Dark Secret (2016)

by Edward M. Lerner

  But that could be changed.

  “Since we’re doing so well,” Rikki blurted out, “maybe it’s time to take the next step. Maybe it’s time we begin raising some children.”

  *

  Dance, my marionettes. Dance.

  Li kept her expression blandly cheerful. How subtly she had conditioned her companions to believe her unsubtle. With such understated skill had she primed them to speak their lines!

  As pathetic, pliable, oblivious Rikki had just taken her cue.

  “Children,” Dana repeated. Getting out the single word seemed to be a struggle. Beside her, Antonio twitched in surprise. Carlos nodded agreement, and Li had no difficulty reading his thoughts. But he was manageable; she had years before those perv tendencies would matter.

  Li struck a contemplative pose, silent, waiting. Blake owned the next important line in this melodrama—as clueless as he, too, was of his role. She studied his pursed lips, his furrowed brow, the nuances of his posture….

  He would take a while to get there.

  “Can we?” Dana asked. “I mean, could we manage children? Li, what do you think?”

  Li took a moment, hands clasped behind her back, pretending to consider. The point of the exercise was to make the decision seem anyone else’s idea. “The artificial wombs do the work. But are we ready? That’s harder.”

  “Wrong,” Rikki snapped, rising out of her apathy to take the bait. “If we started today, we’d have nine months to prepare.”

  How sprightly the puppets leapt as Li tugged their strings.

  “Is anyone ever prepared?” Antonio murmured something more Li couldn’t quite make out. Something, maybe, about diapers.

  Dana managed a wistful smile. “I remember my brother and his wife finding out they were expecting. They spent the entire pregnancy in a panic. And when the baby came, they did fine.”

  Carlos offered, “And we have Marvin to keep an eye on them round the clock. It’ll take only a few cameras strategically placed.”

  “True, children won’t be mobile right away….” Li allowed them to think that they were swaying her.

  Dana tipped her head, looking unhappy. She wasn’t ready to take on parenting.

  Blake looked close to a decision. When he next looked in Li’s direction, she, with an all but imperceptible nod, answered the question he still wasn’t quite certain how to articulate: would mothering raise Rikki’s spirits?

  And at last—

  “I think we should,” Blake said firmly. He gave Rikki’s hand a squeeze. “Sooner rather than later. Why are we even here, if not to restore the human race?”

  Quite right. No matter that, at the moment, humankind’s future was merely Blake’s means to a very personal end.

  Deep down, a part of Li regretted the pain she had caused. First, do no harm, the ancient dictum went, and she agreed. But in the face of extinction, her priority was the greater good. Of the six of them, who better than she to orchestrate a new society?

  She had tried her hand at politics, at Mother’s urging, two worlds ago. And gone nowhere, not even as far as Mother. But unlike Mother, Li had learned from their mistakes.

  Hence, today’s puppet theater.

  Many people stumbled from grief into depression. It hadn’t taken much—the occasional “ill-chosen” remark evoking memories of home and family—to nudge Rikki over the precipice. Thereafter, it was all about waiting for the right moment.

  Which Rikki, snapping one of those chicken-wing arms of hers, had obligingly delivered. Sidetracked, feeling useless—she had fallen hard.

  Li ignored the stirrings of guilt. When the cast came off, the “nutritional supplements” she would provide would rebalance Rikki’s neurotransmitters.

  “Well?” Blake demanded.

  Head canted, Li gazed off into space. “What I said about the artificial wombs? Let me rephrase it. Of course they’ll nurture the unborn—but I’ll have to monitor the process at all times. We don’t dare put our trust in software that never had our circumstances in mind.

  “What harm did decades of radiation do to the frozen embryos? Without a doubt, some, and those effects will be random. Ditto for the biotech of the wombs themselves. And though we understand fetal and early childhood development on the Moon and Mars and piddly little asteroids, we know nothing about the process in more than a standard gravity. We don’t know what sensitivities or allergies a fetus might develop to amniotic fluid synthed from Dark biomass, or infants to formula synthed locally. We’ll need major reserves of every possible trace element, nutritional supplement, and medicine. We’ll need—”

  “We’ll do what it takes,” Blake said. Turning, he focused his gaze on Dana. “Won’t we?”

