Starburst

21

ON THE MORNING OF DAY 6354 JERON WAS HURRYING ME —"Come and see something! Come on!"—and I didn't want to be hurried. "What's the matter, Aunt Mommy?" he demanded, bristling his little moustache at me. "You hung over again?"

I was not, or even close to it. The operative word was not "hangover" but "depression." But "You'll be really interested," he wheedled. "I have to get to the cabbage patch." "Do not! Aw. Come on. It won't he take was more insistent: than a minute."

Part of what he said was no doubt true—I didn't really have to get to the cabbage patch; Molomy had taken over the biggest part of keeping the crew in line. Part was false. It took a lot more than a minute, and I did not at first see what he was trying to show me.

Partly it was because he took me to the great viewing port with all the funny little wrinkles built into its glass, where I almost never go, and we were not alone there. Standing tall and strange was my dearly beloved Other Half.

"Hello, Jim," I said. It didn't matter. Jim is sometimes willing to talk to me, but he's got this speech impediment. He has forgotten how. He gets all sweating and stammering, trying to find the words, and then he's not good for much else. So we mostly don't talk at all anymore. He looked away from the viewer and at me, trying to remember who I was—maybe even what I was—and I patted him on the shoulder. "That's all right, Jim," I said. "Don't let us dis-turb you." He sighed rustily and turned back to whatever he was watching.

Which, it seemed, was what Jeron wanted me to watch too.

The viewing window is not a solid piece of glass, and I am not sure if it is glass at all. It is made of layers and clots of transparent material of many varieties and indices of refraction, so that if you move around you can magnify parts of what you are looking at. It helps to know what parts are of interest. The biggest thing outside the window at that moment was the factory, with its immense bright sails trapping the heat of Alpha and the structural parts of the next ring of the habitat, wandering out of the finished-products end until they brought up at the limits of their tethers. That did not interest me. It was not what interested Jeron, either, and he was quite irritable about it: "No, Eve, not there! Beyond! Toward the damn Dipper!"

Well, that was a part of the sky I knew pretty well, because in our Centaurian constellations it was not far from where the good old home Sun lay; there were only about half a dozen first-magnitude stars in that whole section.

But now there were seven. The new one was reddish- rusty-ugly, and I had never seen it before. I bobbed around before the port, trying to get the best look at it; and under the highest magnification I could find the damned thing displayed an actual disk.

"My God," I said. "What am I looking at?"

Jeron was crowing with excitement. "Aunt Ann!" he cried. "She's pulling a new planet around her!"

The reason I hadn't had a hangover was that I had been spending more and more time sleeping, just sleeping. And the reason I had been sleeping was that more and more I had preferred my dreams, or nothing at all, to the world around me; and among the things I liked least about it were notions such as Ann Becklund building a planet.

Molomy had all the gardening crew hard at work when at last I showed up, and she gave me a hard look. "There's something the matter, right?" she decided.

I certainly didn't want to talk about it, since I didn't even want to think about it. "Did you get the new rows in?" I asked—to change the subject, because I had already seen that she had. The ten tiny farmhands were already snipping off shoots for the next brew.

"Of course," she said, frowning, and stood up, rubbing gently at her small breasts. Now that Molomy had a child of her own in a vegetable cow she didn't trust the little kids to tend the cabbage patch anymore, and that was where I had found her. "My boobs hurt. Aunt Eve," she complained. "It's just as though Albert was right in my belly, just like you used to have them in the old days."

I knelt down and felt the occupied pods myself. "I didn't really, Molomy," I said. "All the babies I had I had just the way you're having Albert—is that what you're going to call him?"

"Either that or Walter. Or Picklebick, or Bill. You mean you didn't ever get pregged with all that sex you were doing back on Earth?"

"Actually, no—well," I said, remembering, "I did get pregnant a couple of times when I was a kid. But I decided not to have them." That was in the Los Angeles days, and who wanted to have kids then? But no one knew about those old abortions, not even Kneffie; they were caught early and aspirated out, schloop, ptooie, and you weren't pregnant anymore.

"How very strange," Molomy said primly, and did not speak again for a while. We loosened the soil around the roots of the vegetable wombs and I thought about all that sex I had been doing back on Earth—although the sex had not been all of it. The most important part, maybe.

How long ago that seemed, and, from four light-years away, how pleasant! Especially compared to the scary thinking about what Ann was up to. It was an easy time. Los Angeles County paid for my root-canal work and doled out welfare checks, and the feds gave me food stamps, and for spending money all you had to do was hitch to Mexico to buy goods. I don't mean drugs. I was always too fearful to deal drugs. But in Tijuana you could buy cheap sleazy silver and cheap make-believe turquoise, and back home in Venice you could glue the turquoise to the silver, hitch down Santa Monica Boulevard (or take the bus) to the Century Plaza or one of the downtown hotels, and sell the stuff to the tourists. Easy money. Tax-free cash. And good friends! The loosest and coolest people I ever knew shared those beachfront houses. Don the Drunk, Harold the Head, sweet Lily, Marian the Marauder who could clean off any drugstore counter in the time it took the clerk to turn around for a pack of cigarettes. And studious old Jim.

