Not that Marvin’s knowledge wasn’t useful: it showed they had dodged a bullet. Their seeds, all varieties gengineered for Mars, fixed nitrogen directly from the atmosphere. Blake hadn’t taken biology since high school, so maybe he’d forgotten that unmodded crops often depended upon nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil. More likely, he had never known it in the first place. Inner-city curricula didn’t dwell much on farming.
Rikki plodded along behind the tractor, hand-planting the field row by row and labeling test plots. When she had tired of stooping and he of the shuddering of the tractor, they swapped places. The windborne silt by then had turned them both a dusky gray.
Except by shouting, they couldn’t make themselves understood over the roar of the tractor. He resented the noise and fumes, but the ridiculous internal-combustion engine was dependable and easy to maintain. There was no use complaining about it.
As there was no use complaining that babies, like wheat and corn and even slime ponds, must be scheduled just so, the winter, labor-intensive crop of newborns timed to arrive after the harvest of the weather-dependent crops. Or about the cookie-cutter “parenting” largely outsourced to Marvin.
Only realism did nothing to ease the pain. He had seen the hurt again that morning in Rikki’s eyes. The yearning, the ache, the need to bear her own child. Their child.
Weeks earlier, he had sought out Li to ask about it. In private, because Li was the last person with whom Rikki would share anything personal….
*
“Bad idea,” Li had told Blake.
“The gravity?” he had guessed.
“The gravity. It causes constant skeletal strain, wear and tear on the joints, and constriction of the blood vessels.
“Forty percent excess weight is nothing to sneeze it. That’s for you and me. For Rikki it’s almost four times the weight her body developed to handle. Even with nanites and meds, it’s a struggle to keep her blood pressure controlled. Pregnancy would only exacerbate the problem.”
“It would be uncomfortable?”
Li had shaken her head. “Quite possibly fatal.”
“Jesus! What about the girls who’ll be born here? When they’re old enough?”
“I’m hopeful they’ll be able to carry babies to term, but we’ll have to wait and see. By then, maybe, I’ll have a better handle on the situation, and better meds.”
All the sacrifice, everything that the six of them had endured…it might still be all for naught? That was too horrifying to face, too cosmic. The personal tragedy was heartbreaking enough.
With a lump in his throat, he had asked, “What do I tell Rikki?”
“What I would tell her, if she’d been the one to consult me. The truth.”
“I can’t. It would destroy her.”
Li had stood there, head tipped, lost in thought. “There is another possibility. We may need to go this way eventually, anyway.”
“Tell me,” he had demanded.
“IVF. In vitro fertilization. Afterward we transfer the embryo to one of the wombs for gestation.”
“Then I’ll say that.”
“Okay.” It had come out skeptically.
“Rikki wants a baby. We want a baby.”
“Uh-huh.”
Only Li had been right. When Blake broached the IVF option, Rikki had stormed from their home, slamming the door behind her.
*
Suddenly glad for the engine’s roar, Blake tried to lose himself in work.
Every selection of grain type, every depth of planting, every concentration of chemical fertilizer or chicken feces, was another experiment—performed with irreplaceable seeds. But trial and error was their only way to learn if and how fertilized silt would grow crops.
He told himself that Dark had neither weeds nor plant parasites. And, having once mentioned those advantages to Rikki, he brooded about her rejoinder: for now.
Evolution abhorred an ecological vacuum.
Late that morning Antonio arrived on the opposite bank of the nearby river channel, driving the colony’s other tractor, to scatter diaspores from Carlos’s latest batch of designer lichens. Even the most advanced terraforming lichen varieties Endeavour had brought, gene-tweaked to tolerate the ubiquitous arsenic, would not produce useful depths of true soil sooner than in decades. A glacial pace, for an all but glacial planet….
But Carlos and Antonio kept at it, as Blake and Rikki would on the silt plain, because the only large-scale food-producing alternative was the bacterial ponds. If nothing else, the lichens brought welcome splashes of color to the dreary countryside.
Blake hated farming, if he could so dignify their as yet futile toiling in the dirt, but he loathed working the slimy ponds. That festering blanket of scum. That fetid, pungent stench.
From the memory alone, he all but puked.
The tractor sputtered and stopped. From its seat, Rikki called, “I’m ready to switch places again.”
“I’m ready for lunch,” he countered, abusing the meanings of both ready and lunch.
Antonio had abandoned his tractor to handpick specimens from a nearby gravel deposit. He been gathering rocks, everywhere he went, since the onset of spring.
Blake had not asked why, lacking the energy for another of the esoteric circumlocutions that with Antonio too often passed for an explanation. An answer might start with the Big Bang.
“Join us for lunch?” Blake shouted, gesturing at the bobbing pontoon bridge that linked the delta to the shore.
Antonio looked up, not quite in Blake’s direction. “No thanks. I’ve got things to do.”
“What’s with the rocks?” Rikki called.
“You’ll be sorry you asked,” Blake said sotto voce.
But all Antonio offered, with his attention already returned to his collecting, was, “I don’t have postage stamps. Or…blueberries.”
*
Through the colony’s array of safety cameras, Li watched the peasants traipsing home from their day’s toil. She never called them peasants, not aloud, but how else did
