Li’s grandma used to claim that one caught more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Li eased herself out from under Carlos’s out-flung arm and leg, thinking he was more spider than fly, and more octopus than spider. And she had no interest in catching any of them, far less this arrested-development adolescent.
With a snort Carlos flopped onto her side of the bed. The thick, coarse hair on his back disgusted her. He disgusted her.
She stood for a long time, her eyes closed, beneath the hot, pulsating spray of the shower. The water carried away Carlos’s sweat and stench, but it couldn’t touch her nausea. Sex with Carlos was for the greater good, and only for the greater good, because from time to time he proved useful.
As he had been today, bringing her a preview of the likely ambush that night at dinner.
You couldn’t dignify the society here as an economy. They had no use for money. Whatever material goods they had were as readily produced for six people as for one. Carlos was too shallow and transparent to handle power, not that she would ever consider sharing power. The lone currency that remained was…favors.
She didn’t feel dirty, exactly, nor degraded, but something. At an intellectual level, she even felt a touch of nobility, of self-sacrifice. Carlos had her body—when she permitted it—but never her. And he never would.
So what was it she felt? Out of joint. Out of sorts. Decoupled from reality.
How old would the girls need to be before they caught his eye?
*
Long ago and far away, in a municipal campaign that had been Li’s to lose—and she had—Li learned a hard lesson. Never let the other side choose the issue.
So: while the peasants still dug into synthed meatloaf with real mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy, or glanced sidelong at the strawberry shortcake that waited on the serving cart, she brought up childrearing. Indirectly, to be sure. She had guessed Antonio’s digging into ancient Greece would lead him to Sparta and the education of its young, and Marvin had confirmed it. Antonio never bothered to conceal what he did with the AI.
Whereas the more…informative of her interactions with Marvin were as secure as possible. Not in any conventional sense, because access controls and personal firewalls would have screamed of something to hide, but subtly veiled. Too bad such computing legerdemain far exceeded her skills.
But not Carlos’s. Li fought down a shudder.
The important thing was, she was prepared, if necessary, to discuss childrearing, and the relative virtues of Athens versus Sparta. She knew Antonio well enough, if it came to it, to sidetrack Antonio in a pointless meander through Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War.
She saw no reason to let matters come to that.
Li blotted her lips, folded and set down her napkin, and began. “With this spring’s planting almost complete, in the comparative lull before we begin harvesting, I propose that we expand the childcare center.”
“So that we can crank out more children?” Rikki blurted out.
“Interesting,” Li said. “I was going to say that as the children get older we’ll want separate dormitories for the boys and the girls. And I thought it would be nice to add an atrium, a little indoor park. But you’re quite right, Rikki. The same expansion will allow us to raise more. Thank you.”
Rikki blinked. She had not foreseen her sarcasm getting deflected into a proposal. “That’s not what—”
“About that,” Antonio interrupted.
Antonio wasn’t the type to interrupt. Not unless he had something on his mind he was bound and determined to get out.
It seemed Carlos had earned his pre-dinner favor.
“If we could finish one topic before we move on to the next?” Li chided.
“Of course,” Antonio said.
“Marvin, my sketch, please.” Li slid back her chair to stand alongside the wall, which became a 3-D architectural rendering. “You see the enclosed area that I thought might serve as a garden or park. But maybe it’s too large an expanse for that.”
She studied the wall display, pensive, giving the peasants time to make the idea their own. And maybe to set aside their nitpicking, since she had just proposed this touchy-feely expansion of the facility.
“We could make a portion of that space an indoor playground,” Rikki offered.
“Or maybe we should enclose only part of the area,” Dana said. “At some point the children have to get used to the outdoors.”
Li let them natter on, with each suggestion making the project more grandiose and labor-intensive. A screened-in solarium into which even the youngest children could be brought on nice days for fresh air. A rock garden. A flower garden. An ever more extensive playground.
The evening was unfolding better than Li had dared to hope.
While the peasants bulldoze and landscape and build with concrete, she thought, the children remained hers. As Rikki had observed—and as quickly let drop—the enlarged childcare center about which they now all waxed eloquent, would give Li the capacity to speed up decanting of the embryos. With, alas, some encouragement to Carlos to speed up womb production.
Li said, “Once the children have acclimated, they’ll be closer to ready to meet the real world. Suppose we put up a fence, enclosed the area around the center and its neighboring buildings. If we put locks on the doors the oldest children could roam around.” In answer to Rikki’s raised eyebrow, Li explained, “I don’t believe they’re old enough to play among the explosives and chemical stocks.”
The eyebrow went back down.
But as Blake and Dana grew giddy about the prospect of passing along the fine art of snowman construction, and with Antonio sidetracked into planning for a rock garden, Rikki’s eyes narrowed with suspicion.
Too much, too fast, Li thought. The woman wasn’t entirely gullible.
Li said, “I’m gratified by such enthusiasm, but we can’t do everything at once. We also have a PFC factory, or refinery, or whatever I should call it, to build.”
And Rikki relaxed.
Fool, Li thought.
32
In swooping arcs and soaring leaps, up and down through the clouds like a bucking bronco,
