by Allan Kaster
“Everything’s fine,” I murmured in his ear. “Ricochet was designed for this kind of maneuver.”
Our safety harnesses held us tight to the wall netting. Below, Safir and Émeraude climbed up the floor, laughing and hooting. Long Meng tossed pillows at them.
Tré gripped my thumb, yanking as if it were a joystick with the power to tame the room’s spin. Then he shot me a live feed showing Ricochet’s chief astronautics officer, a dark-skinned, silver-haired woman with protective bubbles fastened over her eyes.
“Who’s that?” I asked, pretending I didn’t know.
“Vijayalakshmi,” Tré answered. “If anything goes wrong, she’ll fix it.”
“Have you met her?” I knew very well he had, but asking questions is an excellent calming technique.
“Yeah, lots of times.” He flashed a pointer at the astronaut’s mirrored eye coverings. “Is she sick?”
“Might be cataracts. That’s a normal age-related condition. What’s worrying you?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Why don’t you ask Long Meng about it?”
Long Meng was the Jewel Box’s physician. Ricochet-raised, with a facial deformity that thrust her mandible severely forward. As an adult, once bone ossification had completed, she had rejected the cosmetic surgery that could have normalized her jaw.
“Not all interventions are worthwhile,” she’d told me once. “I wouldn’t feel like myself with a new face.”
As a pediatric specialist, Long Meng was responsible for the health and development of twenty crèches, but we were her favorite. She’d decided to celebrate the boost with us. At that moment, she was dangling from the floor with Safir and Émeraude, tickling their tummies and howling with laughter.
I tried to mitigate Tré’s distress with good, old-fashioned cuddle and chat. I showed him feeds from the biodiversity preserve, where the netted megafauna floated in mid-air, riding out the boost in safety, legs dangling. One big cat groomed itself as it floated, licking one huge paw and wiping down its whiskers with an air of unconcern.
Once the boost was complete and we were back to our normal gravity regime, Tré’s indicators quickly normalized. The kids ran up to the garden to check out the damage. I followed slowly, leaning on my cane. One of the bots had malfunctioned and lost stability, destroying several rows of terraced seating in the open-air auditorium just next to our patch. The kids all thought that was pretty funny. Tré seemed perfectly fine, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d failed him somehow.
☼ ☼ ☼
The Jewel Box didn’t visit Mars. Martian habs are popular, their excursion contracts highly priced. The kids put in a few bids but didn’t have the credits to win.
“Next boost,” I told them. “Venus in four years. Then Earth.”
I didn’t mention Luna. I’d done my best to forget it even existed. Easy to do. Ricochet has almost no social or trade ties with Earth’s moon. Our main economic sector is human reproduction and development—artificial wombs, zygote husbandry, natal decanting, every bit of art and science that turns a mass of undifferentiated cells into a healthy young adult. Luna’s crèche system collapsed completely not long after I left. Serves them right.
I’m a centenarian, facing my last decade or two. I may look serene and wise, but I’ve never gotten over being the butt of my old friends’ jokes.
Maybe I’ve always been immature. It would explain a lot.
☼ ☼ ☼
Four years passed with the usual small dramas. The Jewel Box grew in body and mind, stretching into young adults of sixteen. All six—Diamant, Émeraude, Trésor, Opale, Safir, and Rubis—hit their benchmarks erratically and inconsistently, which made me proud. Kids are supposed to be odd little individuals. We’re not raising robots, after all.
As Ricochet approached, the Venusian habs began peppering us with proposals. Recreation opportunities, educational seminars, sightseeing trips, arts festivals, sporting tournaments—all on reasonable trade terms. Venus wanted us to visit, fall in love, stay. They’d been losing population to Mars for years. The brain drain was getting critical.
The Jewel Box decided to bid on a three-day excursion. Sightseeing with a focus on natural geology, including active volcanism. For the first time in their lives, they’d experience real, unaugmented planetary gravity instead of Ricochet’s one-point-zero cobbled together by centripetal force and a Steffof field.
While the kids were lounging around the rumpus room, arguing over how many credits to sink into the bid, Long Meng pinged me.
