how to hold a spoon by Aunt Eve or being challenged by one of Uncle Ski's grow-up-quick stratagems, Jeron practiced talking on anyone who would stay still long enough, adult or child.
There were not as many of either to be stayed as one might think. It was a cranky, fretful environment he grew up in. Even the children were quirky; and the adults were mostly terrifying.
They were the only adults Jeron had ever known and he had no basis for comparison, but even his tiny infant mind thought they were bizarre. Aunt Mommy (he had not yet learned to call her Aunt Eve Barstow) was always fussing and fluttering over an unblown nose or a wet sleeping bag, but she was cuddly nice. As she was nearly always lactating, she smelled heavenly of warm milk. The others—well, they fought. Jeron did not understand the word "obsession," but he recognized in each of them an internal drive that nearly blinded them to other concerns. Each one had a burning compulsion to know and to do—his thing, or hers—and when they communicated with each other, or with one of the children, it was nearly always at a high pitch of emotion. They seemed to range between fury and black despair, and were almost always frightening to be around. The only male tiny Jeron felt close to at all was Uncle Will. It was Uncle Will who monitored the displays over his sleeping bag, pretty patterns of bunnies and toddlers displayed on the liquid crystal panels, with simple words to name them enunciated clearly from the speaker under Jeron's swaddling-bag. It was Uncle Will who taught him to distinguish between k's and t's, and to pronounce his final g's. Jeron seldom saw Uncle Will, but then most people never saw him at all. He was a whispering disembodied voice, a shimmering haze like the air over a hot highway, or, when he remembered to make a hologram, an intangible glassy form of light like the outline of a human figure. What he looked like more precisely was a Thom optical catastrophe, but Jeron was not yet two and would not learn catastrophe theory for at least another year. First he had to learn to speak and read, and he did that from Uncle Ghost's bedside displays. They were not electric. They came in ripe fruit colors, banana yellow, peach, apple red, grass green. They were created by some of Uncle Ghost's magic. Jeron didn't know how. It did not occur to him to ask how dead Will Becklund created the pretty pictures for him, or, for that matter, how he had created himself. He took Uncle Ghost as he found him; although he seldom called him that, as the other children did. Jeron did not think of Will Becklund as a ghost, in spite of the fact that Uncle Will Becklund by then had been dead for nearly four years.
The years of the young are very long; it is a relativistic time-dilation effect like accelerating toward the velocity of light. Jeron's years were longer than most. In this third year he already spoke quite well and was beginning to read.
He was a strong young child by then, and quite handsome. Before he was born, in fact almost as soon as he was conceived, his mother had allowed Aunt Flo to select among the paired genes for muscles and blue eyes and quickness.
Eve would not allow any other tampering, such as the addition of genes from other sources, but she saw no objection to improving the luck of the draw, and so Jeron was strong and quick. He was also quite smart, but no special selection was needed for that. All the possible parents on board the Constitution were smart as hell to begin with, or else they wouldn't have been there. He had a full-time job by then, helping Aunt Flo and then Aunt Eve in the painstaking breeding and rearranging in the hydroponics flats. He was more than a helper. There were long periods when he was the only person in charge, alone among the rows of curious growing things, because the aunts were busy elsewhere.
A decision was being made; it was part of the reason why the atmosphere in the ship was growing more and more frantic and upsetting.
Uncle Will took time to explain the decision to the child, rehearsing every word until he was sure Jeron understood. "You know we were all tricked, Jeron," he whispered out of a shadow under the ledge for Jeron's sleeping sack. "We were tricked in a very mean way. We were all sent to a place that does not exist, and we were meant to die there."
"I a'ready know all that, Unca Will," Jeron lisped.
"Ung-kull. Say your L's, Jeron. Well, we are going to that place anyway. And, although there is no place for us to live there, we are going to make a place."
Jeron leaned over the edge of his bunk to peer into the shadow. As he had thought, there was nothing to see down there. Uncle Will had not chosen to make himself visible. "Will that be hard for us to do, Ung-kull Will?" he asked.
"It will be very hard. I am not sure how we can do it. But we don't have any choice."
"All right, Uncle Will," said Jeron, and, half an hour later, when his tutor had quizzed and corrected him until comprehension was complete, he drifted comfortably to sleep. One concept he found hard to grasp: "another" place; what could another place than the Constitution possibly be like? Anything like the stories Aunt Flo told him (which he had taken to be fairy tales) about "home"?
But he was not disturbed. He had known about the treachery of human beings on Earth as long as he had known anything at all. The very primers that Will programmed to teach him his alphabet, glowing gently over his sleeping sack, told the story:
A's for America, that sent us out to die.
B's for all the bastards who did us in the eye.
C's for Centaurus. We'll reach it all the same.
D's for bad old Dieter. He plays a dirty game.
What Jeron did not have was any very realistic picture of Dieter von Knefhausen. Horns and a tail? Scaly or furry? Would he sit on a hill of skulls, farting sulfoxides and belching soot, gnawing a haunch of human child?
So his dreams were often troubled. So are the dreams of all children, everywhere, at all times, as their small subconscious minds try to map the terrors of Hell or the mad onslaught of werewolves or whatever other terrifying fantasy grownups have been feeding them against the tiny wickednesses for which they are sent to bed or deprived of a toy. But when he woke he had his work, and his pets, and his peers, and his parents . . . and the others.
Although Aunt Flo's skills were extreme, she had not succeeded in breeding really satisfactory tame animals. Not real ones. The cottony-downy bunny plants were soft and cuddly, and as good as any Teddy bear for a little kid to sleep with. But they were no better than that. They did not eat, sleep, wet, or move. The place that a kitten might have filled for him if he had been born on Earth was taken by the others. There were times when he drifted off to sleep with another presence beside him, and sometimes when he and the other three children of his cohort sang their lesson songs it seemed that there were five voices raised, or even more, more whispery even than Uncle Ghost, even harder to see. They were not very satisfactory either. So mostly Jeron's companionship was infant human, like himself, or—whatever the original eight had become.