"Now count off," Feldhouse decreed. "When I point to you, say where you come from—Ship, or Home. You first!" And he pointed to the tallest boy, who promptly announced that he was Home, and so was the girl next behind him, but the one after that was from Mayflower and so she was paired with the first boy.
When they got down to Viktor his "buddy" was a girl named Theresa McGann. They looked at each other with speculative hostility, but took their seats together as instructed, while Feldhouse looked on the four unpaired planet-born children. "You four belong to me," he declared. "The rest of you are going to work together. You from the Ship, you teach your buddies as much as you can remember from what you got out of the teaching machines. You from Home, you teach geography and what the farms are like and everything else about what it's like here—what is it, what's your name?"
"I'm Viktor Sorricaine," Viktor announced, putting his hand down. "Why do you call this place 'Home'?"
"Because that's what it is," the teacher explained. "That's the first thing you all have to learn. This planet's name is Enki, according to the astronomers, but its right name is Newmanhome. We call it Home for short. From now on you only have one home, and this is it."
It had taken eight months for the last of the corpsicles in New Mayflower to be thawed, oriented, and paradropped to Newmanhome's surface. Most of that time was spent tearing the crew and cargo sections of the ship apart to make them into the modules that would carry everybody and everything down, and assembling the light-sail-parachutes and streamers that would keep the landing from being a catastrophe. The colonists already there welcomed the new arrivals, to be sure. They welcomed the cargoes each brought down even more. For that matter, the empty modules themselves were fallen upon with joy; each one, when emptied, contributed nearly half a ton of precious steel.
In all this work everybody had to lend a hand, kids included. Kids also had to go to Mr. Feldhouse's school (if they were twelve to fourteen biological Earth years; there were other schools for younger and older ones). For three hours a day they used the teaching machines and drilled each other in grammar and trigonometry and Earth history and music and drawing, under Feldhouse's short-tempered and sketchy supervision. The good part of the school was that Viktor had other children of his own age for company, even if one of them was the bratty Reesa McGann the teacher had forced on him the first day. The bad part was that almost all of the kids were strangers. And a lot of them—the children from the first ship, that was—were really stuck up.
Because he and Reesa were "buddies" they shared a seat in the crowded school hut, and she was the one who had the privilege of pointing out to him how little he knew about how to live on Newmanhome. Every time he complained about shared books or heavy labor, she was sure to tell him how very much worse it had been six years before, when they landed. Their Ark hadn't been designed for disassembly, like the Mayflower. All the first colonists could do was strip it of its cargo and most of its moveables. Then, reluctantly, they abandoned it. It was still up there in orbit, drive almost dead except for the trickle of power that fed its freezer units, otherwise just a hulk. With all its precious steel.
"If you'd been a little smarter," Viktor told the girl in a superior tone as he was trying to make a fire in the fireplace outside their tent, "you'd at least have fixed the drive so it could beam power down, like our ship."
"If we were smarter," she answered, "we'd have come in the second ship like you, so somebody else would have done all the hard work for us before we got here." And then she added, "Pull out all that wood and start over. You've got the heavy chunks on the bottom and all the kindling on top. Don't you know anything?" And then she pushed him out of the way and did it herself. The girl was so physical.
If Viktor had really looked at Theresa McGann he would have discovered that she wasn't such a bad girl after all. True, she kept reminding him of his immense areas of ignorance (but he was grimly repairing them as fast as he could). True, she had scabby knees. True, she was several centimeters taller than he, but that was only because fourteen-year-old girls are generally taller than fourteen-year-old boys. He didn't look at her that way, though. It wasn't that he wasn't interested in the opposite sex, even such a touchy-squeezy physical specimen of it as Reesa McGann. He was often obsessed with the opposite sex, like any healthy, horny male teenager, but the focus of his interest hadn't changed. It remained the beautiful (and now widowed) Marie-Claude Stockbridge.
Marie-Claude remained widowed, too. Suffering, Viktor observed that she often "saw" other men, but he took some comfort in noting that she seemed to have no intention of marrying one of them.
Apart from his schoolwork Viktor's contribution to the community was officially defined as "scutwork"—meaning the kinds of low-skilled jobs other people didn't have time for. When he possibly could, he tried to get into a work party with Marie-Claude, but most of the time he possibly couldn't. There was too much work, of too many kinds. Up on the rapidly emptying Mayflower the cleanup crews were emptying the cargo holds and launching the contents to the surface. The most precious and fragile of the new supplies came down in one or another of the three-winged, rocket-driven landing craft Mayflower had carried in its hold, but there wasn't enough fuel made yet to use them for more than one trip each. Sturdier shipments, including passengers, came down in the big pods.
There were all kinds of things in those pods—tractors, stills, hand tools, lathes, stores, drilling equipment, rifles, flashlights, cooking utensils, plates, surgical instruments, coils of copper wire, coils of fencing, coils of light-conducting tube, coils of flexible pipe; then there were cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, dogs, cats, carp, tilapia, trout, bees, dung beetles, earthworms, kelp, algae, catfish—each fresh out of the freezer, wrapped in protective foam or immobilized in a plastic bag. The living things didn't all come down at first; many of them (and many, many tubes of ova and sperm and seeds and spores) stayed frozen on the ship against a future need.
The pods kept coming. Almost every time Mayflower came around in orbit in the right position—only about one orbit in twenty was right, because of the planet's rotation—the orbital crews launched clusters of twelve or fourteen separate loads, linked until the retrofire rockets slowed them, then shaking apart, popping their light-sail-parachutes, coming down in fleets of bright gold film canopies, with the gray metal pods hanging underneath. Those were smart parachutes. Each one had sensors that kept it posted on where it was drifting and shroud controls that could maneuver it toward its planned drop point—fairly well, anyway—at least, well enough, provided the linked pods had been ejected at just the right moment and the retrofire burn had been precise.
But even with everything going right, the chutes could land anywhere within a ten-kilometer radius of the drop point, inshore of the colony on the shore of what they were calling Great Ocean.
It would have been nice if the drop point could have been right on the little town itself. But that would have meant that half the pods would surely have fallen into Great Ocean, and that meant a whole different order of difficulty in getting them back. It was easier to send people like Viktor out to drag them back on tractor-drawn sledges. So that was what he did—half a dozen times a week.