They walked into the kitchen, where Liz was sitting at the big cluttered table, trying to coax Sandy into having some soup. Mark’s daughter looked the picture of misery with her cheeks and nose all red, eyes damp, and wrapped in a big warm blanket. It was a flu variant that had been going the rounds of all the local kids. Barry had managed to avoid it so far.
“Daddy,” Sandy said weakly, and held her arms out.
Mark knelt down and gave her a big cuddle. “So how are you feeling today, my angel, any better?”
She nodded miserably. “Little bit.”
“Oh, that’s good. Well done, darling.” He sat in the chair next to her, and got a very fast and perfunctory kiss from Liz. “How about eating some of this soup then?” he asked his daughter. “We’ll eat it together.”
What might have been a smile passed across Sandy’s lips. “Yes,” she said bravely.
Liz rolled her eyes for Mark and got up. “I’ll leave you two to it, then. Come on, Barry, what do you want for tea?”
“Pizza?” he said immediately, followed by a hopeful, “and chips.”
“It’s not going to be pizza,” Liz told him sternly. “You know you’ve cleared all of them out of the freezer. It’s going to have to be fish.”
“Oww, Mum!”
“We can probably find some chips to go with them,” Liz said, knowing it was the only way to get him to eat the fish.
“All right,” the boy said glumly. “Well, is it fried fish, then?”
“I’ve no idea.”
Barry sat in his chair at the table, a picture of tragedy. Liz told the maidbot to fetch some fish from the freezer, adding an order silently through her e-butler to make it a grill-only packet.
“So why didn’t anything make sense?” Mark asked again.
“Well, it did sort of,” Barry said. “It’s just that I don’t see the point.”
“Of what?”
“School.”
“Ah, why not?”
“I don’t need it,” the boy said sincerely. He gestured to the broad kitchen window with its view back down the Ulon Valley. “I’m going to be a jetboat captain, and do the river.”
“Oh, right.” Last week it had been a gyroball instructor. Kids in the Randtown district tended to be influenced by the more sporting and physical aspects of life. They were all going to be raft masters, or jetboat captains, or ski instructors, or pro fliers, or gill divers. “Well, you still need a basic education, I’m afraid, even to qualify for that. So you’ll have to keep going, at least for a few years more.”
“Okay,” Barry said mournfully. “I might be a starship pilot, as well. I was watching that on the cybersphere today. The whole school was there when the Second Chance docked with its platform. That was so cool.”
Mark kept looking at Sandy as he was spooning her the soup. “Yeah, it was.”
“You saw it, too?”
“Certainly did.”
The maidbot arrived back with a packet of fish. Liz grabbed it from the little machine. “Come on, help me cook this.”
“Where are the chips?” Barry asked plaintively.
“There are some potatoes in the basket. We’ll cut them up. It won’t take long.”
“No no, Mum, real chips. From the freezer!”
Mark took Sandy through into the living room while Barry and Liz prepared the fish. He cleared some of the toys off the sofa and sat down. Sandy curled up in his lap, sniffling as she clung to her friend-doll, a pro-response polar bear that was sensing her illness, and held on to her arm affectionately.
He flicked through a few cybersphere reports on the big portal before reluctantly settling on Alessandra Baron, who had secured an exclusive with Nigel Sheldon himself. He was sitting behind some big desk in his corporate office, talking clearly and confidently, as if the whole starship return drama had been just a scheduled stop for one of his trains. “While I deeply regret that Captain Kime had to leave Emmanuelle and Dudley behind, I don’t believe he had any choice in the matter. I was not there, nor were any of the somewhat distasteful armchair critics I’ve heard today. As such we are completely unable to offer anything approaching a valid opinion concerning what was done, and what other courses of action were supposedly available. Only a fool would try to second-guess an event like that. I appointed Wilson as captain because I believed he was the right man for the job. His exemplary actions throughout the mission have completely vindicated that appointment.
“Of course, CSI has already authorized re-life procedures for both of our lost crew. Thanks to the safety procedures which we take so seriously, their onboard secure memory stores were updated just before they went over to the Watchtower.”
