“When can I play with other children?” Beth asked, reaching for a new sheet of paper.
“Someday.” When Li couldn’t stuff any more children into the settlement. Then the fences must come down, whether Rikki liked it or not. She had anticipated and dreaded that day since before Beth was born.
She and Blake had talked endlessly about a second child. But in standard years, she had already been almost forty-one when Beth was born. The pregnancy might have been hard even on Mars. Better her baby grow up an only child than without a mother.
No, the young ones inside were Beth’s only hope for a normal life. Of companionship after her parents and Antonio and Dana had passed on.
But could anyone be normal, raised by lunatics inside a prison camp?
“Could you draw me another?”
“Sure, Mommy.”
Rikki stood. Just stretching my legs, she told herself, knowing herself for a liar. Out her front window, across Main Street, through another window, she checked to see that Antonio still sat reading in his living room. With Blake and Dana away, Antonio had even offered to sleep on the sofa.
She would be damned if she’d let Beth see how terrified she was.
How could Antonio protect her anyway? How could anyone? Li had the guns, and the explosives, and the madness to use them.
What Rikki really ached to do was flee with her daughter into the hills, to hide within the maze of the caves. But she didn’t dare to risk revealing that they had been stocking the caverns as an emergency shelter. Lugging supplies through the back entrance, flying Endeavour in from behind the ridge, below the hilltops, there was no way—in theory, anyway—that Li and Carlos could know. If they discovered that a significant food reserve had been set aside, Li would only speed up her baby factory.
Bedtime’s approach brought new sadness. She couldn’t read her daughter a simple bedtime story! Simple but impossible, even after Blake had returned from a recent food delivery with, among the many book files, a collection of classic children’s stories.
Children’s stories are about relating to…someone. A brother or sister. Classmates. Friends. Pets. Cute little animals as surrogate people. What did any of that have to do with Beth? How could it help to remind her baby that she was alone?
Beth was past old enough to learn to read. Only what could they give her to read?
“Mom! Look what you did.”
“Oops.” Rikki discovered she had Beth in a bear hug, arms pinned to her sides. In the process, she had caused Beth to scribble a big diagonal crayon streak across her paper. This drawing was shaping up as a close-up of the fence, and Rikki didn’t want to think anymore about that. “It’s time for your bath.”
“Ten minutes.”
They negotiated and settled on five. As Beth splashed in her tub, Rikki opened a novel on her datasheet. And sighed. And closed the file again. It seemed wrong until she found something to read to Beth.
At last she got the little imp into bed.
“Why didn’t Daddy call tonight?”
Rikki gave her daughter a big kiss on the forehead. “He and Aunt Dana are very busy.”
“Where did they go?”
“Exploring, hon. You know that. Looking for useful stuff before the snow starts.”
Some things couldn’t be explained to a child. Like a mother’s stubborn insistence on understanding why five years of PFCs pumped into the atmosphere had yet to slow the globe’s inexplicable cooling. That by drilling, by examining millennia of sediment samples, one peered into the past. That to Blake and Dana these expeditions had only been excuses, a cover for trips to sneak supplies into the caves.
That she fervently wished Blake and Dana had been correct.
Because the samples established, more with each expedition, that a terrible flood, or floods, had afflicted parts of Dark. The havoc in the physical record was extreme, such that even Antonio did not dare to date the catastrophe any more precisely than “within the past thousand years, give or take.”
Geologically speaking, that wasn’t as much as an eye-blink ago.
If a tsunami were to hit Darwin Sea, the wave would sweep away the farms, the bacterial basins, and even blast up the slope all the way to the settlement.
It would scour away—everything.
39
Children—shrieking, babbling, bickering, squealing with glee—were everywhere in the yard. Climbing, swinging, and sliding. Playing catch. Playing tag. Chasing snowflakes. Digging in sandboxes. Stomping in puddles. Jumping rope. Hopping. Skipping. Running races. Running aimlessly.
All that bedlam made Antonio, wandering up and down Main Street for fresh air and to clear his mind, very tired. That wasn’t the hardest part. Having had the children in his life—and then lost them—made him very, very sad.
He couldn’t watch, not directly. Try to watch and he would be running, screaming, from the area. So he kept track of things indirectly. From the corner of an eye. Listening.
And in that disarray, that spontaneity, the children zooming about like so many asteroids, he found a modicum of hope for the future. Li liked quiet and order.
Actually the local asteroids were far more orderly than these children.
For a few seconds Antonio took in a clear, cloudless sky. Today the sky seemed more blue than green, and the few hints of red dust hung close to the horizon. For most of his life, any glimpse of the sky had calmed him. Like numbers, the sky had been a refuge.
No longer.
He had feared asteroid bombardments since his first glimpses of this solar system. With both a gas giant and an asteroid belt close to Dark, bombardment was inevitable. Physics and math said so.
It drove him crazy how few incidents, even harmless, burn-up-in-the-atmosphere meteoroid encounters, the observatories on the moons reported. It drove him to suspect design flaws in the observatory instruments, only those weren’t the problem. Many long nights with Endeavour’s telescope, surveying the asteroid belt, had replaced one mystery with another. Dark, it seemed, was spared impacts because the nearby asteroid belt was…tidy. The orbits were all nicely circularized.
Neither math nor physics could explain that
