Dark Secret (2016)

by Edward M. Lerner

  “It would be uncomfortable?”

  Li had shaken her head. “Quite possibly fatal.”

  “Jesus! What about the girls who’ll be born here? When they’re old enough?”

  “I’m hopeful they’ll be able to carry babies to term, but we’ll have to wait and see. By then, maybe, I’ll have a better handle on the situation, and better meds.”

  All the sacrifice, everything that the six of them had endured…it might still be all for naught? That was too horrifying to face, too cosmic. The personal tragedy was heartbreaking enough.

  With a lump in his throat, he had asked, “What do I tell Rikki?”

  “What I would tell her, if she’d been the one to consult me. The truth.”

  “I can’t. It would destroy her.”

  Li had stood there, head tipped, lost in thought. “There is another possibility. We may need to go this way eventually, anyway.”

  “Tell me,” he had demanded.

  “IVF. In vitro fertilization. Afterward we transfer the embryo to one of the wombs for gestation.”

  “Then I’ll say that.”

  “Okay.” It had come out skeptically.

  “Rikki wants a baby. We want a baby.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Only Li had been right. When Blake broached the IVF option, Rikki had stormed from their home, slamming the door behind her.

  *

  Suddenly glad for the engine’s roar, Blake tried to lose himself in work.

  Every selection of grain type, every depth of planting, every concentration of chemical fertilizer or chicken feces, was another experiment—performed with irreplaceable seeds. But trial and error was their only way to learn if and how fertilized silt would grow crops.

  He told himself that Dark had neither weeds nor plant parasites. And, having once mentioned those advantages to Rikki, he brooded about her rejoinder: for now.

  Evolution abhorred an ecological vacuum.

  Late that morning Antonio arrived on the opposite bank of the nearby river channel, driving the colony’s other tractor, to scatter diaspores from Carlos’s latest batch of designer lichens. Even the most advanced terraforming lichen varieties Endeavour had brought, gene-tweaked to tolerate the ubiquitous arsenic, would not produce useful depths of true soil sooner than in decades. A glacial pace, for an all but glacial planet….

  But Carlos and Antonio kept at it, as Blake and Rikki would on the silt plain, because the only large-scale food-producing alternative was the bacterial ponds. If nothing else, the lichens brought welcome splashes of color to the dreary countryside.

  Blake hated farming, if he could so dignify their as yet futile toiling in the dirt, but he loathed working the slimy ponds. That festering blanket of scum. That fetid, pungent stench.

  From the memory alone, he all but puked.

  The tractor sputtered and stopped. From its seat, Rikki called, “I’m ready to switch places again.”

  “I’m ready for lunch,” he countered, abusing the meanings of both ready and lunch.

  Antonio had abandoned his tractor to handpick specimens from a nearby gravel deposit. He been gathering rocks, everywhere he went, since the onset of spring.

  Blake had not asked why, lacking the energy for another of the esoteric circumlocutions that with Antonio too often passed for an explanation. An answer might start with the Big Bang.

  “Join us for lunch?” Blake shouted, gesturing at the bobbing pontoon bridge that linked the delta to the shore.

  Antonio looked up, not quite in Blake’s direction. “No thanks. I’ve got things to do.”

  “What’s with the rocks?” Rikki called.

  “You’ll be sorry you asked,” Blake said sotto voce.

  But all Antonio offered, with his attention already returned to his collecting, was, “I don’t have postage stamps. Or…blueberries.”

  *

  Through the colony’s array of safety cameras, Li watched the peasants traipsing home from their day’s toil. She never called them peasants, not aloud, but how else did one describe those bound to the land to feed and serve their master?

  She never called herself their master, either. It sufficed that at a subconscious level they knew. And anyway, she preferred Dark Empress. It had a certain cachet.

  Above the two-tractor caravan, the sky had turned foreboding. Then the clouds opened up and rain spoiled her view. She had to imagine them wet, muddy, and miserable.

  Well, the phosphate mines in the asteroid belt were dry enough.

