Lawrence and Alan hadn't seen him approach from a walkway intersection. He was staring down at the four fat-worms twisting their way across the metal. Several of the other kids were behind him, and Mrs. Segan was scurrying up, anxious to see what the fuss was about.
'I knocked a bin over, sir, and we were trying to pick them up,' Lawrence said, holding out his icy hands as proof. Slime dripped from white, cold-crinkled fingertips. 'I'm really sorry.'
Mr. Kaufman was frowning, not fully convinced.
'Don't touch them,' Mrs. Segan called urgently. She slipped past Mr. Kaufman, pulling on a pair of thick gauntlets. 'Remember what I told you about them being adapted to the cold.'
Lawrence and Alan traded a look.
Mrs. Segan picked up the first fatworm. Her eyes narrowed as she took in the big red mark around its middle. She took it over to the nearest bin. 'What have you done?' she yelled. All the fatworms inside had the same red mark. None of them were moving. She hurried to the next bin, and gasped. In the third bin there were some fatworms left undulating slowly; Lawrence and Alan hadn't raced all of them yet. She whirled around. Lawrence took a step back, afraid she'd strike him. Her face was rigid with fury. 'You burned them all, you little...' She turned to Mr. Kaufman. 'Tour's over. Get these brats out of here.'
Lawrence had taken over the robot garage several years ago. The compact tracked machines that originally tended to the elaborate gardens of his family's domes had been replaced by newer, more efficient models when they upgraded their AS groundskeeper program. He'd found the old concrete ramp in the middle of a clump of copper-flowering bushes that had been allowed to expand and merge into a shaggy wall now the entrance was no longer needed. At the base of the ramp was a swing-up door with stiff old lever arms. It took a commendable amount of effort and persistence for a nine-year-old to prize it open, but Lawrence did it, to be rewarded with a musty concrete cave stretching out ahead of him for a good ten meters. Its roof was less than two meters from the ground, and it had strange metal tracks bolted to the floor, walls and ceiling where waldo arms had once run. But there was still power, and a data node.
Since then it had become his den. He'd moved in life's essentials, cluttering it with a dilapidated magenta-colored leather settee, piles of cushions, a couple of tables, an old-model desktop pearl, a sound system with a decibel level that most hard-rock bands would envy, two active memory towers his father had salvaged from the office for him, an eclectic array of tools and boxes of toys he never played with. He'd tacked sheet screens over the walls and even part of the ceiling. A mosaic of images played as soon as the door was opened, some from the memory towers while others broadcast live camera feeds from the datapool.
It was a grand refuge from his family and the rest of Amethi. Even his four younger siblings knew to stay out unless he explicitly invited them in.
He'd gone there as soon as he got back after the ecology field trip. The sheet screens were showing several images of Templeton from cameras mounted on the apex of various domes. One of them showed Nizana's bright crescent, relayed from a near-side school's astronomy department telescope. Another was a telescope tracking Barric, the third-largest moon.
Lawrence told the desktop pearl to find a spaceport feed and switch it to the biggest sheet screen, the one hanging opposite the sofa, which took up half the wall. The camera must have been sited on the control tower: it showed the thick gray runway stabbing out across the bleak rusty-colored tundra. Nothing was landing or taking off.
'Get me a Flight: Horizon episode,' he instructed the pearl.
'Which one?' it's AS program asked.
'Doesn't matter. No. Wait. Series one, episode five: 'Creation-5.' I want third person with the edit I chose last time. Put it on the big screen, and close down the others.' He flopped into the settee and stuck his feet up on the armrest. The remaining sheet screens blacked out. Right in front of him the credits started to roll and the soundtrack kicked in, making the thin screens tremble.
He'd found Flight: Horizon two years ago when he sent an askping through the catalogues of Amethi's multimedia companies; as far as he was concerned it was the greatest science fiction series ever made. Not fully i, but it allowed personae selection so the episode could be viewed from any of the principal characters' viewpoint. And it wasn't educational like all of Amethi's i-dramas aimed at the youth audience.
Set hundreds of years in the future, it featured the amazingly cool starship Ultema, which had been sent to explore a section of the spiral arm halfway round the galaxy from Earth: several of the crew were alien, and the weird planets they visited were superbly scary. They were also facing some awesome evil aliens, the Delexians, who wanted to prevent them from getting home. It had been imported from Earth thirty years ago, though the copyright was 2287. There were only thirty episodes in the multimedia company's library, and Lawrence knew them so well now he could almost recite the dialogue from memory. He couldn't believe that was all that had been made. The Earth datapool address of the show's fanclub was tagged in the expanded features menu of every episode, so he'd paid a starship carriage fee and sent them a text message asking for more information. Every time a star-ship arrived back at Amethi he checked its communication AS, but they'd never sent him a reply.
The Ultema was locked in a gigantic energy battle against a blue dwarf star that the Delexians had imprinted with a sentience matrix when a green priority script icon opened in the center of the sheet screen. The starship froze, and the script scrolled down.
Lawrence, please come to your father's study.
He checked the clock. Quarter to six. His father had been back home ten minutes. Mr. Kaufman hadn't wasted any time filing his report package. 'Gimme the study pearl,' he said to the den's AS.
'I have it online,' the AS said.
'I'm busy right now,' Lawrence said. He pushed some injured annoyance into the tone. The AS running in the study's desktop pearl was smart.
'Lawrence, please, I accessed the message from your school and prioritized it. Your father wants to see you now.'
He kept silent.
'Do you want me to bring your father into this conversation on real time?'
'All right.' Grudgingly. 'I'm coming, I suppose. But you have to explain to the school AS why my homestudy is short tonight.'
'You're not doing homestudy.'
'I am. I just have Flight: Horizon on as background.'
Lawrence swung the garage door shut behind him and wriggled through the bushes. The garage was near the rim of the main dome, which was approaching the end of summer. There were six of the big structures making up the Newton family estate: the large one in the center with its temperate climate, and five smaller ones ringing it, each with a different environment inside. It was one of the larger estates in the Reuiza District, which was where the capital's wealthiest citizens clustered.
He had a three-hundred-meter walk across the grounds to the house itself. The landscape designer had gone in for split levels, with a chessboard of English manor lawns walled in with near-vertical borders of flowering shrubs and perennials. Each lawn was themed with classical plants: one had roses, one with fuchsia, another had begonias, magnolias, hydrangeas, delphiniums; for variety several lawns were enclosed by rockeries sprouting dozens of alpines. Two serpentine pools led away into shallow rocky cascades with reeds and lilies sprouting from outcrops and shelves in the slope. Tall trees stood above the corner of every lawn, again selected