You and I should send a proposal to the Venusian crèches, she whispered. A master class or something. Something so tasty they can’t resist.
Why? Are you trying to pad your billable hours?
She gave me a toothy grin. I want a vacation. Wouldn’t it be fun to get Venus to fund it?
Long Meng and I had collaborated before, when our numbers had come up for board positions on the crèche governance authority. Nine miserable months co-authoring policy memos, revising the crèche management best practices guide, and presenting at skills development seminars. All on top of our regular responsibilities. Against the odds, our friendship survived the bureaucracy.
We spent a few hours cooking up a seminar to tempt the on-planet crèche specialists and fired it off to a bunch of Venusian booking agents. We called it “Attachment and Self-regulation in Theory and Practice: Approaches to Promoting Emotional Independence in the Crèche-raised Child.” Sound dry? Not a bit. The Venusians gobbled it up.
I shot the finalized syllabus to our chosen booking agent, then escorted the Jewel Box to their open-air climbing lab. I turned them over to their instructor and settled onto my usual bench under a tall oak. Diamant took the lead position up the cliff, as usual. By the time they’d completed the first pitch, all three seminars were filled.
The agent is asking for more sessions, I whispered to Long Meng. What do you think?
“No way.” Long Meng’s voice rang out, startling me. As I pinged her location, her lanky form appeared in the distant aspen grove.
“This is a vacation,” she shouted. “If I wanted to pack my billable hours, I’d volunteer for another board position.”
I shuddered. Agreed.
She jogged over and climbed onto the bench beside me, sitting on the backrest with her feet on the seat. “Plus, you haven’t been off this rock in twenty years,” she added, plucking a leaf from the overhead bough.
“I said okay, Long Meng.”
We watched the kids as they moved with confidence and ease over the gleaming, pyrite-inflected cliff face. Big, bulky Diamant didn’t look like a climber but was obsessed with the sport. The other five had gradually been infected by their crèche-mate’s passion.
Long Meng and I waved to the kids as they settled in for a rest mid-route. Then she turned to me. “What do you want to see on-planet? Have you made a wish list yet?”
“I’ve been to Venus. It’s not that special.”
She laughed, a great, good-natured, wide-mouthed guffaw. “Nothing can compare to Luna, can it, Jules?”
“Don’t say that word.”
“Luna? Okay. What’s better than Venus? Earth?”
“Earth doesn’t smell right.”
“The Sol belt?”
“Never been there.”
“What then?”
“This is nice.” I waved at the groves of trees surrounding the cliff. Overhead, the plasma core that formed the backbone of our hab was just shifting its visible spectrum into twilight. Mellow light filtered through the leaves. Teenage laughter echoed off the cliff, and in the distance, the steady droning wail of a fussy newborn.
I pulled up the surrounding camera feeds and located the newborn. A tired-looking cuddler carried the baby in an over-shoulder sling, patting its bottom rhythmically as they strolled down a sunflower-lined path. I pinged the baby’s biom. Three weeks old. Chronic gas and reflux unresponsive to every intervention strategy. Nothing to do but wait for
the child to grow out of it.
The kids summited, waved to us, then began rappelling back down. Long Meng and I met them at the base.
“Em, how’s your finger?” Long Meng asked.
“Good.” Émeraude bounced off the last ledge and slipped to the ground, wave of pink hair flapping. “Better than good.”
“Let’s see, then.”
Émeraude unclipped and offered the doctor their hand. They were a kid with only two modes: all-out or flatline. A few months back, they’d injured themselves cranking on a crimp, completely bowstringing the flexor tendon.
Long Meng launched into an explanation of annular pulley repair strategies and recovery times. I tried to listen but I was tired. My hips ached, my back ached, my limbs rotated on joints gritty with age. In truth, I didn’t want to go to Venus. The kids had won their bid, and with them off-hab, staying home would have been a good rest. But Long Meng’s friendship was important, and making her happy was worth a little effort.
☼ ☼ ☼
Long Meng and I accompanied the Jewel Box down Venus’s umbilical, through the high sulfuric acid clouds to the elevator’s base deep in the planet’s mantle. When we entered the busy central transit hub, with its domed ceiling and slick, speedy slideways, the kids began making faces.
