Time

unidentifiable to Maura. But there were also some pieces of apparatus more familiar from her own school days: Bunsen burners and big chunky electromagnets and what looked like a Van de Graaff generator.

There were five children here, gathered in a circle, sitting cross-legged on the ground. One of them was Tom Tybee. The children didn’t have any tools with them, no softscreens or writing paper. They were simply talking, but so fast Maura could barely make out a word. One of the children was a girl, taller than the rest, her blond hair plaited neatly on her head. But it wasn’t clear that she was in any way leading the discussion.

“We call this our physics lab,” Reeve said softly. “But much of what the children seem to be exploring is multidisciplinary, in our terms. And if you can’t follow what they’re saying, don’t worry. If they don’t know a word, they will often make up their own. Sometimes we can translate back to English. Sometimes we find there is no English word for the referent.”

“Clever kids.”

“Little smart-asses,” Reeve said with a vehemence that startled Maura. “Of course most of what they do is theoretical. We can’t give them very advanced equipment here.”

“If it’s a question of budget—”

“Representative Della, they are still children. And you can’t put a child, however smart, in charge of a particle accelerator.”

“I suppose not.”

Watching the children talking and working, quietly, purposefully, Maura felt a frisson of fear: the superstitious, destructive awe she so reviled in others.

The question was, what were they working toward? What was their goal, why were they here, how did they know what to do? The questions were unanswerable, deeply disturbing — and that was without being a parent, without having to ask herself the most profound questions of all: Why my child? Why has she been taken away?

Perhaps, she thought uneasily, they would all soon find out. And then what?

“Hello, Ms. Della.”

Maura looked down. It was Tom Tybee. He was standing before her, straight and solemn in his golden suit. He was clutching an orange football shape.

Maura forced a smile and bent down to Tom’s level. “Hello, Tom.”

The taller blond girl had come to stand beside him. She was holding Tom’s hand and was watching Maura with suspicious eyes.

“Look.” Tom held out his toy to her. It was his Heart: an emotion container, a sound-vision recording device that enabled the user to record his favorite experiences. Maura wondered what he found to record here.

“My mom gave it to me.”

“Well, I think it’s terrific.”

Reeve said, “Representative Della, meet Anna. Our oldest student.”

The girl stared at Maura — not hostile, just reserved, wary.

“Can I go?” Tom asked.

Maura felt unaccountably baffled, excluded. “Yes, Tom. It was nice to see you.”

Tom, his hand still in Anna’s, returned to the group and sat down, and the rich flow of their conversation resumed. Anna joined in, but Maura noticed that she kept her gray eyes on her and Reeve.

“You see?” Reeve said tiredly.

“See what?”

“How they make you feel!’¹ Reeve smiled and pushed gray hair out of her eyes. “Hello, good-bye. I know they can’t help it. But they simply aren’t interested in us. It’s impossible to feel warmth for them. People, the staff, tend not to stay long.”

“How do you vet your staff?”

“We use parents and relatives where we can. Tom Tybee’s father has done some work here, for instance… I’ll take you through the recruitment procedures.”

“Where is Anna from?”

“The North Territory School.”

“Australia.” The worst in the world, a virtual concentration camp. No wonder she is so wary, Maura thought.

Well, this wasn’t a summer camp either, she reminded herself. It was a prison.

But the real bars around these children were intangible, formed by the fear and ignorance and superstition of the society that had given them birth. Until that got better, until some kind of public education worked its way into the mass consciousness to displace the hysterical fear and hostility that surrounded these children, maybe this fortress was the best anybody could do. But she promised herself that she would watch this place, and the others around the country, and ensure that here at least things did not get worse for Tom Tybee, and Anna, and the other children here, the Blues.

Some childhood, she thought.

She let Reeve take her to her office, and they began to go through staff profiles.

Reid Malenfant:

Malenfant stood tethered to the surface of Cruithne, waiting.

He was aware how grimy he had become. After a couple of weeks on the asteroid, everything — his suit, the fireflies and habitats, every piece of equipment — had turned to the dismal gray- black color of Cruithne, coated with coal-dark electrostatically clinging regolith dust.

A fabric canopy towered over him. Erected by the squid with their waldoes and fireflies, it was rigid, improbably skinny, a tent that could surely never remain upright on Earth; yet here, in Cruithne’s vacuum and miniature gravity, it could last years, unperturbed, until the fabric itself crumbled under the relentless onslaught of solar radiation.

An automated countdown was proceeding in his headrest. Impatient, he snapped a switch to kill the robot’s soft Midwestern female voice. What difference did it make, to know the precise second? This operation wasn’t under his control anyhow. This was all cephalopod now, and Malenfant was just an observer. And he was dog tired.

Meanwhile Cruithne turned, as it had for a billion years. Sun and stars wheeled alternately over him. When the raw sunlight hit him he could feel its strength, and the fans and pumps of his backpack whirred, the water in his cooling garment bubbling, as his suit labored under the fierce hail of photons to keep him cool and alive.

