All those new wants made hard work for the architects. Plumbing? Well, yes, but water intakes and sewage outlets meant underground networks of pipes and conduits that could rupture in even a moderate quake. They wanted high rises, which meant elevators and some very heavy structural members that could fall on the inhabitants unless built with sophisticated skill and attention to the harmonics of the natural frequencies of earthquake shocks. Paper and bamboo went out. Sprung, flexible steel, prestressed concrete, and curtain walls came in.
By the time the people on Moon Mary began to build in earnest, all those old lessons were learned over again.
To be sure, those latter-day architects were helped a great deal by Mary's light gravity. There simply didn't have to be that much mass involved in support columns. They were helped even more by high technology. Chips replaced tangles of wire. Transformable walls served as windows or temperature control devices. Water recycling saved a lot of plumbing, and what couldn't be avoided was flexible and tough. When, during Viktor's first night on Moon Mary, he woke to find the whole building swaying, he was the only one in it who jumped out of bed. Everyone else slept right through, even young Balit, and the next morning they laughed at him for his fears.
They laughed quite politely, though. They were always polite. "Helpful" was another thing—they did their best, but to Viktor's crushed surprise they had little help to give.
These people, whom Nrina had touted to him as the most knowledgeable alive, didn't even know the vocabulary of astrophysical research! "Spectroscopy," Frit said, sounding the word out. "Spec—tross—k'pee. That's a really pretty word, Viktor! I must use it in a poem. And it means something about finding out what a star is like?"
"It means measuring the bands of light and dark in a spectrum from a star, so that you can identify all the elements and ions present," Viktor said darkly, gazing at the man who had been advertised to know all these things.
"Ions! Spectrum! Oh, Viktor," Frit said with delight, "you're just full of wonderful words I can use. Forta? Come in here, please. We're going to find some 'spectroscopy' in our files for dear Viktor!"
But, as it turned out, they didn't.
They couldn't, or not in any easy way, at least. Between the two of them, Frit and Forta managed to get their data-retrieval desks to turn up several hundred references to one astronomical term or another. But "spectroscope" was not among them. Neither was "spectroscopy," nor even the field terms "cosmology" or "astrophysics." True, there were long lists of citations under such promising words as "nova" and "supernova" and "black hole" and even "Hertzsprung-Russell diagram." But, when tracked down, all the references were to plays, paintings, musical compositions, poems (some by Frit himself), and dances, frequently by Forta.
"It's only programmed for the things we're really interested in," Forta apologized.
Viktor couldn't believe their failure. He was the only disappointed person, though. Frit and Forta were enthralled.
"Great Transporter!" Forta cried in delight. "I didn't know we had this sort of material here! Perhaps it's from Balit's school files—but see here, Frit! Isn't this beautiful?" He was looking at a five-hundred-year-old painting of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. "I can't think why people have let this be forgotten! What do you think, Frit? All these star colors! For a new dance! Don't you think they'd look marvelous in my costume?"
Frit patted his mate's arm fondly, but he was peering at the diagram on the desk. "I don't think I know what it means," he admitted.
"It shows the slope of the mass-luminosity relation," Viktor explained. "You can see how stars develop, and their color depends on the temperature of the photosphere, anywhere from red through yellow and white to blue."
"Exactly!" Forta cried, hardly listening. "I will dance the aging of a star. See, I'll start out big—" He mimicked being big, lifting his shoulder, puffing his cheeks, arcing his arms up and before him. "And then the lighting will be blue, then greenish, then yellow and smaller, for a long time—is that right, Viktor?—then big again, and red!"
"You'll be lovely," Frit said with pride. He smiled at their son, politely silent as the grown-ups talked. "Don't you think Forta could make a lovely star dance?"
"He always does," Balit said loyally, but keeping his eyes on Viktor.
Forta sighed. "But I'm afraid we're not giving our friend Viktor what he wants. There just isn't much of that sort of thing in the current files."
Viktor pricked up his ears. "Are there others?"
"Of course there's always the old data banks on Newmanhome," Frit said, looking surprised. "Only they aren't very convenient, you know. Because they're old. And they aren't here."
"Can I access them?" Viktor demanded.
Frit looked at him with the expression of a host whose guest has just requested a bigger bedroom, or a rare brand of tea. "I'm not sure if I know how you could do that," he said, thoughtfully. "Forta?"
"I suppose it's possible, Viktor," Forta said doubtfully. "They go back a long time, though, all the way back to when everybody still lived on Newmanhome. When we built the habitats, thousands of years ago, everything was shiny new, you know, and the data-retrieval systems were all redesigned. The ones we use now aren't really compatible with the ones on Newmanhome, and besides, there's hardly anyone there."
"On Newmanhome?" Viktor repeated.
Forta nodded. "It's a nasty place to live, with everything weighing so much. People don't like to go there—except funny ones like Pelly," he added laughingly. "So the old records might as well not exist, don't you see?"
Balit, watching their guest with concern, squirmed away from his parent's fondly patting hand. "We do have the paintings, Viktor," the boy piped up.
And when Viktor looked inquiringly at Balit's parents, Forta said with pride, "Yes, of course. There are some wonderful paintings of the star burst, for instance. It was still in the sky, oh, up to six or eight hundred years ago. Then it just gradually began to fade, and then the sun came back."
"That must have been an exciting time," Frit said wistfully. "Of course, we weren't born then."
Forta thought that over. "I don't know if I'd say 'exciting,' exactly. I know people did talk about it, quite a lot, once they noticed it. And there was the art. I remember my mother taking me to—whose performance was it? I think it was Danglord's—yes, that's what it was. It was a dance play about the sun returning. I was just a child, hadn't even had my coming-of-age party yet, but—" He smiled bashfully at Viktor. "It was certainly important to me. I think Danglord's play was what made up my mind to be a dancer myself."
As the family's guest expert on the care and feeding of primitive organisms, it was Viktor who had to show them how to thaw out a little of the frozen cat-milk substitute Nrina had made for them, and how to hold a bottle so the kitten could drink out of it. "She'll be eating solid food soon," he promised. "Then she won't be so much trouble. Meanwhile, what have you done about a cat box?"
Then he had to explain what a cat box was for, and help them improvise one out of a tray from the cooking room, and fill it with soil from the garden, and show them how to put the little animal in it and stroke her and encourage her until she finally did what she was put there to do.
At least he was useful for something, Viktor thought.
After a final glass of wine Frit escorted him to their guest room. "It's not actually a guest room," Frit explained, showing Viktor where the sanitary facilities were and the drawers to store his clothes. "It's going to be Balit's room, now that he's liberated—but of course he's happy to have you use it for your stay," Frit added hastily.