by Kage Baker
“Too bloody right you’re right,” said Cochevelou. He gulped down his mugful of batch and made a face, wiping the foam from his mustache.
“Well then! I’m here to tell you that I feel things ought to change. I feel we should be working together as partners, driving the great terraforming effort forward,” said Mr. Nennius. “Hello,” he added, turning to glare as Mr. De Wit slid into the booth beside them.
“Hello,” Mr. De Wit replied. “Don’t mind me. I’m just here as Ms. Griffith’s legal counsel.”
“And that’s just great,” said Mr. Nennius. “Really. I’ll have a lot to go over with Mary here later, but what I really want to do is talk to Maurice about those incredible pollinating microbots. Your son is a bloody genius!”
“That’s what he is, indeed,” said Cochevelou, a little mollified.
“And far too busy to talk to me, and I understand that,” said Mr. Nennius, with a depreciatory wave of his hand. “Geniuses need their space. But you have to understand how absolutely gobsmacked I was to come up here and see these amazing artificial bees zipping around your fields! Miniature self-guided agricultural robots. Totally brilliant. I said to myself, ‘They’ve got to realize the commercial value of these things!’ And of course you do. Necessity really is the mother of invention, isn’t it? Who’d have thought that a technology developed for Mars would have so many potential uses for poor old Earth, too, with her agricultural crises? To say nothing of General Hydroponics Labs on Luna. But I was just wondering: who have you got lined up to market them for you?”
“Er,” said Cochevelou. “Well. They’re still in development, see. Not ready.”
“Not ready?” said Mr. Nennius, his face a mask of honest astonishment. “They seem to work all right to me. All those fine green fields! I’ve seen the agricultural production reports for the last ten years. You came close to failing here, until your son turned everything around. Now you’ve got the perfect agricultural system for Mars! Bumper crops every four months! And you’re telling me the biis aren’t ready?”
“Perrik says not,” replied Cochevelou. “He has his plans, see.”
“Well, what are his plans?”
Mary saw the confusion in Cochevelou’s eyes, watched him rubbing his fingertips together. He has no idea, she realized. “Ah, that would be telling,” she said cheerfully. “Wouldn’t it, now? With the millions to be made, I’m sure you understand why the clan is inclined to be a little close-mouthed about such a discovery.”
“Well, of course,” said Mr. Nennius, with rather a thin smile. “But I’d feel better about things if I knew a bit more. I mean, I want to be able to work to your advantage with the British Arean Company. You wouldn’t want them creating problems for you at the last minute because you hadn’t filed some sort of safety permit, or anything like that.”
Sweat broke out on Cochevelou’s brow. “No, of course not,” he stammered.
Bloody hell, they’ve never filed for any permits, Mary realized. And Mr. Nennius had just realized it too, to judge from his smirk. He reached for his mug of batch and pretended to drink.
“I don’t need to see any actual physical plans, naturally,” he said, setting the mug aside once more. “No industrial secrets. I would just like to get acquainted with Perrik, though. You’ll feel better about that too, I’m sure. It’s not fair to put you in the middle this way. Do you think you could arrange an interview?”
There was a roar of amusement from the crowd, as Uncle Tars presented Mr. Crosley and Eddie the Yeti with a pair of virtual fuzzy dice to hang in the Excelsior’s cab.
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Cochevelou. “Can’t promise anything, of course. What with the boy being so busy and all.”
“That’s just great,” said Mr. Nennius, leaning forward to shake his hand again. Mary had a sinking feeling. Beside her, Mr. De Wit sighed.
“. . . so Uncle Tars has brought you your very own Philips Home Holo System, with a complete library of Mexican cinema classics!” shouted the Brick, leaping up and down so that all four of his arms flailed.
Late that night in their loft, Alice settled herself comfortably around Mr. De Wit’s long frame. He put his arm around her.
“I don’t think I like your friend Mr. Nennius,” she said.
