Starburst

17

JERON NEVER FORGOT WHAT HE HAD SEEN, AND DARED NOT speak of it, either. He was afraid. Shef, chuckling through his whiskers, peering through the lookout port; Ann, her body locked with his in some sort of sexual em- brace—oh, yes, they had been doing something! They were celebrating it. Or perhaps they were repenting it. Jeron could not tell; they were communicating, but not in words.

He would not have known they had been doing anything if they had not reacted so violently when they caught him watching. Shef moved like lightning. He shouted wordlessly, dived across the chamber and had Jeron by the hair in an instant; he must have untangled himself from Ann in the process, but so quickly that Jeron didn't see it happen. Ann shrieked after him—one word, "Don't!", and simultaneously her thumb-tip ripped across her throat. Jeron understood the message. It was his good fortune that so did Uncle Shef.

Shef did not release the boy, but the arm that had whipped across his throat relaxed. The two adults grunted and shrugged at each other over the terrified Jeron's head, and then Shef took him firmly by the two shoulders and stared into his eyes. He was trying to remember how to say what he wanted. His lips moved silently for a moment, and then he got out: "Don't . . . tell." And, a moment later, "Anything. No. Anyone."

"I promise, Uncle Shef," Jeron whined, and was allowed to struggle free. It was not over yet. There was something in Shef's eyes that was mad even by the flaky standards of the Constitution. Jeron moved cautiously away, inch by inch, far from sure that this terrifying adult would not grab him again. As Jeron was about to turn and dive for the downshaft, Shef managed to get out one more word:

"Ever!"

For the next few days, Uncle Shef and Aunt Ann seemed to be popping up all the time. It didn't matter where Jeron went. Working at his job on the hydroponics flats, he would look up and there would be Uncle Shef's eyes burning at him through the tangles of vines and raggedy hair. Taking his turn at KP, Aunt Ann's face would appear over the steaming vats of stew. He even fled to the communications room, where the printers spat out the latest budget of disaster and contradictions from Earth whenever anyone on Earth remembered to transmit—whenever anyone on the Constitution bothered to turn them on. And there was one of them, pausing in the descent tube to give him a cold-eyed stare.

A "promise" was not particularly binding in Jeron's view. He had rarely been asked for one by a grownup, and what passed between him and the other kids was not significant. But he was too scared to talk. Uncle Ghost at once noticed something was wrong. So, a little later, did Aunt Eve and Uncle Ski. He told them all he was upset by the changes in gravity, in domestic arrangements, in prospects, which was true even if not relevant; so Jeron learned to lie. And a week or two later Aunt Ann came to the hydroponics room. Births had been postponed until there was room to house them, so the vegetable wombs lay empty. The milk plants were stored as seeds, and now Jeron was uprooting the squacipro that even the youngest had outgrown to put in some new venture of Aunt Flo's. Aunt Ann stood over him without speaking for a time.

She should have looked quite nonthreatening, really. Her long blond hair was well brushed and pulled back in a silky tail. She was wearing the black pajama suit that went with the Chinese life-style she had been affecting again, but the pajamas, this time, were clean. By normal human standards, she had never looked more the model of an all- American woman of an interesting age. Jeron's standards were different. He thought she looked scary. He retreated from the bare flats and tried to busy himself with picking sweetbeans, nipping off the fleshy cinnamon-colored pods with his thumbnail and depositing them in a bowl, but she followed him with her eyes. He was aware she was rehearsing things to say to him in children's English.

At length she hopped a row of vines and smiled down at him. "Jeron," she said seriously, "I tell you a story. When Emperor K'ang­hsi in boat at Hangkow, petitioner swam out, letter in teeth. Petitioner said, 'Please use imperial power help punish my enemy, who is wickedest man in world.' You know what K'ang-hsi say?"

He looked up at her and nibbled a raw sweetbean. "Not really, Aunt Ann," he said.

She thought for a moment, then brought it out: "Say, 'Who then is second wickedest?' And tear up petition; so I tell Shef this. You understand?"

"Well, not exactly," Jeron admitted. She scowled at him in disappointment, then shrugged. When Ann Becklund shrugged her whole body was involved, like a soldier who has just received a bullet in the chest; a spasm. She said angrily, "Must understand! Shef very unhappy! Needed to do this thing! Knefhausen wickedest of men!"

Jeron wriggled under her gaze, a finger in his mouth. He had no idea what sort of response she wanted from him until she made it clear by repeating what Shef had said: "Don't tell anyone, ever!"

"Oh, I won't, Aunt Ann." He would have promised far more than that to get her eyes off him.

