“Salt water or fresh?” Carlos asked.
“The sea?” Blake said. “Brackish. Nothing we couldn’t purify, if needed. Any other questions?” He paused for a few seconds. “Moving on, then. The hike up to the caves takes forty-five minutes. Marvin, can you fast-forward, say fifty to one, and debounce the vid while you’re at it?”
“Done,” the AI said.
The vid zigzagged up the slope, dodging boulders and gullies. Every few seconds, at this accelerated pace, the camera turned to gaze back. From these higher elevations Dana saw that two rivers emptied into the sea. One river entered in a spectacular waterfall. The second river reached the sea through a sinuous gorge and a broad delta.
They “arrived” in less than a minute at a high cliff face. In the vid, Rikki paused in a cave mouth that was more or less triangular. With her height as a reference the opening measured about four meters wide at ground level, and three meters high.
“Marvin, resume real time,” Blake said.
“The front door,” Rikki-in-the-vid narrated. “And a mere hundred or so meters away”—the camera following as she pointed—“once we clear away the boulders, a ready-made landing field for Endeavour.”
Dana almost missed Carlos glancing at Li from the corner of his eye.
What’s she up to? Dana wondered.
At a walking pace, the vid went inside. Marvin adjusted the apparent illumination so smoothly that Dana almost didn’t notice the sputtering of one flare and the igniting of the next. They moved from one grotto to another. Twice, a soaring ceiling opened through a great shaft to the blue-green sky. Sinkholes, she guessed. One shaft looked at least a hundred meters deep!
It all reminded her of…what? Mammoth Cave. Now there was an ancient memory: she had been eight or nine when her family passed through Kentucky on holiday in North America. And just as in Mammoth Cave, moving deeper and deeper underground brought them to a rushing subterranean river. Sub-Darkian. Whatever.
“In-home running water,” Blake said. “Fresh, by the way.”
“What’s the inside temperature?” Antonio asked.
Blake said, “Away from the entrance and the air shafts? Call it twelve degrees Celsius. Often, that’ll be warmer than the surface.”
Twelve? Balmy by Martian standards, too.
“How about flooding?” Dana asked. “Any data?”
Blake grimaced. “My guess is it won’t be a problem, but that’s so outside my area of expertise. Here’s what I can say. The terrain outside slopes away from the entrance. The cliff overhangs the cave mouth, so rain runoff and snowmelt should hit downhill and keep heading away. Inside the entrance—”
“The one we’ve found thus far,” Rikki interrupted.
“Fair enough,” Blake said. “Inside this entrance, the cave floor trends downward. Its slope should carry away whatever rain and snowmelt does get inside. Supposing the cave has other, flood-prone entrances, there is a huge volume to fill before water can reach the upper chambers. And because the caves are dry now, we know the river drains somewhere. That’s also encouraging.”
As much as Dana wanted to believe, she wasn’t convinced. “How about rain coming through those sinkholes?”
Rikki said, “There are big chambers upslope of where the sinkholes empty. I’d think we’d want to keep to those upper reaches, at least till we’ve experienced a couple rainstorms.”
Antonio, his brow furrowed, was flipping holo frames on his datasheet.
Dana asked, “Antonio? If you have something to add?”
“I’ve been examining the vid up close. A violent torrent would sweep up big rocks and scar the cave walls. I haven’t seen grooves like…that. There aren’t many puddles. There’s little dried mud and none of it is high on the walls.”
“Then there’s no flooding risk?” Dana asked.
Antonio shrugged.
“And seismically?” Carlos asked. “Is the area stable?”
Blake said, “On our flyover, I didn’t notice any faults or indications of volcanism. And nothing inside these caves suggests otherwise.”
“Is that definitive?” Carlos persisted.
“You want definitive?” Blake glowered. “We don’t have seismometers. I doubt they’d be hard to build, but even on quake-prone territory they might give no indication for years. And minor shocks, if we did detect any, could be the norm everywhere on the planet.”
“Look at these…stalactites.” Rikki glanced at Blake for confirmation of the word. “They’re old, aren’t they?”
From what Dana remembered, stalactites grew maybe a few millimeters per year. Blake’s vid showed stalactites at least three meters long. A thousand years old, then, without a major temblor? In a few years, surely, they would learn to build here and would vacate the caves.
She liked those odds.
“That whole area must be old,” Antonio said. “Consider those sinkholes. There wasn’t much rubble beneath them. All that rock dissolved. Imagine how…long that process took.”
“It’s a new world,” Carlos retorted. “Can we really know?”
“But not new physics. I…think.”
The longer they analyzed and weighed, mulled and debated, the more Dana wondered, why is Li so quiet?
*
Li would never forget the night Mei Yeo won her seat in the California state assembly. Campaign aides and well-wishers thronging the tiny apartment. Anxious chatter and too loud laughter. The sudden hush whenever some volunteer observer texted an update from a polling place. Excitement mounting as the early returns broke Mother’s way. Exuberant cheering—and Mother’s tears of joy—when, long after midnight, her opponent called to concede.
Li had never seen her mother so happy.
And never did again. Anyone electable from the People’s Republic of Berkeley was too extreme to advance her agenda in Sacramento.
And so Li learned at a young age that the purpose of politics is power, not popularity. Mother never did get that lesson. She ran and won and was miserable, stymied, one dreary term after another, rather than admit to the futility of it all. Even after, in her bitterness, she drove Li’s father first to sluts and then to divorce.
Li had goals for the colony soon to be. And unlike Mother, she would see them come to fruition.
*
Would Dana never come to the point? Li wondered.
Finally, Dana did. “What do you say, folks? Have we found a home?”
“I’m ready for
