Nobody was using the little mirror when Viktor came puffing up to the observatory—not in broad daylight. The class wasn't even inside the little dome. There was a teaching machine, its screen hooded against the sunlight, and a dozen or so people were gathered around it, looking at the rainbow colors of a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of stellar types.
Viktor saw Reesa sitting there cross-legged on the spiky Newmanhome grass, sharing a blanket with Billy Stockbridge. That was displeasing; he hadn't really taken his mother's remarks seriously. He was no more pleased to see Jake Lundy in the class. Viktor didn't really like Jake Lundy—hadn't since they had first met, in the long-ago school days when Lundy was the older kid sometimes stuck with supervising the young ones, and something of a bully. It didn't help that Jake, a little older than Viktor, had managed to land one of the coveted jobs as aircraft pilot, instead of being stuck with a surface ship. It also happened to be true (as Viktor knew) that Jake Lundy was the father of Reesa's older child—not that that had anything to do with Viktor's feelings about the man, of course.
When Viktor approached the group his father paused in his lecture long enough to give him a combination of a welcoming nod and a peremptory gesture to take a seat. Viktor sat near enough to Reesa so that she could talk to him if she wanted to, yet far enough away that he wasn't obviously seeking conversation. She gave him a quick, absent smile and returned to the lesson.
Viktor's father wasn't looking well. Though his artificial limb was a high-tech device as close to the real thing as any machine could be, he limped as he moved around the teaching machine, and his voice was hoarse as he explained the natural sequence of star types Hertzsprung and Russell had described centuries earlier. It seemed to Viktor that the old man's hands were shaking, too. But he paid attention to the lecture, and when it was finished and Pal Sorricaine asked for questions, Viktor's hand shot up.
"What's this about space piloting?" he demanded.
The dozen students grinned tolerantly at him.
"If you'd stay around Homeport you'd know these things, Viktor," Pal said. "We'll have rocket fuel soon, from the gas-liquefying plants they're building for the freezers. The council decided weeks ago that as soon as New Argosy arrives we'll start space exploration again. So I volunteered to give a refresher course on astrophysics, for anyone who wants to try for astronaut training."
"Why astrophysics, though?" Viktor asked his father. "I mean, why not something useful, like navigation?" It seemed to him a natural and harmless question, but his father scowled.
Pal rubbed his lips. "It's my course, Viktor," he said, his voice hostile. "If you don't want to take it, go away."
Unexpectedly, a female voice spoke up. "But I think your son is right, Pal," the woman said, and stood up on the far side of the crowd. It was Ibtissam Khadek, looking older than Victor remembered her, and quite determined. "We know that your personal interest is in such things as theoretical cosmology and your so-called Sorricaine-Mtiga objects," she went on, looking around for support, "but for most of us here, what we want is to go into space. To explore this whole solar system, of which we know so little—and to do it now, please. In my case, before I am too old to be accepted for a ship's crew."
Pal Sorricaine looked astonished, and then resentful, and then surly. "There's nothing to keep you from starting a course of your own, Tiss," he pointed out.
The astronomer shook her head. "We shouldn't be competing," she said sweetly. "We should be working together, don't you think? For instance! When my grandfather first described this system, he of course marked Enki"—how like the woman, Viktor thought, to insist on calling familiar Newmanhome by its Babylonian name!—"as the most habitable planet, but he specifically listed the brown dwarf, Nergal, as the one most important to observe. It's our plain duty to take a good look at it, for the sake of science!"
"We're looking at Nergal all the time," Pal Sorricaine protested. "We've got millions of pictures. Ark's instruments are covering it routinely."
"I am not speaking of routine," Khadek cried. "I am speaking of a dedicated mission."
"But why Nergal?" Jake Lundy put in. "For that matter, why don't we look at Nebo? I think that's even more interesting, because we all know it's been changing! Your grandfather said it had almost no water vapor in its atmosphere, but now it's so clouded we can hardly see the surface—why is that?"
"You are right," Tiss Khadek conceded graciously. "Of course we should do both. But, I think, Nergal first—after all, it is the first brown dwarf anyone has had the chance to observe."
Viktor started to open his mouth to get into the discussion, but Reesa's warm hand pulled him toward her. "Look what you've started!" she whispered, while the argument raged around them. "Why did you come here?"
"I've got as much right to be here as you do," he whispered hotly back, and then was compelled to add, "Anyway, I was looking for you. I, uh, I thought I'd spend a little time with Yan today. I mean, it's my birthday."
"Of course it is," she said testily. She looked at him closely, then nodded. "I'm going back to feed the kids as soon as this is over, then I'll bring them back up here for the fireworks and the dancing … if you want to come."
"All right," Viktor agreed—and then saw that his father had quelled the discussion and was looking at him dangerously.
"We're going on with the class now," Pal Sorricaine said loudly. "Anybody has anything to say on any other subject, we can take that up after the lesson. Now! Are there any questions about stellar evolution?"
Viktor walked his father back to their home—helped him, actually, because the old man's artificial leg was giving him trouble again, and besides he had disappeared into the dome for a moment by himself before he was willing to leave. Viktor didn't have to ask his father the reason. He could smell it on the old man's breath.
"Dad?" Viktor offered, halfway down. "I'm sorry if I messed up your class."
His father gave him a discouraged look. "That's all right," he panted gruffly. "Ouch!" He stopped to rub his thigh, then put a hand on Viktor's shoulder and limped on. "It's not you," he said. "It's that Tiss Khadek mostly. She keeps trying to get the whole bunch fired up about her pet Nergal." He winced. "Would you mind if we didn't talk right now? This is hard work—"
"Of course, Dad," Viktor said, but not happily. It was difficult, looking at this shrunken old man, to remember the strong man with the laughing blue eyes who had tossed him in his arms on New Mayflower. When at last they got to his parents' home, Pal Sorricaine sank wearily into a chair.
Viktor was shocked to see even more weariness on his mother's face. Nevertheless she greeted him joyously—put up her face to be kissed, told him he looked as though he wasn't eating enough, and winked that there was a surprise waiting for him. He didn't have to guess at the surprise. He knew his mother would have seen the ship in dock and would long since have baked a cake for his birthday.
But she was beginning to look tired and, well, almost old. When he said something she said firmly it was just that she'd had a hard day. The two new children drained a lot of her energy, coupled with the demands of her job—it was a busy time for agronomists, she told him. "Agronomists?" Viktor repeated, startled. "I thought that was just your, you know, kind of hobby."
"It started out that way, Vik," she sighed. "But I've switched over. I did have undergraduate courses, you know, and—well, feeding people seemed more important than building more machines. And now, with new cultivars to clone and test every time someone starts planning to plant a new microenvironment, they need all the help they can get."