Dark Secret (2016)

by Edward M. Lerner

  The evening was unfolding better than Li had dared to hope.

  While the peasants bulldoze and landscape and build with concrete, she thought, the children remained hers. As Rikki had observed—and as quickly let drop—the enlarged childcare center about which they now all waxed eloquent, would give Li the capacity to speed up decanting of the embryos. With, alas, some encouragement to Carlos to speed up womb production.

  Li said, “Once the children have acclimated, they’ll be closer to ready to meet the real world. Suppose we put up a fence, enclosed the area around the center and its neighboring buildings. If we put locks on the doors the oldest children could roam around.” In answer to Rikki’s raised eyebrow, Li explained, “I don’t believe they’re old enough to play among the explosives and chemical stocks.”

  The eyebrow went back down.

  But as Blake and Dana grew giddy about the prospect of passing along the fine art of snowman construction, and with Antonio sidetracked into planning for a rock garden, Rikki’s eyes narrowed with suspicion.

  Too much, too fast, Li thought. The woman wasn’t entirely gullible.

  Li said, “I’m gratified by such enthusiasm, but we can’t do everything at once. We also have a PFC factory, or refinery, or whatever I should call it, to build.”

  And Rikki relaxed.

  Fool, Li thought.

  32

  In swooping arcs and soaring leaps, up and down through the clouds like a bucking bronco, Endeavour gyrated its way around the globe. The meandering course on its intricately constructed timeline did more than challenge Dana’s reflexes. By the time she returned home, ship and the moons’ observatories together would have compiled a thorough and precise global atmospheric survey, captured at more or less the same local time everywhere.

  Too bad the prescribed local time was midnight, because she would have enjoyed the view. She wasn’t enjoying the company.

  Blake had accomplished the impossible: making Antonio look chatty. He was making the rocks from Antonio’s collection look chatty.

  Dana sighed. Antonio had asked to come along, looking so kicked-puppy disappointed when she’d said no. And though she hadn’t lied about there being no time between collection points to gather southern-hemisphere rocks, and that this was fancy enough flying she should have a proficient copilot to spell her, neither had she been entirely honest with him.

  On her console, a timer ticked down the seconds to the next atmospheric sampling. A real-time holo showed her displacement in three dimensions from the target collection point. As the high-altitude winds buffeted the ship, her hands danced over the controls to make endless course corrections.

  A single moon above the horizon—everywhere—could have captured the data they sought. The moons did not cooperate like that, and so here she was. As for precision, computer-controlled navigation, forget it. Only all three moons in sight would have served to triangulate the ship’s position. And so, as one moon or another sank below the horizon, as clouds turned her course into a game of peek-a-boo with the stars, as the buffeting of the jet stream befuddled the autopilot and played havoc with the short-range projections from inertial navigation, she fell back, time and again, upon the most basic navigational system of all: seat of the pants.

  If the outing had been a summer evening’s stroll through Kensington Gardens, she still would have left Antonio back in the settlement. She needed some one-on-one time with Blake.

  “Collection on my mark,” she announced. “Three. Two. One. Mark.”

  “Mark,” Blake repeated. As he had for the past twenty or so collections.

  “Throw me a bone,” Dana said. “Are you satisfied? Dissatisfied? How does the data look so far?”

  “Fine,” Blake allowed.

  “And the data is telling us…what?”

  “Nighttime temperature and PFC trace concentration profiles—”

  “By altitude on a grid of closely-spaced points surrounding the planet.” Dana sighed again. “I know what we’re collecting, and why. Is the data revealing anything useful? Is it what you expect?”

  “I don’t know. Rikki doubted the raw measurements themselves would reveal much; especially not point by point. It’s all input to a global circulation model. Ask me after Antonio and Marvin have taken a crack at the full dataset, when we know how well the PFCs have dispersed.”

  The nav holo updated to show the way to the next collection point; Dana put her ship into another steep climb. “You’re not very talkative these days.”

  “Well, you know.”

