“I can present the pre-planning as a theoretical class exercise, at first. Buy a week or two. They’ll have to be told eventually, you know.”
“Not too soon. I’ll hold you responsible for keeping the chimps under control, you copy?”
“I copy. Do I have my authorization? Oh—and I’ll need to get an extension against my downside gravity leave.”
“HQ doesn’t like that. Liability.”
“It’s either me or you, Bruce.”
“True…” Van Atta waved a hand, already sinking back gratefully from harried to languid mode. “All right. You got it.”
A blank check. Leo tamped a wolfish grin into a fawning smile. “You’ll remember this, won’t you Bruce—later?”
Van Atta’s lips too drew back. “I guarantee, Leo, I’ll remember everything.”
Leo bowed himself out, mumbling gratitude.
Silver poked her head through the door to the creche mother’s private sleep cubicle. “Mama Nilla?”
“Sh!” Mama Nilla held her finger to her lips and nodded toward Andy, asleep in a sack on the wall with his face peeping out. She whispered, “For heaven’s sake don’t wake the baby. He’s been so fussy—I think the formula disagrees with him. I wish Dr. Minchenko were back. Here, I’ll come out in the corridor.”
The airseal doors swished shut behind her. In preparation for sleep Mama Nilla had exchanged her pink working coveralls for a set of flowered pajamas cinched in around her ample waist. Silver suppressed an urge to clamp herself to that soft torso as she had in desperate moments when she was little—she was much too grown-up to be cuddled anymore, she told herself sternly. “How’s Andy doing?” she asked instead, with a nod toward the closed doors.
“Hm. All right,” said Mama Nilla. “Though I hope I can get this formula problem straightened out soon. And… well… I’m not sure you could call it depression, exactly, but his attention span seems shorter, and he fusses—don’t tell Claire that, though, poor dear, she has enough troubles. Tell her he’s all right.”
Silver nodded. “I understand.”
Mama Nilla frowned introspectively. “I wrote up a protest, but my supervisor blocked it. Ill-timed, she said. Ha. More like Mr. Van Atta has her spooked. I could just… ahem. Anyway, I’ve been turning in overtime chits like crazy, and I requested an extra assistant be assigned to my creche unit. Maybe when they realize that this foolishness is costing them money, they’ll give in. You can tell Claire that, I think.”
“Yes,” said Silver, “she could use a little hope.”
Mama Nilla sighed. “I feel so badly about this. Whatever possessed those children to try and run off, anyway? I could just shake Tony. And as for that stupid Security guard, I could just… well…” she shook her head.
“Have you heard any more about Tony, that I could pass on to Claire?”
“Ah. Yes.” Mama Nilla glanced up and down the corridor, to assure herself of their privacy. “Dr. Minchenko called me last night on the personal channel. He assures me Tony’s out of danger now, they got that infection under control. But he’s still very weak. Dr. Minchenko means to bring him back up to the Habitat when he finishes his own gravity leave. He thinks Tony will complete his recovery faster up here. So that’s a bit of good news you can pass on to Claire.”
Silver calculated, her lower fingers tapping out the days unobtrusively below Mama Nilla’s line of sight, and breathed relief. That was one massive problem she could report to Leo as solved. Tony would be back before their revolt broke into the open. His safe return might even become the signal for it. A smile lit her face. “Thanks, Mama Nilla. That is good news.”
Revolution 101 for the Bewildered, Leo decided grimly, should be his course title. Or worse; 050. Remedial Revolution…
The shell of floating quaddies hovering expectantly around him in the lecture module had been officially augmented by both the off-duty pusher crews, and loaded with all the off-shift older quaddies Silver had been able to contact covertly. Sixty or seventy altogether. The lecture module was jammed, causing Leo to jump ahead mentally and think about oxygen consumption and regeneration plans for the reconfigured Habitat. There was tension, as well as carbon dioxide, in the air. Rumors were afloat already, Leo realized, God knew in what mutant forms. It was time to replace rumors with facts.
Silver waved all clear from the airseal doors, turning all four thumbs up and grinning at Leo, as one last T-shirted quaddie scurried within. The airseal doors slid shut, eclipsing her as she turned to take up guard duty in the corridor.
Leo took up his lecture station in the center. The center, the hub of the wheel, where stresses are most concentrated. After some initial whispering, poking, and prodding, they hushed for him, to an almost frightening attentiveness. He could hear them breathing. We would need you even if you weren’t an engineer, Leo, Silver had remarked. We’re all too used to taking orders from people with legs.
Are you saying you need a front man? he’d asked, amused.
Is that what it’s called? Her gaze upon him had been coolly pragmatic.
He was getting too old, his brain was short-circuiting to some distant rock beat, slipping back to the noisier rhythms of his adolescence. Let me be your front man, baby. Call me Leo. Call me anytime, day or night. Let me help. He eyed the closed airseal doors. Was the man waving the baton at the front of the parade pulling it after him—or being pushed along ahead of it? He had a queasy premonition he was going to learn the answer. He woofed a breath, and returned his attention to the lecture chamber.
“As some of you have already heard,” Leo began, words like pebbles in the pool of silence, “a new gravity technology has arrived from the outlying planets. It’s apparently based on a variation of the Necklin field tensor equations, the same mathematics that underlie the technology we use to punch through those wrinkles in space-time we call wormholes. I haven’t been able to get hold of the tech specs yet myself, but it seems it’s already been developed to the marketable stage. The theoretical possibility was not, strictly speaking, new, but I for one never expected to see its practical capture in my lifetime. Evidently, neither did the people who created you quaddies.
“There is a kind of strange symmetry to it. The spurt forward in genetic bioengineering that made you possible was based on the perfection of a new technology, the uterine replicator, from Beta Colony. Now, barely a generation later, the new technology that renders you obsolete has arrived from the same source. Because that’s what you have become, before you even got on-line—technologically obsolete. At least from GalacTech’s point of view.” Leo drew breath, watching for their reactions.
“Now, when a machine becomes obsolete, we scrap it. When a man’s training becomes obsolete, we send him back to school. But your obsolescence was bred in your bones. It’s either a cruel mistake, or, or, or,” he paused for emphasis, “the greatest opportunity you will ever have to become a free people.
“Don’t… don’t take notes,” Leo choked, as heads bent automatically over their scribble boards, illuminating his key words with their light pens as the autotranscription marched across their displays. “This isn’t a class. This is real life.” He had to stop a moment to regain his equilibrium. He was positive some child at the back was still highlighting “no notes—real life”, in reflexive virtue.
Pramod, floating near, looked up, his dark eyes agitated. “Leo? There was a rumor going around that the company was going to take us all downside and shoot us. Lake Tony.”
Leo smiled sourly. “That’s actually the least likely scenario. You are to be taken downside, yes, to a sort of prison camp. But this is how guilt-free genocide is handled. One administrator passes you on to the next, and him to the next, and him to the next. You become a routine expense on the inventory. Expenses rise, as they always do. In response, your downsider support employees are gradually withdrawn, as the company names you ‘self-suflicient.’ Life support equipment deteriorates with age. Breakdowns happen more and more often, maintenance and re-supply become more and more erratic.