"Good . . . uh, boy," she said, patting his young genitals. He exhaled a sigh of relief as she turned away, but the relief did not last long. She stopped, then faced him again, scowling in the effort to remember the children's-English words for what she wanted to say:

"I warn them, you understand. You understand? Sent warning. Late a little. But radio faster than kaons, get there first." She stared at him, her face clouding again. "Good boy," she said again, and strolled thoughtfully away.

Although Jeron had understood almost nothing of the exchange, he understood that it was over. He dumped the sweetbeans back into the gravelly substrate they were growing in and headed in the other direction. It was a worrying position for a four-year-old to be in, especially if he wanted to live to reach five.

"Wait, Jeron," whispered Uncle Will from the tangle of citrus at the entrance. "What was that all about?"

Jeron jumped. "You scared me, Uncle Will," he accused, peering around until he located the glassy shadow behind the rich fruit.

"I'm sorry," said Uncle Will, waiting for the answer Jeron wanted mightily to give, but did not dare.

"Oh," the boy said, "she was telling me Chinese stories again. And all that other stuff all you grownups say, that I'm acting funny. Damn sick of hearing it," he added shrewdly.

"Is that all?" whispered Uncle Ghost.

"All I understood." There was silence from among the oranges while Uncle Will pondered. If he had really wanted to know, Jeron reflected, he would have come up and listened; but even Uncle Will did not like interfering with his widow's private matters.

If Will had pressed any harder Jeron would have told him the whole thing, or as much of it as he understood, but Will didn't press and the boy didn't dare. It wasn't that he didn't trust Will. Will would have kept his confidence. Would even have tried to protect him, but how much protection could you expect from a ghost?

To build a planet they needed structural materials. To forge the materials from raw spaceborne rubble they needed heat. Alpha Centauri gave them the heat—once they had rolled out the foil to cup it and pour it into their furnaces —once they had built the tools to roll the foil—once they had captured the ores to make the metals to build the tools to roll the foil. They were in orbit a year, and Jeron was five years old, before the first artifact not made out of original ship's stores was ready. It was a thirty-ton roller. From then on progress was exponential. Everyone was working, all eight adults (even shadowy Will) and all fifty-two of the children. The youngest cohort was now nearly four, and thus of laboring age. There was no room now for anyone not working, and the six-year­olds were kept occupied holding the webby edge of a shell section or overseeing an automatic welder, the fives like Jeron did more adult but less physical tasks, and even the fours toted meals to the grownups. It was not enough, of course. The job was too big for human beings. So no person from the starship, not even a child, ever did anything that a machine could do instead . . . after they had achieved the machines.

In all that time Jeron kept locked the ununderstood event he had been forbidden to disclose. All through his studies, all through his games and maturation rites with the other kids, all through the slow growth of their new home, he remembered that one subject was not to be talked about. Uncle Will Ghost worried at him about it for months, but Jeron was too scared at first to open up and, anyway, learned how to be more clever about concealing the fact of concealment as time went on. Finally even Uncle Ghost let it drop. There was an exponentially growing inventory of secrets among them anyway. With all the modes of communication the grownups had invented, there was still an increasing corpus of information each retained. Partly for privacy. Mostly because few of them were, really, very interested in what any of the others was doing any more.

There is no trip like a knowledge trip, no hallucinogen more potent than an area of knowledge no one else shares. All eight of them were constantly stoned out of their minds with revelatory insights. Occasionally they offered to discuss them with each other, and found few listeners. Now and then they thought to try to pass them on to the children —and failed; there were not enough points of common experience for communication at these rarefied levels. It would have been as easy to teach eschatology to a cat. The only area which all of them shared was the building of the habitat, and that occupied most of everyone's time anyway. In thirty-one months from the first orbital approximation, the machines they built were building the machines that did the work, and Alpha-Aleph was growing. Ring on ring the O'Neill habitat took form. When the third ring locked on it became their home.

Even though he was now seven Jeron still worked in the fields, no longer because he was not good enough for anything else but because he had become very good at that. He was transplanting a seedling, patting the damp made soil with one hand while the other held the plastic film to put over it, when he realized someone was near.

"Hai!" shouted a voice over his shoulder. But before that he had already begun to rise and turn, his right hand grasping out for the trowel.

"Hai!" he shouted in return, ready for attack. But it was only Jemolio, a full sister from his own cohort, holding a grain stalk as though it were a sword.

He relaxed from the ready position, scowling, and put the trowel down. They eyed each other warily, both bare and glistening with sweat, only their cache-sexes marring the shiny tanned skins. "You lost that one," he said, "and you're not supposed to pull up the plants."

She tossed the stalk onto the compost heap. "It was one of Uncle Ghost's failures anyway. There's a cohort meeting. Uncle Ski wants us all there. Twenty minutes. I think the grownups are fighting again."

"Oh, Jesus."

"Sure, but be there."

