Through sensors wired into the cribs, Marvin watched, listened, and sniffed ceaselessly for any hints of distress. From displays at the foot of each crib the AI’s smiling animation would be beaming down, crooning or speaking soothingly to each infant as it (or, rather, Li’s verbal generalities turned by Carlos into updated programming) deemed appropriate.
Antonio, passed out on the room’s rumpled cot, an out-flung arm trailing on the floor, remained on duty for whenever the AI needed hands or suspected a problem. To judge by the line-up of empty formula bottles on the table along the wall, and the overflowing diaper pails, Antonio had had a long night.
As Rikki reached for the doorknob, Blake said, “Don’t. You’ll wake Antonio.” Who, like Dana, was old enough to be a grandparent. In a fairer world, neither would be expected to pull all-nighters like this.
Rikki jerked back her hand, looking sad and relieved. “It’s so…cold.”
Impersonal, she meant. “I know,” he told her.
And yet inescapable. He nudged her around another corner and they peeked in on the toddlers. Marvin kept watch here, too.
Most here were awake, playing and babbling in their cribs. By accident or with insight, a few had opened the refrigerated compartments in their cribs and helped themselves to formula bottles. Antonio would be along soon—roused by Marvin, if need be—to help those who hadn’t managed to feed themselves.
And to change diapers. Lots of diapers.
Rikki reached for the knob of this door, too. Once inside, she wouldn’t leave without first rocking, cuddling, and cooing over each of the twenty-six.
If any child would let her. A haunted expression told Blake she, too, feared their recoiling.
“We need to get a move on,” he said, not meeting her eyes.
Around the final corner they looked in on the oldest children. This room had no cribs; mattresses resting directly on thickly padded carpet hid much of the floor.
Eleven of these children were just shy of three standard years. Some played, as often side by side as with one another. A few rammed around, bouncing off padded walls and each other. Three sat in a corner staring at an animation with images of colored toys. When Blake pressed an intercom button, Marvin was teaching numbers. From other wall displays, Marvin’s avatars praised, cajoled, and chided its charges.
Then there was the oldest cohort. The guinea-pig generation.
Blond, blue-eyed Eve, by almost a day the grande dame of the Dark-born, was loading a tray with snacks. Castor, burly and intense, was piling plastic blocks. Pollux, his black hair a tousled mess, frowning, sat hunched on one of the room’s tiny toilets.
The trio struck Blake as wise—or was it wizened?—beyond their five standard years.
He tried to remember when he had seen any of them smile. And he pretended not to notice Rikki brushing a tear from her cheek.
This…factory was no way to raise children, but how else could six adults cope? And duty demanded they bring yet more children into the world, while growing food for everyone.
“Let’s get some breakfast,” he said gently.
Rikki nodded, too choked up to speak.
When they retraced their steps through the gallery, Antonio was up, yawning, a red-faced, bawling baby in his arms. From another room, furtive scrabbling sounds announced that at least some of the lab mice had awakened, too. But not Li: they found her in the ICU, dozing in a chair, her mouth fallen open. Her patient, asleep in the room’s single occupied isolette, was sticklike, its joints misshapen. Li had not had any explanation beyond, “It happens.”
She works harder than all of us, Blake thought. And she can’t leave the settlement, can’t ever stray more than a few steps from the children.
The moment of empathy almost kept Blake from not dreading the remainder of his day.
*
Breakfast was as best-ignored as usual. He and Rikki scarcely overlapped with Carlos and Dana, heading out that morning on a quick flight to gather more phosphates. Carlos swigged from a tall glass; Blake guessed that the synthed orange juice was laced with vodka.
“We can’t have too much phosphate,” Li had said again and again, when she wasn’t pushing them to stockpile other minerals and trace elements. “If Endeavour ever breaks down…”
And she was right, although phosphates half-filled their largest storehouse.
Until recently it had been a full warehouse. The crush of snow from the winter’s final storm had buckled the roof; three days of torrential rain only the week before had washed away half their reserves.
Blake missed robins as the first sign of spring.
He and Rikki packed lunches, grabbed a tractor from the garage, and trundled down Main Street. Past storehouses and workshops. Past a massive, deeply buried bunker, showing only its roof and slanted double doors. It safeguarded their most precious treasures: embryo banks, both human and animal, and seed bags, and Marvin’s servers. Past their other bunker, housing a fusion reactor. Past the ethanol-fueled, steam-powered generator that backstopped the reactor, and the ethanol refinery. Past the chemical fertilizer plant and its noxious odor. Past the chicken coop, with its clacking, clamoring occupants and their worse than noxious stench. Past the glass-walled hydroponics conservatory and its touches of terrestrial greenery. Past the foundry in which he had fabricated, among many things, parts for this tractor.
Past twelve headstones and twelve heartbreakingly tiny graves.
Gravity’s effects on gestation? Local toxins? Radiation damage from the long voyage? Li couldn’t always tell, and that meant they could expect to lose more children.
They drove in silence down to the silt plains.
To the roar of the tractor engine, Blake began tilling. The throbbing of the motor ran up the steering column, out the steering wheel, into sore hands, aching arms, and tense shoulders. Despite gloves and bandages, he kept popping blisters faster than med nanites could heal them. He felt about a hundred years old.
The stiff morning breeze off the Darwin Sea whipped across the Spencer River Delta, pelting him with grit and roiling the dust plume that trailed behind the tractor for a good fifty meters. Should he plow
