Dana had her ship to pilot, to keep them supplied with phosphates and metals and everything else not readily found or mined on the ground. Blake had the ship to keep flying, and a thousand other gadgets from tractors to chicken-feed dryers to design, build, and maintain. Carlos reprogrammed synth vats and nanites, built specialty medical gear for Li, and constructed and maintained the steadily growing number of artificial wombs.
Whereas Antonio and I are manual labor. Diaper changers and field hands.
Did Antonio ever feel insignificant, too? He shouldn’t. But for him, they would never have escaped the GRB. His rock collection might serve no more purpose than his blueberry obsession, but at least he had interests.
I don’t have laurels or interests to fall back on. Just survivor’s guilt.
The colony would have much brighter prospects if Hawthorne had sent a farmer or miner in her stead. Of what use to anyone was a science historian? Of what earthly use….
“Are you all right, dear?” Li asked.
“We’re bringing up the next generation like strays and foundlings. I don’t like it.”
Li’s sad smile might have been intended to convey no more than, “What choice do we have?” but Rikki read it as, “Queen Li knows best.”
I need purpose, Rikki decided. Something I can contribute. Something of my own. Something important.
In a flash of insight, she knew what that something would be.
29
The six of them had not discussed terraforming since before landing. Why would they? Dark was a terrestrial world.
But, Rikki decided, maybe they should.
Techniques that had been making Mars habitable could also make a difference on Dark. It was more than a matter of personal comfort: the crops that struggled here might thrive in a warmer climate. And she could give them that warmer climate: designer perfluorocarbons were incredibly effective as climate agents, some thousands of times more potent as greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide.
Nor would they need to pump much PFC into the atmosphere to begin altering the climate. Twentieth-century industries had, in a few short decades, without meaning to, almost destroyed Earth’s ozone layer with chemically similar chlorofluorocarbons.
She began making order of magnitude estimates in her head—
And stopped. She was getting ahead of herself. The first rule of terraforming was, don’t meddle with what you don’t understand.
She didn’t understand Dark. None of them did. They had experienced their share of weather, but four local years was too brief a time to reveal anything reliable about climate.
Continuous measurements covered only a few square klicks around the settlement. Their knowledge of anywhere else—spotty and haphazard, anecdotes rather than systemic data—was limited to whatever observations Endeavour had serendipitously made in the course of doing something else.
A remote-sensing satellite in synchronous orbit for the past few years would have told Rikki a great deal—but Dark had no synchronous orbits. Its moons soon destabilized the orbit of any artificial satellite placed at the proper distance.
Then there was the matter of oceans….
Oceans stored heat from sunlight, releasing that heat to moderate temperature swings both diurnal and seasonal. An ocean current like Earth’s Gulf Stream could alter the climate of entire continents. Multiyear oceanic temperature cycles, like El Niño and La Niña, had global impact. Knowing what happened in Dark’s ocean depths mattered.
The data that had been collected on this world’s oceans and seas? Precisely zero.
She’d had the sense (or the lack of courage of her convictions?) to follow her instincts. She’d not spoken a word about any of this. Luckily so, because had anyone known how she’d been spending her time, she would only have looked useless. More useless. Marvin knew—she needed the AI’s help with data retrieval, model building, and number crunching—but she had ordered it to keep her secret to itself.
Toiling in secrecy didn’t help. By some miracle, the little ones had mostly slept the latest night she had spent at the childcare center. With a few minutes here and a few there, she had shoehorned in a couple hours of work. (For them, she told herself, guilt-ridden at not playing with everyone not asleep—and more guilt-ridden at the relief that came of sparing herself their rejection. For their future.) She got a bit more research accomplished when Blake spent the night in the nursery. Desperate for progress, feigning insomnia, on consecutive evenings she had squeezed in another few hours of work. But she couldn’t keep up the pace. Without a decent night’s sleep, and soon, she would keel over or run someone over with a tractor.
When the time came to commit serious astronomy, Rikki knew she had to enlist Antonio.
*
Rikki threw off her side of the blankets. She got up and began dressing for outdoors.
“What?” Blake murmured sleepily.
“Insomnia,” she told him. “Again. I’m going for a walk.”
Blinking, he sat up. “Give me a minute. I’ll walk with you.”
“Wrong,” she told him. “That I can’t sleep doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.”
“But I—”
“Gallantry noted. I’ll be fine.” This wasn’t a campsite in some tropical jungle, surrounded by lions and hostile natives. The settlement’s few buildings were surrounded by nothing and nobody. “Seriously, sleep.”
“Stay close.”
“I will.” She gave him a quick kiss. “Sleep.”
Antonio didn’t put all his free time into his ever expanding rock collection, at least not at night. She found him where she had expected: using the ship’s telescope. The main bridge display showed Ayn Rand, with two of its inner moons in transit. He seemed not to have noticed her arrival.
“Do you see something interesting?” she asked.
“I’m making a survey.”
A nonanswer answer, she noted. Well, she had been on the taciturn side, too. He was in the pilot’s acceleration couch, and she plopped into the copilot’s seat. “I wondered if you could help me with something. Discreetly.”
Because if she could harness his obsessive-compulsive focus, and his sometimes encyclopedic knowledge, he might do much to advance her research.
Finally, he turned away from the bridge console, if not to look directly at her. “If I can. Help,
