“Just be careful what you promise,” Carlo warned him. “The Object will give its own verdict on all of these plans, and if you’ve talked up the prospect of quadrupling the harvest you might have some disappointed voters to deal with.”
Silvano was puzzled. “I told you: the whole point of my candidacy will be to ensure that people benefit regardless. If we can’t farm the Object, solving the fuel problem would certainly be a big boost to morale—but we have to be prepared to find more space for agriculture, whatever the Gnat discovers.”
“Rocket fuel or rock, you win either way?” Carla was finding the whole thing amusing. “I can see the posters already.”
When they’d left the apartment, Carlo turned to her. “You think there’s a chance we’ll end up farming the Object?”
“Anything’s possible,” she said. “Though if the whole thing’s as inert as calmstone and we end up relying on it, the fuel problem won’t just be unsolved, it will be doubled.”
“Yeah.” As a child, when he’d first understood that the Peerless had been loaded up far beyond its capacity to return, Carlo had railed against the ancestors—and now here was Silvano, contemplating doing exactly the same thing. “Do you want to run for the Council on a No Expansion platform? ‘Forget about a bigger harvest, people! There’s no point getting used to a mountain of extra food, when we have no way to decelerate a mountain of extra rock!’”
Carla buzzed wryly. “Maybe not. I can’t really blame Silvano, though. He doesn’t want his son to have to do what he did.” When Carlo didn’t reply she glanced across at him. “Your solution would be better, but it’s harder for most of us to believe in. We all know that a flying mountain can be turned into a farm, but for well-fed women to start having two children sounds more like turning people into voles.”
“Western shrub voles, to be precise,” Carlo replied. “They’re the biparous ones. But they have no males, so that doesn’t really help—breeding still doubles their numbers. As far as anyone knows, there’s never been an animal population that was stable in the absence of predation, famine or disease.”
“Don’t get discouraged,” Carla said, reaching over and putting a hand on his shoulder. “That’s just the history of life for the last few eons. It’s not as if it’s a law of physics.”
14
Tamara woke in the clearing as the wheatlight was fading. She brushed the straw and petals off her body, then lay still for a while, luxuriating in the sensation of the soil against her skin. She was spoilt as a farmer’s co, she decided; she didn’t know how anyone could sleep in the near-weightlessness of the apartments. She’d never had any trouble doing her work in the observatory, and she often spent the whole day close to the axis, but having to be held in place by a tarpaulin every night, trying to cool yourself in an artificial bed’s sterile sand, struck her as the most miserable recipe for insomnia imaginable.
She rose to her feet and looked around. Tamaro was standing a short distance away; her father was up, but she couldn’t see him.
“Good morning,” Tamaro said. He seemed distracted, the greeting no more than a formality.
“Good morning.” Tamara stretched lazily and turned her face to the ceiling. Above them, the moss was waking; in the corridors the same species shone ceaselessly, but here it had learned to defer to the wheat. “Have you been up long?”
“A lapse or two,” he replied.
“Oh.” She’d half-woken much earlier and thought she’d sensed his absence—in the yielding of the scythe when she’d brushed an arm against it—but she hadn’t opened her eyes to check. “I should get moving,” she said. She had no urgent business to attend to, but when Tamaro was distant like this it usually meant that he was hoping she’d leave soon, allowing him to eat an early breakfast. That was probably what her father was doing right now.
He said, “Can I talk to you first?”
“Of course.” Tamara walked over to him.
“I heard about Massima,” he said.
“Yeah, that was a shame.”
“You never mentioned it.”
Tamara buzzed curtly. “It wasn’t that much of a shame. I would have been happy to have her with us, but it won’t affect the mission.”
Tamaro said, “She must have decided that it wasn’t worth the risk.”
“Well, that was her right.” Tamara was annoyed now. Did he really think he could compare her to Massima? “Since she was only ever going to be a spectator, I don’t blame her for setting such a low threshold.”
“Do I have to beg you not to go?” he asked her. He sounded hurt now. “Have you even thought about what it would mean to me, if something happened to you?”
Tamara reached down and squeezed his shoulder reassuringly. “Of course I have. But I’ll be careful, I promise.” She tried to think back to what Ada had said, the way of putting it that had won over her own co. “We were born too late to share the thrill of the launch, and too early to take part in the return. If I turn down an opportunity like this, what’s my life for? Just waiting around until we have children?”
“Did I ever put pressure on you to have children?” Tamaro demanded indignantly.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I’ve always been happy for you to work!” he said. “You won’t hear a word of complaint from me, just so long as you do something safe.”
Tamara struggled to be patient. “You’re not listening. I need to do this. Part of it’s the chance to help the chemists fix the fuel problem—and that in itself would be no small thing. But flying the Gnat is the perfect job for me: for my skills, my temperament, my passions. If I’d had to spend my life watching rocks like this pass by in the distance, I would have made the best of it. But this is a chance to do everything I’m capable of.”
Tamaro said coldly, “And you’d risk our children, for that?”
“Oh…” Tamara was angry now; she’d never imagined he’d resort to anything so cheap. “If I die out there, you’ll find yourself a nice widow soon enough. I know most of them have sold their own entitlements, but you’ll have mine, won’t you? You’ll be the definition of an irresistible co-stead.”
“You think this is a joke?” Tamaro was furious.
“How was I joking? It’s the truth: if I die, you’ll still get to be a father. So stop sulking about it, as if you have more at stake here than I do.”
He stepped away from her, visibly revolted. “I’m not fathering children with someone else,” he said. “The flesh of our mother is the flesh of my children; however long you might borrow it, it’s not yours. Least of all yours to endanger.”
Tamara buzzed with derision. “What age are you living in? I can’t even look at you, you buffoon!” She pushed past him onto the path and headed out of the clearing, half expecting him to start following her and haranguing her, but each time she stole a glance with her rear gaze he was still standing motionless where she’d left him.
When he vanished from sight behind a bend in the path, Tamara felt a strange, vertiginous thrill. Was she leaving him? At the very least, she wouldn’t be coming back to the farm until he sought her out and apologized. She could sleep in the office next to the observatory—in a bed without gravity, but she’d survive.
As she strode along between the dormant wheat-flowers, she began to feel a twinge of guilt. She wanted Tamaro to understand what the Gnat meant to her, but she didn’t want to bludgeon him into acquiescence. If he was afraid of losing his chance to be a father, the threat of desertion would be even more distressing than the prospect of her death: her children, not his, would inherit the family’s entitlement. What kind of fate was she prepared to force upon him? The choice between a lonely death and… what? Hiding the children he had with some widow? Stealing grain for them from his own crops, until the auditors finally caught him? He needed to grow up and accept her autonomy, but there were limits to how ruthless she was willing to be. She still loved him, she still wanted him to raise their children. Whatever they’d both said in the heat of the moment, she couldn’t imagine anything changing that.