“But what about the information the Second Chance brought back?” Alessandra asked. “Surely you have to concede it’s disappointing?”
Nigel Sheldon smiled as if he pitied her. “We have more data than the entire Commonwealth physics community can absorb. I’d hardly call that a dearth.”
“I was referring to the lack of knowledge about the Dyson aliens. After so much money was spent, so much time devoted, and with the added cost of human life, don’t you think we should know more? We don’t even know what they look like.”
“We know that they shoot at us on sight. The one thing I am in agreement with my good friend Senator Burnelli over is that there must be a return mission. This is the nature of exploration, Alessandra, I’m sorry it’s not fast enough for your personal timetable. But sensible, rational humans venture somewhere new and see what the conditions are like so that we can prepare ourselves to go farther next time. The Second Chance did this, it brought back a wealth of details on Dyson Alpha and what kind of ship we need to go back there with.”
“So you’re in favor of going back, then?”
“Definitely. We’ve only just begun our encounter with the Dyson stars.”
“And what kind of ship should we use, based on what we learned from the first mission?”
“One that is very fast, and very strong. In fact, just to be safe, we should probably send more than one.”
Mark and Liz got the kids to bed and settled by eight o’clock. After that, they sat in the kitchen, eating their own supper of chicken Kiev: out of a packet and microwaved, of course. “Old Tony Matvig has some chickens,” Mark said. “I talked to him the other day, he’ll give us some eggs if we want our own.” His fork prodded at the meat on his plate, squeezing out some more of the garlic butter. “It would be nice to have something we know isn’t full of hormones and weird gene splices to feed the kids with.”
Liz gave him her “weighing up” look. “No, Mark. You know we’ve been through all this. I like living here, and I’ll like it a whole lot more once the house has finished growing, but I’m not buying in that deeply. We don’t need to keep chickens, we earn more than enough to eat well, and I don’t order factory food from the Big15. Everything in that freezer has the clean-feed label, if you ever bothered to look. And who did you see plucking and gutting these chickens, exactly? Were you going to do it?”
“I could do.”
“You won’t. The smell is revolting. It made me throw up.”
“When did you ever gut a chicken?”
“About fifty years ago. Back when I was young and idealistic.”
“And foolish. Yeah, I know.”
She leaned over and rubbed his cheek with her fingers. “Am I a real pain?”
“No.” He tried to catch one of her fingers in his teeth—missing.
“In any case,” she said, “chickens will ruin the lawn. Have you ever taken a good look at their claws? They’re evil.”
Mark grinned. “Killer chickens.”
“They kill lawns, and rip the rest of the garden apart as well.”
“Okay. No chickens.”
“But I’m all in favor of the vegetable garden.”
“Yeah. Because I’m going to rig up an irrigation system, and a gardeningbot can look after the rest of it.”
Liz blew him a kiss. “I said I’d tend the herb bed myself.”
“Wow. All of it?”
“Any regrets yet?”
“Not one.”
“I can think of one.”
“What?” he asked indignantly.
“I need a big strong man to go out and look at the precipitator leaves again.”
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding! I fixed them last week.”
“I know, darling. But they barely filled the tank last night.”
“Goddamn semiorganic crap. We should have dug a decent well.”
“Well, we can get a constructionbot to lay a pipe down to the river when the real house is finished.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
The maidbot took their plates and cutlery away to stack in the dishwasher. Mark carried a dish of sticky toffee pudding through into the living room, along with two spoons. They snuggled up together on the sofa, and started scooping at the gooey mass from opposite ends. Over on the portal, Wendy Bose was stammering and weeping her way through a statement. Professor Truten, labeled by the subtitles as a “close family friend,” had his arm supportively around her shoulder.
“Poor woman,” Liz said.
“Yeah.”
“She needs to go into rejuve. I wonder if CST will pay for that?”
“Why does she need rejuve?” Mark peered at her image inside the portal. “She doesn’t look like she’s that old.”