  She could almost envy Carlos and Dana. Li would kill for a change of scenery, not to mention a break from this oppressive gravity. Appearing indispensable had its price.

  The caravan neared the edge of the settlement proper, the garage’s overhead door creeping upward at a radioed command. That was Li’s cue that someone, if not all three, would swing by soon to visit the children.

  Li closed her office door behind her. Whoever came would find her, brow furrowed, shoulders slumped, expression sad, examining one of the babies.

  28

  Rikki lay bonelessly, eyes closed, head tipped back against the rim of the whirlpool tub, as the hot pulsing jets massaged away knots in her back, arms, and legs. Water and electricity, if little else, they had in abundance. She let the fizzing water buoy her, let it persuade her, that for a few minutes, anyway, gravity’s cruel dominion had been overthrown.

  After hard labor from dawn to dusk, it wasn’t a bad way to end the day.

  Blake said, “You look like you’re only sleeping.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m going to get out now.”

  His voice rose in pitch, just a little, at the end of the announcement. Asking, without asking, “Unless you want to fool around?”

  “I’ll be along in a while,” she said.

  Eyes still closed, Rikki felt and heard the water slosh as he climbed from the sunken tub. Faint but brisk, she heard the whisper of fabric against skin as he toweled off, and the slap-slap of bare feet on the concrete floor as he padded from the bathroom.

  Then she opened her eyes.

  Part of her even wanted sex: for the closeness to Blake. To know he still found her desirable, no matter that this godforsaken rock had turned her into a muscle-bound Amazon. To exorcise some of her pent-up anger.

  And that anger was why most of her didn’t. Couldn’t. Because what she truly craved, the ache more insistent with each passing day, was the feel of a child growing inside her.

  A host of med nanites would not allow that to happen. And Li would not permit that to change. “For your own good,” Rikki mimicked.

  “What’s that?” Blake called from the bedroom.

  “Sorry. Talking to myself again.”

  “It’s about time we head out for dinner,” he said.

  “Thanks.” She permitted herself several seconds more buoyant relief. “Okay, I’m getting out.”

  He stuck his head through the doorway with a comically exaggerated leer.

  “Maybe later,” she said.

  *

  Beneath diamond-bright stars, shivering in the evening chill, Rikki and Blake scurried down Main Street to the communal dining hall. Celestial sparkles and the nip in the air shared a cause. Dark’s thin, dry air didn’t block much inbound starlight; it didn’t stop much of the day’s heat from reradiating back into space, either.

  She searched overhead for any hint of home. As always, the sky had nothing to offer her but alien constellations, many still unnamed, too large moons, and the soul-sucking, inchoate darkness that was the Coalsack.

  “Make a wish,” Blake said.

  Turning toward him, studying the western horizon where he appeared to be looking, Rikki saw the meteor. Or a different meteor, because the sky was suddenly filled with faint streaks.

  “Done,” she said, trying to make her tone light. Alas, no mere wishing star would fix what ailed her.

  The meteor shower ended in seconds, eminently forgettable. Planets glimmered overhead
, too, the brightest of them so close that with binoculars you could clearly see its Saturn-like rings. Back home, Ayn Rand’s orbit would not have encompassed the inner edge of the Asteroid Belt; the local version of a Belt was shoehorned in between the gas giant and Dark. Nearby asteroids meant nearby resources.

  And though they had been fortunate so far, logically those rocks also made Dark a shooting gallery.

  “I made a wish, too,” Blake said, waggling an eyebrow at her.

  She laughed. “It must be your lucky day.”

  “I’m not admitting anything, or it won’t come true.”

  The dining hall smelled wonderful. Rikki couldn’t place the aroma. Something different. Something she had not encountered in a long time. Carlos’s muttering, from inside the kitchen, revealed nothing. It was his turn to prepare dinner, and that somehow always entailed guzzling the synthed swill that served as cooking sherry.

  Wallpaper to her left and right showed an Earth forest; the wall straight ahead cycled through scenes of something from Marvin’s media library. She didn’t recognize the vid from its previews, and that didn’t surprise her. For those who stayed after dinner, the communal movie was the cook’s choice.

