Dark Secret (2016)

by Edward M. Lerner

  Duties that left him free to look around: the other, if unofficial, reason he was here. As often as he had championed exploration, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, something—typically farm chores and colicky babies—had always come first.

  How much harder would Dana have it on this excursion for having him along, not Blake?

  Antonio loved her all the more for bringing him, regardless.

  The remote-sensing station was a kludge, the first among a whole constellation of kludges. Once Dana had it checked out, they would hop Endeavour a third of the way around this little moon and deploy a second station. Then take another hop, to deliver a third.

  It wasn’t bad enough that Aristophanes, orbiting so near Dark, precluded siting their sensor suites where above any rational planet they belonged: aboard synchronous satellites. Aristophanes also had an unhelpful rate of rotation; it didn’t present a constant face to the world below, as the Moon presented to Earth. Only with three well separated stations would some one of them at all times have the planet under observation. Each station had to store its readings until Dark’s rotation, the moon’s rotation, and the moon’s orbit combined to provide a line-of-site downlink opportunity to the settlement.

  After finishing on Aristophanes they would get to reprise the triple deployment on Aeschylus and again on Euripides. And on occasion, parts of Dark would still go unmonitored.

  Three fascinating little worlds, Antonio thought, sad that no one shared his fascination.

  While Dana, with a multimeter in hand, fussed over some calibration, Antonio wandered about gathering rocks for his collection. As feeble as was Aristophanes’ gravity, not even a klutz like him could trip off or leap free of it. He could, if he lost focus, bound high enough to spend a long while drifting back to the surface. And so he shuffled, sweeping aside ancient regolith with his boots, leaving sloppy troughs in his wake. His tracks shone paler than the undisturbed surface.

  “Almost done here,” Dana called. “How about you?”

  Done scuffing up the surface? Done collecting rocks? “Ready when you are.”

  They remained suited up for the jaunt to their next landing site, sparing themselves another round of checkouts. Here they were on the moon’s night side, with the planet half below the horizon. Antonio could still see clearly by—the word tickled him—Darklight.

  He helped Dana carry their second station to an area clear of stony rubble. While she configured the unit, he resumed pebble collecting. Here, too, the ruts left by his plodding gait were paler than the undisturbed surface.

  When, with an abrupt sneeze, Dana let fly the removable clasp of an access panel, he helped her search for it. When they gave up the fastener for lost, swallowed by the thick dust or hiding in the inky shadow of some boulder, he scavenged nuts and bolts for her from ship’s stores. He found a spare thermocouple when an instrument failed diagnostics; without accurate temperature readings here, they could not calibrate long-range readings they made of Dark. Then, having bagged and labeled every interesting-looking pebble in the vicinity, he tried to entertain himself by tracing geometric shapes in the dust with his boot tip.

  “Ready to move on?” Dana called.

  “Sure.”

  Their third landing returned them to sunlight and gave them a line of sight to the settlement. Dana called down.

  “How’s it going, Endeavour?” Blake answered, yawning. He had gray bags beneath his bloodshot eyes, and his beard looked overdue for a trim. Maybe a shearing.

  “Everything seems fine on this end,” Dana said.

  “With you, too, Antonio?”

  “Indeed. Apart from the inefficiency of it all.”

  “Don’t blame me. I didn’t put the moons there.” Arching an eyebrow, Blake leaned toward the camera. “What do you two crazy kids have planned, all unchaperoned?”

  Dana and Antonio exchanged glances.

  “Looking around a bit,” he said. That sounded frivolous, even to him. “Survey the…area for useful minerals.”

  “Getting finished,” Dana said firmly, “as fast as we can. Maybe a quick nap before the flight to Aeschylus.”

  “What is this nap thing of which you speak?” Blake yawned again. “Before you depart lovely Aristophanes, let’s run an end-to-end system test of at least one station.”

  “Copy that,” Dana said. “We’re at station three. From my end, everything is a go.”

