Dark Secret (2016)

by Edward M. Lerner

  “Are you all right, dear?” Li asked.

  “We’re bringing up the next generation like strays and foundlings. I don’t like it.”

  Li’s sad smile might have been intended to convey no more than, “What choice do we have?” but Rikki read it as, “Queen Li knows best.”

  I need purpose, Rikki decided. Something I can contribute. Something of my own. Something important.

  In a flash of insight, she knew what that something would be.

  29

  The six of them had not discussed terraforming since before landing. Why would they? Dark was a terrestrial world.

  But, Rikki decided, maybe they should.

  Techniques that had been making Mars habitable could also make a difference on Dark. It was more than a matter of personal comfort: the crops that struggled here might thrive in a warmer climate. And she could give them that warmer climate: designer perfluorocarbons were incredibly effective as climate agents, some thousands of times more potent as greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide.

  Nor would they need to pump much PFC into the atmosphere to begin altering the climate. Twentieth-century industries had, in a few short decades, without meaning to, almost destroyed Earth’s ozone layer with chemically similar chlorofluorocarbons.

  She began making order of magnitude estimates in her head—

  And stopped. She was getting ahead of herself. The first rule of terraforming was, don’t meddle with what you don’t understand.

  She didn’t understand Dark. None of them did. They had experienced their share of weather, but four local years was too brief a time to reveal anything reliable about climate.

  Continuous measurements covered only a few square klicks around the settlement. Their knowledge of anywhere else—spotty and haphazard, anecdotes rather than systemic data—was limited to whatever observations Endeavour had serendipitously made in the course of doing something else.

  A remote-sensing satellite in synchronous orbit for the past few years would have told Rikki a great deal—but Dark had no synchronous orbits. Its moons soon destabilized the orbit of any artificial satellite placed at the proper distance.

  Then there was the matter of oceans….

  Oceans stored heat from sunlight, releasing that heat to moderate temperature swings both diurnal and seasonal. An ocean current like Earth’s Gulf Stream could alter the climate of entire continents. Multiyear oceanic temperature cycles, like El Niño and La Niña, had global impact. Knowing what happened in Dark’s ocean depths mattered.

  The data that had been collected on this world’s oceans and seas? Precisely zero.

  She’d had the sense (or the lack of courage of her convictions?) to follow her instincts. She’d not spoken a word about any of this. Luckily so, because had anyone known how she’d been spending her time, she would only have looked useless. More useless. Marvin knew—she needed the AI’s help with data retrieval, model building, and number crunching—but she had ordered it to keep her secret to itself.

  Toiling in secrecy didn’t help. By some miracle, the little ones had mostly slept the latest night she had spent at the childcare center. With a few minutes here and a few there, she had shoehorned in a couple hours of work. (For them, she told herself, guilt-ridden at not playing with everyone not asleep—and more guilt-ridden at the relief that came of sparing herself their rejection. For their future.) She got a bit more research accomplished when Blake spent the night in the nursery. Desperate for progress, feigning insomnia, on consecutive evenings she had squeezed in another few hours of work. But she couldn’t keep up the pace. Without a decent night’s sleep, and soon, she would keel over or run someone over with a tractor.

  When the time came to commit serious astronomy, Rikki knew she had to enlist Antonio.

  *

  Rikki threw off her side of the blankets. She got up and began dressing for outdoors.

  “What?” Blake murmured sleepily.

  “Insomnia,” she told him. “Again. I’m going for a walk.”

  Blinking, he sat up. “Give me a minute. I’ll walk with you.”

  “Wrong,” she told him. “That I can’t sleep doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.”

  “But I—”

  “Gallantry noted. I’ll be fine.” This wasn’t a campsite in some tropical jungle, surrounded by lions and hostile natives. The settlement’s few buildings were surrounded by nothing and nobody. “Seriously, sleep.”

  “Stay close.”

  “I will.” She gave him a quick kiss. “Sleep.”

