Analog Science Fiction and Fact - June 2013

“Let’s get some breakfast,” he said gently.
Rikki nodded, too choked up to speak.
When they retraced their steps through the
gallery, Antonio was up, yawning, a red-faced,
bawling baby in his arms. From another room,
furtive scrabbling sounds announced that at
least some of the lab mice had awakened, too.
But not Li: they found her in the ICU, dozing
in a chair, her mouth fallen open. Her patient,
asleep in the room’s single occupied isolette,
was sticklike, its joints misshapen. Li had not
had any explanation beyond, “It happens.”
She works harder than all of us, Blake
thought. And she can’t leave the settlement,
can’t ever stray more than a few steps from
the children.
The moment of empathy almost kept Blake
from not dreading the remainder of his day.
Breakfast was as best-ignored as usual. He
and Rikki scarcely overlapped with Carlos and
Dana, heading out that morning on a quick
flight to gather more phosphates. Carlos
swigged from a tall glass; Blake guessed that
the synthed orange juice was laced with vodka.
“We can’t have too much phosphate,” Li
had said again and again, when she wasn’t
pushing them to stockpile other minerals and
trace elements. “If Endeavour ever breaks
down . . .”
And she was right, although phosphates
half-filled their largest storehouse.
Until recently it had been a full warehouse.
The crush of snow from the winter’s final
storm had buckled the roof; three days of torrential
rain only the week before had washed
away half their reserves.
Blake missed robins as the first sign of
spring.
He and Rikki packed lunches, grabbed a
tractor from the garage, and trundled down
Main Street. Past storehouses and workshops.
Past a massive, deeply buried bunker, showing
only its roof and slanted double doors. It safeguarded
their most precious treasures: embryo
banks, both human and animal, and seed
bags, and Marvin’s servers. Past their other
bunker, housing a fusion reactor. Past the
ethanol-fueled, steam-powered generator that
backstopped the reactor, and the ethanol refinery.
Past the chemical fertilizer plant and its
noxious odor. Past the chicken coop, with its
DARK SECRET
JUNE 2013
clacking, clamoring occupants and their
worse than noxious stench. Past the glasswalled
hydroponics conservatory and its
touches of terrestrial greenery. Past the
foundry in which he had fabricated, among
many things, parts for this tractor.
Past twelve headstones and twelve heartbreakingly
tiny graves.
Gravity’s effects on gestation? Local toxins?
Radiation damage from the long voyage? Li
couldn’t always tell, and that meant they
could expect to lose more children.
They drove in silence down to the silt
plains.
To the roar of the tractor engine, Blake began
tilling. The throbbing of the motor ran up
the steering column, out the steering wheel,
into sore hands, aching arms, and tense shoulders.
Despite gloves and bandages, he kept
popping blisters faster than med nanites could
heal them. He felt about a hundred years old.
The stiff morning breeze off the Darwin Sea
whipped across the Spencer River Delta, pelting
him with grit and roiling the dust plume
that trailed behind the tractor for a good fifty
meters. Should he plow the lifeless silt with or
across the prevailing wind? Follow the contours
of the landscape? He had no idea, and
Marvin’s databases, though rife with esoteric
botanical theory, offered little practical how-to
to enlighten him. Last year’s trials with silt and
fertilizer in a few pots and planters, as encouraging
as they had been, suggested nothing
about plowing techniques. So Blake changed
course every few rows, putting in furrows
every which way. When the crops came in—if
the crops came in—he would have a better
idea for next year.
Not that Marvin’s knowledge wasn’t useful:
it showed they had dodged a bullet. Their
seeds, all varieties gengineered for Mars, fixed
nitrogen directly from the atmosphere. Blake
hadn’t taken biology since high school, so
maybe he’d forgotten that unmodded crops often
depended upon nitrogen-fixing bacteria in
the soil. More likely, he had never known it in
the first place. Inner-city curricula didn’t
dwell much on farming.
Rikki plodded along behind the tractor,
hand-planting the field row by row and labeling
test plots. When she had tired of stooping
and he of the shuddering of the tractor, they
swapped places. The windborne silt by then
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