“Hm?” Mr. De Wit lowered his eyes from contemplation of the ceiling. “Oh. I don’t like Nennius much, either. I wouldn’t call him a friend, in fact. We just . . . have worked, on occasion, for the same people.”
Alice stared at his profile and wondered what that meant. All other men she had ever entertained had poured their hearts out to her, talked endlessly about themselves, their hopes, their dreams. Mr. De Wit was kindly, certainly affectionate, even biddable to some extent; but he had an air of quiet self-sufficiency that unnerved her a little. Nor did he ever seem to feel any need to talk about himself.
“Did he say he was a lawyer, too?” she prompted.
“He didn’t exactly say that.” Mr. De Wit yawned. “Let’s just say Nennius’s job is breaking things. My job, on the other hand, is fixing them.”
“You’re a much nicer man,” said Alice. She rubbed the back of her hand, where Mr. Nennius’s lips had touched it, against the blanket.
Mr. De Wit chuckled, and kissed her. It was a warm and loving kiss, but there was neither violent passion in it nor desperate need. At moments like this Alice felt off balance, uncertain. He was her lifeline to the future, her ticket back to Earth, and if she wasn’t the center of his universe, how could she know whether he loved her? Though love doesn’t hold a man, she told herself. They only stay with you if they need you.
She was frightened, for no reason she could name. “Tell me about Amsterdam again. Tell me about the canals, and the trees!” she begged impulsively.
“Well, it has canals and trees,” said Mr. De Wit, in amusement. “And . . . lovely old houses along the canals. And canal boats on the canals. Some people live on the canal boats. And you can go out into the country, and see the flat green fields stretching away as far as the eye can see. And there’s the sea . . . and the windmills . . . and the cozy parlors where you can drop in and have a little glass of gin with friends . . . and the museums with paintings, famous old paintings. The people are brave . . . and tolerant . . . usually . . .”
“There aren’t any deserts there, I’ll bet,” said Alice.
“No. No deserts.”
“No horrible big mountains that make you feel like you’re a tiny bug about to be crushed, either. And the moon is big and silvery, not some stupid little rock you can’t tell from a star. And people don’t just shrug when someone dies. And you can breathe real air. And it’s warm.”
“Not all that warm,” said Mr. De Wit.
“Warmer than here. I hate Mars,” said Alice, with passion.
“I know,” said Mr. De Wit resignedly. They had had this part of the conversation nearly every night since he had begun sleeping with her.
“But we’ll go home to Amsterdam some day, won’t we? Goddess, I’m going to love it there. I want to be able to run outside without having to put a mask on first. I want to see tulips. I want to see blue water and green trees. When I get there, after living in this bloody dry desert, it’s going to look like Heaven!”
“It did to me,” said Mr. De Wit, yawning again. “The first time I saw it.”
“Where had you come from, when you first saw it? Was it someplace dry, like this?”
“Judea,” said Mr. De Wit. “But that was a long, long time ago.”
“Well, I hate, hate, hate it here, so anywhere on Earth would be better. But let’s live in Amsterdam. In an old house on a canal. Or maybe on a canal boat. Or maybe we’ll go out in the country and live in a windmill. Anywhere but here . . . ow! Damn baby’s kicking.”
“She’ll calm down,” said Mr. De Wit. He cupped his hand over Alice’s belly, felt the tiny flailing inside. “No more anger, little daughter.”
He began to sing, quietly, in a language Alice did
not know, something sonorous and beautiful. It slowed her angry heartbeat. It calmed her. She fell asleep and dreamed she was lying in a green field, under an immense yellow sun, and flowers were blooming all around her.
CHAPTER 14
Father and Son
A week later the bar was quiet and near empty, all the holiday debris swept up. Mary stood behind the bar, moving her bar towel in steady circles on the stone surface. Years of polishing had given it a lovely gloss. Was it the color of rose quartz? No . . . nor porphyry, nor jasper, nor coral. Opal matrix, she decided.