  “No!” Dana snapped, surprising herself. “I don’t know, because you’ve locked me out. I thought we were friends.”

  “We are.” After a long while, he said, “I’m not a deep thinker, you know.”

  Deeper than you credit yourself. “What’s your point?”

  “Except for Rikki, we’re introverts, if not loners and misfits. Have you noticed that?”

  “Uh-uh.” Hawthorne had, though, in dossiers the existence of which Dana still kept to herself. More than once she had almost deleted the files. Other than the occasional piloting gig, her job was farming. She had no reason to keep the personnel data—and less inclination to share any of it with Li. “Not deep, you say?”

  “I couldn’t make a puddle jealous.”

  On Dana’s console, a timer initialized and began counting down, showing when she should aim to reach the next collection point. She slowed the ship. “So, introverts and loners. What of it?”

  Blake busied himself checking something on his console. With not answering. “My mom and dad were like oil and water. My sister, the raging extrovert, and I were more like oil and matches. The neighbors didn’t offer many shining examples of stability, either. As for the broader community where I grew up, it was a mess. One-parent households were the norm. The schools sucked. To belong to something the choices were high-school sports, if you had talent, which I didn’t, or the gangs.”

  “So you stuck to yourself.”

  “More like, I kept my head down. Then the oddest thing happened. I was either ten or eleven. Standard years, I mean. It was late summer, and I was getting the mandatory preschool physical from the family doctor. Doc Sullivan was this upbeat guy with a friendly, booming voice. Jovial, yet managing not to be obnoxious. He asked me some questions about school.

  “Whatever he asked and I answered, he decided, and I couldn’t tell you why, that I had potential. Then and there, he zapped two old college texts from his datasheet to my little-kid pocket comp. Both books were decades out of date and of no use to him, but I didn’t know that.”

  “And that’s why you became an engineer,” Dana guessed. She had no idea what this had to do with, well, anything. “Nice.”

  Blake laughed. “Who gives a college text on biochemistry to a ten-year-old? It was Greek to me. No, less. At least I’d heard of Greece.

  “And yet that is how I ended up an engineer. You’d like to believe it was because this engaging, successful professional saw potential in me. Did the gesture inspire me? Yeah, for the couple of weeks before the cops hauled Doc Sullivan away. My last, best hope of a role model had defrauded Federal Health Service of millions.

  “So he set my career course, all right. He decided for me that, whatever I did when I grew up, it would involve machines, not people. Not that I understood engineering then, beyond that machines, maybe, could be fixed.”

  “I’m not buying you as a loner,” Dana said, still at a loss where this might be going. “You can charm the pants off people.”

  “Off young women, anyway. That doesn’t make me a people person. It makes—made—me a calculating, cynical, manipulative jerk. I want to believe I’ve grown since then.”

  The pieces fell into place. “So this is about Rikki.”

  “Of course”—his voice cracked—“it’s about Rikki. Pretty much the first thing I knew about her, back on the cruise where we met, was how eager she was to get home. How much she had missed her family while she’
d been away at grad school. It was real closeness, too, not part of some sitcom. And yet more amazing, soon enough they weren’t her family, but our family.

  “So here you and I are: loners. Carlos, it embarrasses me to admit, is much as I once was, if not as smooth. Antonio is, well, you know.”

  “I know,” Dana said. And a dear, regardless, in his own way.

  “Li, though…I can’t read her.”

  “Me, either.” At the end, Hawthorne had had only hours to round out the crew for this mission. Li’s file, and Carlos’s for that matter, was a short dump from the public record, little more than a résumé. “I’d bet that shrinks learn to mask their feelings.” And politicians, too, only Li had never, to Dana’s knowledge, volunteered to anyone here that facet of her past.

  “Heads up.” Blake’s voice changed tone. “Radar shows a high mountain range.”

  “Yeah, I see it, but thanks. We’ll have almost a klick of clearance. “You left out Rikki.”

  “She’s not like you or me or any of the rest of us. She is a people person. I remember what happened back home. I do think occasionally about everyone we left behind. When it happens, I’m sad, but then I get over it.