Jim lived in the same lockless rooms as the rest of us, but by day he went to engineering school and at night he tended bar in a beach joint; and, as soon as he asked me, we got married.

Why, if it wasn't for marrying Jim Barstow, how could I possibly have got to Alpha Centauri? He was the one who shamed me into going back to school, settling down, making careers for the two of us. I owe him a lot, damn his soul.

"Those kids!" cried Molomy in indignation, and stood up. "Ringo!" she screeched. "You break any more petri dishes and I'll pound you good!"

The two-year-old thumbed her nose and screeched back, "Up yours, Molomy!" Honor was satisfied; but there was less rattling of glassware as they worked in the stripy sunlight thereafter, so Molomy was satisfied too. Molomy was tired of working, if not of authority, so she decided to converse herself a rest. "I guess you've heard," she said confidingly, one grownup to another. "Crazy, isn't it?"

"You shouldn't say grownups are crazy," I said automatically, although of course I agreed with her. Crazy? Impossible would have been a better way to put it, if I hadn't seen the little worldlet growing with my own eyes. "It's quite an astonishing thing Aunt Ann is doing!"

"Oh, sure, but I meant the others. Flo wants more breeding stock, and Uncle Shef says it's too much trouble making chromium and iridium and all those things here, so he wants some shipped out—"

I stood up and faced her. "I don't know what you're talking about!"

She was triumphant; old Aunt Eve was always the last to know, but she hadn't been sure in this case. "Why, the plan to demand some new shipments from Earth, Eve. I thought you knew. Everybody knew, even the little kids." And tittering from the workbench confirmed it, until Molomy quelled them with a look.

And I hadn't known a thing about any of this!

I needed someone to talk to. When you came right down to it, there was only one logical candidate.

Jeron's personal house was in the middle of a cathedral grove of towering redwoods. Not real redwoods; the thirty-meter tallest of them was only six years old, and their chief ancestor had been rhubarb. But they looked quite fine.

They were my own grove, or had been, and you would think Jeron would have been a little grateful to the person who gave them to him.

Not he. He shrugged, and pointed out that I should not be surprised that Ann was making a new planet. She had, after all, said in the message to Knefhausen that she intended to.

"But that was just rhetoric! It's impossible—isn't it? The bits and pieces of matter have to take a long time to get together. Even longer to cool—"

He laughed. "Still trapped in the myth of causality," he observed. "If you don't understand, shall I show you?"

"Show me what?"

"Something." He led me proudly to his bedroom, a chamber I had been careful to stay out of for some years, and flung the door wide.

It was an Uncle Ghost production, and it looked like Fourth of July fireworks—only reversed fireworks, because they were going the wrong way. Not exploding. Imploding. It showed bits and pieces of matter spiraling into a central point, and that point becoming a world. It was rather pretty, like all of Will Becklund's toys for the kiddies, but it was not what I wanted to see. "Uncle Ghost made it for me personally," he said importantly, and unnecessarily.

"He doesn't like to be called Uncle Ghost."

"I don't like to be told what Uncle Ghost likes to be called," he said, "and anyway, you didn't come here to ask me about Ann's planet."

I hesitated. "Actually you're right. I'm concerned about this message to Earth."

He pushed me out of his room crossly and closed the door. "We want some things they have. What's wrong with that?"

"It's that word 'demand.' It just isn't the right way to do things, Jeron. I can understand wanting things from Earth —there are some I'd like too! Some decent coffee, a couple of recent issues of Good Housekeeping, a box of cordial cherries from Blum's. But I wouldn't demand them."

"We need templates," he said. "Anyway, it's not exactly a demand. More like a threat."

"A threat!"

"They send us what we want, Shef won't use the dis-ray on them again."

"Jeron! What we want can't be so much! That's like putting a pistol to somebody's head to ask him what time it is."

He shrugged. "What would you do?"

"I'd be more polite. We could exchange gifts! We've got all these wonderful new things we've grown—there's nothing like them back home! We could put together a sort of package of the best of them and send them off. Then, if we mentioned what kind of things we wanted, they'd send them to us. I'm sure they would."

He rubbed his velvet chin and scowled at me. "Mostly wouldn't work. Our stuff is adapted for light gravity. For Earth they'd need whole new stem and root systems, God knows what else."

"Oh, I could breed that in no time."

"Huh." He stood up and peered out at the habitat, thinking.

"Will you help me, Jeron?"

He shook his head irritably. "No, what you say is dumb, Eve. I don't like your idea. But I've got a better one."