Dark Secret (2016)

by Edward M. Lerner

  “To bring us food,” Eve said.

  “But they’re bad and food is good. Why would they do something good for us?”

  “It’s complicated,” Eve said. “Because of their many sins, God commands that they must work hard.”

  Happily, Tanya did not ask what sin was.

  Not that Tanya had run out of questions. She never did. “Why are there bad people in the world at all?”

  To disobey was sin, and Eve had been told to instruct the younger children on matters of faith. Even when she didn’t understand herself. She began, “Once, in a place far away—”

  “The other world.”

  “Right. Don’t interrupt if you want an answer.”

  “Sorry,” Tanya said, eyes downcast.

  “The other world was filled with bad people. God told Ms. Li that He would destroy the world to end the evil.” Eve wasn’t clear who God was, either. Someone very powerful, a friend of Ms. Li’s. Or what evil was, beyond not doing as God and His messenger decreed. “Ms. Li pleaded with God to spare the world, and He said He would if she could show Him ten good people. She could not find even ten, but God was so moved by her compassion—”

  “Her what?” Tanya asked shyly.

  “Her concern for all the others.” One by one, as children heard Eve retelling the Great Story, they stopped their play and sidled closer to listen. Raising her voice so that everyone could hear, Eve continued. “God commanded Ms. Li to build a special ship called the ark to save herself, the five good people she had found, and all the unborn children.”

  “And you were the first to be born here.”

  Which meant the others looked to her for answers, whether or not she had any. Being the oldest didn’t make her an adult! It didn’t impart the wisdom of the other world.

  I’m a child, too! Every day—every hour!—she wanted to scream the words but did not dare. She had duties, however unwelcome, and the children’s trust, however undeserved. And a room of her own. A private room marked her as special, set her apart. She would so much rather sleep with the others, as she had when she was younger.

  For so many reasons.

  Tanya glanced to where the unloading continued. “But why are the bad people here?”

  “I’m coming to that,” Eve said. “Most people Ms. Li brought on her ark had tricked her by pretending to be good. They prepared to bring sin to this world. But Ms. Li had foreseen their evil plan. Mr. Carlos made the devices that protect us—”

  “And you and the other oldest ones helped,” one of the children interrupted.

  “Right.” Eve still did not understand what they hid in the gravel that day, but she would never forget the tooth-rattling bang! one made soon after they finished. And again when—

  No. She could not bear to remember that.

  But the things in the gravel, whatever they were, scared the bad people, too. They kept their distance except when bringing food.

  “…is that, Eve?” little Jorge asked.

  She had allowed her attention to wander again. “What?”

  “Why doesn’t God punish these bad people? Why do they get to have most of the world? Why did God allow them to steal the ark?”

  The answer, when Eve had once made similar inquiries, involved rainbows, God’s mysterious ways, and the promise Ms. Li would someday soon lead the children into a promised land.

  “I guess it is God’s will,” Eve told the children, wishing once more that she understood. “Now go play.”

  From the corner of an eye, around the edge of a building, she resumed her study of Mr. Blake and Ms. Dana unloading the food.

  Sometimes Eve watched Mr. Blake through the fence. He and a young girl, she about five and a half, would throw back and forth a striped ovoid ball, the girl as often as not dropping it or flinging it far beyond his reach. He called her Beth. She called him Daddy, and that Mr. Blake had a second name was yet another mystery to Eve.

  She didn’t understand the activity’s purpose, or why Mr. Blake kept at it so patiently, ever calling out encouragement. She didn’t understand why she never saw but the one child outside. She didn’t understand why Mr. Blake prattled on about saints and bengals, cowboys and patriots, whatever those were, or the strange noises the girl sometimes broke into.

  “Giggling,” Marvin called the noise when Eve had asked.

  “Is she injured?”

  “No, Beth is fine,” Marvin had said. “That is a happy sound.”