  “But Rikki? She grieves, still. For her family most of all.

  “That she can’t continue her family? And the rejection by the kids here? It’s killing her, Dana.”

  At the catch in Blake’s voice, Dana glanced away from the console. He was trembling.

  In an anguished tone, not much above a whisper, he said, “I don’t know how to fix this.”

  Dana didn’t know how to fix him. “It’s been years since you learned Rikki can’t safely get pregnant. She still hasn’t come to terms with it?”

  “Worse.” Blake hesitated. “If Li gave her blessing today, I think Rikki would be afraid to try. I think she’s lost faith in herself as a parent.”

  “That’s…ridiculous.” Only Dana felt that inadequacy, too. More and more, whenever she swung by the childcare center. With sixty-four more children almost to term.

  She hadn’t admitted those feelings—failings—to anyone, either. She didn’t know that she could.

  For the remainder of the flight, she and Blake were both quiet.

  *

  Wearing a big, welcoming smile, Dana closed the distance to the children’s white picket fence. From afar you couldn’t tell that the pickets were poured concrete, not fashioned from wood. From afar, you didn’t see that the pickets stood two meters tall.

  Drawing near, seeing the children through the pickets, the fence looked like a stockade.

  “Kids grow,” Li had said. “We don’t want to rebuild the fence every couple years.” It sounded reasonable. Most everything she said sounded reasonable.

  The day was sunny and crisp. Perfect football weather Blake had declared it when they landed. But this being Dark, the few hints of fall colors came from inside the greenhouse and on saplings in clay planters glimpsed through the fence.

  Dana flashed a hand signal. On a pole just inside the gate a camera bobbed: Marvin acknowledging that he had seen her. As she approached the gate, at which the handprint-reader lamp flashed ready, Li opened the gate from inside.

  “Hi,” Li said. “Did you have a good flight?”

  “It had its ups and downs.”

  Dana slipped inside, the gate falling locked and shut behind her with a loud click. It must have rained while she and Blake were off flying, because the green carpet squished beneath her boots. Kids should play on grass, she thought sadly, although no one could spare the time to keep such a large expanse mowed, or to haul and spread the truckloads of river-delta silt a lawn would have required. Had there been time, no one would have permitted children around the quantities of fertilizer the lifeless silt would have needed applied several times each year.

  Children clambered over the playground equipment. Younger kids with shovels and pails dug in sandboxes. Dark lacked soil, but it had plenty of sand. As she had sensed from the distance, several of the bigger kids were in the tiny garden plot. Picking tomatoes, apparently. All the boys and girls wore pants and sweaters, dressed alike except for color. Red for the oldest, blue for the cohort a year younger, green for those a year younger still.

  Like uniforms. Why had she never noticed that?

  The yard, for all the dozens of little ones, was quiet and orderly; the expressions on so many of the young faces seemed purposeful rather than playful. But on what basis could she form expectations? Only ancient memories of her own childhood.

  Dana walked to the garden. She leaned forward, hand outstretched to tousle Eve’s hair.

  Eve scuttled away, circling behind a row of potted tomato plants, to shelter behind Li.

  “Excuse me, Eve,” Dana said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “Tell Ms. Dana you’re sorry,” Li directed.

  “No need,” Dana said hastily. “Honey, how are you doing? Are you enjoying the nice weather?”

  Eve buried her face in Li’s back. “I’m sorry, Ms. Dana,” she mumbled.

  Her brothers (for lack of a more fitting term), had sidled close together.

  “How are you big boys today?” Dana asked.

  “Fine, Ms. Dana,” Castor said. Pollux, his lower lip trembling, held out a tomato.

  “Run along,” Li told them. “Take inside what you’ve picked, and then see if Mr. Carlos could use your help.”

  Pails swinging at their sides, the three scampered toward the childcare center.

  “What was that about?” Dana asked Li.

  “What do you mean?”