  Would Dana deny her old friends? Li doubted it.

  Dana asked, “Does any of this become easier if we wait?”

  “Who cares about easier?” Li said. “I love children. Why do you suppose I did what I did, back home?” Dramatic pause. She would have preferred a dramatic, heartfelt sob, only she couldn’t carry that off. Not, in any event, with Mother’s sarcastic laughter ringing in her memories. “This needs to work. I need this to work.”

  “We all do,” Dana said. “Tell us everything you will need and how we can help.”

  And so, centimeter by centimeter, Li allowed them to coax her into starting the first cohort of babies. Whatever that took. With everyone standing ready: to test, tweak, and fine-tune the artificial wombs, under her guidance. To come running whenever her medical training—or, so much on Dark being uncertain, her instincts—insisted human eyes and brains were needed to observe. To synth or, whenever templates weren’t available, to improvise, everything they would need on hand: from diapers and hypoallergenic cleaning supplies, to blankets and bassinets, to bottles and nipples and a stockpile of formula, to specialty tiny surgical gear just in case….

  Everyone at Li’s beck and call.

  Dana, throughout, would be scouring the solar system for every obscure trace element imaginable—certain all the while that her being anywhere but the colony was wise and responsible, and vindication of her insistence on keeping the ship flying, and her very own idea. Leaving a complete leadership vacuum on Dark.

  Dance, my marionettes. Dance.

  This, Mother, is how one exercises power. With finesse.

  DYSTOPIA

  (Spring, Year Four)

  27

  Beneath a sullen teal sky, under the pitiless glare of an alien sun, Blake plodded forward. No matter the ceaseless wind, despite the remnants, all around, of the spring’s latest unseasonable snowfall, he dripped with sweat. He was as tanned as a walnut, as filthy as mud, as exhausted as…as….

  Words failed him.

  Somewhere beyond the too distant horizon his destination beckoned. If only he could reach it. If only he could see his goal. If only he could spare a moment to rest. If only he—

  To a flourish of trumpets, he shuddered awake.

  Bach? McCartney? Copeland? Some centuries-ago composer. A way to keep alive a bit of the culture they had left behind, that Li insisted it was important for them to cherish. Most mornings, the random selection was okay.

  This was just a discordant bleat.

  “I’m up,” Blake croaked, so Marvin would kill the noise. “Lights on dim.”

  At Blake’s side, Rikki tugged the blankets over her head.

  “Time to get up, hon,” he said softly, sitting up.

  She burrowed deeper.

  “We have things to do.”

  “Yeah.” She threw aside her covers, but required a minute to summon the energy to stir further.

  Blake understood. He hadn’t felt rested since….

  Since Eve arrived.

  After willing themselves from bed, he and Rikki quickly showered and dressed. Outside their concrete cabin, the dawn air had a chill to it. At the height of summer, mornings would have a chill to them.

  The sun had yet to clear the horizon. Almost as baleful as in his dream, the d
awn light, blood-red, blazed down the settlement’s lone street.

  Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning, the ditty bubbled up from his subconscious. What about a sun that ever verged on red? What about a greenish sky?

  Blake turned toward the dining hall. Rikki, a wistful look in her eye, faced the other way, toward the much larger, but no less utilitarian, squat concrete box that was the childcare center.

  What the hell, they could gobble breakfast. It was only fuel, best not noticed.

  “We can spare a few minutes,” he told her, offering his hand.

  Rikki led them down Main Street, the rutted path there was never the time or the resources to pave, into the childcare center. A broad corridor, its inner wall entirely one-way glass, enclosed the facility on all four sides. They paused first outside the gestation room, its glow panels still night-dim. On forty-eight empty wombs, Ready lights shone a steady green. Carlos expected to have another ten or more units finished soon.

  On a rear-wall display, above and behind the wombs, counters ticked down toward Family Day. Forty-five days….

