he could pilot as well as she.
Now, the next decision: should she suit up and fetch Mum and Dad? It was no use trying to get them on the com; they probably had their suit-speakers off. Even though they weren't supposed to do that. And this wasn't an emergency; they would be decidedly annoyed if she buzzed in on them, and they found out it was just an unscheduled social call from a courier ship, even if it was Moira. They might be more than annoyed if they were in the middle of something important, like documenting a find or running an age assay, and she joggled their elbows.
Moira didn't say it was important She wouldn't have talked about errant brawns and birthday presents if what she carried was really, really earth-shaking.
Tia glanced at the clock; it wasn't more than a half hour until lunch break. If there was one thing that Pota Andropolous-Cade (Doctor of Science in Bio-Forensics, Doctor of Xenology, Doctor of Archeology), and her husband Braddon Maartens-Cade (Doctor of Science in Geology, Doctor of Physics in Cosmology, Associate Degree in Archeology, and licensed Astrogator) had in common, besides daughter Hypatia and their enduring, if absent- minded love for each other, it was punctuality. At precisely oh seven hundred every 'morning', no matter where they were, the Cades had breakfast together. At precisely twelve hundred, they arrived at the dome for lunch together. The AI saw that Hypatia had a snack at sixteen hundred. And at precisely nineteen hundred, the Cades returned from the dig for dinner together.
So in thirty minutes, precisely, Pota and Braddon would be here. Moira couldn't possibly land in less than twenty minutes. The visitor, or visitors; there was no telling if there was someone on board besides the brawn, the yet-un-met Tomas, would not have long to wait.
She trotted around the living room of the dome; picking up her books and puzzles, straightening the pillows on the sofa, turning on lights and the holoscape of waving blue trees by a green lagoon on Mycon, where her parents had met. She told the kitchen to start coffee, overriding the lunch program to instruct it to make selection V-l, a setup program Braddon had logged for her for munchies for visitors. She decided on music on her own; the Arkenstone Suite, a lively synthesizer piece she thought matched the holo-mural.
There wasn't much else to do, so she sat down and waited, something she had learned how to do very early. She thought she did it very well, actually. There had certainly been enough of it in her life. The lot of an archeologists' child was full of waiting, usually alone, and required her to be mostly self-sufficient.
She had never had playmates or been around very many children of her own age. Usually Mum and Dad were alone on a dig, for they specialized in Class One Evaluation sites; when they weren't, it was usually on a Class Two dig, Exploratory. Never a Class Three Excavation dig, with hundreds of people and their families. It wasn't often that the other scientists her parents' age on a Class Two dig had children younger than their teens. And even those were usually away somewhere at school.
She knew that other people thought that the Cades were eccentric for bringing their daughter with them on every dig, especially so young a child. Most parents with a remote job to do left their offspring with relatives or sent them to boarding schools. Tia listened to the adults around her, who usually spoke as if she couldn't understand what they were talking about She learned a great deal that way; probably more even than her Mum and Dad suspected.
One of the things she overheard, quite frequently in fact, was that she seemed like something of an afterthought. Or perhaps an 'accident', she'd overheard that before, too.
She knew very well what was meant by the 'afterthought or accident' comment. The last time someone had said that, she'd decided that she'd heard it often enough.
It had been at a reception, following the reading of several scientific papers. She'd marched straight up to the lady in question and had informed her solemnly that she, Tia, had been planned very carefully, thank you. That Braddon and Pota had determined that their careers would be secure just about when Pota's biological clock had the last few seconds on it, and that was when they would have one, singular, female child. Herself. Hypatia. Planned from the beginning. From the leave-time to give birth to the way she had been brought on each assignment; from the pressure-bubble glovebox that had served as her cradle until she could crawl, to the pressure-tent that became a crib, to the kind of AI that would best perform the dual functions of tutor and guardian.
The lady in question, red-faced, hadn't known what to say. Her escort had tried to laugh it away, telling her that the 'child' was just parroting what she'd overheard and couldn't possibly understand any of it.
Whereupon Tia, well-versed in the ethnological habits, including courtship and mating, of four separate sapient species, including homo sap., had proceeded to prove that he was wrong.
Then, while the escort was still spluttering, she had turned back to the original offender and informed her, with earnest sincerity, that she had better think about having her children soon, too, since it was obvious that she couldn't have much more time before menopause.
Tia had, quite literally, silenced that section of the room. When reproached later for her behavior by the host of the party, Tia had been completely unrepentant 'She was being rude and nasty,' Tia had said. When the host protested that the remark hadn't been meant for her, Tia had replied, 'Then she shouldn't have said it so loudly that everyone else laughed. And besides,' she had continued with inexorable logic, 'being rude about someone is worse than being rude to them.'
Braddon, summoned to deal with his erring daughter, had shrugged casually and said only, 'I warned you. And you didn't believe me.'
Though exactly what it was Dad had warned Doctor Julius about, Tia never discovered.