  Antonio didn’t put all his free time into his ever expanding rock collection, at least not at night. She found him where she had expected: using the ship’s telescope. The main bridge display showed Ayn Rand, with two of its inner moons in transit. He seemed not to have noticed her arrival.

  “Do you see something interesting?” she asked.

  “I’m making a survey.”

  A nonanswer answer, she noted. Well, she had been on the taciturn side, too. He was in the pilot’s acceleration couch, and she plopped into the copilot’s seat. “I wondered if you could help me with something. Discreetly.”

  Because if she could harness his obsessive-compulsive focus, and his sometimes encyclopedic knowledge, he might do much to advance her research.

  Finally, he turned away from the bridge console, if not to look directly at her. “If I can. Help, I mean.”

  “I’m trying to understand the climate here. Back home there were astronomical effects on climate.”

  Without leaving his seat Antonio seemed to strike a pose. Something in his voice changed. “You are remembering Milankovitch cycles.”

  Professorial mode. She wondered if he missed the academic life.

  “The tilt of Earth’s axis varies over…millennia. And like a wobbling toy top the Earth precesses about that axis, also over millennia. And because planetary orbits are ellipses, not circles, the axis of the entire orbit slowly revolves around the sun. In the case of Earth, that last cycle takes more than a hundred millennia. All three processes affect what sunlight strikes the planet, where, and at what angle. All three affect seasons and…climate.”

  As she had more or less remembered. “And those processes are independent, correct? Every so often, they peak together.”

  “Cycles peaking together have been implicated in triggering ice ages.”

  “And extrapolating to Dark? What does our long-range forecast look like?”

  He studied his feet. “I don’t know.”

  “What would it take to find out?”

  “A lot of observing time. And modeling time, too.” He gestured at the image on the big display. “Earth doesn’t have a big neighbor planet like that to tug at it. Or three moons. The cyclic variations here are apt to be more complex.”

  Farming and childrearing didn’t leave much time for, well, anything else. Maybe those were the only tasks she was good for.

  Something she knew about the history of science had to be useful. Didn’t it?

  Maybe this was it.

  *

  From the deep shadow alongside the reroofed phosphate storehouse, Carlos watched Rikki. Out in the middle of the night, slinking home from Endeavour. Having a bit of after-hours fun, are we?

  But kudos for Antonio! Carlos would not have guessed the odd little guy had it in him. Or, more precisely, that he got it into Rikki.

  After she slipped past, Carlos continued to his workshop. His extracurricular activities also demanded discretion.

  Yawning, exhausted after a full day’s work, he nonetheless toiled in high spirits. For months he had put his free nights into making things for Li. If what she wanted wasn’t candy and flowers, nonetheless each new batch of the gadgets made her very appreciative.

  He could appreciate that.

  *

  Discovery set down on a broad plain, between soaring rock canyon walls.

  “Touchdown,” Blake announced. “The crowd goes wild.”

  They had landed on a peb
bly shore along the Spencer River. A very damp shore, to judge by the steam that billowed around them, blocking Rikki’s view from the cockpit. That fog would dissipate into the dry air long before the ground cooled enough for them to climb down.

  “You do realize,” she said, “that I’ve never seen a football game.” Or cared to. Martians didn’t do football: the playing field would have had to be ridiculously big.

  “I know many things.” He popped his helmet, unbuckled his safety harness, and twisted around to see her behind his headrest. “Such as that you’ve never asked to accompany me on a routine checkout flight. Not once. Today you announced you were coming and proposed a destination. What gives?”

  “Nothing.” Almost nothing, anyway: the vague memory of terrain glimpsed from a fast-moving shuttle, when the two of them had first flown over this region.

  “Here in the canyon, we’re out of radio contact. If you have secrets, this is the place to spill them.”

  His unhappy expression added, “Unless you’re keeping secrets from me.”

  “No secrets,” she dissembled. “I wanted to see these rock faces up close.”

  “Be that way.” He turned forward.

  “Really, that’s why I came.” And if she saw what she expected to see, she would explain. She just didn’t want to look stupid.