  Around the corner, in the gallery outside the nursery, he and Rikki tarried longer. In twenty-seven glass-enclosed cribs, eerily hushed, babies slept, or stirred, or fussed. The little ones only seemed silent; so that they would not disturb each other, noise cancellers in each enclosure masked most sounds. Though the babies varied in size, they were almost identical in age: about four months.

  Through sensors wired into the cribs, Marvin watched, listened, and sniffed ceaselessly for any hints of distress. From displays at the foot of each crib the AI’s smiling animation would be beaming down, crooning or speaking soothingly to each infant as it (or, rather, Li’s verbal generalities turned by Carlos into updated programming) deemed appropriate.

  Antonio, passed out on the room’s rumpled cot, an out-flung arm trailing on the floor, remained on duty for whenever the AI needed hands or suspected a problem. To judge by the line-up of empty formula bottles on the table along the wall, and the overflowing diaper pails, Antonio had had a long night.

  As Rikki reached for the doorknob, Blake said, “Don’t. You’ll wake Antonio.” Who, like Dana, was old enough to be a grandparent. In a fairer world, neither would be expected to pull all-nighters like this.

  Rikki jerked back her hand, looking sad and relieved. “It’s so…cold.”

  Impersonal, she meant. “I know,” he told her.

  And yet inescapable. He nudged her around another corner and they peeked in on the toddlers. Marvin kept watch here, too.

  Most here were awake, playing and babbling in their cribs. By accident or with insight, a few had opened the refrigerated compartments in their cribs and helped themselves to formula bottles. Antonio would be along soon—roused by Marvin, if need be—to help those who hadn’t managed to feed themselves.

  And to change diapers. Lots of diapers.

  Rikki reached for the knob of this door, too. Once inside, she wouldn’t leave without first rocking, cuddling, and cooing over each of the twenty-six.

  If any child would let her. A haunted expression told Blake she, too, feared their recoiling.

  “We need to get a move on,” he said, not meeting her eyes.

  Around the final corner they looked in on the oldest children. This room had no cribs; mattresses resting directly on thickly padded carpet hid much of the floor.

  Eleven of these children were just shy of three standard years. Some played, as often side by side as with one another. A few rammed around, bouncing off padded walls and each other. Three sat in a corner staring at an animation with images of colored toys. When Blake pressed an intercom button, Marvin was teaching numbers. From other wall displays, Marvin’s avatars praised, cajoled, and chided its charges.

  Then there was the oldest cohort. The guinea-pig generation.

  Blond, blue-eyed Eve, by almost a day the grande dame of the Dark-born, was loading a tray with snacks. Castor, burly and intense, was piling plastic blocks. Pollux, his black hair a tousled mess, frowning, sat hunched on one of the room’s tiny toilets.

  The trio struck Blake as wise—or was it wizened?—beyond their five standard years.

  He tried to remember when he had seen any of them smile. And he pretended not to notice Rikki brushing a tear from her cheek.

  This…factory was no way to raise children, but how else could six adults cope? And duty demanded they bring yet more children into the world, while growing food for everyone.

  “Let’s get some breakfast,” he said gently.

  Rikki nodded, too choked up to speak.

  When they retraced their steps through the gallery, Antonio was up, yawning, a red-faced, bawling baby in his arms. From another room, furtive scrabbling sounds announced that at least some of the lab mice had awakened, too. But not Li: they found her in the ICU, dozing in a chair, her mouth fallen open. Her patient, asleep in the room’s single occupied isolette, was sticklike, its joints misshapen. Li had not had any explanation beyond, “It happens.”

  She works harder than all of us, Blake thought. And she can’t leave the settlement, can’t ever stray more than a few steps from the children.

  The moment of empathy almost kept Blake from not dreading the remainder of his day.

  *

  Breakfast was as best-ignored as usual. He and Rikki scarcely overlapped with Carlos and Dana, heading out that morning on a quick flight to gather more phosphates. Carlos swigged from a tall glass; Blake guessed that the synthed orange juice was laced with vodka.

