At his side, Dawn stirred and rose to her feet. She had been quiet while Josh was working, though she hadn’t seemed to watch the displays at all. Now she said, “Come on,” and held out her hand.
“Come on where? Oh, who cares. I’m not getting anywhere here.” Josh allowed himself to be dragged out of the data center and up the stairs, higher and higher, until they came to a little room at the end of the loft. He hadn’t remembered its existence until he saw it again. Then he remembered that it always used to be locked. Dawn went in and pulled a swing-down ladder into position, which also opened a skylight. She led the way up.
They emerged onto a flat part of the roof. Josh was sure that he had never been here before, and it took a few seconds to orient himself. City kids didn’t see open sky very often—too many streetlights and tall buildings—but the rising moon told him which way was east.
The night sky was so clear that you thought you could see a million stars in it, as well as dozens of rapidly moving points of light that had to be ships and stations in low orbit. He thought that Dawn had just brought him up to look at everything, until she took his arm to get his attention and pointed up and to the southwest.
“What is it?” He couldn’t see a thing where she was telling him to look.
She giggled. “Belt node.”
No wonder he couldn’t find anything. No one could possibly see a node in the Asteroid Belt or the Kuiper Belt from here, not if they had the biggest telescope on Earth to look through. He stared anyway, for a long time, and saw nothing.
Then she was pointing farther north. “Messina Dust Cloud.”
Again, there was nothing visible. But she certainly seemed to be staring at something.
It gave him a definitely creepy feeling. Either she could pick up something that was totally invisible to him, or she couldn’t, and she was playing some sort of game of her own. Either way, he didn’t like it. For the first time, his feelings about Dawn took a strongly negative turn. With her long silences and her strange reactions, she really spooked him.
They stayed on the flat roof until the air cooled. At last Josh felt himself shivering. Dawn, in her sleeveless dress, must have been freezing. He said “Come on” and led the way back inside. She followed, and, rather to his relief, continued on to her own room.
He did the same. The house doors were already locked, though that seemed to be of less concern here than in the apartments where he and his mother had always lived. This time he undressed and put on night clothes before he lay down on his bed.
He welcomed the chance to be alone for a while. He had a lot to think about. The fact that he had been dropped onto Burnt Willow Farm uninvited; Aunt Stacy and Uncle Ryan and the medical examination; the network nodes and the Messina Dust Cloud; Solferino and Foodlines and Unimine; they all swirled around disturbingly inside his head.
And Dawn. What strange ideas ran around in her head, when she lay down to sleep? Did she, like Josh, worry about the next day and her own future? Or did she live all in the present, like Mister Micklegruber, now snoring so loudly outside that Josh could hear him through the open window?
Josh did not know if it was Uncle Ryan and Aunt Stacy’s return that woke him up, or the sound of their voices.
He lay flat on his back and wondered what time it was. It felt like the middle of the night. He was ready to turn over and try to go back to sleep when he thought that he heard Uncle Ryan say the word, Joshua, with unusual emphasis.
He lay totally still, staring up at the ceiling and listening intently. It was no good—he could hear enough to be sure that they were talking, and sometimes pick out odd words and phrases, but he could not quite make sense of the whole conversation.
He eased out of bed as quietly as he could and moved across to the door. Their bedroom was on the floor below his, but for some reason he could hear even less when he was here at the head of the stairs. In fact, he didn’t think they were in their bedroom at all. There was a light on farther down, as though they were still downstairs. He knew how much the old stairs creaked. If he went down, they would surely hear him coming no matter how quietly he tried to walk.
He moved back and put his ear to the wall at the head end of his bed. That was a lot better. Through some trick of the house’s construction, sounds below carried here almost perfectly.
He stood motionless and tried not to breathe.
“I’m not saying it isn’t.” That was Uncle Ryan. “In fact, it’s a good deal more than I expected.”
“So what’s your problem?”
“Well, for one thing it’s our existing commitments. I have contracts for crop delivery this harvest.”
“Harvest?” Aunt Stacy laughed, but it carried no humor. “If we don’t take the Foodlines offer, there’ll be no harvest. You’ll be plowing under dry stalks. But if we take their offer, they’ll make water available. And you heard Mort, he’ll make sure that our contracts are fulfilled no matter what.”
“So he says. You know I don’t trust that man as far as I can throw him.”
“I don’t see why. He’s always been straight with me.”
“You weren’t around when other farms were bought out, Stacy. You haven’t heard the stories. Mort Langstrom made promises, but once the deal was signed and people were off their own property, that was the last anybody heard about prior commitments.”
“I see.” There was a pause, then Aunt Stacy spoke again in a different voice. “Suppose that we could talk Foodlines into signing a deal now, but they agree we can stay on at Burnt Willow Farm until this harvest is in. Would that make a difference?”
“Of course it would. But you know they won’t go for that. They were quite clear about the situation on Solferino. If we want to get that early-in working interest that they talked about, we have to have a physical presence there within sixty days. I must say, I’ve never heard of a contract clause like that in my life. I wonder who put it in.”
“I wonder, too.” There was a certain tone in Aunt Stacy’s voice. Josh recalled his mother’s acting-out of parts. See this now. Wide-open eyes. The mouth parted, just a little. Perfect innocence.
Aunt Stacy was continuing, “But Ryan, it could still work.”
“How? We can’t be in two places at once.”
“We don’t have to be. There’s Joshua.”
Josh, his ear to the wall, felt the goosebumps rise at the sound of his own name.
“What about Joshua?” asked Uncle Ryan.
“He could go on ahead of us, and establish a presence on behalf of the family. He would need special training anyway, to live and work on Solferino. It would be better if he had it there than here.”
Josh gasped with excitement and put his hand over his mouth. But Ryan said, more than loudly enough to cover the noise from Josh, “Stacy!”
“What’s wrong?”
“Are you crazy? We don’t even know how to reach Lucy to discuss it.”
“So what? We can hardly be blamed for that. What makes you think she wants to discuss this, or anything else to do with Joshua?”
“She’d have to.”
“Why? She sent us all the legal records on him; we can take any action we believe to be to his benefit. Ryan, can’t you see that Lucy Kerrigan doesn’t give a damn what happens to her son? From all I’ve heard about her, she’s a totally selfish bitch who never did one thing for anybody except herself in her whole life. Who was Joshua’s father? Can you tell me that?”
“I don’t know. Maria didn’t know, either. Lucy never told us.”
“Wonderful. So Lucy Kerrigan has herself a bastard. And when it becomes inconvenient to have him around, what does she do? She drops him off on strangers.”