  The awkward, silent wait till he popped the canopy release seemed interminable.

  Rikki hung a ladder over the cockpit’s side, swung herself up and over, and clambered down the rungs. “I remember when doing that was hard.”

  “We’re getting used to the place. Home sweet home.”

  Home, sweet or otherwise. That was why she had to get her head wrapped around the climate here. “I’m going to stroll along the river for a ways. Join me?”

  “Sure.”

  The river’s flow here was slow and placid. When she walked up to the shore and dipped in a fingertip, the water was icy. “No skinny-dipping,” she told him preemptively.

  “So what is this about?”

  Slowly, she pivoted, taking in the panoramic view. “Isn’t this enough?”

  The flat plain stretched for at least a hundred meters behind them before rising to meet rugged cliffs. The river, gray with silt, hugged the canyon’s other wall. Perhaps a half-klick downstream from where they stood, a small but spectacular cascade burst from the nearer rock face to crash into the waters far below. Rikki dubbed the torrent Beagle Falls.

  How long ago had this valley silted up? Had the silt accumulated gradually, or had it settled out in the aftermath of some terrible flood? She didn’t know, but an answer to that mystery could wait.

  Craning her neck, peering up and up and up, Rikki studied the nearer canyon wall. Two hundred or so meters high. Sedimentary rock. Barren of life, of course, without even a hint of greenery. Great crags and brooding hollows carved as water and wind had patiently eroded the softest rock. Several dozen strata, of varying depths, in countless shades of gray. Subtle, subdued red tones here and there among the grays.

  She took out her camera. With its laser rangefinder active to capture precise distances and scales, she started panning.

  “Magnificent,” Blake said. “It reminds me of the Grand Canyon.”

  “Then my suggestion was worthwhile?”

  “You tell me.”

  She couldn’t know without detailed analysis, but yes, she was sure. “The layering of the rock embodies sedimentation rates over time. Those reflect the climate.” And cycles of the climate, over perhaps millions of years.

  “And that’s important?”

  She couldn’t know that yet, either. “It might be.”

  *

  The inevitable confrontation began after dinner, in an impassioned and arcane outpouring of verbiage from Rikki. Blake, Dana, and Antonio, looking on approvingly, were clearly in on it. And the four had waited till Carlos, Li’s dependable ally (when sober, anyway), had left for his shift at the childcare center. Climate. Growing season. Terraform. Blah, blah, blah.

  Rikki finally wound down.

  “I don’t know,” Li told the assembled peasants.

  The more candid answer would have been I don’t care. Candor did not suit her purpose.

  Nor did the topic matter. It mattered only that they found something over which to rebel. Something other than the manner of childrearing.

  “It’s important,” Rikki insisted. She spoke too loud and stood too close. Her chin jutted out and she had crossed her arms across her chest.

  Classic belligerence, Li thought. Excellent. “Maybe someday.”

  “Respectfully,” Blake began, “I disagree. We shouldn’t wait.”

  “Of course you disagree,” Li said. Goading him by criticizing his woman. Because, as Li made a point of reinforcing from time to time, she was never subtle.

  “Damn it, Li,” Rikki said, “be reasonable. We need to understand the climate. Climate affects our food supply. You must care about that.”

  Li smiled condescendingly: another goad. “We settled almost inside the tropics. Can you find us someplace suitable anywhere warmer?”

  “That’s the point,” Antonio said. “If the climate fails us…here, the colony is in trouble. Let’s find out sooner rather than later. While maybe there’s still the opportunity to change things.”

  Blake’s turn. “Or we may find we’ve lucked out. This one set of observations, from this one canyon, suggests the trend might be to warmer weather. It would be nice to have an idea when and how far we can expand into higher latitudes.”

  Li said, “Planning for the long run.”

  “Exactly,” Dana said.

  In the long run, we’re all dead. Li couldn’t remember who, other than someone long dead, had first said that. The provenance didn’t matter because she wasn’t going to quote it. She wanted the four of them to prevail.