It was, without question, a hell of a place to be.

This operation was the fulfillment of Malenfant’s bargain with the squid.

The mining operation here was an order of magnitude more ambitious than the simple regolith scraping Sheena 5 had initiated after she first landed. The tentlike canopy had been set up over a suitable impact crater — which Emma had named, with her gentle humor, Kimberley. The canopy was just a low-tech way to contain ore thrown out by the robot dust kicker now burrowing its way into Cruithne. When the canopy contained enough ore it would be sealed up and moved to the processing site.

There, mechanical grinders would chew steadily at the ore within a rotating cylinder. The spin would force the grains of crushed ore through a series of sorting screens, and the sorted material dropped onto rotating magnetic drums. The idea was to separate nonmagnetic silicate grains from nickel-iron metal granules; every so often the metallic material would be scraped off the drums and recycled through the sorter, until only highly pure metal was left.

It was possible to cast raw asteroid metal directly, but the native metals were heavily polluted with carbon and sulfur, and the result would be an inferior product. So the ore would be passed through a solar toaster, as Malenfant thought of it — an inflatable solar collector working at a couple of hundred degrees centigrade. The toaster was the key to a process called gaseous carbonyl extraction, which allowed the extraction of ultra-pure metals — and, as a bonus, the direct fabrication of ultra-pure iron and nickel products in high-precision molds via chemical vapor deposition.

The objective of these first tentative steps was just to give the squid access to the most easily extracted metals: nickel and iron in the form of metallic alloy. In fact, locked up in Cruithne there were also troilite, olivine, pyroxene, and feldspar — minerals that could also serve as sources of ferrous metals when the nickel-iron was exhausted, even if their extraction was a little more complex. Besides that, the ore also contained other valuable metals like cobalt and the platinum-group metals, as well as nonmetals like sulfur, arsenic, selenium, germanium, phosphorus, carbon…

Cornelius Taine had been dead set against pointing the squid toward more advanced processing techniques. In fact, Cornelius had been all for reneging on Malenfant’s contract with the squid altogether. Malenfant had insisted on keeping his promise, but had given in to Cornelius on the advanced processing.

Not that it made much difference, he figured; the squid were smart and would surely not take long to figure out how to extract the full potential of these ancient rocks, whether humans showed them what to do or not.

Cornelius was right to have reservations, however. The squid, if they did get out of the resource bottleneck of Cruithne, would be formidable rivals. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to start the relationship of the two species with a grudge.

All three of the adults had spent time out on the surface modifying firefly and miner robots, surveying the asteroid for a suitable crater to serve as a pit head, and operating test and pilot runs of the various processes involved. Cruithne had turned out to be a congenial environment to work in. The gravity here was better than zero G because tools, dust, and people tended to stay where you last put them rather than float away. But on the other hand structures did not have to be as strong as under Earth’s ferocious pull.

But the work hadn’t been easy. Though the skinsuits were a marvelous piece of lightweight engineering, a couple of hours of even the lightest physical work — shoveling crumbling regolith into the hoppers of the test plants, for example — left Malenfant drenched in sweat and with sores chafing at his elbows, knees, armpits, groin. Cornelius had actually suffered worse; a pressure imbalance caused by a rucking of his suit had given him a severe embolism on one leg, an incident that hadn’t helped improve his mood.

Anyhow it was over now. Malenfant was proud of what they had achieved here. The technological infrastructure they had built here was neat, elegant, simple, low maintenance.

Earth came into view, a bright blue disclet shadowed by the pallid Moon.

It struck him that it had been the dream of his whole life to come to a place like this: to stand here on the surface of another world, to watch heavy machinery tear into its rock and begin the construction of a living space, to watch the beginnings of the expansion of Earth life beyond the planet, fulfilling the dreams of Tsiolkovski and Goddard and Bernal and O’Neill and so many others.

Well, he’d gotten himself here, and he ought to be grateful for that. Not only that, his basic plan — using asteroid materials to bootstrap extraterrestrial colonization — was obviously working.

But he hadn’t expected it to be like this — in the hands of another species.

In a way, a part of him wished it wasn’t so: that this had been a simple story of asteroid mines and O’Neill colonies and homesteads in space, that the extraordinary future hadn’t intruded. Simple dreams, easily fulfilled. But that had never been an option.

The future, it seemed, was turning out to be one damn thing after another.

He turned away from the canopy, and began to make his way back to the O’Neill.

When the squid made their next surprising request Malenfant and the others held a council of war on the O ‘Neill ‘s meatware deck.

Cornelius Taine, as ever, was hostile to any form of rapprochement with the squid beyond what was absolutely necessary to maintain their base on this asteroid. “So they want to leave. Good riddance. They shouldn’t be here anyhow. They weren’t in the plan.”

Emma said severely, “You mean they should be dead.”