Dan turned to them and smiled. It was disconcerting, with his eyes concealed. “Yo, Malenfant, Emma. Welcome to the geeko-sphere.” Maybe, for him, they were floating against coal-black Cruithne. But she noticed he seemed to be able to work his softscreen, despite its awkward draping over his lap, without glancing down. “You want coffee, or soda? There’s a Shit machine—”
“Just give me some news, Dan,” Malenfant said. “As good as possible.” His voice sounded tight with stress.
Dan pushed his VR hood off his face. His eyes were reddened and sore, and the mask had left white marks across his forehead and cheeks. “Pay dirt,” he said. “The carbonaceous ore contains hydrogen, nitrogen, methane, carbon monoxide and dioxide, sulfur dioxide, ammonia—”
“Water?” Emma asked.
He nodded. “Oh, yes. As permafrost and hydrated minerals. Twenty percent by mass, by God. Every prediction fulfilled, exceeded in fact.”
Malenfant smacked his hands together. “It’s a warehouse up there.”
Dan plastered a big softscreen over the posters and photos and memos and other crap on the wall, and tapped its surface. Up came an image of the asteroid’s surface — gritty and crumpled, Emma thought, like roadside slush — and there was one of the microrobots they were calling “fireflies.”
As she watched, a tiny puff of vapor vented from the base of the firefly. It jetted sharply up away from the asteroid ground, swiveled neatly, then shot out a little dart that trailed a fine cable, like fishing line. The dart buried itself in the loose rock. The line went taut and began to haul itself in, neatly dragging the firefly back to the surface.
“The fireflies are working great,” Dan said. “We should be able to find a hundred applications for these babies: in LEO, other asteroids, even on the Moon. The propulsion system is neat. It’s a digital propulsion chip: a little bank of solid rocket motors, and you can address the motors individually, pop pop pop, to get a high degree of maneuverability and control.”
Emma asked, “And Sheena is running these things?”
“Oh, yes.” Dan grinned proudly. “She has a big waldo glove in the habitat she can fit her whole body right inside. Of course that took some designing. Because she lacks bones, Sheena doesn’t have a good sense of where her arms are in space. So the wal-does feed back information about pressure and texture. She does a fine job. She can run eight of these babies at once. In many ways she’s smarter than we are.”
“And yet we sent her out there, to die,” Emma said.
There was an uncomfortable silence, as if she’d been impolite to mention such a thing.
Dan pulled his VR mask over his face and started to scroll through more results from the asteroid, and Emma went in search of a coffee machine.
Sheena 5:
And on Cruithne, Sheena laid her eggs.
They were cased in jelly sacs, hundreds of them in each tube. There was no spawning ground here, of course. So she draped the egg sacs over the knot of machinery at the heart of her miniature ocean, which had now anchored itself to the surface of Cruithne. The gardens of egg cases dangled there, soft and organic against the hard machinery.
Small schools of fish came to nose at the eggs. She watched until she was sure that the fish were repelled by the jelly that coated the eggs, which was its purpose.
She had no instinct to return to the eggs, to cradle them. But she knew this was an unusual circumstance; this small ball of water, collapsed to a fat lens against the asteroid, was no enriching ocean. So she developed a habit of visiting the eggs every few hours, of squirting gentle water jets over them to keep them aerated.
All this was out of sight of Dan’s cameras. She did not tell him what she had done.
Michaeclass="underline"
More children arrived, but now they seemed bewildered and frightened. They always had blue circles crudely stitched onto their shirts or jackets. The children would complain and cry until they learned the first of the rules Michael had learned, which was never to complain or cry.
Some children were taken away, too.
Many were taken by concerned-looking people who would put their arms around a frightened child. Michael didn’t know what this meant. Perhaps it was a trick.
The children taken away all had white skin. The children who were brought in mostly had black or brown skin. Soon, most of the children who were left behind, including Michael, had brown or black skin. He didn’t know what this meant either.
One day he saw a Brother wearing a gold ring.
Michael was fascinated by the gold, the deep luster of the time-stretched electrons in its structure. He came forward and stared at it. The Brother smiled at him and held out his hand so he could see.
Then, without warning, the Brother swung back his arm and slammed his fist into the side of Michael’s head. Michael could feel the ring dig into his flesh, warm blood spurting. The Brother smiled and walked away.
To his shame, Michael was crying.
He ran back to his dormitory. He ran across the floor toward his pallet. But there was a Sister here, and she grabbed his arm and shouted at him. He didn’t understand, but then she pointed at the floor. He had left a trail of blood. He had to get a mop and bucket and scrape his drying blood off the floor. But still the blood flowed, and he had to work harder to keep it off the floor, and it seemed as if it would never stop.
That snapshot, the incident with the ring, divided Michael’s life in two, as light from dark.
The visitors grew fewer, until they stopped coming altogether.
And the lessons were more infrequent. Sometimes they were replaced by work sessions, in which the children had to paint the huts or clean floors or mop out the toilet blocks. Sometimes they were just canceled altogether.
The refrigerators and bowls of food were taken away. Now there was only food at mealtimes, twice a day.
The children were no longer issued fresh clothes. They were given shirts and shorts and shoes that were marked with small blue circles, just one set per child. The clothes soon became dirty and threadbare.
The last lessons were stopped, and the softscreens were taken away.
Many of the children wept and fought at that, but not Michael.
He had expected this to happen someday. The School had been like a strange dream anyway.
He would be able to work in his head. As long as he was left alone, as he had been in the village.
Emma Stoney:
Each morning now, Emma had to run the gauntlet of the noisy mobs outside Bootstrap’s Vegas office. This morning, as her car approached, a few of them burst through the police line. The car sensed warm human bodies ahead and slowed to a halt. Emma made sure her windows were sealed up, overrode the Smart-Drive, and inched the car forward.
Slowly the people parted, but not before they got close enough to scream in through the windscreen at her. There were eco types in body paint, a lot of religious groups she couldn’t identify, and also counter-protesters, people actually in favor of Bootstrap and its projects, mostly young white males with U.S. flags and other national emblems, chanting about pioneers and the new frontier. Some of them wore animated T-shirts with an image of Malenfant making a speech somewhere: a few words and a smile, cycled over and over on the crumpled cloth. She grimaced; she wondered how much money some remote corner of Bootstrap was making out of that. A line of cops, supplemented by company security people (racking up one hell of an expense, as Emma knew too well) kept the factions apart.
Here was a beefy guy with shaved hair, dressed in a green T-shirt and pants as if he were some kind of veteran. He was limping, one of his legs betraying him. He was carrying a blown-up picture of a sickly looking kid blowing candles on a birthday cake. He was shouting. “Yellow babies! Look what you did, Malenfant! Look what you did!”