  Around the sandboxes most of the children had stopped their play. Several stared, wide-eyed, at Dana. She said, “Look at them.”

  “Kids watch adults. That’s part of how they learn. They don’t see you often, is all.”

  Only to Dana these children looked wary, not curious. “And Eve? I would swear she was afraid of me. Pollux, too.”

  Li sighed exasperatedly. “Shy. Eve was shy, Dana. Pollux, too. Kids sometimes are. Now look what he gave you, and what you did with it.”

  Dana looked. Her hand was wet and sticky. She had squeezed the tomato into goo; juice and pulp dribbled between her fingers.

  “I guess I’m tense,” she admitted. No, scared shitless that Rikki was right. That apart from Li, none of them knew what they were doing. “Maybe the kids picked up on that.”

  “They did,” Li said flatly.

  “Sorry about that.” More sorry than you can imagine.

  “Go home,” Li said. “Take the afternoon off. There’s something important I’ll be bringing up after dinner.”

  *

  “We’ve reached a major milestone,” Li said.

  Around the dinner table, the peasants studied her with curiosity. Carlos wore a relaxed grin, from a beer or three too many rather than from foreknowledge.

  “Every day is a new challenge,” Li continued. “Every day has its chores. But look what we’ve accomplished. Wheat, corn, and barley crops ripening for the upcoming harvest, and enough freeze-dried bacterial mat to see us through bad weather. Remote-sensing instruments placed on the moons. Our very own climate-improvement program.”

  “And ever more thriving children,” Carlos added. Giving Li credit, predictably. With hopes, no doubt, of…reward later.

  “And thriving children,” Li repeated.

  She had set the dining-room walls to a peaceful seascape, a gentle froth of combers rushing up and swirling back down a sparkling white sand beach. In a cerulean sky, behind pink wisps of cloud, a tomato-red sun kissed the sea. Waves whispered, and tropical breezes sighed through palm trees, and sandpipers piped. Restful. Hopefully lulling. Even Carlos and Rikki, neither of whom had ever visited Earth or experienced such a sunset, must feel it.

  The common experiences of thousands of generations embedded themselves in the genetic code. Not as simple as memory, genetic programming recorded the common heritage of the species. Genetic programming instilled fear of t
he dark, when predators hunted and proto-humans were wise to hide, and of predators yet unseen. Genetic programming suggested, too, what was not a threat and when—as in this case—it was safe to relax.

  That basic neural hardwiring would not be denied. So be at peace, my peasants. Be at peace.

  “Many accomplishments,” Dana agreed. “But Li, what is this milestone you mentioned?”

  “Specialization. I eat by the sweat of your brows. We stay healthy in large measure by Carlos’s steady tweaking of our nanites. And if I may say so, the children continue to benefit from my attention.”

  “You may say so,” Antonio said.

  “The milestone,” Li continued, “is this. That we’re ready to recognize and make formal the patterns that are already working so well for us.”

  “What patterns?” Blake asked.

  “Job specialization.” Li counted silently to three. “Including those of us who will interact with the children.”

  Raw emotions scrabbled and jostled behind Rikki’s eyes. For several long seconds Li thought relief would win, but guilt chased it away. Maternal instincts were hardwired, too.

  Rikki swallowed hard. “We all help with the children.”

  “Perhaps that should change,” Li said. “Not everyone is as…well-suited.”

  Not everyone is successful at it. The children don’t recoil from everyone. You know who you are.

  There was pain now in Rikki’s eyes. In Dana’s, too. Because Li was good at what she did. And when the two women conceded, their men would go along.

  “Is it even possible?” Rikki asked. (Hoping for which answer? Li couldn’t tell.) “Even with six of us, sometimes watching the children is draining. How could you alone handle it?”

  “Yes, it’s possible,” Li asserted. “But it won’t be just me. The children are comfortable around Carlos, too.” And, you are free to infer, with no one else. “And Marvin, of course, who never sleeps. And Eve and the twins are old enough to help. They want to help.”

  “Children raising children,” Blake said dubiously.