Mr. Kaufman was frowning, not fully convinced.
"Don't touch them," Mrs. Segan called urgently. She slipped past Mr. Kaufman, pulling on a pair of thick gauntlets. "Remember what I told you about them being adapted to the cold."
Lawrence and Alan traded a look.
Mrs. Segan picked up the first fatworm. Her eyes narrowed as she took in the big red mark around its middle. She took it over to the nearest bin. "What have you done?" she yelled. All the fatworms inside had the same red mark. None of them were moving. She hurried to the next bin, and gasped. In the third bin there were some fatworms left undulating slowly; Lawrence and Alan hadn't raced all of them yet. She whirled around. Lawrence took a step back, afraid she'd strike him. Her face was rigid with fury. "You burned them all, you little..." She turned to Mr. Kaufman. "Tour's over. Get these brats out of here."
Lawrence had taken over the robot garage several years ago. The compact tracked machines that originally tended to the elaborate gardens of his family's domes had been replaced by newer, more efficient models when they upgraded their AS groundskeeper program. He'd found the old concrete ramp in the middle of a clump of copper-flowering bushes that had been allowed to expand and merge into a shaggy wall now the entrance was no longer needed. At the base of the ramp was a swing-up door with stiff old lever arms. It took a commendable amount of effort and persistence for a nine-year-old to prize it open, but Lawrence did it, to be rewarded with a musty concrete cave stretching out ahead of him for a good ten meters. Its roof was less than two meters from the ground, and it had strange metal tracks bolted to the floor, walls and ceiling where waldo arms had once run. But there was still power, and a data node.
Since then it had become his den. He'd moved in life's essentials, cluttering it with a dilapidated magenta-colored leather settee, piles of cushions, a couple of tables, an old-model desktop pearl, a sound system with a decibel level that most hard-rock bands would envy, two active memory towers his father had salvaged from the office for him, an eclectic array of tools and boxes of toys he never played with. He'd tacked sheet screens over the walls and even part of the ceiling. A mosaic of images played as soon as the door was opened, some from the memory towers while others broadcast live camera feeds from the datapool.
It was a grand refuge from his family and the rest of Amethi. Even his four younger siblings knew to stay out unless he explicitly invited them in.
He'd gone there as soon as he got back after the ecology field trip. The sheet screens were showing several images of Templeton from cameras mounted on the apex of various domes. One of them showed Nizana's bright crescent, relayed from a near-side school's astronomy department telescope. Another was a telescope tracking Barric, the third-largest moon.
Lawrence told the desktop pearl to find a spaceport feed and switch it to the biggest sheet screen, the one hanging opposite the sofa, which took up half the wall. The camera must have been sited on the control tower: it showed the thick gray runway stabbing out across the bleak rusty-colored tundra. Nothing was landing or taking off.
"Get me a Flight: Horizon episode," he instructed the pearl.
"Which one?" it's AS program asked.
"Doesn't matter. No. Wait. Series one, episode five: 'Creation-5.' I want third person with the edit I chose last time. Put it on the big screen, and close down the others." He flopped into the settee and stuck his feet up on the armrest. The remaining sheet screens blacked out. Right in front of him the credits started to roll and the soundtrack kicked in, making the thin screens tremble.
He'd found Flight: Horizon two years ago when he sent an askping through the catalogues of Amethi's multimedia companies; as far as he was concerned it was the greatest science fiction series ever made. Not fully i, but it allowed personae selection so the episode could be viewed from any of the principal characters' viewpoint. And it wasn't educational like all of Amethi's i-dramas aimed at the youth audience.
Set hundreds of years in the future, it featured the amazingly cool starship Ultema, which had been sent to explore a section of the spiral arm halfway round the galaxy from Earth: several of the crew were alien, and the weird planets they visited were superbly scary. They were also facing some awesome evil aliens, the Delexians, who wanted to prevent them from getting home. It had been imported from Earth thirty years ago, though the copyright was 2287. There were only thirty episodes in the multimedia company's library, and Lawrence knew them so well now he could almost recite the dialogue from memory. He couldn't believe that was all that had been made. The Earth datapool address of the show's fanclub was tagged in the expanded features menu of every episode, so he'd paid a starship carriage fee and sent them a text message asking for more information. Every time a star-ship arrived back at Amethi he checked its communication AS, but they'd never sent him a reply.
The Ultema was locked in a gigantic energy battle against a blue dwarf star that the Delexians had imprinted with a sentience matrix when a green priority script icon opened in the center of the sheet screen. The starship froze, and the script scrolled down.
Lawrence, please come to your father's study.
He checked the clock. Quarter to six. His father had been back home ten minutes. Mr. Kaufman hadn't wasted any time filing his report package. "Gimme the study pearl," he said to the den's AS.
"I have it online," the AS said.
"I'm busy right now," Lawrence said. He pushed some injured annoyance into the tone. The AS running in the study's desktop pearl was smart.
"Lawrence, please, I accessed the message from your school and prioritized it. Your father wants to see you now."
He kept silent.
"Do you want me to bring your father into this conversation on real time?"
"All right." Grudgingly. "I'm coming, I suppose. But you have to explain to the school AS why my homestudy is short tonight."
"You're not doing homestudy."
"I am. I just have Flight: Horizon on as background."
Lawrence swung the garage door shut behind him and wriggled through the bushes. The garage was near the rim of the main dome, which was approaching the end of summer. There were six of the big structures making up the Newton family estate: the large one in the center with its temperate climate, and five smaller ones ringing it, each with a different environment inside. It was one of the larger estates in the Reuiza District, which was where the capital's wealthiest citizens clustered.