  Behind Rikki, a door opened with a squeak. Li said, “I guess tonight’s treat won’t be a surprise. Wow, that smells good.”

  “Roast chicken?” Blake asked in wonder.

  Because while they often had eggs, they had yet to eat meat. The priority remained expansion of the flock.

  It pained Rikki to have learned the proper name for a bunch of chickens. And that tomorrow she would be up before dawn to collect eggs, scatter bucketfuls of feed pellets—dried, chopped bacterial mat—and muck out the coop.

  Just as with cooking, they took turns caring for the chickens. Except Li. She refused to do anything so nonsterile lest one of the babies should need immediate care.

  Logical…and so convenient.

  “Some chickens got into a fight today,” Li said. “Marvin alerted me. Before I could get to the coop, one chicken was severely pecked and clawed. I had to put the bird down, and saw no reason to let its meat go to waste.”

  “Fair enough,” Blake said with enthusiasm.

  Rikki sat at the dining-room table and Blake sat next to her. Li took the seat straight across from Blake.

  Just to bug me, Rikki thought. And it works. Even after she had finally satisfied herself that while Blake respected Li, he did not much like her.

  The door opened again, admitting the stragglers. “Sorry we’re late,” Antonio said. “Dana asked to look in on the children.”

  Did the little ones hate Dana, too? Did they avert their eyes, burst into tears, even back away, when Dana entered the nursery? Rikki was too ashamed of her failings ever to have asked.

  “Not a problem,” Li said. “But it’s good that you’re here.”

  “Do I smell chicken?” Dana asked.

  Li beamed. “You do.”

  So Queen Li means to take credit for a melee among the chickens? Despising the woman, Rikki changed the subject. “How was everyone’s day?”

  Antonio shrugged. “Another day. Another few…calluses.”

  “About that chicken?” Dana prompted.

  As Li started to explain, Carlos emerged from the kitchen pushing a serving cart. With the grand flourish of a magician, he raised the domed cover.

  The roast chicken’s skin was a crackly, golden brown. Clear juices oozed from punctures where he must have tested the bird’s doneness with a fork.

  Rikki’s mouth started to water.

  Nor did the feast end with the chicken. The greenhouse had contributed everything for a tossed salad: lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, onions, and cucumbers. There were baked potatoes, too, with synthed butter and dollops of faux sour cream. There were bowls of what looked like chocolate pudding.

  When Carlos began carving the chicken, his hands were steady. If nothing else, the man could hold his liquor.

  What were they celebrating, Rikki wondered, beyond Li’s largesse with the bounty to which everyone but she contributed?

  “It’s a shame,” Rikki began, sadness and sudden anger commingling.

  Carlos stopped carving. Heads turned toward Rikki.

  “Tonight feels like a Sunday family dinner. Only there’s no family.”

  “We’re family,” Li said.

  “Of course,” Rikki said. “But I’m thinking bigger. I’m thinking of the children.”

  I’m thinking of bonding with them, or, rather, them bonding with us. Only Li doesn’t see it. Li spends her days with the children, and they love her just fine.

  Silence. Beneath the table, Blake gave Rikki’s knee a pat. Maybe he meant it as comfort. It felt patronizing.

  Forget your wish upon a star, fella.

  Rikki plunged ahead. “We don’t treat those kids—our kids—much different than the chickens in that egg factory down the street. We feed them and clean up after them like they’re on some sort of production line. Apart from regular baths, they might as well be chickens.”

  “Except that we don’t eat the children,” Carlos said dryly, as he resumed carving.

  Dana asked, “What do you have in mind, Rikki?”

  “Dinner is the only time we’re together,” she answered. “We should eat with the kids. We should let them hear genuine conversation among adults, not abdicate to Marvin teaching them to speak.” And so much else.

  “That’s seventy children.” Li answered in the slow, calm, reasoned manner that drove Rikki up the wall, in the affected tone of voice that reminded: I’m the professional here. That reminded: they love me. “This year we’ll add another sixty, more or less.”