  “I don’t understand,” Eve had told it. She still didn’t. Throwing and catching and shouting encouragement didn’t seem like the things a bad person would do.

  “You will have to ask an adult,” Marvin had told her.

  Eve knew better than that.

  Had she ever giggled? Had she ever even played, like Tanya and Samir and the rest of her charges got to do? If so, it had happened so long ago that Eve no longer remembered.

  Sometimes, watching man and child toss their ball, Eve had wondered if Mr. Blake slipped into the little girl’s room at night. If Mr. Blake…touched things, and made Beth—

  No. Eve refused to think about that.

  As the bad people, gasping with effort, continued to unload the food—and as Mr. Carlos stood watching—Eve found herself trying to imagine something strange.

  What would it be like to giggle and be happy?

  38

  Frowning in concentration, tongue peeking from a corner of her mouth, Beth colored feverishly. Rikki thought she had never seen anything so adorable—and, at the same time, if she allowed herself to ponder what sort of future her little girl could have, so terrifying.

  “What do you have there?” Rikki asked.

  Beth looked up, and coal-black bangs flopped into her beautiful, incredulous eyes. “That’s us, Mommy.”

  Two big and one little person standing in front of a box with windows: that, Rikki hadn’t needed help to decode. Six or more sketches like it adorned their kitchen at all times. It was the backdrop behind the house that puzzled her. Bunches of closely spaced vertical lines, with dots of color between.

  Oh. The children of the settlement. Li’s…puppets.

  Rikki’s heart sank. “Let’s put your pretty picture up on the wall, hon.”

  “When can I play with other children?” Beth asked, reaching for a new sheet of paper.

  “Someday.” When Li couldn’t stuff any more children into the settlement. Then the fences must come down, whether Rikki liked it or not. She had anticipated and dreaded that day since before Beth was born.

  She and Blake had talked endlessly about a second child. But in standard years, she had already been almost forty-one when Beth was born. The pregnancy might have been hard even on Mars. Better her baby grow up an only child than without a mother.

  No, the young ones inside were Beth’s only hope for a normal life. Of companionship after her parents and Antonio and Dana had passed on.

  But could anyone be normal, raised by lunatics inside a prison camp?

  “Could you draw me another?”

  “Sure, Mommy.”

  Rikki stood. Just stretching my legs, she told herself, knowing herself for a liar. Out her front window, across Main Street, through another window, she checked to see that Antonio still sat reading in his living room. With Blake and Dana away, Antonio had even offered to sleep on the sofa.

  She would be damned if she’d let Beth see how terrified she was.

  How could Antonio protect her anyway? How could anyone? Li had the guns, and the explosives, and the madness to use them.

  What Rikki really ached to do was flee with her daughter into the hills, to hide within the maze of the caves. But she didn’t dare to risk revealing that they had been stocking the caverns as an emergency shelter. Lugging supplies through the back entrance, flying Endeavour in from behind the ridge, below the hilltops, there was no way—in theory, anyway—that Li and Carlos could know. If they discovered that a significant food reserve had been set aside, Li would only speed up he
r baby factory.

  Bedtime’s approach brought new sadness. She couldn’t read her daughter a simple bedtime story! Simple but impossible, even after Blake had returned from a recent food delivery with, among the many book files, a collection of classic children’s stories.

  Children’s stories are about relating to…someone. A brother or sister. Classmates. Friends. Pets. Cute little animals as surrogate people. What did any of that have to do with Beth? How could it help to remind her baby that she was alone?

  Beth was past old enough to learn to read. Only what could they give her to read?

  “Mom! Look what you did.”

  “Oops.” Rikki discovered she had Beth in a bear hug, arms pinned to her sides. In the process, she had caused Beth to scribble a big diagonal crayon streak across her paper. This drawing was shaping up as a close-up of the fence, and Rikki didn’t want to think anymore about that. “It’s time for your bath.”

  “Ten minutes.”