He had a three-hundred-meter walk across the grounds to the house itself. The landscape designer had gone in for split levels, with a chessboard of English manor lawns walled in with near-vertical borders of flowering shrubs and perennials. Each lawn was themed with classical plants: one had roses, one with fuchsia, another had begonias, magnolias, hydrangeas, delphiniums; for variety several lawns were enclosed by rockeries sprouting dozens of alpines. Two serpentine pools led away into shallow rocky cascades with reeds and lilies sprouting from outcrops and shelves in the slope. Tall trees stood above the corner of every lawn, again selected for traditional appearance: willow, spruce, birch, horse chestnut, larch. Each of them had had boughs that drooped, either naturally or by judicious shaping, forming massive verdant skirts that swept the grass. Fabulous adventure caves for small children. Lawrence had enjoyed a lot of summers playing in the gardens, as his siblings did now.
A stream ran through the dome, a rough horseshoe shape around the outside of the formal lawns, where the grass was permitted to grow shaggy and daisies and forget-me-nots flourished. He crossed over a narrow moss-cloaked humpback bridge and walked the flagstone path to the house, going up or down steps at the end of each square lawn. Ahead of him, the Newton residence was a stately home built from a yellow stone, with big bay windows protruding from walls swarmed by honeysuckle. Several peacocks strutted around on the gravel path surrounding the house, long folded tails swishing the pebbles about. Their mad penetrating cackle-cry was virtually the only sound in the dome. They scattered as Lawrence crossed the path and made his way up the steps to the front door.
The entrance hall inside was cool. Heavy polished oak doors opened into the formal ground-floor rooms. Their furnishings and decorations were all exquisite antique pieces. Lawrence hated them; he was frightened to go into any of the rooms for fear of breaking some priceless chunk of the family's precious heritage. What was the point of having a house like this? Nobody could use it properly, not like the real homes some of his schoolmates had. It cost a fortune to build. And it didn't belong on Amethi anyway. This was how people used to build. It was the past.
A wooden staircase curved up to the second-floor landing. He trotted up it, footfalls absorbed by the dark crimson carpet.
His mother was standing at the top, holding two-year-old Veronica on her hip. She gave him a worried look. But then that was Mother, always worried about something. His little sister smiled brightly and held out her hands to him. He grinned and kissed her.
"Oh, Lawrence," his mother said. Her voice carried a unique tone of despair and disapproval that always made him lower his head. It was awful, not being able to look at his own mother. And now he'd upset her again, which was a terrible thing, because she was six months' pregnant. It wasn't that he didn't want another brother or sister, but pregnancy always tired her so much. Whenever he said anything she smiled bravely and said it was why she had married his father, to continue the family line.
Family. Everything was for the family.
"Is he really cross?" Lawrence asked.
"We're both disappointed with you. It was a dreadful thing to do. Imagine treating Barrel like that."
Barrel was one of the family's dogs, a shaggy black Labrador. Lawrence's favorite out of the pack that roamed around the house. They'd grown up together. "It's not the same," he protested. "They're just worms."
"I'm not arguing with you. Go and see your father." With that she turned her back on him and started down the stairs. Veronica gurgled happily, waving.
Lawrence waved back forlornly and walked slowly to the study. The door was open. He knocked on the wooden frame.
Kristina was just coming out. The new junior nanny for the Newton children. She gave Lawrence a sly wink, which lifted his spirits considerably. Kristina was twenty-one and utterly beautiful. He often wondered if he had a crush on her, but wasn't sure how you knew. He certainly thought about her a lot, if that's what qualified. Anyway, crushes were stupid. Beauty aside, it was great when she was on duty: she was fun, and she joined in the games his brothers and sisters played, and she didn't seem to mind what he got up to or how late to bed he was. All his siblings liked her as well, which was fortunate because she wasn't a whole load of use when it came to changing diapers and preparing food and things. Pity she wasn't on duty more often.
Like the rest of the house, the study wasn't for the use of children. There was a high marble fireplace that had never seen any flames other than the holographic variety. A couple of green leather reading chairs. You had to look hard to see any accommodation to modern technology: the two largest oil paintings were actually sheet screens, and the desk diary was a case for a pane. The walls were covered in bookcases holding leather-bound volumes. Lawrence would have loved to open up some of the classics (definitely not the poetry) and read what was inside. But they weren't books to be read, just to be looked at and assigned high dollar values.
"Shut the door," his father ordered.
Sighing, Lawrence did as he was told.
His father was sitting behind the walnut veneer desk, throwing a silver Dansk paperweight from hand to hand. He was Doug, to his friends—and a lot of people in Templeton fought over gaining that classification. In his mid-forties, though his extensive germline v-writing made it difficult to tell. With a lean build and a face to which smiling came easy, he could have passed for twenty-five without too much problem. Rivals on McArthur's Board had mistaken that smile for an easygoing nature, an assumption they never repeated.
"All right," he said. "I'm not going to shout at you, Lawrence. At your age it's just a waste of time. You just curl up into a sulk and let it all wash over you. If I didn't know better I'd say you were hitting puberty."
Lawrence blushed furiously. This wasn't what he was expecting, which was probably why his father was talking in such a fashion.
"Want to tell me what happened today?"
"I was just messing about," Lawrence said, making sure there was plenty of regret in his voice. "They were only worms. I didn't know getting them hot could kill them. I didn't mean to do it."
"Only worms. Humm." Doug Newton stopped throwing the paperweight and stared at the ceiling as if lost in deep thought. "That would be the same fatworms that are vital for preparing our ecology, would it?"
"Yes, but they clone millions of them in there every day."