Analog Science Fiction and Fact - June 2013

ANALOG
had turned them both a dusky gray.
Except by shouting, they couldn’t make
themselves understood over the roar of the
tractor. He resented the noise and fumes, but
the ridiculous internal-combustion engine was
dependable and easy to maintain. There was
no use complaining about it.
As there was no use complaining that babies,
like wheat and corn and even slime
ponds, must be scheduled just so, the winter,
labor-intensive crop of newborns timed to arrive
after the harvest of the weather-dependent
crops. Or about the cookie-cutter
“parenting” largely outsourced to Marvin.
Only realism did nothing to ease the pain.
He had seen the hurt again that morning in
Rikki’s eyes. The yearning, the ache, the need
to bear her own child. Their child.
Weeks earlier, he had sought out Li to ask
about it. In private, because Li was the last
person with whom Rikki would share anything
personal. . . .
“Bad idea,” Li had told Blake.
“The gravity?” he had guessed.
“The gravity. It causes constant skeletal
strain, wear and tear on the joints, and constriction
of the blood vessels.
“Forty percent excess weight is nothing to
sneeze it. That’s for you and me. For Rikki it’s
almost four times the weight her body developed
to handle. Even with nanites and meds,
it’s a struggle to keep her blood pressure controlled.
Pregnancy would only exacerbate the
problem.”
“It would be uncomfortable?”
Li had shaken her head. “Quite possibly fatal.”
“Jesus! What about the girls who’ll be born
here? When they’re old enough?”
“I’m hopeful they’ll be able to carry babies
to term, but we’ll have to wait and see. By
then, maybe, I’ll have a better handle on the
situation, and better meds.”
All the sacrifice, everything that the six of
them had endured . . . it might still be all for
naught? That was too horrifying to face, too
cosmic. The personal tragedy was heartbreaking
enough.
With a lump in his throat, he had asked,
“What do I tell Rikki?”
“What I would tell her, if she’d been the one
to consult me. The truth.”
“I can’t. It would destroy her.”
Li had stood there, head tipped, lost in
thought. “There is another possibility. We may
need to go this way eventually, anyway.”
“Tell me,” he had demanded.
“IVF. In vitro fertilization. Afterward we
transfer the embryo to one of the wombs for
gestation.”
“Then I’ll say that.”
“Okay.” It had come out skeptically.
“Rikki wants a baby. We want a baby.”
“Uh-huh.”
Only Li had been right. When Blake
broached the IVF option, Rikki had stormed
from their home, slamming the door behind
her.
Suddenly glad for the engine’s roar, Blake
tried to lose himself in work.
Every selection of grain type, every depth of
planting, every concentration of chemical fertilizer
or chicken feces, was another experiment—performed
with irreplaceable seeds.
But trial and error was their only way to learn
if and how fertilized silt would grow crops.
He told himself that Dark had neither weeds
nor plant parasites. And, having once mentioned
those advantages to Rikki, he brooded
about her rejoinder: for now.
Evolution abhorred an ecological vacuum.
Late that morning Antonio arrived on the
opposite bank of the nearby river channel,
driving the colony’s other tractor, to scatter diaspores
from Carlos’s latest batch of designer
lichens. Even the most advanced terraforming
lichen varieties Endeavour had brought,
gene-tweaked to tolerate the ubiquitous arsenic,
would not produce useful depths of
true soil sooner than in decades. A glacial
pace, for an all but glacial planet . . .
But Carlos and Antonio kept at it, as Blake
and Rikki would on the silt plain, because the
only large-scale food-producing alternative
was the bacterial ponds. If nothing else, the
lichens brought welcome splashes of color to
the dreary countryside.
Blake hated farming, if he could so dignify
their as yet futile toiling in the dirt, but he
loathed working the slimy ponds. That festering
blanket of scum. That fetid, pungent
stench.
From the memory alone, he all but puked.
The tractor sputtered and stopped. From its
72 EDWARD M. LERNER