Blake followed his wife into the room, spoiling Carlos’s fantasies. Then Antonio entered, more grizzled than ever. He and Dana were getting old.
Face it, Carlos told himself. We all are.
“Are you busy?” Blake asked.
Carlos sat in an arc of active displays, of nanite memory readouts, program listings, electron-microscope scans, and design documents. Props, all of them. He said nothing.
Blake grimaced. “Sorry, dumb question. Can you spare us a couple of minutes before we head to work?”
Carlos gestured at nearby stools. “What’s up?”
Rikki said, “I think Li is up to something.”
To the best of Carlos’s knowledge, Li was always up to something. The challenge was ferreting out what and why. If he could accomplish either with any regularity, she would be in his power, not the other way around.
“Up to what?” Carlos asked.
“I don’t know.” Rikki frowned. “She’s been too agreeable.”
I wish, Carlos thought. The thrashing Li had given him on the ship had been no fluke. He had not required a third lesson.
He asked, “Agreeable about what?”
“About support for possible terraforming.” Rikki finally dragged over a stool and sat. The other two stayed standing. “Yeah, I know how that sounds. The research program was my idea. But the weird thing, to me, anyway, is that Li hasn’t tried to limit the effort.”
“Here’s a thought,” Carlos said. “Ignore whatever contributions, if any, the off-world sensors make to our understanding of the climate. They’ve already improved our weather forecasting. That will help our crops, and that’s something I’m sure Li cares about.” And because she let you plead for the deployment, you end up feeling indebted to her.
And don’t suppose for an instant she won’t find a way to call in that debt.
“Could be.” Blake pulled a scrap of thin wire from the jumble on a workbench, and began tying knots. “Or she imagines we’ll rein ourselves in. Fatigue has a wonderful ability to clarify priorities.”
Rikki gave her husband a dirty look.
Trouble in paradise? Carlos wondered. Hubby isn’t supportive enough of your science project? “What does this have to do with me?”
“You know Li pretty well,” Rikki said delicately.
You live together, she meant. You side with Li on the issues. You must understand her.
Carlos thought, if you only knew.
What he had with Li was a marriage of inconvenience. Hers was a cold beauty: look but don’t touch. And yet he stayed. He was the last available man in the universe—and the last available woman couldn’t care less. What did that say about him?
She had him by the pride as much as by the balls. When he got into her pants, all too seldom, it was because she wanted his backing.
Get inside Li’s head? That had yet to happen.
“Do you plan on ever coming to the point?” Carlos asked.
Rikki grimaced. “We want to know what else Li isn’t telling us.”
Carlos countered, “Is she under some obligation to tell you what she’s thinking?”
“No,” Blake said, still torturing his piece of wire. “But also yes.”
“Pretend you broke it already.” Carlos plucked the much-knotted wire from Blake’s hands. “Yes or no. Which is it?”
Rikki said, “As an individual, whatever Li thinks is her business. But in practice, she’s our leader. We all defer to her.”
I could be convinced to defer to you, Carlos thought. Motivate me. Let’s see how bendy you can be.
He said, “On our trek, to survive, we needed one sort of expertise. We deferred to Dana and properly so. I doubt Dana shared everything she was thinking, and I’ll bet we were happier for that. Rearing children and building a civilization? Those call for a different sort of expert. That’s Li.”
“That’s Li,” Blake agreed. “However…”
Antonio, who had been looking all around the lab, finally spoke. “I’ve been studying.”
With Antonio’s eclectic interests, those studies might involve anything. Carlos gestured to his workbench. “Guys, your couple minutes are more than up.”
“Aristophanes I had heard of,” Antonio said. “I didn’t know who Aeschylus and Euripides were.”
“I don’t know if your interest is in moons or ancient Greek theater,” Carlos said. “Either way it can wait till tonight at dinner.” When I also won’t pay attention. “Isn’t there a crop somewhere that needs your attention?”
“I became interested in ancient Greece,” Antonio went on. “And branched out from there. Are you familiar with…”
“At dinner,” Carlos repeated.
“Speaking of crops, why are you settled, all comfy, here in the lab?” Blake asked. “We could use a hand.”
At transplanting a couple hundred potted apple, cherry, and pear seedlings from the greenhouse to the river delta. No thanks. “I’m doing something more critical.”
“Figuring out how to mass-produce PFCs?” Rikki asked.
Right. As if what the climate might be like a hundred years hence was time sensitive.
“Nutrition related.” Carlos pointed to a nearby cage, in which mice sniffed curiously. “They don’t take up trace nutrients from diet as well as they should. I’m trying to tweak their nanites to compensate.”
“Mouse nanites,” Rikki said. “That sounds urgent. I vote you save those for a rainy day.”
Had the short-term forecast shown rain, Carlos would have waited to tamper with the tissue samples he’d shown to Li that morning.
He half suspected from Li’s sly smile that she knew. That by agreeing he should investigate his anomaly, she was doing him a favor. Throwing him a bone.
His other half guessed that she had planted the idea in the first place. That would explain the sly smile, too.
Pissing him off yet further. It was Li he was angry at, but Li wasn’t here. And it was Li who had what he wanted.
“Look,” Carlos said. “What affects the mice might well affect us. Or the children, or their children, some years hence. I propose to see what I can accomplish by tweaking nanites in the mice. Unless you prefer to make the children our guinea pigs.”
Rikki flinched, as he had known she would.
By the time they finally left, Carlos needed another drink.
