“Please drink the tea, Griffith Zumu.”
Griffith took the tea cup and took a sip.
There was excited murmuring through the group, then Chen held up a hand.
“Chen GangHai and Betsy Reynolds are one couple now, and we are all one family.”
There was a cheer. Then Stacy and Tracy disappeared into the nearest house. Moments later they emerged carrying a cake they somehow managed to sneak home from the kitchens.
“Party now,” Stacy said.
“We have cake,” Tracy said.
Chen looked over to Jasic and nodded, and Jasic nodded back.
Later, in bed in the house they now shared, Reynolds drew GangHai to her.
“Come to me, my husband.”
The next day, people began showing up at the compound looking for the Uptown Market. There was no furniture yet, but they had blankets on the ground with lavalavas and flip-flops to sell. They charged outrageous prices for them, and people simply didn’t care.
For one outfit to wear that wasn’t coveralls and work boots, people were willing to part with a couple day’s pay. It wasn’t like they needed the money for necessities anyway, as rent and food were all taken care of, at least for the moment. Those sewing the lavalavas worked in the compound all day trying to keep up.
The digital payments for their sales were handled by the communicators, and the Chen-Jasic family started building up its financial resources.
Meanwhile, within the compound, the planting went on apace. The cuttings had to be gotten into the ground while they were still viable. The rocks they found in the soil they dug up and set aside. They were great building material, once mortar became available. They could also be used to make troughs to route water from the house wing overflows to the garden.
They were trimming the grass within the compound by the simple expedient of crawling along the ground and lifting the trampled grass up, then cutting it off with knives. The Chens gathered up the cut grass and set it aside to dry out. It would be used for stuffing into furniture cushions. Having been poor all their lives, they wasted nothing.
On Monday, Mark Kendall was considering a minor problem he had put off until things became more clear. Naming streets.
He had asked all the colonists for names or naming schemes on Friday, and hundreds of them had come in. The best names for the two main broader streets that met downtown, in the middle of the four permanent buildings, were Arcadia Boulevard for the north-south street that continued out to the farms, and Quant Boulevard for the east-west street, which continued east to the warehouse and, farther, the powerplant.
For the smaller streets, the suggestions Kendall liked best were First Street, Second Street, Third Street, and so on, for the streets paralleling Quant Boulevard as one went north, and A Street, B Street, C Street, and so on, for the streets paralleling Quant Boulevard as one went south.
For the north-south streets, the one just west of the hospital should be Hospital Street, and the one just east of the school building should be University Street. So the hospital building was between Arcadia Boulevard and Hospital Street, and between Quant Boulevard and First Street. The administration building was just south of the hospital, between Arcadia Boulevard and Hospital Street, and between Quant Boulevard and A Street.
On the east side of Arcadia Boulevard, between it and University Street, the school building was north of Quant and south of First Street, and the office building was south of Quant and north of A Street.
There were various names suggested for the other north-south streets.
One name a lot of people mentioned, though, was Market Street for the next street west of Hospital Street. This street went north-south and passed the Uptown Market between Fourteenth Street and Fifteenth Street.
Kendall had seen quite a few people at dinner on Sunday wearing lavalavas and flip-flops, which had proved very popular after almost two weeks in coveralls and either booties or work boots. He wasn’t surprised to find his own wife wearing a lavalava and flip-flops at dinner that night.
Kendall worked on names for the other north-south streets, to put a package together for council approval.
Quant #1
First Steps
Janice Quant had successfully staged her own death and that of all her avatars in the breakup and destruction of the interstellar transporter. She had built a video from the point of view of the interstellar probe that was accompanying the transporter, and then sent the video back to Texas on a video drone, as if it had filmed the whole thing.
Quant had warned her best friend and inventor, Bernd Decker, of her plan, but she thought he would probably find the video disturbing anyway.
As for everyone else’s feelings, Quant was monitoring communications out of Earth using her secret interstellar communicators, hidden away in the Asteroid Belt. If she could simultaneously transport twenty-four whole colonies – all the colonists, their supplies, entire buildings – with the interstellar transporter, it turned out it was pretty easy to transport streams of electrons. Modulate those streams and you had communications.
Quant found all the testimonials and eulogies touching. She wondered if people would feel the same way if they knew she was a computer entity – the first actual computer entity – rather than a flesh-and-blood human. Probably not.
Quant needed to move on. She had devised a plan to put an end to the one great remaining extinction-event cataclysm that could destroy the human race – war – and it was time to be getting on with it.
The first thing Quant needed was a rich debris field. In particular, she needed organics, especially carbon. Carbon bonds were among the strongest chemical bonds – they figured prominently in diamond, carbon fiber, high-carbon steel – and she needed a