“Perrik won’t even talk to me,” said Cochevelou miserably, where he sat huddled over an ale. “How am I going to get him to talk to a stranger? And such a bold straightforward in-your-face sort of stranger at that.”
“He doesn’t have to talk to anyone,” said Mary. “You know that. I wouldn’t trust this Nennius bugger any farther than I could spit, I tell you plain.”
“But what if he’s right about the biis being worth millions on Earth?” said Cochevelou. “There’s been some rumors started already among my folk, I don’t know how. Dev and Kev and Padraig all came to me, asking if it was true we’ve been sitting on a fortune all this time, and might have sold the biis to get rich before now?
“When times were hard, we were like fingers on one hand making a fist, united and resolved. But with the diamonds, and then all this talk of money . . . there’s some have begun to talk about giving it up and going back Down Home, once we’re all bloody millionaires.”
“And what’s to become of terraforming Mars?”
Cochevelou shrugged. “The clan isn’t for Mars,” he said. “Necessarily. The clan is for the clan. If I can make ’em rich, then that’s my duty as chief. What I was wondering was . . . if you wouldn’t ever mind coming down to our place and seeing if you can have a word with the boy? He’s always liked you, you know.”
Clan Morrigan’s fields were swarming with little points of light when Mary came down the Tube with Cochevelou. Not only gold now but the occasional blue light danced over the rows. Down near the soil she caught glimpses of red lights like hot matchheads congregating around the bases of the plants, and wondered what they did there. The clan residential halls were largely deserted; people were either laboring in the ironworks or in the cattle pens, at this hour of the day.
“The boy’s like his mother,” said Cochevelou suddenly, unbidden as he plodded along beside her. “She was never one for talking to anybody. Even to me. Wild as a little lost bird. She let me look after her, you know, and talk to other people for her, and keep away the shadows and the drafts. So delicate and nervous in her ways, and yet she had a steely will. Just like him. Half the time I wondered whether she wasn’t some princess strayed from the courts of the sidhe.”
“And did you find her beside a hollow hill, then?” said Mary absently, wondering what sort of mood Perrik might be in.
“Never. Waiting in an agbus queue in Knockdoul, of all places.”
“I’ll just fetch us a dram, shall I?” said Cochevelou, ushering her into his private chamber. He vanished out through the lock, and Mary doubted he’d be back anytime soon.
She heard a steady pullulating drone coming from Perrik’s chamber. As she seated herself to think, a stream of little golden lights emerged into the room through one vent grating, and vanished again through another. More followed. She watched for a while as the lights came and went, knowing she couldn’t just knock on the door and call Perrik’s name.
At last she began to sing, the first tune that popped into her head: “All Through the Night.” Mary had an old-fashioned trilling soprano, still remarkably intact after all those years’ exposure to Martian dust. She sang, full-throated, and after a while the hatch opened and Perrik looked out at her. She left off singing and smiled at him.
“Oh, good morning, Perrik dear,” she said. “I was just visiting your dad, see, and he got called away.”
“Would you like to see the new biis?” he asked her without preamble.
“I should like that very much, Perrik,” she replied as she rose to her feet. He held the hatch for her and closed it as soon as she’d passed through.
And caught her breath. The globe frame in the corner had been replaced by a bigger one, alive with shifting and pulsing lights in all colors, glowing like a stained-glass window at noon. “How beautiful,” she murmured.
“It’s a visual pleasure, but it only gets better,” said Perrik. “Look at this.” He held out his hand and flexed it; a few golden motes came at once and settled in the cup of his palm. “Here are the pollinators, right? They handle the primary task.”
A few blue lights followed and became part of the shifting mass in his hand. “And the drones, and they handle the secondary task. And what is the secondary task?”
“S-secondary task is, let’s see, seeking out weeds and unwanted plants and eating them,” said Mary, knowing that it mattered terribly to Perrik that she remembered. “And then converting the cellulose into a polymer, and excreting it in pellets, for the . . . ?”
