Molly mixed a cup of instant coffee from the hot water dispenser. “And physics,” she said,“is everything. Right?”
When she turned around the boy was staring at her, spoon poised halfway to his mouth.“Well?”Verb said.“Isn’t it?”
They were scaring her, but only, she told herself, because she was letting them.The coffee seemed raw and bloody, as if she could taste her own nerve endings in it.“Forget it,” she said, pouring the coffee down the recycler.“Forget I said anything. Let’s get out of here.”
In the fields outside, the first of the farm teams was already at work, six women, four men, two older children.Two of the women and one of the men were chemical lobotomies, apt to forget what they were doing and stand staring into the dazzling reflections in the mirror over-head.All of them wore goggles as well as the usual oxygen masks to cut the sting of the ammonia fertilizer they sprayed.
They were being recorded by a video camera on a light pole overhead, one of thirty or more that Curtis had salvaged from various early probes or converted from the home units of his subordinates.They fed a control room in the Center, the heart of Curtis’s “electronic democracy.”
As they passed the farmers, one of their children looked up and muttered,“Hey, freak.”
“Hush!” one of the women scolded, but there were no apologies, no other reprimands, and Molly let it pass.Verb went on talking about some new mathematical model as if she’d never heard.
It was all so fragile, the human chemistry as well as the inorganic.The ammonia, for example, came from Haber-Bosch catalysis of nitrogen and hydrogen that had been compressed, condensed, and filtered out of the Martian atmosphere.The same process gave them their oxygen and the nitrogen/argon buffer they breathed with it, and squeezed almost a pound of water out of 30 cubic meters of Martian air. Each piece fit snugly into place, endlessly recycled, without waste or inefficiency.
Their society had worked that way too, at least for a while.The first hard years had provided the heat to fuse them all together, Russians, Americans, Japanese, in a proton-proton reaction that kept them all alive. It was only now that the energy of that fusion was burning out, leaving collapsing factions behind that could flare into violence at any moment.
Through it all Curtis had kept his iron control, obsessed with his vision of a terraformed Mars, even after it became obvious that they didn’t have the resources to do it on their own.They needed help from Earth, the ships, the material to make huge solar mirrors, the mass drivers to bring them ice and asteroids.
Curtis had been right the night before, of course. He didn’t know what Verb’s physics was capable of, or he would have moved in and taken it for himself long before.
Because the new physics meant energy virtually without a price tag, energy for the taking, enough to make Curtis’s dreams into reality and solidify his vision of Mars forever.And no matter how much she wanted to see Mars bloom, she couldn’t let Curtis twist that garden into his own rigid image.
She stopped outside the Center.“Stay here,” she said to the children. “If he’s up to it, I’ll send him out in a little bit.”
All four of the astronauts were sleeping, and for an instant, barely long enough for the thought to register at all, it occurred to her how easy it would be to get rid of them now, to inject air bubbles into their veins or move them into the surgery and quietly gas them.
Then Kane turned over, making a soft noise in his sleep, and she was back to normal.
She knelt beside Reese’s cot, touching his forehead and testing the pulse in his carotid artery. He woke under her hand and said,“Hello,” his voice still thick with sleep.
“How do you feel?”
“Hungry,” he said, sitting up cautiously.“Hungry and...sort of stupid.”
“Sarah’s outside,” she said.“Verb is what they call her now.”
“What?”
“I told you, they have their own names for each other.Verb is what they call her now.”
“Verb. No kidding.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Go on.”
“She’s outside now. She’ll take you to breakfast, if you want.”
“Yeah.”
“She’s not beautiful, Reese. I just want you to be prepared for that. There’s not anything beautiful about her. I don’t even know if there’s anything there to love. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He stood up and she helped him as far as the sick bay door, and then she handed him an oxygen mask from the rack on the wall. He put it on and walked out of the Center on his own, Molly just behind him.
He stood there for a long moment, and Molly watched him take it all in, knowing that as sick as she was of this fishbowl city, as much as she missed the luxuries of Earth, as much as she wanted even more to be further, deeper, faster, that she would be homesick for this place if she’d been stranded the way Reese had, not knowing if he would ever get this far again.
Then Verb came up to them, leaving E17 sitting a dozen meters away with his back to them. She took Reese’s left arm in both her hands and quietly said,“Grandpa?”
The night before, after Molly left, Reese had lain in the darkness, trying to second-guess Morgan’s plan.
He tried to leave his emotions out of it.That he’d been swindled was no surprise, set up for some kind of complicated snatch-and-run by Morgan’s promises of new frontiers; what hurt was the knowledge that it might all end here, not just for himself but for the entire human race, as if the only fish ever to crawl onto land had lasted ten years and then died with no offspring.
And surely he was not exaggerating.Whatever Morgan had programmed Kane to do would be devastating, might bring the entire colony down in the process.
Don’t kid yourself, he thought.You know what Morgan wants.The transporter, the one that’s good for ten or twenty light-years.
The very thing you want for yourself.
Someone at the far end of the sickbay groaned in her sleep, the whimper of the fly being sucked dry by the spider, a tiny, apologetic cry for help when there was no help to be given.
He knew his odds: his father had died of cancer, he himself had made two round trips to Mars and then this last run, had poisoned his body with alcohol and drugs. Given enough time, cancer was a virtual certainty.
Not me, Reese thought. Not that way.
He thought about Sarah.
She was alive, Molly had said, alive but strange, stranger than he would be able to imagine. Strange enough, he wondered, to build a matter transporter? The voice on the tape had said it was a kid, female, and then Molly had told him they had new names now. He remembered the last time he’d seen her, only two years old, already pacing herself through the elementary math and logic tutorials on Molly’s computer, sketching from memory a diagram of a hypercube.
If it was Sarah, and it almost had to be, the irony was compelling, the grandchild become mother to the man...
The sight of her the next morning was more than he could have prepared himself for: her pale flabbiness, her stringy hair and lopsided eyes. And then she called him grandfather.
“Molly?” he said.“You told her?”
“No. I had no idea she even knew. Not until now.”
“It’s no big deal,” the girl said, turning her oversized head at an angle to look at Molly, as if it weighed too much even for her thick, wrinkled neck.“I can use a computer, you know. I’ve looked up your genetics and they’re a lot closer to Reese’s than to the guy that was supposed to be your father.”
“Jesus,” Molly said.“She was talking about connections this morning. I should have seen this coming.”
“I don’t suppose it matters,” Reese said.“Not anymore.”
“It shouldn’t,” Molly said.“Not to any rational person. But it’s liable to put Curtis over the edge. It’s not like you guys are Damon and Pythias to start with.”
“I never told anybody,” the girl said.“I don’t have to tell anybody now.”