  “Power…check,” Blake said. “Comm…ditto. Primary control…check. Moving on to the instruments. Radiometer…check. Scatterometer…check. High-res multispectral imager…looking good. Nice sharp image. Doppler radar…”

  As the recitation droned on, as motes glinted in the furrows of his aimless shuffling, Antonio’s thoughts wandered. Many instruments. Much data to come. And one Big Question.

  Rock strata and ice cores: each sample told a tale, and no two stories ever quite agreed. Dark was a living world, on which storms and weathering, quakes and floods, volcanoes and even meteor strikes had all left their marks.

  Read enough stories, though, and for all their idiosyncratic plot twists they confirmed what astrophysics predicted: that Dark experienced Milankovitch cycles. That the global climate had warmed and cooled, warmed and cooled, warmed and cooled, like clockwork, for as long—half a million years!—as the record could be reconstructed. That by its ancient rhythm, Dark was due, indeed, well into, a new warming era.

  How pronounced were the historical climate swings? Antonio refused to guess. To infer anything about past average global temperatures from such paleogeological proxies as ice cores, he would first need to calibrate modern ice cores against years, at the least, of direct temperature measurements.

  “Atmospheric sounder…check,” Blake continued. “Wideband, ground-penetrating radar…”

  Many, many instruments.

  And yet Antonio had his doubts whether, even working together, the sensors they deployed could resolve the anomaly in the geological record of the past few centuries. That the sensors could explain why the climate had been steadily cooling. Or that sensors would answer the Big Question.

  Just how frigid would Dark get?

  31

  At the soft scrape of approaching footsteps Carlos took a swig of vodka, then screwed shut the flask and stashed it inside a cabinet. He popped a breath mint into his mouth. The vodka was inferior, despite his best efforts. The mint tasted worse but smelled better.

  He was in no mood to be lectured about his drinking. If and when he chose to, he’d stop.

  Rikki loped through the lab door. Something about her (the berry-dark tan? the pouty lips? the long, high ponytail? the long legs in taut slacks?) reminded Carlos of a grad student he had had. And had and had and had. Very lithe and bendy, Helena was—and the more she fretted about her dissertation, the more imaginatively she strove to keep him happy. And so he, with a sigh or well-timed frown….

  Blake followed his wife into the room, spoiling Carlos’s fantasies. Then Antonio entered, more grizzled than ever. He and Dana were getting old.

  Face it, Carlos told himself. We all are.

  “Are you busy?” Blake asked.

  Carlos sat in an arc of active displays, of nanite memory readouts, program listings, electron-microscope scans, and design documents. Props, all of them. He said nothing.

  Blake grimaced. “Sorry, dumb question. Can you spare us a couple of minutes before we head to work?”

  Carlos gestured at nearby stools. “What’s up?”

  Rikki said, “I think Li is up to something.”

  To the best of Carlos’s knowledge, Li was always up to something. The challenge was ferreting out what and why. If he could accomplish either with any regularity, she would be in his power, not the other way around.

  “Up to what?” Carlos asked.

  “I don’t know.” Rikki frowned. “She’s been too agreeable.”

  I wish, Carlos thought. The thrashing Li had given him on the ship had been no fluke. He had not required a thi
rd lesson.

  He asked, “Agreeable about what?”

  “About support for possible terraforming.” Rikki finally dragged over a stool and sat. The other two stayed standing. “Yeah, I know how that sounds. The research program was my idea. But the weird thing, to me, anyway, is that Li hasn’t tried to limit the effort.”

  “Here’s a thought,” Carlos said. “Ignore whatever contributions, if any, the off-world sensors make to our understanding of the climate. They’ve already improved our weather forecasting. That will help our crops, and that’s something I’m sure Li cares about.” And because she let you plead for the deployment, you end up feeling indebted to her.

  And don’t suppose for an instant she won’t find a way to call in that debt.