  “We can’t have too much phosphate,” Li had said again and again, when she wasn’t pushing them to stockpile other minerals and trace elements. “If Endeavour ever breaks down…”

  And she was right, although phosphates half-filled their largest storehouse.

  Until recently it had been a full warehouse. The crush of snow from the winter’s final storm had buckled the roof; three days of torrential rain only the week before had washed away half their reserves.

  Blake missed robins as the first sign of spring.

  He and Rikki packed lunches, grabbed a tractor from the garage, and trundled down Main Street. Past storehouses and workshops. Past a massive, deeply buried bunker, showing only its roof and slanted double doors. It safeguarded their most precious treasures: embryo banks, both human and animal, and seed bags, and Marvin’s servers. Past their other bunker, housing a fusion reactor. Past the ethanol-fueled, steam-powered generator that backstopped the reactor, and the ethanol refinery. Past the chemical fertilizer plant and its noxious odor. Past the chicken coop, with its clacking, clamoring occupants and their worse than noxious stench. Past the glass-walled hydroponics conservatory and its touches of terrestrial greenery. Past the foundry in which he had fabricated, among many things, parts for this tractor.

  Past twelve headstones and twelve heartbreakingly tiny graves.

  Gravity’s effects on gestation? Local toxins? Radiation damage from the long voyage? Li couldn’t always tell, and that meant they could expect to lose more children.

  They drove in silence down to the silt plains.

  To the roar of the tractor engine, Blake began tilling. The throbbing of the motor ran up the steering column, out the steering wheel, into sore hands, aching arms, and tense shoulders. Despite gloves and bandages, he kept popping blisters faster than med nanites could heal them. He felt about a hundred years old.

  The stiff morning breeze off the Darwin Sea whipped across the Spencer River Delta, pelting him with grit and roiling the dust plume that trailed behind the tractor for a good fifty meters. Should he plow the lifeless silt with or across the prevailing wind? Follow the contours of the landscape? He had no idea, and Marvin’s databases, though rife with esoteric botanical theory, offered little practical how-to to enlighten him. Last year’s trials with silt and fertilizer in a few pots and planters, as encouraging as they had been, suggested nothing about plowing techniques. So Blake changed course every few rows, putting in furrows
every which way. When the crops came in—if the crops came in—he would have a better idea for next year.

  Not that Marvin’s knowledge wasn’t useful: it showed they had dodged a bullet. Their seeds, all varieties gengineered for Mars, fixed nitrogen directly from the atmosphere. Blake hadn’t taken biology since high school, so maybe he’d forgotten that unmodded crops often depended upon nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil. More likely, he had never known it in the first place. Inner-city curricula didn’t dwell much on farming.

  Rikki plodded along behind the tractor, hand-planting the field row by row and labeling test plots. When she had tired of stooping and he of the shuddering of the tractor, they swapped places. The windborne silt by then had turned them both a dusky gray.

  Except by shouting, they couldn’t make themselves understood over the roar of the tractor. He resented the noise and fumes, but the ridiculous internal-combustion engine was dependable and easy to maintain. There was no use complaining about it.

  As there was no use complaining that babies, like wheat and corn and even slime ponds, must be scheduled just so, the winter, labor-intensive crop of newborns timed to arrive after the harvest of the weather-dependent crops. Or about the cookie-cutter “parenting” largely outsourced to Marvin.

  Only realism did nothing to ease the pain. He had seen the hurt again that morning in Rikki’s eyes. The yearning, the ache, the need to bear her own child. Their child.

  Weeks earlier, he had sought out Li to ask about it. In private, because Li was the last person with whom Rikki would share anything personal….

  *

  “Bad idea,” Li had told Blake.

  “The gravity?” he had guessed.

  “The gravity. It causes constant skeletal strain, wear and tear on the joints, and constriction of the blood vessels.

  “Forty percent excess weight is nothing to sneeze it. That’s for you and me. For Rikki it’s almost four times the weight her body developed to handle. Even with nanites and meds, it’s a struggle to keep her blood pressure controlled. Pregnancy would only exacerbate the problem.”