Rikki finally wound down.
“I don’t know,” Li told the assembled peasants.
The more candid answer would have been I don’t care. Candor did not suit her purpose.
Nor did the topic matter. It mattered only that they found something over which to rebel. Something other than the manner of childrearing.
“It’s important,” Rikki insisted. She spoke too loud and stood too close. Her chin jutted out and she had crossed her arms across her chest.
Classic belligerence, Li thought. Excellent. “Maybe someday.”
“Respectfully,” Blake began, “I disagree. We shouldn’t wait.”
“Of course you disagree,” Li said. Goading him by criticizing his woman. Because, as Li made a point of reinforcing from time to time, she was never subtle.
“Damn it, Li,” Rikki said, “be reasonable. We need to understand the climate. Climate affects our food supply. You must care about that.”
Li smiled condescendingly: another goad. “We settled almost inside the tropics. Can you find us someplace suitable anywhere warmer?”
“That’s the point,” Antonio said. “If the climate fails us…here, the colony is in trouble. Let’s find out sooner rather than later. While maybe there’s still the opportunity to change things.”
Blake’s turn. “Or we may find we’ve lucked out. This one set of observations, from this one canyon, suggests the trend might be to warmer weather. It would be nice to have an idea when and how far we can expand into higher latitudes.”
Li said, “Planning for the long run.”
“Exactly,” Dana said.
In the long run, we’re all dead. Li couldn’t remember who, other than someone long dead, had first said that. The provenance didn’t matter because she wasn’t going to quote it. She wanted the four of them to prevail.
Convince me, people. Convince yourselves you convinced me.
“We need to eat,” Rikki said. “The children need to eat.”
They had an entire world to farm. How could they ever lack for food? But if she were wrong, if on occasion they wound up supplementing crops with a bit of bacterial sludge, so be it. What mattered was raising obedient, subservient children to do the colony’s bidding.
To do her bidding.
And to that end, she needed the others too busy to interfere with her affairs.
Li permitted her shoulders to sag. She lowered her head, nibbled on her lower lip. Read: doubt. Read: you’re winning me over. She said, “Can you fit in these studies without impact to our other work?”
“Well…,” Dana conceded.
“Because,” Li said, “I could take on longer shifts in the childcare center. If that would help.”
“It would help,” Antonio managed.
“Tell me again,” Li said, “what will you do?”
Blake and Dana swapped glances. They’d caught her verb choice: will, not would.
“We need a more global data set,” Rikki said. “There are other ancient canyons to read. Ice-core samples to collect from glaciers and the polar icecaps. Bore holes to drill in the sediments of lake and sea bottoms. All should tell us useful things about climate patterns and trends.”
“It sounds major,” Li said.
“It is major,” Rikki said.
Li resumed chewing on her lip: sincere, accessible leader here, open to everyone’s inputs. “Okay,” she conceded. To grins all around, she added, “We’ll have to figure out a revised work schedule first. We still have children to feed.”
“Of course,” Antonio said.
“Thanks, Li,” Rikki said, at last letting her arms fall to her sides.
Li smiled. “You’re welcome, and I thank you for bringing this matter to my attention.”
Because while you’re gadding about, the children will continue in my sole care. When you’re here, you’ll be crunching the data or laboring in the fields or in bed, exhausted, and the children will remain, under Marvin’s watchful and carefully programmed eye.
Learning obedience. Discipline. Self-denial. Conformity. When (ever less frequently) the peasants questioned her methods, the analogy with which they struggled was an orphanage.
If any of her companions had read Dickens, they would still be on the wrong track.
Her true model—updated and improved, of course—was a Spartan barracks. The children would grow up to serve the State. The State she would define.
This, Mother, is how one wields power.
Before a single peasant ever suspected Li wanted them distracted by another project, it would be too late.
By then, all the children will be mine.
30
“Oh-two?” Dana asked.
“Two fresh tanks,” Antonio answered.
“Oh-two pressure?”
“Nominal.”
“Cee-oh-two?”
“Barely registering.”
“Suit heater?”
Antonio had checked and rechecked everything on the long list, but he wouldn’t dream of interrupting Dana’s methodical run-through. Who better than he to respect obsessive behavior?
And she was being obsessive. Because she cared. She got him, not just better than anyone else alive—not a high hurdle—but better, almost, than anyone who had ever lived. As well, almost, as had Tabitha.
And knowing him, knowing how thoroughly he would have checked everything, Dana still made it her job to watch out for him.
After Tabitha died, he had never expected anyone to care again.
At last they left Endeavour, stepping from the forward air lock onto the sunbaked surface of Aristophanes. The terrain, what little could be seen before the freakishly close horizon, was less cratered than he expected.
A world at half-phase hung—loomed—overhead. Enormous. Thirty-five times the size of the Moon as seen from Earth. Icecaps and cloud tops sparkled, but could not overcome an overall gloominess.
Dark was aptly named.
“When you’re done gawking,” Dana said, with a hint of fond amusement in her voice.
They offloaded from cargo hold one the first of the remote-sensing stations. Though massive and bulky, here the unit weighed almost nothing. They set down the apparatus on a flat expanse and he stepped away. She would unfold the stabilizing legs, deploy the delicate solar panels, align the dish antennas, and run the final instrument calibrations. His job was to answer technical questions, should any arise, while keeping his ten left thumbs at a safe distance.
Duties that left him free to look around: the other, if unofficial, reason he was here. As often as he had championed exploration, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, something—typically farm chores and colicky babies—had always come first.
How much harder would Dana have it on this excursion for having him