  “Could be.” Blake pulled a scrap of thin wire from the jumble on a workbench, and began tying knots. “Or she imagines we’ll rein ourselves in. Fatigue has a wonderful ability to clarify priorities.”

  Rikki gave her husband a dirty look.

  Trouble in paradise? Carlos wondered. Hubby isn’t supportive enough of your science project? “What does this have to do with me?”

  “You know Li pretty well,” Rikki said delicately.

  You live together, she meant. You side with Li on the issues. You must understand her.

  Carlos thought, if you only knew.

  What he had with Li was a marriage of inconvenience. Hers was a cold beauty: look but don’t touch. And yet he stayed. He was the last available man in the universe—and the last available woman couldn’t care less. What did that say about him?

  She had him by the pride as much as by the balls. When he got into her pants, all too seldom, it was because she wanted his backing.

  Get inside Li’s head? That had yet to happen.

  “Do you plan on ever coming to the point?” Carlos asked.

  Rikki grimaced. “We want to know what else Li isn’t telling us.”

  Carlos countered, “Is she under some obligation to tell you what she’s thinking?”

  “No,” Blake said, still torturing his piece of wire. “But also yes.”

  “Pretend you broke it already.” Carlos plucked the much-knotted wire from Blake’s hands. “Yes or no. Which is it?”

  Rikki said, “As an individual, whatever Li thinks is her business. But in practice, she’s our leader. We all defer to her.”

  I could be convinced to defer to you, Carlos thought. Motivate me. Let’s see how bendy you can be.

  He said, “On our trek, to survive, we needed one sort of expertise. We deferred to Dana and properly so. I doubt Dana shared everything she was thinking, and I’ll bet we were happier for that. Rearing children and building a civilization? Those call for a different sort of expert. That’s Li.”

  “That’s Li,” Blake agreed. “However…”

  Antonio, who had been looking all around the lab, finally spoke. “I’ve been studying.”

  With Antonio’s eclectic interests, those studies might involve anything. Carlos gestured to his workbench. “Guys, your couple minutes are more than up.”

  “Aristophanes I had heard of,” Antonio said. “I didn’t know who Aeschylus and Euripides were.”

  “I don’t know if your interest is in moons or ancient Greek theater,” Carlos said. “Either way it can wait till tonight at dinner.” When I also won’t pay attention. “Isn’t there a crop somewhere that needs your attention?”

  “I became interested in ancient Greece,” Antonio went on. “And branched out from there. Are you familiar with…”

  “At dinner,” Carlos repeated.

  “Speaking of crops, why are you settled, all comfy, here in the lab?” Blake asked. “We could use a hand.”

  At transplanting a couple hundred potted apple, cherry, and pear seedlings from the greenhouse to the river delta. No thanks. “I’m doing something more critical.”

  “Figuring out how to mass-produce PFCs?” Rikki asked.

  Right. As if what the climate might be like a hundred years hence was time sensitive.

  “Nutrition related.” Carlos pointed to a nearby cage, in which mice sniffed curiously. “They don’t take up trace nutrients from diet as well as they should. I’m trying to tweak their nanites to compensate.”

  “Mouse nanites,” Rikki said. “That sounds urgent. I vote you save those for a rainy day.”

  Had the short-term forecast shown rain, Carlos would have waited to tamper with the tissue samples he’d shown to Li that morning.

  He half suspected from Li’s sly smile that she knew. That by agreeing he should investigate his anomaly, she was doing him a favor. Throwing him a bone.

  His other half guessed that she had planted the idea in the first place. That would explain the sly smile, too.

  Pissing him off yet further. It was Li he was angry at, but Li wasn’t here. And it was Li who had what he wanted.

  “Look,” Carlos said. “What affects the mice might well affect us. Or the children, or their children, some years hence. I propose to see what I can accomplish by tweaking nanites in the mice. Unless you prefer to make the children our guinea pigs.”

  Rikki flinched, as he had known she would.

  By the time they finally left, Carlos needed another drink.

  *

  Li’s grandma used to claim that one caught more flies with honey than with vinegar.

