They worked from sunup to school, two or three hours every morning. Reesa was always the first one to tell Viktor it was time to leave, because Viktor had no incentive to leave Marie-Claude's company for the schoolmaster's—except one day. On that day Reesa disappeared into the backhouse for several minutes when work was through, and when she appeared she grabbed his arm, looking oddly triumphant. "Look at this, doofus," she ordered, flushed and excited.
"We're going to be late for class," he complained. He wasn't much annoyed. He was only irritated by the fact that she was touching him again—he tolerated with difficulty the fact that she was a touching, hugging kind of person, always wanting physical contact—until he saw what she was displaying for him. Then he recoiled from the scrap of stained white fabric in disgust. "Ugh! Gross!" he cried. "It's your dirty underwear!"
Her face was rosy with pride. "Look at what it's dirty with! That's blood!" she crowed. "That means I'm a grown-up woman now, Viktor Sorricaine, and you're still just a dumb little kid."
He looked around apprehensively, to see if anyone was observing this, but the others were still hard at work. He understood what she was showing him. What he didn't understand was why. Of course he knew what menstruation was, because the teaching machines had been quite specific about all the physiological details of sex. But, as far as the female reproductive systems were concerned, the overriding impression Viktor had come away with was that it was messy. Viktor wasn't a male chauvinist pig. At least, he didn't think he was. He didn't consider himself superior to females simply because of gender. What he thought about sexual dimorphism was mostly charitable compassion for the nasty predicaments females found themselves in every month, and the even worse ones that confronted them in childbearing.
It had never occurred to him that any female would boast about it.
"That means I could have a baby!" Reesa chortled.
"Not without some guy to help you," Viktor pointed out defensively.
"Oh," Reesa said, starry-eyed, "there isn't going to be any problem with that."
And the colony grew.
Even while Marie-Claude was turning loose the first few of her Von Neumanns, her fingers crossed in the hope that they wouldn't break down, that they would work the way they were supposed to, that they would find their way back as they should—even then the construction workers were finishing the great steel skeleton of the vast rectenna that, very soon, would deliver the first Mayflower-generated microwave power to the colony. A model steel plant was half done, ready for the first of Marie-Claude's Von Neumanns to come back with raw metal. And wells were being sunk into the hot water that underlay the hills behind the town they were beginning to call Homeport. When those geothermal wells were beginning to produce electricity there would be plenty to spare, enough to run the immense freezers whose foundations were being dug, to store all the samples still on Mayflower and Ark.
That wasn't all. Real homes were being built, with a lottery every week to see which half-dozen lucky families would get to move out of their tents into something with walls. The beamed broadcasts from Earth still came in, all the hours of every day, along with the regular reports from New Argosy, now more than halfway to Newmanhome; but people watched them now only for entertainment, not with the hopeless yearning of the first years.
It was a time for—well, not for rejoicing, exactly, because there were still endless years of hard work ahead. But at least it was a time when the three thousand and more (every day more) human beings could look back on how much had been accomplished, and look around at the farms and the docks and the sprawling town with satisfaction that the planet was being tamed to their needs.
Of course, they hadn't yet seen any new strange objects in the sky.
Fifth (Navigator) Officer Pal Sorricaine had no ship to be an officer of anymore, and nowhere to navigate anyway.
It meant a considerable comedown for him. He was still a kind of astronomer, of course. But the flare star was only a memory, which meant there was nothing much to do about that still-troubling puzzle, and anyway there wasn't much he could have done about solving it. There weren't any decent-sized telescopes on the surface of Newmanhome. Mayflower's sensors were still operating, but they weren't telling anybody anything they didn't already know, except for some peculiar readings from the innermost planet, Nebo. There was a little group of interested people who got together to talk about it from time to time, Sorricaine and Frances Mtiga and the Iraqi woman, Tiss Khadek. They spent hours trying to find in the datastores some suggestion of why the hot little planet had an atmosphere, and what the gamma radiation that seemed to come from parts of its surface might mean, but there was nothing in previous astronomical history to help. It didn't seem very urgent, even to them. No one thought the readings were important enough to spend scarce man-hours on, not while the rectenna was still unfinished and the new food warehouses were still almost empty.
So Pal Sorricaine did odd jobs.
It was the kind of work the kids did when not in school. Unskilled work. Hard labor, sometimes, and in inconvenient places. He was away from the community two or three days at a time, with a team of other men similarly among the technologically unemployed. They spent their time collecting the low-priority cargo pods that had fallen at the inconveniently far perimeter of the drop zone, or even outside it. They sledged them into the city; not only hard work, but not even very interesting.
Pal Sorricaine didn't seem to mind. He took on the job of cartography when he was out in the wildwoods, searching for lost pods, and his maps became the best the community had. When he was home he was cheerful. He took his turn at minding Baby Weeny. He was loving to his wife and affectionate to Viktor. It was puzzling to Viktor that his mother seemed to worry about her husband. But when he asked her about it she simply laughed and said, "It's a kind of a problem for your dad, Viktor. He was one of the most important men on the ship. Now he's sort of—well—general labor, you know? When things get more settled and he can do real astronomy again …"
She let it trail off there. Viktor didn't bother to ask her when she thought things would be that settled. Of course, she didn't know any more than he did. Maybe the only right answer would have been "never." But that night, when his father returned with the tractor team, four great pods of steel bumping and scraping behind them, he seemed content enough. Pal was in a good mood, anxious to hear about what had been going on in the town while he was away, and bursting with a couple of pieces of gossip he had brought back from long night talks with the other men. "Do you know what Marie-Claude's been doing?" he asked his wife, chuckling. "She's pregnant, that's what!"
Viktor dropped the spoon he was trying to feed his baby sister with. "But—her husband's dead!" he cried, appalled at the news.
"Did I say anything about a husband?" Pal Sorricaine asked good-naturedly. "I just said she's going to have a baby. I didn't say she was getting married. I guess she likes the idea of being a merry widow."
"Pal," Viktor's mother said warningly, looking at her son. "Don't make it sound awful, Pal. Marie-Claude's a good person, and besides we need more babies."