“Red ones,” said Perrik, smiling as a cluster of red lights joined the others in his hand. “Call them Haulers, if you like. And they collect the pellets and take them back to the hive. As well as bringing back minerals they pick up from the soil. Back to the hive with the lot. There to . . . ?”
“Well, not to make honey, I expect,” said Mary. “Nor to make wax, not out of polymer. They use it for . . . building material?”
“You’re almost there,” said Perrik. “Building material to make . . . ?”
“A bigger hive?” Mary guessed.
“No.” Perrik rolled his shoulders, and a whole network of green lights emerged from a box across the room and landed in his hand. “More biis. These are the mechanics, you see? They use what the Haulers bring back to repair or replace damaged biis. And they build new ones, so the hive continues to grow.” He looked with satisfaction at the cluster of moving jewel colors he held. “A perfect self-sustaining society. A closed system. What do you think?”
No wonder the British Arean Company’s suddenly interested in them, thought Mary. “I’m impressed, dear. It’s exactly what we need.”
“I might do more with them. I might make some that play around with molecules to create oxygen. I don’t know, though; that would require a terrific lot of modifications. I don’t think that’s for the biis. Probably the next project,” said Perrik thoughtfully.
“Have you shown your dad?”
“Not the mechanics, no,” said Perrik, with contempt edging into his voice. “He wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh, I think he might, dear.”
“If he actually paid attention to what I was saying. If he didn’t just go into his ‘That’s my little genius!’ act,” said Perrik, turning his arm as the biis moved along it toward his shoulder. “But he doesn’t really understand.”
“Well.” Mary looked down. “That’s between you and your dad, I suppose. But, you know, dear, other people are starting to be interested, too. There’s a new clerk the BAC has now, very interrogatory he was. Wants to meet you. Talk to you, face-to-face, about the biis.”
“What?” Perrik looked at her, startled. “Meet me?”
“Meet with you, dear, and ask you all kinds of questions. Says he’d like to help you with the marketing and all.”
Before her eyes, the self-possessed boy began to crumble. He paled, developed a tic under one eye, turned away. “Marketing? No. No. Why would I want to market them with the British Arean Company? They’re the evil corporate overlord. They’d grab all the money for themselves. They wouldn’t appreciate the design, they’d want to change it around and ruin it. And anyway, I can’t talk with anyone! I’m too busy! Too many projects. I don’t have all the time in the world to waste in social chitchat, in talking, don’t they see that?”
As his voice rose the drone of the biis grew louder too, and hundreds of points of light left the globe frame, came and spun around him i
n apparent agitation.
“They’re evil corporate overlords,” said Mary. “Of course they don’t see it. But you needn’t talk to them, Perrik dear. In fact, I think it would be a bad idea.”
“And I’ll just bet Dad invited them in to come see me, didn’t he?” Perrik raved, the center of a whirling storm of colored light. “ ‘Sure, you just come right on in and stare at my bloody little freak genius!’ ”
“He did not!” said Mary sharply. “And shame on you, boy, if you don’t know your father any better than that. He told ’em you were too busy, of course he did.”
“Then that’s then end of the matter,” said Perrik, retreating to a corner of the room. “Case closed. No further discussion.” But his biis were an increasingly angry cloud around him, a surging nebula. Mary found herself wondering how he controlled them.
“Would you like me to leave now, Perrik?” she asked.
“Please,” he said shortly.
Yet before she had got as far as the door he was beside her again, with his arms around her and his averted face buried in her neck. “Please,” he muttered through tears, “please don’t let strangers come in here.” Mary stood very still, as the biis spun around them both. Had the boy built them with stings? She had never asked.
“Your dad and I will be sure of that, Perrik,” she said gently.
CHAPTER 15
Prospects
“I told you they’re uncooperative,” said Mr. Rotherhithe with a trace of smugness. “It’s all very well to draw conclusions and make plans from a nice clean well-ordered office Down Home, young man, but when you’ve been up here a while, as I have, you’ll find that Earth rules don’t apply in this damned place.”