Obviously that was unfair. But the world was chronically unfair in so many ways that Myra de Soyza Subramanian had no patience for wasting time in resentment. That was the unchangeable way the world was. What was the point in complaining? There would be a time when both her children were in college. Then she would be as free as any human could ever get, and then she would have twenty, thirty, maybe even fifty years of productive life in which to unravel the riddles of her chosen profession.
Deferred gratification was the name of that game. You didn’t have to like its rules to play by them. And, one way or another, you might even win.
Both Myra and Ranjit considered themselves big winners when Robert Ganesh Subramanian was born. His parents thought they had hit the jackpot with two fine offspring. Robert was a vociferously healthy newborn who gained weight and strength as rapidly as Ranjit and Myra could have hoped for. He tried to turn himself over in his crib even earlier than Natasha had, and was toilet trained almost as early. All of their friends declared that he was the handsomest child they had ever seen, and they weren’t really lying, either. Robert was the kind of infant for whose picture baby-food manufacturers would have paid handsomely to put on their labels.
Interestingly, if there was anyone who loved Baby Robert more than his parents did, that person was little Natasha, who wasn’t all that little anymore and was already beginning to demonstrate a considerable aptitude for athletics, education, and getting her parents to do just about everything she might require of them.
Which, in this case, was to let her take care of Baby Robert.
Well, not quite all of his care. Not the part that involved situations that smelled really bad. But dressing Robert, pushing Robert around in his stroller, playing with Robert—Natasha demanded the privilege of taking care of those things, and after some early worried hesitation, Myra gave her daughter what she asked.
Actually, Natasha was good at the job. When Robert screamed or roared, it was Natasha who could usually fit words to his outcries. And when his mother took him away, Natasha had her own life to live, school or her daily swim sessions or just spending time with her friends…or most likely combining her interests, with her friends joining her at the pool, or Robert slumbering beside her as she studied English verbs or the history of India and its satellite nations.
All this, of course, was a good thing for Myra. With Natasha relieving her of so much of the work of raising Robert, Myra was not falling behind as rapidly as she might have feared in AI nerding. And what was good for Myra was certainly good for Ranjit, for whom his wife was as dear—and as unpredictably exciting—as she had been on the day they were wed.
All in all, things were going well for Ranjit Subramanian. One seminar per semester was all he needed to do, Dr. Davoodbhoy had decreed, but as long as he was going to do the one, they might as well make it a big one. So Ranjit’s classroom had become the exact supersize theater in which he had thrilled to Joris Vorhulst’s stories of the worlds of the solar system. Ranjit didn’t have twenty students at a time anymore, either. Now he had a hundred. Which, Dr. Davoodbhoy assured him, entitled him to the luxury of a teaching assistant—that eager young woman, Ramya Salgado, now possessed of a master’s degree of her own, who had so enriched his second seminar—and freedom to do his own “research” for the rest of each semester. Davoodbhoy intimated that that was so he could get a head start on whatever proof he was going to assign his next class.
Or, Ranjit realized, it was a good time to do some of that exploration of his native country that he had been intending to get around to ever since Myra had first chided him as overparochial.
That was a more attractive idea than it might have been some years earlier, for even tourist travel was looking more attractive in this post–Silent Thunder world. They could, for example, cruise the Nile River, as Myra had longed to do since she was ten; both Egypt and Kenya had furloughed large fractions of their militaries while the ecologists for all the countries involved worked out water-saving ways of containing their thirsts for Nile water. The Subramanians could have taken the children to London—or to Paris, or New York, or Rome—to get an idea of what a great city was like. They could have settled for Norwegian fjords or Swiss mountains or the jungles of Amazonia; they could indeed have gone almost anywhere, but what in fact happened was that, while they were still studying travel brochures, they got a text from Joris Vorhulst. It said:
Mother tells me that you have some vacation time coming. I’ll be down at the terminal for at least a week, starting the first of next month. Why don’t you come see what we’re doing these days?
“Actually,” Myra said, “that would be fun.” And Natasha said, “You bet!” And even Robert, hanging on to Natasha’s chair and listening to every word, bellowed something that Natasha explained was a yes. And so the family of four prepared for its first long trip together.
It wasn’t just Vorhulst’s invitation that made Ranjit look forward to visiting the Skyhook terminal. There were actually two reasons, and the first was the advisory board that Vorhulst had talked him into joining a number of years ago. It had been as undemanding as Vorhulst had promised—no meetings to go to, not even any voting on any issues, because if there were any issues troublesome enough to require a decision, that decision was made for them by the real controllers of the enterprise, the governments of China, Russia, and the United States. Ranjit had, however, been the recipient of a monthly progress report. There too the heavy hand of the big three was felt, because most of each report’s content was sternly secret, and even more of it was simply dismissed as what was cryptically called “development.” He had only been to the site a handful of times, and those visits had been quite cursory. Whether he would learn more by being at the scene Ranjit could not say, but he was anxious to find out.
The other reason was a surprise to Ranjit himself. The Subramanians didn’t have a car of their own—Ranjit and Myra biked to most places, sometimes with Natasha riding happily in front of them and Robert strapped into a child’s seat behind his father, and when they needed more in the way of transport, there were always cabs. But the university had promised the loan of a car for the trip, and Ranjit picked it up from the grinning Dr. Davoodbhoy. “It’s special for you,” he said. “Pax per Fidem sent it. It’s a new design from transparent Korea—with all those geniuses who used to build weapons now free for new civilian ideas, they’ve got a lot of stuff.” And when he’d explained what the perky little four-seater could do, it sent Ranjit back to Myra grinning with pleasure.
“Get me a pitcher of water,” he commanded as he pulled up at their house. Mystified, she obeyed. She was even more mystified when he ceremoniously opened the fuel tank and poured the water in, and when he then started the motor and listened pleasurably to its purr, she was totally baffled.
He gave her the explanation Davoodbhoy had given him. “Boron,” he said. “It’s called the Abu-Hamed drive, after I don’t know who, maybe the person who invented it. You know the element boron is so hungry for oxygen that it’ll pull it right out of compounds like water? And when you take the oxygen out of the water molecule, what do you have left?”
Myra frowned at him. “Hydrogen, but—”
Grinning, he touched a finger to her lips. “But boron’s terribly expensive, and burning a carbon fuel’s so much cheaper that nobody ever bothered with it. But here it is! They’ve found out how to regenerate the boron so they can use it over and over. And so we’re driving a car that not only is low-emission, it doesn’t emit anything at all!”