In his third year Jeron was mature enough for more adult responsibilities, so Aunt Ann began teaching him elementary Chinese and Uncle Shef put him to work.
He was not alone. Sheffield Jackman, who no longer was addressed by that name and certainly never by the title "colonel," drafted everybody too weak to resist to his project. He wanted a better telescope. What he really needed was a ten-meter mirror, but he did not have ten years to cast it and cool it and figure it. So he elected to make ten thousand ten-centimeter mirrors instead. The light-gathering capacity would be the same, it was only a matter of so arranging them that each would contribute its share of photons to the same point. Difficult, to be sure. Not impossible, especially as they could stop the thruster for observations and so excuse themselves from the troublesome effects of sagging or twisting. It was necessary, in any case, because Uncle Shef was going to have to locate every object with a magnitude of plus-25 or better through a large section of the heavens, and sort out the ones that moved. He would have to scan more than two hundred astronomical units from the primary Alpha Centauri, and locate everything with a diameter of more than one hundred kilometers; and it was even harder than it seemed. The brightest ones would be easy, but they were not the ones he wanted to find. What was the use of finding a comet core of frozen gases and clathrates when what he needed was structural steel? It was the low-albedo objects that he wanted most, which were by definition the hardest to see.
Intelligence replaced brute force. The ten thousand tiny shells cooled quickly and easily, especially as there was no reason not to cast them of pure aluminum instead of quartz. The first crude sculpting of each took only a week, and then each of the first batches of mirrors was within a millimeter of its figure at all points. But then there was nothing to replace the pads and the rouge and the constant testing with knife edge and beam of light; and that was where Jeron and his cohort and the older kids came in. They had to work under nitrogen, because of the aluminum, their hands inside sealed hoods; they had to use what Aunt Flo had grown for an abrasive, because no jewelers' supply store was nearby; and they had to get it right. At first it took each of them the better part of a week, spoiling half a dozen blanks in the process, to do one mirror. But they learned. They learned enough to do five or six apiece in each day's work, because Uncle Shef made them. Long before the last mirror was in place and collimated Uncle Shef had begun stopping the ship's thrust to begin his primary observations, and by the time they were finished he had mapped more than eighteen hundred chunks of matter.
After each shift Aunt Eve rubbed their sore forearms and hugged their weary bodies, and Uncle Will tried to comfort their fatigued minds. "It's how we're going to make a home," he whispered to Jeron out of the shrouded cherry-fruit vines that grew over his bed. "It will all be worth it, you'll see."
"I never doubted it, Uncle Will," yawned Jeron, rubbing his eyes. "Please, now go talk to some other kid. I want to go to sleep."
And actually, none of the children minded at all; it was a great communal effort, and they were part of it. After Uncle Shef finished his sky map there was even more work, but not quite as satisfying because much of it involved brute force and therefore adult bodies. They helped when they could. The problem was the delta-V forces involved in deceleration. Before deceleration could even start a great deal had to be done—or, rather, undone. Fully three-quarters of the mirrors they had so painfully ground had to be brought back in and remelted and replaced as structural members to strengthen the ship's interior. All of the grownups were fussing and tidying around the ship, lashing things down, stowing things, undoing the careless alterations they had made over the years when the thrusters were working at fractional strength because relativity made further acceleration fairly pointless. The inside was a lot of work, but the kids could help. The outside was worse, and the kids could do nothing there. Most of it fell on Uncle Shef and Uncle Ski and Uncle Jim, who were outside the hull in their EVA suits more often than in, cutting away all the extrusions and annexes that had been tacked on so unconsideringly over the years. Uncle Jim was in charge of that project. He drove the others, muttering and cursing. He drove himself even harder.
What brought him to profanity was the recollection of the jettisoned side boosters and the blown-away sections of the hull from the time they rebuilt the drive. "Chrome steel and magnesium!" he shouted into his suit radio. "And where are we going to get that kind of stuff again?" Every gram his torch severed was cherishingly brought back aboard. He did not trouble to remove every last strut and stub, only the ones that might cause trouble if there were violent decelerations as they rounded Alpha Centauri to slow down. When at last he pronounced the Constitution's hull integral once more he came back to the hydroponics gardens, where Jeron had taken over the grownup chores to relieve adult muscles, and lay a whole day between the bright lemon- smelling squash vines on one side and the vegetable porks on the other, refusing to move.
By the time Jeron was four they were approaching the bright yellow star, now recognizably a sun.
It would be bigger, later, when they took up a proper orbit and began their presumptuous construction project of a permanent home. But already it was bigger than anything Jeron had ever seen. In his short lifetime it had grown immensely.
The spectacle had a terribly high price for Jeron and the other children, for now deceleration began in earnest. There were no more interludes of weightlessness for games and thrills. There was not even the steady slowing thrust they had grown up with; the plasma burned hotter and hotter, and the pressure on everybody increased. The adults hated it, but it was what they had been born to. For the children it was new and terrible. Jeron had weighed ten kilos, more or less; now he weighed twenty, then twenty-five. Half a dozen of the littlest kids fractured bones in one week, and then Aunt Eve began making them drink nasty messes that she said were rich in calcium and they added vomiting to their miseries. One G, then one point two, then one point four, and even the grownups were wheezing and falling down; and then they jockeyed around the immense terrifying star for the final shedding of surplus v; no one's navigation had been quite good enough for that delicate operation, and so there were bursts of two-G and even three-G acceleration that left the babies too weak to whimper and even Jeron blacked out twice.
But then it was over, and Aunt Eve was cuddling the littlest ones and Uncle Ghost trying to reassure the others, and the real work was about to begin.
Alpha Centauri had no proper planets. Perhaps the nearness of its companion had something to do with that fact.
But it did have a girdle or two of rubble where otherwise planets might have formed, and wandering cometary lumps scattered all through nearby space. "We're going to mine them," whispered Uncle Ghost from the shadows behind Jeron's cohort as they peered out into the starry sky. "We're going to show that bastard what we can do!"