“Why?”
“What do you mean, why?”
“I mean, what was their reason for helping us? Did they just like us humans, or what?”
“The Keeper knows, kid, I don’t.”
“Who’s the Keeper?”
“It’s just a saying the Gentherans have. Anything nobody knows, they say, ‘The Keeper knows.’ Then you say, ‘Well, ask the Keeper,’ and they say, ‘You can only reach the Keeper by walking seven roads at once.’
“Nobody can do that,” I said.
“That’s the point. It’s like saying, when hell freezes over or when pigs fly. Pigs are extinct animals that didn’t have wings…”
“I know that,” I said, somewhat offended.
“Anyhow, the Gentherans insisted we set up one government for Earth, and one government for the off-Earth humans, because if some predatory race found us, all our political subdivisions would get eaten for lunch. ISTO only deals with one government per planet or group of planets, and if a planet doesn’t have one government, the Combines just swallow all the local governments up. That threat scared people badly enough that Earthgov got voted in very quickly, and as soon as the colonies were running, they set up Dominion Central Authority. DCA has representatives from each of the six colonies plus one each from the little stations on Luna and Mars, plus a bunch of Gentherans, because they were responsible for helping set up the colonies.”
“Someone told me you’re the Mars delegate to Dominion.”
“I am that. I’ve been here since the Gentherans picked Mars as the site for Dominion Central Authority and offered to build the DCA structure, around 2067.”
“That’s the same year my mother went to Phobos, with her parents. She was ten years old. My father got to Phobos fifteen years later, and I was born in 2084.”
Chili Mech shuddered. “Lucky man. He got out just in time. The eighties were bad years!”
“How do you mean?” I sat on the floor and crossed my legs, looking up at the little woman. “I never heard about that?”
“Well, 2080 was the year the Mercan Combine discovered the human colony on Thairy. They showed up in Earth orbit. You’ve seen the ships. Compared to the little Gentheran ships, they’re enormous, like planetoids! They said they were from Interstellar Trade Organization. I can remember Earth people being all bug-eyed like kids at a carnival, here the splendid ETs were, come to solve our problems.
“Well, that didn’t last long, just until the Combine and the Federation had a chance to examine Earth and decide it wouldn’t be worth their while to negotiate a trade agreement because we had nothing to trade. Earth was falling apart, and it was too late to fix anything.”
She pursed her lips, as though about to spit. “Then they dropped the bomb. Since we were out on the edge of nowhere, a very expensive destination to get to, they were planning to hang around in orbit until the imminent collapse occurred and mine the wreckage for scrap after everyone was dead.”
My mouth was open, as it had been for some time. “They said it just like that?”
Chili Mech looked over my head into space, slowly nodding. “Just like that, with nine-tenths of Earth’s population watching and listening. After we died, their retrieval robots would take the dead humans to make protein meal for their livestock, and their scavenger robots would take all metals.”
“What happened?”
“What do you think happened with half a dozen huge ships, blocking off half the sky! Those prancing K’Famir with all the extra arms and legs! The dirty, hissing Hrass, the boneheaded Frossians, the sneery Elos? Arrogant as all hell, while Earthgov’s people practically licked their feet! Nobody on Earth had done anything about Earth’s situation for at least two centuries, but now everyone was scared spitless.”
I waited, finally urging, “Then?”
“Earthgov sent a delegation to ask if there wasn’t something, anything the Combine or Federation would do to help us. The Federation and the Combine just hung up there, acting totally uninterested for a while, but finally, when we were just about to give up hope, they offered to stave off our collapse by buying the only surplus produce Earth had: people. They said they’d buy healthy ten-to-fifty-year-old people from us on fifteen-year labor contracts, and they’d even transport them to human colonies once the contracts expired.
“By that time, everyone on Earth was so scared that any way out would have seemed like a good idea. Earthgov consulted with the Gentherans and accepted the offer.” She stared at me, really looking at me. “By all that’s holy, you’ve seen their ships going back and forth to Earth, girl. Didn’t you ever wonder what the ships were carrying?”
I flushed. I hadn’t. It was just about the only thing I had never wondered about. “No. I didn’t. What did they buy people with? Money?”
“What good would that do? They buy humans with water.”
I thought about that. “What happened then?”
Chili regarded me doubtfully, eyes half-lidded. “Well, that’s a touchy subject. You better ask your mom about that.”
“She doesn’t talk to me.”
“Ask her anyhow. You got a right to know.”
Later, even though Chili wouldn’t say anything more about the eighties, she did talk about other things. She said the Mars program was being phased out because there wasn’t enough water on Mars to support a real colony, much less enough to relieve Earth’s water shortage.
“Didn’t people find out how much water there was when they first came up here?” I asked her.
Chili grinned. “Somehow the Gentherans ‘made a mistake’ in their calculations. They told us there was a lot more water than we’ve ever found. Some say the Gentherans always meant to have Dominion headquarter on Mars, so they phonied the data that supported the settlement effort until they got it built. We didn’t find out the truth about the water until just recently. In fact, nobody else knows the truth about the water except
