Talbot was working atop the dome roof with Damien and Kylee, scrubbing out one of the rainwater collectors where a slimy green algae of terrestrial origin—if that meant anything—had taken root in the tanks and piping.
For two weeks now, he had been grappling with the fact that Dya was pregnant. And then, that morning, came the startling revelation that Su had conceived. Apparently as a result of their first coupling.
He was still trying to get his head around the implications. Coming, as he did, from a rural section of England, he’d been raised in a rather traditional family, in a culture where a woman who wanted to have a baby had to first pass certain genetics tests, obtain a license, and then undergo a strictly observed Corporate-monitored pregnancy. The entire process was managed and controlled by The Corporation.
Until he’d walked out of the forest, nothing in his mental template could have entertained the notion of “pragmatic copulation,” as Dya phrased it.
Hell, he was still stumbling over the complexities of polygamy. It wasn’t anything like he’d imagined. But then, dealing with his three wives was challenging enough. Each had her own little peculiarities, and essentially he was the newcomer in their house, their territory. But ultimately, the looming reality that there was only the four of them—literally the only adults in their world—acted as the final arbitrator in their relationship. That knowledge tempered all of their interactions.
As Talbot puzzled over his curious new life, he stopped short, frozen in midscrub.
The distant, high, roar of the shuttle couldn’t be mistaken. The sound rose shrilly, a distant booming.
“It’s a shuttle!” Damien cried, turning from where he ran a swab through one of the pipes.
Talbot jerked himself up straight, staring off to the northwest. “Coming in from orbit. There’s a ship up there!”
For long moments they listened as the sound grew in the north and faded.
“They’ve crossed the threshold,” Talbot said. “Hear the way the sound dropped off? They just slowed enough to drop below the sonic barrier. If we were closer to Port Authority, we’d hear the thrusters.”
“Tell me about Port Authority,” Damien said. The lanky kid reached up to flip curly dark-brown hair out of his eyes. He had his mother’s angular face, was going to be tall and thick-framed like she was.
As he told Damien about the shuttle landing field, the fences, the cafeteria, Inga’s, and various domes, he watched the young man’s eyes gleam with excitement.
“Rebecca would never allow us to go there.” Damien was thoughtful. “There would be other people my age, wouldn’t there? Males and females?”
“There are.”
“I would like to meet them.” Damien stared off to the north, a wistful look in his eyes.
And no, Rebecca would never allow them to go there. In so many ways she remained an enigma. Of Talbot’s three wives, she only rarely came to his bed. He wasn’t sure how his wives worked it out. Nothing was ever said to him. When he retired it was usually Dya who crawled under the covers with him, not always for sex, but often just to sleep with him. A couple of nights a week it would be Su. And every so often, after the lights were out, he would feel Rebecca slip under his covers. She was always gone by morning, fading away in the night as quietly as she had come.
And somehow over the weeks, the awkwardness of it had evaporated.
“The thing we forget,” Dya once told him, “is that prior to the industrial age, more than sixty percent of human cultures were polygamous, matrilineal, or both. Usually because of a surplus of females. In many ways, we’re just like those early horticultural societies. Donovan is hard on men.”
As he considered that, a second roar built in the northwest.
“Two of them,” Kylee said softly, her blue eyes, like Damien’s, filled with wonder.
And what does that mean for me?
Talbot took a deep breath. Glanced down at the two kids. His kids. He hadn’t recognized the precise moment that eight strange children had become wards, let alone precious to him. It just happened.
Kylee? Well, of course. He had a special relationship with her and Rocket. But more and more, he’d been spending time with Damien, answering questions about Solar System, the Marines, combat, what it was like to space when symmetry inverted, and especially about what the great ships were like.
The women had even tasked Talbot with lessons, teaching Earth and Solar System history, The Corporation, the history of war, and economics.
And now two shuttles had Kylee and Damien’s eyes aglow with possibilities.
“It’s not all wonderful,” he told them. “Here at Mundo Base you have family. People you know and can rely on. Once you get out into the rest of space? Things get a bit trickier.”