  They negotiated and settled on five. As Beth splashed in her tub, Rikki opened a novel on her datasheet. And sighed. And closed the file again. It seemed wrong until she found something to read to Beth.

  At last she got the little imp into bed.

  “Why didn’t Daddy call tonight?”

  Rikki gave her daughter a big kiss on the forehead. “He and Aunt Dana are very busy.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “Exploring, hon. You know that. Looking for useful stuff before the snow starts.”

  Some things couldn’t be explained to a child. Like a mother’s stubborn insistence on understanding why five years of PFCs pumped into the atmosphere had yet to slow the globe’s inexplicable cooling. That by drilling, by examining millennia of sediment samples, one peered into the past. That to Blake and Dana these expeditions had only been excuses, a cover for trips to sneak supplies into the caves.

  That she fervently wished Blake and Dana had been correct.

  Because the samples established, more with each expedition, that a terrible flood, or floods, had afflicted parts of Dark. The havoc in the physical record was extreme, such that even Antonio did not dare to date the catastrophe any more precisely than “within the past thousand years, give or take.”

  Geologically speaking, that wasn’t as much as an eye-blink ago.

  If a tsunami were to hit Darwin Sea, the wave would sweep away the farms, the bacterial basins, and even blast up the slope all the way to the settlement.

  It would scour away—everything.

  39

  Children—shrieking, babbling, bickering, squealing with glee—were everywhere in the yard. Climbing, swinging, and sliding. Playing catch. Playing tag. Chasing snowflakes. Digging in sandboxes. Stomping in puddles. Jumping rope. Hopping. Skipping. Running races. Running aimlessly.

  All that bedlam made Antonio, wandering up and down Main Street for fresh air and to clear his mind, very tired. That wasn’t the hardest part. Having had the children in his life—and then lost them—made him very, very sad.

  He couldn’t watch, not directly. Try to watch and he would be running, screaming, from the area. So he kept track of things indirectly. From the corner of an eye. Listening.

  And in that disarray, that spontaneity, the children zooming about like so many asteroids, he found a modicum of hope for the future. Li liked quiet and order.

  Actually the local asteroids were far more orderly than these children.

  For a few seconds Antonio took in a clear, cloudless sky. Today the sky seemed more blue than green, and the few hints of red dust hung close to the horizon. For most of his life, any glimpse of the sky had calmed him. Like numbers, the sky had been a refuge.

  No longer.

  He had feared asteroid bombardments since his first glimpses of this solar system. With both a gas giant and an asteroid belt close to Dark, bombardment was inevitable. Physics and math said so.

  It drove him crazy how few incidents, even harmless, burn-up-in-the-atmosphere meteoroid encounters, the observatories on the moons reported. It drove him to suspect design flaws in the observatory instruments, only those weren’t the problem. Many long nights with Endeavour’s telescope, surveying the asteroid belt, had replaced one mystery with another. Dark, it seemed, was spared impacts because the nearby asteroid belt was…tidy. The orbits were all nicely circularized.

  Neither math nor physics could explain that observation, either.

  When the evidence mounted of recent widespread flooding—as unnerving as that was—at least the world made sense again. The law of averages had caught up.

  Except that it hadn’t.

  If a big impact or impacts had unleashed the tsunamis, there would be signs. Granules of shocked quartz and natural glass, forged in the heat and pressure of impact, would be widespread. The asteroid strike that doomed the dinosaurs had left behind a worldwide scattering of iridium dust. Iridium was scarcer than gold—yet all around the Earth, a fine layer of iridium dust could be found at the geologic boundary between periods. That iridium had to have come from an asteroid. A big one. The kind of rock that, smacking into an ocean, unleashed a tsunami.

  On Dark, across the past thousand years, ice cores, clay cores, and lakebed sediments alike showed only the disorder and the sudden salinity surges of floods. There was no layer of glass and shocked quartz. There were no elemental anomalies, such as Earth’s iridium dusting at the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods.