“This place stinks,” said Diamante.
“Yeah, smells like piss,” said Rubis.
Tré looked worried. “Do they have diseases here or something?”
Opale slapped her hand over her mouth. “I’m going to be sick. Is it the smell or the gravity?”
A quick glance at Opale’s biom showed she was perfectly fine. All six kids were. Time for a classic crèche manager-style social intervention.
If you can’t be polite around the locals, I whispered, knocking my cane on the ground for emphasis. I’ll shoot you right back up the elevator.
If you send us home, do we get our credits back? Émeraude asked, yawning.
No. You’d be penalized for non-completion of contract.
I posted a leaderboard for good behavior. Then I told them Venusians were especially gossipy, and if word got out they’d bad-mouthed the planet, they’d get nothing but dirty looks for the whole trip.
A bald lie. Venus is no more gossipy than most habs. But it nurses a significant anti-crèche prejudice. Not as extreme as Luna, but still. Ricochet kids were used to being loved by everyone. On Venus, they would get attitude just for existing. I wanted to offer a convenient explanation for the chilly reception from the locals.
The group of us rode the slideway to Vanavara portway, where Engku, Megat, and Bruce were waiting. Under the towering archway, I hugged and kissed the kids, told them to have lots of fun, and waved at their retreating backs. Then Long Meng and I were on our own.
She took my arm and steered us into Vanavara’s passeggiata, a social stroll that wound through the hab like a pedestrian river. We drifted with the flow, joining the people-watching crowd, seeing and being seen.
The hab had spectacular sculpture gardens and fountains, and Venus’s point-nine-odd gravity was a relief on my knees and hips, but the kids weren’t wrong about the stench. Vanavara smelled like oily vinaigrette over half-rotted lettuce leaves, with an animal undercurrent reminiscent of hormonal teenagers on a cleanliness strike. As we walked, the stench surged and faded, then resurfaced again.
We ducked into a kiosk where a lone chef roasted kebabs over an open flame. We sat at the counter, drinking sparkling wine and watching her prepare meal packages for bot delivery.
“What’s wrong with the air scrubbers here?” Long Meng asked the chef.
“Unstable population,” she answered. “We don’t have enough civil engineers to handle the optimization workload. If you know any nuts-and-bolts types, tell them to come to Vanavara. The bank will kiss them all over.”
She served us grilled protein on disks of crispy starch topped with charred vegetable and heaped with garlicky sauce, followed by finger-sized blossoms with tender, fleshy petals over a crisp honeycomb core. When we rejoined the throng, we shot the chef a pair of big, bright public valentines on slow decay, visible to everyone passing by. The chef ran after us with two tulip-shaped bulbs of amaro.
“Enjoy your stay,” she said, handing us the bulbs. “We’re developing a terrific fresh food culture here. You’ll love it.”
In response to the population downswing, Venus’s habs had started accepting all kinds of marginal business proposals. Artists. Innovators. Experimenters. Lose a ventilation engineer; gain a chef. Lose a surgeon; gain a puppeteer. With the chefs and puppeteers come all the people who want to live in a hab with chefs and puppeteers, and are willing to put up with a little stench to get it. Eventually, the hab’s fortunes turn around. Population starts flowing back, attracted by the burgeoning quality of life. Engineers and surgeons return, and the chefs and puppeteers move on to the next proposal-friendly hab. Basic human dynamics.
Long Meng sucked the last drop of amaro from her bulb and then tossed it to a disposal bot.
“First night of vacation.” She gave me a wicked grin. “Want to get drunk?”
When I rolled out of my sleep stack in the morning, I was puffy and stiff. My hair stood in untamable clumps. The pouches under my eyes shone an alarming purple, and my wrinkle inventory had doubled. My tongue tasted like garlic sauce. But as long as nobody else could smell it, I wasn’t too concerned. As for the rest, I’d earned every age marker.
When Long Meng finally cracked her stack, she was pressed and perky, wrapped in a crisp fuchsia robe. A filmy teal scarf drifted under her thrusting jawline.