“How so?” Damien asked.
“You don’t know the rules out there. Here everyone is honest. The only people who tell lies here are Shine and Ngyap. Shine’s three. Ngyap’s four. Like the other day when the lamp got knocked over. Ngyap said he didn’t do it. At four, he’s not smart enough to know that he was the only kid in the room. Tuska and Taung, at six and seven, have both figured out that a facile lie doesn’t work anymore. They’ll still try it when the situation is more complex, but not often.”
Talbot waved off to the north. “But once you get into the real world? You’ve got to know the rules, understand that it’s all a series of complicated, often contradictory expectations, opportunities, and challenges.”
Kylee asked, “Like the fact that you broke the rules flying south?”
“Just like that. They consider me a deserter. Even though we didn’t mean to do anything wrong or malicious when we broke the rules, it doesn’t matter. Not to Supervisor Aguila.”
“Do you ever want to go back?” Damien asked. “Would you, if you could?”
“Yes. There are parts of that life that I miss. Sometimes so much that it hurts. And I don’t know how long we can hang on here. We’re going to have trouble. Eventually something important is going to wear out that we can’t fix. Sometime in the coming years we’re going to have to move out of the dome when the power fails. Or the lift is going to break. Something structural will fail. We don’t have the parts to repair things.”
“Living on the ground’s not so bad,” Kylee told him as she stared out at the forest. “Quetzals do it all the time. We’ll be okay.”
“What if you just went for a look?” Damien asked, his gaze still fixed on the distant north. “Just like a scouting trip? Would you do that?”
“Not without a really, really good reason,” Talbot told him. “First, I promised I’d stay here. And even if Rebecca, Su, and Dya asked me to go, I’ve got a lot to lose by doing so.”
“Like what?” Kylee asked.
“Like all of you.” He waved around. “I’ve become part of this place, part of the family. On Earth I was part of a big family. When I was a marine, I was part of the Corps. Now I belong here. I wouldn’t want to be away from you.”
“Even Rebecca?” Kylee asked with false innocence.
“Even Rebecca.” He gave her a wink, then followed Damien’s gaze to the north.
At that moment, Dya and Su climbed up out of the hatch and onto the roof.
“Was that a shuttle?” Dya asked, shading her eyes with a slim hand. The wind teased her blonde hair.
“Two of them. Approaching from the west.” Talbot experienced a curious sense of warmth as Dya stepped under his right arm, while Su took his left hand in hers. She stared north, concern in her dark brown eyes.
Su, too, was something of a mystery. More than even with Rebecca he took pains to be eternally polite, respectful, and considerate. In return, Su had begun to respond in kind with little gestures like she did now, taking his hand.
“Another ship?” Su asked. “What does it mean, Mark?”
“We won’t know for a couple of days. Meanwhile, I think it’ll be a good night to set up the telescope. We know where Freelander’s orbit is. Let’s scan for another ship.”
“There’s a quicker way,” Dya said.
“What’s that?”
“The radio,” Su told him, giving him a sidelong glance. “Just how broken do you think it is?”
“Not very,” he admitted. “Just needs plugging into the power.”
“If there’s a ship,” Damien said, “Two Spots at Port Authority will be talking about it a lot.”
He glanced suspiciously back and forth between his wives. “Thought the radio was strictly off limits?”
“We just wanted to see what you’d do,” Dya told him with a smile. “You never even tried to hook it up.”
“Another test?”
“All of life is tests,” Kylee told him with a toothy grin. “Sometimes you just have to figure out what the test is on a given day.”
“If it’s another ship,” Su said darkly, “it means more supplies, more aircars. Better transportation.”
“And that means that eventually someone is going to come looking for us,” Dya said softly, eyes searching the horizon.
“And that,” Talbot finished, “would be bad for all of us.”
He could see everything he’d built here being taken away as someone Corporate—who thought like Kalico Aguila and her marines—stepped down from an aircar.