  A distant chime sounded: Marvin signaling the end to recess. On the playground, chaos somehow transformed into lines. The cacophony settled down a notch to mere din. Boys and girls made their way into the childcare center.

  Antonio continued his aimless shuffling, wishing that the confusion that afflicted him would resolve itself as easily.

  *

  The hallway echoed with fussing toddlers, the murmurs of the children minding them, and the chiding of Marvin avatars. Childish shrieks and the squeaking of playground swings drifted in from outside. Wet flakes of an afternoon snow flurry spattered against the window.

  Intent on statistics, Li hardly noticed any of it.

  A fuzzy caterpillar of a holo hovered over her desk. In one compact graphic, it encoded everything useful to know about cohort six.

  Dense thickets of colored lines radiated from the holo’s primary axis. Each tint denoted a specific metric of social development, such as obedience, orthodoxy, and self-discipline. The length of each colored line segment encoded a child’s performance in the corresponding metric. The length of each black segment, a weighted average, gave her one subject’s overall socialization index. Concentric translucent gray cylinders provided the scale. Eighteen measurements multiplied by, for this cohort, seventy-two subjects: she had a significant dataset.

  A few segments poked through the outermost translucent cylinder. She reached into the holo to zoom on a subject. 6/32/m/Todd the pop-up tag noted: from cohort six, hence not quite five years local; gestated in womb unit thirty-two; male. By random selection from Marvin’s names database, named Todd.

  Todd’s metric for orthodoxy was two standard deviations from average. In the wrong direction. The rating had gotten worse in each of the last three monthly assessments.

  “Okay, Todd,” Li said to herself. “What’s your problem?”

  Because she couldn’t read minds. Neither could Marvin, although it could analyze speech and categorize body language. It did a passable job, when the children confided, with dream interpretation. So what was going on with Todd?

  It didn’t take long to find recordings of the boy asking inappropriate questions at daily catechism. She had a skeptic on her hands.

  Time, young Todd, for an intervention. Time to teach you and everyone else that, as her Grandmother Hideko used to put it, the nail that sticks up gets pounded down.

  “Li? We should talk.”

  Intent on her work, Li had not heard Carlos approach. With a hand gesture she blanked her display. “If it’s quick.”

 
Not taking the hint he came into her office, closed the door, and sat. His hair and coat were damp, and snowmelt trickled down his face. He reeked of alcohol, even more than usual, even from across the room. So what had he been psyching himself up for?

  Carlos said, “The ground is still too warm for anything to stick for long, but the snow is pretty heavy for this early in the season.”

  “Tell me you didn’t interrupt my work to prattle about the weather.”

  “I’ve been in the yard, talking through the fence with Antonio.” Picking up on her frown, at least, he added, “Relax. Without any kids in earshot.”

  “And?”

  “It’s not just this region experiencing an unseasonably cold fall. It’s most of the northern hemisphere. It can’t be an accident that the icecaps have grown every year.”

  “Per Antonio.”

  “Yes.” Carlos took a while picking his next words. “It’s not weather that concerns me, Li, but climate. The climate is getting colder. I’ve seen the downlinks from the moons and—”

  “From observatories Antonio programmed.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Let me guess. Antonio wants you to give him access to Marvin, or the full data archives, or networked instruments, or all three.”

  “Well, yes.”

  How could Carlos not see? Was it the booze or willful obtuseness? “We retain control because we have Marvin and the others don’t. Give Antonio access and how long do you suppose our control can last?”

  “Let me rephrase. Antonio didn’t ask for access to Marvin. Not directly—”

  “Climate. Floods. If those don’t convince us to lower our guard, they’ll be back with dire warnings of blood, boils, and locusts.”

  Carlos sat forward, hands clasped, index fingers steepled. “Hear me out. Endeavour is just back from a trip collecting sediment cores.

  “And how is that significant?”

  Other than demonstrating that the peasants had too much free time on their hands. She must give them new assignments. Additional garments for the children, perhaps.