Viktor felt a small, lasting ache at the thought of his father being humored.
And he felt a certain irritation with Reesa, too. Although she had seemed happy enough for them to spend much of his time ashore together, she hadn't seemed particularly excited by his attentions. Nor had she tried to conceal from him (that same damned honesty!) that there were others more attentive, and more often around.
All in all, he was glad to be back at sea.
Even that, though, wasn't as exciting as it once had been. When Viktor had first shipped out, as soon as he was big enough to do an adult's job, everything had been thrillingly new. They hadn't just cruised back and forth, as though on tracks; they had gone where, literally, no human had ever been before. They visited islands that they populated with earthworms, insects, algae, and flowering plants, as well as the seedlings that, they hoped, would one day be great forests of oak and apple and pine. Then they returned to those islands, a few Newmanhome years later, to seed them with second generations of fish and birds and small mammals—and a few years after that, with a couple of pairs of foxes to keep the rabbits down, and sheep to start earning the islands' keep. He was too young to have been involved in the spreading of trace minerals in the soils of some of the lands, so that Earthly crops could grow, but he helped dig out the muck where recurrent marsh flooding had drowned thousands of years of colonizing plants, creating a sort of mulch that was almost as good as guano. He was even part of an expedition a hundred kilometers down the coast, once, when an explorer broke a leg in the jungle and had to be rescued from deep, ferny, swampy tangles of Newmanhome's native vegetation.
All that was in Viktor's apprentice days. His current job was crewing one of the giant grain ships that fed the growing city on the North Continent from the new farms on the South. Food for Homeport's people could be grown nearer the city and a lot was. But clearing the tangled, ropy vegetation of that part of the North Continent was hard work. Worse, the stuff refused to stay cleared. The principal native vine was more tenacious than crab-grass or kudzu, and harder to kill. Its root systems went down a dozen meters and more, and the stuff was quite content to grow up right through a field of corn or soy from the vestiges of its roots.
At some point, the leadership council decided, a new city, or a dozen of them, would have to be planted in the hotter, wetter south. The location of their first town, Homeport, had been chosen at long range, from probe imaging and the hurried studies of the Ark officers as they were busy inserting themselves into orbit, and it had been a minor mistake. But, like many such mistakes, it perpetuated itself. Every new building that went up was one more inducement to stay there. The buildings couldn't easily be moved.
The grain could, easily enough. Great Ocean was generally placid, and the prevailing winds were strong enough to drive a grain ship's rotor sails without at the same time raising storm waves big enough to be a nuisance. Navigation was no problem. Viktor's navigating talents were largely wasted. There were no icebergs to collide with, because there wasn't any ice. There were few other ships, and hardly ever any nearby; there were very few reefs or shoals. In fact there was no bottom closer than three hundred meters for the next week's sailing. The signals from the derelict interstellar ships in orbit gave them accurate positions at all times, so between ports the crew was largely honorary.
So Viktor and his shipmates did what everybody on Newmanhome did when they had leisure time. They watched TV, most of it rebroadcast by the orbiting ships from transmissions from distant Earth. (That didn't make them homesick. Watching the stories about crime and violence and overcrowded cities made them grateful not to be there.) Or they made some more babies. Or they tuned in on the transmissions from the third ship, New Argosy, late because of the funding squabbles but now well on its way—and, oh so eagerly awaited! It held so many things they didn't have—grand pianos, and a submarine, and even a complete installation for making more antimatter with a prefabricated near-Sun solar-power satellite—and, wow, what they could do then!
Or they studied.
In Viktor's case, after hearing what the Homeport council had decided, study came first. He spent half his waking hours at the ship's teaching machine, going over and over the fundamentals of orbital transfer and astrogation and celestial mechanics. He didn't seriously believe he would ever get into space, even to help deploy the antimatter manufactury when it arrived. But even an outside chance was worth fighting for. And he even did some refresher studying on his father's particular interest, astrophysics and cosmology. It wouldn't ever be important to him, in any way. He was sure of that—wrong, as it turned out later, but sure. Nevertheless it was interesting.
The people of Newmanhome didn't usually think hard about being happy to be where they were; they had gotten used to it, even the ones who remembered anything else. It was as good a planet as they hoped, and better than they had feared. There was no such thing as "continental climate" on Newmanhome. The biggest continent was smaller than Australia and looked more like a fat question mark than a more or less symmetrical blob. There wasn't much in the way of seasons, either. They'd given up the idea of "months" in their new calendar; they divided the year into Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, with fifty-odd days in each of the divisions, but there was less difference between Winter and Summer than between two successive weeks in most Earthly climates. An axial tilt of only six degrees and a nearly circular orbit disarmed the cycle of seasons; Newmanhome was more like Hawaii than like Chicago or Moscow.
The shorter day helped even things out weatherwise, too. The night didn't have time to cool down as much as on Earth, so extremes of temperature were moderated still more. And the Newmanhome day was close enough to Earth's twenty-four hours that even the people who were grown up when they landed had long since readjusted their diurnal rhythms.
There was plenty of native life on Newmanhome, but not a single native animal to compete with human beings and their stocks. There were things that almost seemed like animals, because they moved about during the day, but they sank roots at night. There were things that ate other things, like terrestrial saprophytes and carnivorous plants, but they all photosynthesized, as well.
Some of the plants were warm-blooded or warm-sapped—and some of the mobile eating things liked to eat the warm ones. That was as close to a danger as the colonists had found. If one of the free-ranging predators, particularly the marine ones, found a sleeping human being, it was likely enough to try to eat him. The predators fed by lancing the prey with hollow things like thorns and injecting digestive saps, then sucking back the resulting soup when it was done. The process didn't work on human beings. Their tissues resisted the lysing enzymes of the predator plants, and anyway after the first itching stab or two the human prey would certainly wake up and go somewhere else. But they could get a hell of a painful wound in the process, and sometimes people died.