  Li eased herself out from under Carlos’s out-flung arm and leg, thinking he was more spider than fly, and more octopus than spider. And she had no interest in catching any of them, far less this arrested-development adolescent.

  With a snort Carlos flopped onto her side of the bed. The thick, coarse hair on his back disgusted her. He disgusted her.

  She stood for a long time, her eyes closed, beneath the hot, pulsating spray of the shower. The water carried away Carlos’s sweat and stench, but it couldn’t touch her nausea. Sex with Carlos was for the greater good, and only for the greater good, because from time to time he proved useful.

  As he had been today, bringing her a preview of the likely ambush that night at dinner.

  You couldn’t dignify the society here as an economy. They had no use for money. Whatever material goods they had were as readily produced for six people as for one. Carlos was too shallow and transparent to handle power, not that she would ever consider sharing power. The lone currency that remained was…favors.

  She didn’t feel dirty, exactly, nor degraded, but something. At an intellectual level, she even felt a touch of nobility, of self-sacrifice. Carlos had her body—when she permitted it—but never her. And he never would.

  So what was it she felt? Out of joint. Out of sorts. Decoupled from reality.

  How old would the girls need to be before they caught his eye?

  *

  Long ago and far away, in a municipal campaign that had been Li’s to lose—and she had—Li learned a hard lesson. Never let the other side choose the issue.

  So: while the peasants still dug into synthed meatloaf with real mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy, or glanced sidelong at the strawberry shortcake that waited on the serving cart, she brought up childrearing. Indirectly, to be sure. She had guessed Antonio’s digging into ancient Greece would lead him to Sparta and the education of its young, and Marvin had confirmed it. Antonio never bothered to conceal what he did with the AI.

  Whereas the more…informative of her interactions with Marvin were as secure as possible. Not in any conventional sense, because access controls and personal firewalls would have screamed of something to hide, but subtly veiled. Too bad such computing legerdemain far exceeded her skills.

  But not Carlos’s. Li fought down a shudder.

  The important thing was, she was prepared, if necessary, to discuss childrearing, and the relative virtues of Athens versus Sparta. She knew Antonio well enough, if it came to it, to sidetrack Antonio in a pointless meander through Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War.

  She saw no reason to let matters come to that.<
br />
  Li blotted her lips, folded and set down her napkin, and began. “With this spring’s planting almost complete, in the comparative lull before we begin harvesting, I propose that we expand the childcare center.”

  “So that we can crank out more children?” Rikki blurted out.

  “Interesting,” Li said. “I was going to say that as the children get older we’ll want separate dormitories for the boys and the girls. And I thought it would be nice to add an atrium, a little indoor park. But you’re quite right, Rikki. The same expansion will allow us to raise more. Thank you.”

  Rikki blinked. She had not foreseen her sarcasm getting deflected into a proposal. “That’s not what—”

  “About that,” Antonio interrupted.

  Antonio wasn’t the type to interrupt. Not unless he had something on his mind he was bound and determined to get out.

  It seemed Carlos had earned his pre-dinner favor.

  “If we could finish one topic before we move on to the next?” Li chided.

  “Of course,” Antonio said.

  “Marvin, my sketch, please.” Li slid back her chair to stand alongside the wall, which became a 3-D architectural rendering. “You see the enclosed area that I thought might serve as a garden or park. But maybe it’s too large an expanse for that.”

  She studied the wall display, pensive, giving the peasants time to make the idea their own. And maybe to set aside their nitpicking, since she had just proposed this touchy-feely expansion of the facility.

  “We could make a portion of that space an indoor playground,” Rikki offered.

  “Or maybe we should enclose only part of the area,” Dana said. “At some point the children have to get used to the outdoors.”

  Li let them natter on, with each suggestion making the project more grandiose and labor-intensive. A screened-in solarium into which even the youngest children could be brought on nice days for fresh air. A rock garden. A flower garden. An ever more extensive playground.