On Miranda’s advice, Cecelia hired three more nursemaids. One wanted to emigrate, and was glad to accept a colony share in lieu of salary. She brought along her own children, a two- and a four-year-old. Five people to care for four children might be overdoing it, Cecelia thought, but she herself didn’t intend to wash a single diaper or wipe a single drippy nose.
By midnight, Cecelia had arranged everything. The yacht would not be ready immediately, of course; even with the assurance of large sums of money, it took time to prepare a large spaceship for a luxury voyage. But Cecelia had arranged for one of the nursemaids from Miranda’s to take the boys to a park with the newly hired maid and her children, leaving the suite clear for at least some hours of the days. No one had seen pictures of them for months; no one, Cecelia was sure, would notice two more young women with children in a park full of young women with children. She had discussed with the nursemaids what clothes would be needed for the voyage and for six months afterward; she didn’t know how easy it would be to find children’s clothes on a colony world. She set up credit lines so that purchases by the nursemaids would not be traceable to her or to Miranda.
Then she fell into bed with a glow of conscious virtue. When the twins woke, bawling, at two in the morning, she pulled a pillow over her head and went back to sleep. That part of it was someone else’s problem.
By the time they boosted from Rockhouse Major, Cecelia felt sure that no one had suspected anything. As far as anyone outside the Palace knew, the twins were still there. The news media had shown no more than normal interest in her doings, and seemed to accept her offhand comment that she had leased the big yacht because she was tired of doing all the work in her little one, and wanted someone else along to cook and clean.
The two boys thoroughly enjoyed the company of other children; Cecelia pored over their medical records in her stateroom, and came to the same conclusion as the doctors and psychologists. Normal children, who could expect to have normal lives. The real question was . . . should she tell Raffaele and Ronnie who they really were? In her own mind, the boys should not know—that they were adopted, yes, but not that their fathers had raped their mother and kept her captive. Of course they must have access to their medical records someday; advances in therapy might make it possible to finish cleaning up their genome.
She saw moral and emotional shoals in either direction.
Chapter Four
Excet Colony 24 looked, from space, like a paradise, sapphire seas and emerald forests, tawny drylands and olive savannas, all spatched and streaked with white water-vapor clouds. It had been seeded two hundred years before with the usual package of invader species, and closely monitored thereafter. Originally, colonization had been planned for a century later, when the introduced ecosystem would be more stable, but oxygen levels had never fallen dangerously low; the original system here had already been oxy-carbon.
The colony spaceport, in contrast, was a dirty little dump, in Cecelia’s view. Her chartered yacht had its own shuttle, whose wide viewscreen gave a clear view of the mess. Discarded cargo containers lay scattered near either end of the runway. The single runway. The spaceport buildings were ugly piles, too much like the Patchcock port. The white plumes of cement factories, the lime kilns where limestone and shale were converted to cement for construction, lay gently on a background of rich green forest in the near distance.
Customs consisted of a harried young woman with a nearly impenetrable accent, whose only concern was whether the new arrivals had colony shares.
“I don’t need a colony share,” Cecelia said. “I’m not staying; I’m just here to visit—”
The young woman glared, took Cecelia’s IDs, and inserted them in a machine. After a moment, she turned to give Cecelia a long look.
“Yer not stain.”
“I’m not staying, no. I’m here to visit my nephew and his wife. Ronald Vandormer.”
“Aow! Rownnie! Whyntcha sai so?”
“I tried,” Cecelia said.
“He’s at th’ office, about naow,” the woman said. “Ya kin gover.” She pointed out the “office,” a two-story cube of concrete.
Like most colonies, this one had been given a head start by its investors: the spaceport town had a small grid of paved streets and a larger grid of gravelled ones. The first hundred or so buildings had been put up of substantial materials—in this case concrete blocks. Beyond that were rickety constructions that Cecelia could only call shacks—crudely built of raw timber. Cecelia noticed, as she walked along, the number of people who were carrying things by hand . . . the absence of hand trucks, let alone vehicles.
The two-story building had a low wall enclosing a courtyard to one side, where a group of men were working on some piece of machinery she didn’t understand. She started to speak up and ask them about Ronnie, when one of the faces in the group suddenly looked familiar. Ronnie? She blinked in the brilliant sunlight, and it still was . . . in face. The glossy young aristocrat, who had always been just one hair from a dandy—and that only because his friend George had been born with creases and a shine, as they said—stood there in tan workshirt and pants, with smears of mud or grease on both. She couldn’t even tell what color his boots had been. But it was Ronnie—as handsome as ever, or more so.
Before she could call out, he turned and went inside; the men went back to doing something with machinery and wood. She followed him inside, to a rough-walled room with a concrete floor, and found him jotting something down on a deskcomp.
“Ronnie—”
He looked up, then his eyes widened. “Aunt Cecelia!”
“I sent word,” Cecelia said.
“We never got it.” He shrugged. “It’s probably in the batch somewhere but everyone’s been too busy . . .” He looked out the window at the bustle in the courtyard.
“It looks like a lot of work,” Cecelia said, eyeing him. This was not a change she had ever expected to see in Ronnie. And why hadn’t he said anything about Bunny’s death? Or asked about Brun?
“It is. It’s not something I thought I’d ever be doing, to tell you the truth.”
“Who’s your colony governor?”
“Er . . . I am, now that Misktov ran off.”
“Ran off?”
“Yes . . . it’s easy enough. He stowed away on an outbound flight with most of our negotiable resources.”
“But—but that’s criminal.”
“So it is,” Ronnie said. “But I didn’t see any police force around to stop him, and we don’t have ansible access down here. No money, no communications.”
“Oh.” Perhaps he didn’t know about Bunny’s assassination. Cecelia took another look around the room. Not an office, exactly—she saw furniture she recognized from Raffa’s mother’s summer cottage. A dining room table covered with data cubes and books. A sofa piled with more books and sheets of plastic and paper that looked like construction drawings. Over everything, a layer of gritty gray dust and ash.
“But we’re doing well, considering,” Ronnie said, before she could organize her thoughts. “It’s just . . . there’s a lot I didn’t know. Don’t know yet. You know, Aunt Cecelia, no matter how many cubes you study, there’s always something . . .”
“For instance?”
“Well . . . the cement plants are working all right, and we’ve got plenty of sand and gravel, so we’re fine for unreinforced construction. But my cubes said unreinforced concrete is dangerous . . .”
“What does your colony engineering team say?”
“Engineering team? We haven’t one. I know, the prospectus says we do, but we don’t. Aunt Cece, ninety percent of our population are low-level workers . . . which makes sense . . . but these people are low-level workers in a high-level system. They’re used to a more advanced infrastructure. They know how to do their work in a world where everything’s already set up, not how to work from scratch. The farmers know how to grow crops in big fields, but they don’t know how to level them. The plumbers know how to connect pipes in standard modular buildings, but they don’t know how to set up a plumbing system from scratch. That’s what the engineering team is supposed to do, make the connection between standard designs and standard practices, and the conditions we have locally. But we don’t have one.”