“Let’s teach these Venusians how to raise kids,” she said.
☼ ☼ ☼
In response to demand, the booking agency had upgraded us to a larger auditorium. The moment we hit the stage, I forgot all my aches and pains. Doctor Footlights, they call it. Performing in front of two thousand strangers produces a lot of adrenaline.
We were a good pair. Long Meng dynamic and engaging, lunging around the stage like a born performer. Me, I was her foil. A grave, wise oldster with fifty years of crèche work under my belt.
Much of our seminar was inspirational. Crèche work is relentless no matter where you practice it, and on Venus it brings negative social status. A little cheerleading goes a long way. We slotted our specialty content in throughout the program, introducing the concepts in the introductory material, building audience confidence by reinforcing what they already knew, then hit them between the eyes with the latest developments in Ricochet’s proprietary cognitive theory and emotional development modelling. We blew their minds, then backed away from the hard stuff and returned to cheerleading.
“What’s the worst part of crèche work, Jules?” Long Meng asked as our program concluded, her scarf waving in the citrus-scented breeze from the ventilation.
“There are no bad parts,” I said drily. “Each and every day is unmitigated joy.”
The audience laughed harder than the joke deserved. I waited for the noise to die down, and mined the silence for a few lingering moments before continuing.
“Our children venture out of the crèche as young adults, ready to form new emotional ties wherever they go. The future is in their hands, an unending medium for them to shape with their ambition and passion. Our crèche work lifts them up and holds them high, all their lives. That’s the best part.”
I held my cane to my heart with both hands.
“The worst part is,” I said, “if we do our jobs right, those kids leave the crèche and never think about us again.”
We left them with a tear in every eye. The audience ran back to their crèches knowing they were doing the most important work in the universe, and open to the possibility of doing it even better.
☼ ☼ ☼
After our second seminar, on a recommendation from the kebab chef, we blew our credits in a restaurant high up in Vanavara’s atrium. Live food raised, prepared, and served by hand; nothing extruded or bulbed.
And no bots, except for the occasional hygiene sweeper.
Long Meng cut into a lobster carapace with a pair of hand shears. “Have you ever noticed how intently people listen to you?”
“Most of the time the kids just pretend to listen.”
“Not kids. Adults.”
She served me a morsel of claw meat, perfectly molded by the creature’s shell. I dredged it in green sauce and popped it in my mouth. Sweet peppers buzzed my sinuses.
“You’re a great leader, Jules.”
“At my age, I should be. I’ve had lots of practice telling people what to do.”
“Exactly,” she said through a mouthful of lobster. “So what are you going to do when the Jewel Box leaves the crèche?”
I lifted my flute of pale green wine and leaned back, gazing through the window at my elbow into the depths of the atrium. I’d been expecting this question for a few years but didn’t expect it from Long Meng. How could someone so young understand the sorrows of the old?
“If you don’t want to talk about it, I’ll shut up,” she added quickly. “But I have some ideas. Do you want to hear them?”
On the atrium floor far below, groups of pedestrians were just smudges, no individuals distinguishable at all. I turned back to the table but kept my eyes on my food.
“Okay, go ahead.”
“A hab consortium is soliciting proposals to rebuild their failed crèche system,” she said, voice eager. “I want to recruit a team. You’d be project advisor. Top position, big picture stuff. I’ll be project lead and do all the grunt work.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “It’s Luna.”
Long Meng nodded. I kept a close eye on my blood pressure indicators. Deep breaths and a sip of water kept the numbers out of the red zone.
“I suppose you’d want me to liaise with Luna’s civic apparatus, too.” I kept my voice flat.
“That would be ideal.” She slapped the table with both palms and grinned. “With a native Lunite at the helm, we’d win for sure.”
Long Meng was so busy bubbling with ideas and ambition as she told me her plans, she didn’t notice my fierce scowl. She probably didn’t even taste her luxurious meal. As for me, I enjoyed every bite, right down to the last crumb of my flaky cardamom-chocolate dessert. Then I pushed back my chair and grabbed my cane.
