We spent somewhat more than an hour in mass proximity phase. It was a strange hour—that is, it felt strange. Strange to be leaving Evdash, the only home either of us could really remember, without parents or friends, and going someplace neither of us knew anything about. If I'd read about something like that, I'd have thought it was neat—an adventure. And it was an adventure, as far as that was concerned. But it didn't feel that neat. Some friendly author hadn't plotted out ahead how we'd get safely through all the dangers and uncertainties and come out wise and winning. It was all on us to make it come out right. Or maybe to end up squashed one way or another. For sure, the odds looked pretty darned poor that we'd find our parents.
Even Deneen was looking sober. We sat in the control room, which was also the living room and eating room, watching through the big wraparound window. For a while we could see Donia, Evdash's major moon, as we drew up on it and passed it at something like sixty or eighty thousand miles to our right.
After Donia fell behind, we just watched the stars. We knew that when we went into FTL mode, we wouldn't have anything at all to watch outside the cutter until we arrived in Fanglith's star system. There'd be just the three of us, in one small cutter, for 57 standard days, with who knew what at the other end.
Finally, the cutter's navigational instruments determined that we were far enough from Evdash's gravitational field, and that was it. It transferred into faster-than-light mode and jumped. After that there was only blackness to see outside, with no stars visible.
Soon after that, Deneen said she was going to bed, and left the control room. Bubba had already gone to sleep there on the deck, with his chin between his paws. But me, old Larn the worrier, I wasn't sleepy. So I browsed through the library index of the computer, flagging for quick access, entries that looked interesting. If Fanglith was as primitive as I expected, I wanted to know something about primitive worlds.
There aren't any primitive human worlds in the Federation, of course, or any known outside the Federation. There hadn't been any since long before the historical era. But some of the felid worlds had been studied and described while they were still primitive, and we could read about them. Basically, civilized felids aren't a whole lot different from humans in the ways they think and act. I could hope that if Fanglith was primitive, it wouldn't be too different from some of the felid worlds were when they had been primitive.
We were lucky that dad had stocked the computer with a good library. Both he and mom were action-type people—doers, not simply "readers about." But they both were also interested in the universe and in life around them, and they liked to know things, so they read a lot, too.
Still, after about thirty days, I'd had my fill of reading about primitive felid societies. It's not that they weren't interesting; they were. But I'd overstuffed myself. I knew about the clans and septs of the Lake District of Moviru, chivalry among the nobility of Grounia, shipbuilding on Faswaur, and the construction and uses of steam engines on Maya Worawi, among other things. I'd even learned a bunch of really interesting stuff about superstitions and mysticism among the striped urso-felids of the ringed planet Fylvikh.
I didn't know then whether any of this made me any better prepared to get along on Fanglith or not. Actually, I don't think I'd have lasted a day on Fanglith without it.
When we'd read everything we could find on primitive felid worlds, we started browsing through anything else that looked interesting. Both of us also got so we slept more and more, as though we were trying to hibernate away the monotony of the trip. Of course, Bubba had been sleeping a lot from the beginning. And we started exercising to keep from getting too soft; we might need our muscles when we got there. Deneen began experimenting in the little galley, too, and taught me to bake bread and stuff.
But we were getting pretty impatient to arrive at Fanglith, whatever we found there.