"All right," he said, turning away—and then quickly twisted, catching up the trowel and lunging at her belly, shouting, "Hai!"

She was ready for him. They were always ready for each other, or for spooky Uncle Ski, in all of these Zen stimulations; by the time they were three they had each been challenged a thousand times. They rolled lazily about in the light gravity. It did not matter how quickly you moved when you weighed just a few kilos, everything turned out to be slow motion anyway. And there was the heat. They were gasping by the time they separated, and Jemolio had wound up on top. She was as strong as Jeron and a little faster. It was not uncommon for her to win the one-on-ones with him, and also not important. Winning was not important. Being always ready—being always accepting of what might come, never surprised, never at a loss—that was what Uncle Ski called important. "Twenty minutes, Jeron," she panted, scratching at her belly. In the heat and terribly low humidity sweat vanished as fast as it formed, but seared mucous membranes and parched skin paid for exertion.

"All right. Don't ever pull up any of my plants again. You don't know which are failures."

She stuck out her tongue and turned away. He had been half tensed for one more pseudoattack, but she simply left. It was a good thing Uncle Ski wasn't there. He would have seen that Jeron was tensed. Punishment would have followed.

The boy finished packing the earth around the seedling and carefully sealed down the vapor shield. The hydroponics were all his now. The grownups were too busy for more than occasional visits. Day by day Jeron was in charge.

Jeron had a knack for plant development. He did not have dead Will Becklund's skill. None of the children did. None were willing to do what Will had done to acquire it.

But Jeron was good. And sometimes he would set out his pots of seedlings and spooky Will would come by in the night and make his magic. And then, out of a row of ten identical sprouts, one might develop soft jelly-fleshed fronds, and another might flower with blooms bigger than hibiscus —and most of the rest die. Will's tricks did not always work.

What they had started with was no more than a hundred plant varieties. A few had been ornamentals. Most had been food. All had been selected because they were really good at soaking up carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen into the air. There were no trees. There was nothing like kelp; there were no water plants at all, except for a few microscopic ones. And that was all they had to work with.

Aunt Flo had changed that a lot and, after his accident, so did Uncle Will. Flo's efforts were mostly rudimentary Luther-Burbankian crosses and selections. Will went deeper. The same patient submicroscopic coaxing that had tripled the thrust of their fusion reactor could switch amino acids within the genes as readily as Flo had urged genes to move about the chromosomes. Plants that started as, mostly, carrots became indistinguishable, nearly, from sweet potatoes. An allele from a volunteer milkweed seed turned sweet corn into cottony-downy pear-shaped fruits that, with a few other tamperings, tasted (nearly) like lamb chops. Out of the frozen and stored meat supplies Uncle Will had salvaged a few viable structural parts from animal chromosomes to add to their basic resources, but they were not really necessary. Long before Alpha-Aleph had begun to fill with their manufactured air Jeron could produce something very close to mahogany veneer—or strawberries, or Gorgonzola at will —out of the materials at hand.

Jeron looked around the gentle sweep of the hydroponics plot and was content. Far at the other side of the ring was another plot, sterile and empty until they made enough water to give it life, to balance the spin of the three joined rings. Someday they would have ground enough rock into sand and squeezed enough organics for loam and the whole habitat would be soil-covered and growing things; but not yet. He left the plot and, hand over hand, pulled himself up the shinnying cable to what was left of the Constitution at the hub. Later on, when they accelerated the habitat to full spin, that would be hard work. But by then there would be more moisture to soak the air, and the temperature of the shell would not have to be kept so high. Jeron could feel the salt drying on his skin as the parched air sucked away his sweat. It itched terribly. He paused to reach down to scratch, and something caught his ankle.

"Hai!" shouted Uncle Ski from beneath him, tugging furiously at his leg. Jeron reacted without thought. He did not pull away. He shifted position and kicked. The foot broke free as Uncle Ski scrambled for a better hold, and Jeron pulled himself a meter or two higher, peering down, ready to place the next kick between Ski's eyes.

"Good enough," said Uncle Ski, panting. "Where are your sibs?" His voice was high and hoarse, because of the air, but he was relaxed as he swung below Jeron, gazing up at the boy.

"Ammarin and Jemolio are there already, I think, Uncle Ski. Forina and Famine are supposed to be with Aunt Mommy. I don't know about the others."

"Aunt Eve Barstow," Ski corrected. "They're not there now. Everybody's supposed to be at the meeting. Get a move on."

Jeron nodded courteously and swarmed up the cable, careful to keep above Uncle Ski's lunging distance. There was something in the old man's eyes that made Jeron think this meeting was special. That would not prevent Uncle Ski from assaulting him again, or a dozen times more; it was the fundamental of his lessons that one must be ready for challenge when one expected it least.

But not this time.