  Convince me, people. Convince yourselves you convinced me.

  “We need to eat,” Rikki said. “The children need to eat.”

  They had an entire world to farm. How could they ever lack for food? But if she were wrong, if on occasion they wound up supplementing crops with a bit of bacterial sludge, so be it. What mattered was raising obedient, subservient children to do the colony’s bidding.

  To do her bidding.

  And to that end, she needed the others too busy to interfere with her affairs.

  Li permitted her shoulders to sag. She lowered her head, nibbled on her lower lip. Read: doubt. Read: you’re winning me over. She said, “Can you fit in these studies without impact to our other work?”

  “Well…,” Dana conceded.

  “Because,” Li said, “I could take on longer shifts in the childcare center. If that would help.”

  “It would help,” Antonio managed.

  “Tell me again,” Li said, “what will you do?”

  Blake and Dana swapped glances. They’d caught her verb choice: will, not would.

  “We need a more global data set,” Rikki said. “There are other ancient canyons to read. Ice-core samples to collect from glaciers and the polar icecaps. Bore holes to drill in the sediments of lake and sea bottoms. All should tell us useful things about climate patterns and trends.”

  “It sounds major,” Li said.

  “It is major,” Rikki said.

  Li resumed chewing on her lip: sincere, accessible leader here, open to everyone’s inputs. “Okay,” she conceded. To grins all around, she added, “We’ll have to figure out a revised work schedule first. We still have children to feed.”

  “Of course,” Antonio said.

  “Thanks, Li,” Rikki said, at last letting her arms fall to her sides.

  Li smiled. “You’re welcome, and I thank you for bringing this matter to my attention.”

  Because while you’re gadding about, the children will continue in my sole care. When you’re here, you’ll be crunching the data or laboring in the fields or in bed, exhausted, and the children will remain, under Marvin’s watchful and carefull
y programmed eye.

  Learning obedience. Discipline. Self-denial. Conformity. When (ever less frequently) the peasants questioned her methods, the analogy with which they struggled was an orphanage.

  If any of her companions had read Dickens, they would still be on the wrong track.

  Her true model—updated and improved, of course—was a Spartan barracks. The children would grow up to serve the State. The State she would define.

  This, Mother, is how one wields power.

  Before a single peasant ever suspected Li wanted them distracted by another project, it would be too late.

  By then, all the children will be mine.

  30

  “Oh-two?” Dana asked.

  “Two fresh tanks,” Antonio answered.

  “Oh-two pressure?”

  “Nominal.”

  “Cee-oh-two?”

  “Barely registering.”

  “Suit heater?”

  Antonio had checked and rechecked everything on the long list, but he wouldn’t dream of interrupting Dana’s methodical run-through. Who better than he to respect obsessive behavior?

  And she was being obsessive. Because she cared. She got him, not just better than anyone else alive—not a high hurdle—but better, almost, than anyone who had ever lived. As well, almost, as had Tabitha.

  And knowing him, knowing how thoroughly he would have checked everything, Dana still made it her job to watch out for him.

  After Tabitha died, he had never expected anyone to care again.

  At last they left Endeavour, stepping from the forward air lock onto the sunbaked surface of Aristophanes. The terrain, what little could be seen before the freakishly close horizon, was less cratered than he expected.

  A world at half-phase hung—loomed—overhead. Enormous. Thirty-five times the size of the Moon as seen from Earth. Icecaps and cloud tops sparkled, but could not overcome an overall gloominess.

  Dark was aptly named.

  “When you’re done gawking,” Dana said, with a hint of fond amusement in her voice.

  They offloaded from cargo hold one the first of the remote-sensing stations. Though massive and bulky, here the unit weighed almost nothing. They set down the apparatus on a flat expanse and he stepped away. She would unfold the stabilizing legs, deploy the delicate solar panels, align the dish antennas, and run the final instrument calibrations. His job was to answer technical questions, should any arise, while keeping his ten left thumbs at a safe distance.