Analog Science Fiction and Fact - June 2013

architectural rendering. “You see the enclosed
area that I thought might serve as a garden or
park. But maybe it’s too large an expanse for
that.”
She studied the wall display, pensive, giving
the peasants time to make the idea their own.
And maybe to set aside their nitpicking, since
she had just proposed this touchy-feely expansion
of the facility.
“We could make a portion of that space an
indoor playground,” Rikki offered.
“Or maybe we should enclose only part of
the area,” Dana said. “At some point the children
have to get used to the outdoors.”
Li let them natter on, with each suggestion
making the project more grandiose and laborintensive.
A screened-in solarium into which
even the youngest children could be brought
on nice days for fresh air. A rock garden. A
flower garden. An ever more extensive playground.
The evening was unfolding better than Li
had dared to hope.
While the peasants bulldoze and landscape
and build with concrete, she thought, the children
remained hers. As Rikki had observed—
and as quickly let drop—the enlarged
childcare center about which they now all
waxed eloquent, would give Li the capacity to
speed up decanting of the embryos. With,
alas, some encouragement to Carlos to speed
up womb production.
Li said, “Once the children have acclimated,
they’ll be closer to ready to meet the real
world. Suppose we put up a fence, enclosed
the area around the center and its neighboring
buildings. If we put locks on the doors, the
oldest children could roam around.” In answer
to Rikki’s raised eyebrow, Li explained, “I
don’t believe they’re old enough to play
among the explosives and chemical stocks.”
The eyebrow went back down.
But as Blake and Dana grew giddy about the
prospect of passing along the fine art of snowman
construction, and with Antonio sidetracked
into planning for a rock garden,
Rikki’s eyes narrowed with suspicion.
Too much, too fast, Li thought. The woman
wasn’t entirely gullible.
Li said, “I’m gratified by such enthusiasm,
but we can’t do everything at once. We also
have a PFC factory, or refinery, or whatever I
should call it, to build.”
DARK SECRET
And Rikki relaxed.
Fool, Li thought.
JUNE 2013
Chapter 32
In swooping arcs and soaring leaps, up and
down through the clouds like a bucking bronco,
Endeavour gyrated its way around the
globe. The meandering course on its intricately
constructed timeline did more than challenge
Dana’s reflexes. By the time she
returned home, the ship and the moons’ observatories
together would have compiled a
thorough and precise global atmospheric survey,
captured at more or less the same local
time everywhere.
Too bad the prescribed local time was midnight,
because she would have enjoyed the
view. She wasn’t enjoying the company.
Blake had accomplished the impossible:
making Antonio look chatty. He was making
the rocks from Antonio’s collection look chatty.
Dana sighed. Antonio had asked to come
along, looking so kicked-puppy disappointed
when she’d said no. And though she hadn’t
lied about there being no time between collection
points to gather southern-hemisphere
rocks, and that this was fancy enough flying
that she should have a proficient copilot to
spell her, neither had she been entirely honest
with him.
On her console, a timer ticked down the
seconds to the next atmospheric sampling. A
real-time holo showed her displacement in
three dimensions from the target collection
point. As the high-altitude winds buffeted the
ship, her hands danced over the controls to
make endless course corrections.
A single moon above the horizon—everywhere—could
have captured the data they
sought. The moons did not cooperate like
that, and so here she was. As for precision,
computer-controlled navigation, forget it.
Only all three moons in sight would have
served to triangulate the ship’s position. And
so, as one moon or another sank below the
horizon, as clouds turned her course into a
game of peek-a-boo with the stars, as the buffeting
of the jet stream befuddled the autopilot
and played havoc with the short-range projections
from inertial navigation, she fell back,
time and again, upon the most basic navigational
system of all: seat of the pants.
85