They emerged into the old Constitution and the last one in slammed the locks behind them. The air was noticeably cooler and more comfortable even before that, and the heat pumps and humidifiers quickly made it optimal. It was sheer bliss to feel normal beads of perspiration trickle down his nose before the temperature dropped, but it was not a good sign. Something was going on. And Jeron saw at once that it centered around the grownups, and the hologram of the Earth in the middle of Constitution's main compartment.

Jeron had three siblings in his cohort, two female and one other male, but he also had three full sibs in the fourth cohort, born so soon after his own that they had grown up almost as a unit. They were still into having children by marital partners when the cohort was conceived. But Ann Becklund wanted children, of course, and of course Uncle Will Becklund was temporarily not able to sire them because of his death. So Uncle Dad—Jim Barstow—donated sperm for Ann's litters. By the time of the fifth cohort the problem of Uncle Will had been solved. They were the largest cohort of all, and the youngest—more than a year younger than Jeron's, just babies!

But now that there was room for real babies again the fifth was admitted to the meetings too. It made a considerable crush in the little Constitution. Jeron crowded through the littler kids and took his place with the medium-sized ones, peering through the tallest at the scene in the middle of the room.

There was the hologram of Earth, basketball-sized and brightly glowing in green and blue and white, and there were a handful of the grownups, chattering and screeching around it. Jeron counted quickly. It was not easy, because they were chattering and screeching and, some of them, leaping about, but there were Uncle Shef and Aunt Ann on one side of the globe, Shef clutching at any of the others who came in reach, Ann serene and silent; there were Aunt Flo and Aunt Eve, whispering savagely to each other; Uncle Jim was shouting at nothing at all, which on closer examination turned out to be Uncle Will Ghost; and there came Uncle Ski, burrowing through the children and sending them flying, as he struggled to get into the cockpit. It was rare for all eight of the grownups to be-present in the same place. That they were at each other's throats was not rare at all, for the eight adults were often that way, though not usually as badly as this. The noise was deafening, and, of course, the audible quick-speech words were only a minor fraction of the arguments. Uncle Ski grabbed Aunt Dot's hand, tapping out pulsed finger pressures to supplement his facial expressions and shrugging shoulders. He was not talking to her with his voice; that was reserved for the other conversation he was carrying on, with Aunt Eve arid Uncle Shef, who were now arm in arm, but not in affection. Aunt Dot was trying to pull her hand free because, stripped nude, she was anointing herself with skin cream to take advantage of the comfortable humidity, and Ski was causing her to smear the shiny stars she had grown on her shoulders. At the same time she talked and grimaced to most of the other adults, and they to her. Even Uncle Will flickered in and out of visibility, an unstable shimmer over the globe itself, and his harsh whisper penetrated the yelling.

Like all of the children, Jeron understood a little quick-speech. It would not have sufficed, except for Aunt Dot. She had elected to take seriously—or jokingly, but the joke had been going on for more than a year now—the orders that had come in from Earth ludicrously promoting her to general's rank; and so she practiced speaking in approved West Point English. "Ten-hut!" she shouted, and at least the children reluctantly fell silent. Into the dwindling din she rapped out: "At oh five hundred hours this date Willis NMI Becklund, civilian, discorporeal, informed this officer that he had obtained evidence indicating that Lt Col Sheffield H Jackman, 0­328770, of this command, had been screwing around retributively with the kaons. Date of offense approximately three years ten months fifteen days prior to present. As senior officer commanding I have convened this court-martial."

Uncle Shef combed the dreadlocks out of his eyes and spat a long, incomprehensible sentence at her; he seemed about to follow with a lunge, but Uncle Ski leaped between them in full unarmed-combat stance. "Knock it off, you two!" Aunt Eve cried furiously. "What are you talking about, Dot?"

Dot merely looked at her frostily; it was Uncle Ghost who replied. "Shef sent a burst of kaons toward the Earth," he whispered. "Pure revenge. Shameful. Jeron! Was that it, boy? Was that what you wouldn't tell me about?"

Aunt Ann flashed, "Not his fault. Anyway, warned them. Message there now, kaons not yet."

"That is verified," nodded Aunt Dot, rubbing her general's stars. "Session is apprised that velocity of kaon stream is approximately point nine nine three light. Subject kaons will therefore arrive approximately nine days twenty-one plus hours after message, less time of delay between dispatch of kaon stream and message." She was making an effort to sit at attention, not easy in the almost gravityless core of the habitat.

Aunt Eve's eyes flashed. "You monsters!" she cried. "What have you done?"

"Revenge!" cried Aunt Ann, and then subsided, folding her hands and malting an attempt to regain detachment.

"Revenge," repeated Eve, weeping. "What kind of animals have we become? What possible crime could justify wiping out every nation in the world?"