  “And we want all of them to be civilized,” Rikki said. “Or they’ll be fighting like the chickens, too.”

  “Because during a sixteen-hour work day, on a short day, I would never think to speak to the children,” Li said.

  Spoken calmly and reasonably, damn the woman.

  “We control the rate of births,” Rikki said, “not the other way around. We shouldn’t”—we mustn’t!—“let an arbitrary decision shape how we bring up these kids.”

  “It’s not arbitrary,” Antonio said. “If we don’t…raise the children while we’re still alive, with firsthand knowledge of technology, culture, and civilization, they’ll be savages. If that should happen, they…won’t long outlive us.”

  Carlos again stopped carving to offer, “And we need genetic diversity.”

  More variety within your future harem, Carlos? Rikki bit her tongue. The children having children, no matter with whom, would not become an issue for years. She said, “They’ll be savages if we don’t slow down the pace, if we don’t invest the effort to make them something better.”

  If we don’t show them love.

  “I agree with Rikki on this,” Blake said.

  On this? What hadn’t made the cut?

  “I’ve made a suggestion,” Rikki said. “Let’s discuss it.”

  “We have discussed it,” Carlos said. “You’ve been told why it’s impractical to—”

  Dana cleared her throat. “Let’s discuss options first. We could bring a few kids every evening. Rotate them through, making sure each child sees something like a normal family setting at least once a month. See how they fare in a social setting. Learn how we have to adapt.”

  Blake’s pocket trilled; tonight was his turn on call. He took out the folded datasheet, glanced at it, and stood. “Sorry, people. Marvin needs hands in the nursery.” He gazed with longing at the feast, not yet even on the table. “So very sorry.”

  Faster than Rikki could offer, Li said, “We’ll save some dinner for you.”

  Rikki’s thoughts—and her gut—churned. Hands. That’s all we are to these children. What will they be like when they grow up?

  Once again, Carlos returned his attention to the chicken. Blake set off toward the kitchen, perhaps for something he could eat while at the childcare center. Antonio, taking a serving b
owl from the cart, managed to knock the salad tongs to the floor. He headed for the kitchen for, presumably, another set. Dana studied the forest scene.

  The sudden silence was deafening.

  It was as though Rikki had never spoken. As though she weren’t even here. “We’re running the universe’s biggest, most impersonal orphanage,” she said.

  Leaning across the table, Li patted Rikki’s hand. “This isn’t about ‘the children,’ you know.”

  Rikki yanked away her hand. “Enlighten me. What is it about?”

  “A particular child.”

  A nonexistent child. Though Rikki hated to admit it, even to herself, Li might be right.

  There could be no denying the clanging of Rikki’s biological clock, but she refused to accept that she was a slave to it. She leaned back in chair, trying to be objective, to separate motivations, to sort out her feelings. And ended up worried: do I crave pregnancy for a sense of worth?

  Li was responsible for everyone’s health, from day-to-day bumps and bruises to reversing the endless complications that cropped up in the wombs, from everyone’s psychological wellbeing to assuring that their agricultural programs would satisfy the colony’s long-term nutritional needs.

  Dana had her ship to pilot, to keep them supplied with phosphates and metals and everything else not readily found or mined on the ground. Blake had the ship to keep flying, and a thousand other gadgets from tractors to chicken-feed dryers to design, build, and maintain. Carlos reprogrammed synth vats and nanites, built specialty medical gear for Li, and constructed and maintained the steadily growing number of artificial wombs.

  Whereas Antonio and I are manual labor. Diaper changers and field hands.

  Did Antonio ever feel insignificant, too? He shouldn’t. But for him, they would never have escaped the GRB. His rock collection might serve no more purpose than his blueberry obsession, but at least he had interests.

  I don’t have laurels or interests to fall back on. Just survivor’s guilt.

  The colony would have much brighter prospects if Hawthorne had sent a farmer or miner in her stead. Of what use to anyone was a science historian? Of what earthly use….