“So you’re in favor of going back, then?”
“Definitely. We’ve only just begun our encounter with the Dyson stars.”
“And what kind of ship should we use, based on what we learned from the first mission?”
“One that is very fast, and very strong. In fact, just to be safe, we should probably send more than one.”
Mark and Liz got the kids to bed and settled by eight o’clock. After that, they sat in the kitchen, eating their own supper of chicken Kiev: out of a packet and microwaved, of course. “Old Tony Matvig has some chickens,” Mark said. “I talked to him the other day, he’ll give us some eggs if we want our own.” His fork prodded at the meat on his plate, squeezing out some more of the garlic butter. “It would be nice to have something we know isn’t full of hormones and weird gene splices to feed the kids with.”
Liz gave him her “weighing up” look. “No, Mark. You know we’ve been through all this. I like living here, and I’ll like it a whole lot more once the house has finished growing, but I’m not buying in that deeply. We don’t need to keep chickens, we earn more than enough to eat well, and I don’t order factory food from the Big15. Everything in that freezer has the clean-feed label, if you ever bothered to look. And who did you see plucking and gutting these chickens, exactly? Were you going to do it?”
“I could do.”
“You won’t. The smell is revolting. It made me throw up.”
“When did you ever gut a chicken?”
“About fifty years ago. Back when I was young and idealistic.”
“And foolish. Yeah, I know.”
She leaned over and rubbed his cheek with her fingers. “Am I a real pain?”
“No.” He tried to catch one of her fingers in his teeth—missing.
“In any case,” she said, “chickens will ruin the lawn. Have you ever taken a good look at their claws? They’re evil.”
Mark grinned. “Killer chickens.”
“They kill lawns, and rip the rest of the garden apart as well.”
“Okay. No chickens.”
“But I’m all in favor of the vegetable garden.”
“Yeah. Because I’m going to rig up an irrigation system, and a gardeningbot can look after the rest of it.”
Liz blew him a kiss. “I said I’d tend the herb bed myself.”
“Wow. All of it?”
“Any regrets yet?”
“Not one.”
“I can think of one.”
“What?” he asked indignantly.
“I need a big strong man to go out and look at the precipitator leaves again.”
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding! I fixed them last week.”
“I know, darling. But they barely filled the tank last night.”
“Goddamn semiorganic crap. We should have dug a decent well.”
“Well, we can get a constructionbot to lay a pipe down to the river when the real house is finished.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
The maidbot took their plates and cutlery away to stack in the dishwasher. Mark carried a dish of sticky toffee pudding through into the living room, along with two spoons. They snuggled up together on the sofa, and started scooping at the gooey mass from opposite ends. Over on the portal, Wendy Bose was stammering and weeping her way through a statement. Professor Truten, labeled by the subtitles as a “close family friend,” had his arm supportively around her shoulder.
“Poor woman,” Liz said.
“Yeah.”
“She needs to go into rejuve. I wonder if CST will pay for that?”
“Why does she need rejuve?” Mark peered at her image inside the portal. “She doesn’t look like she’s that old.”
Liz took advantage of his distraction to spoon up two lots of pudding. “Compared to whom? Dudley Bose’s replacement clone is going to be an eighteen-year-old. She’ll have a physical equivalence of late fifties. Trust me, that’s not a marriage you want to try.”
“Suppose not. I just can’t stop thinking about Bose and Verbeke. Talk about being abandoned a long way from home. Do you think they suicided when they realized?”
“Depends on the Dyson aliens. Maybe they built them an environment chamber, and right now they’ve cracked the translation hurdle and are chatting away happily.”
“You don’t really believe that, do you?”
Liz chewed thoughtfully for a moment. Professor Truten was helping Wendy Bose back into her house. “Nope. They’re bodydead.”
“I figured that, too.” His gaze wandered up to the cheap composite ceiling. “You know Elan’s almost the closest Commonwealth planet to the Dyson Pair.”
“There are seven closer than us, including Anshun. But you’re right, we’re close.” She giggled. “Only seven hundred and fifty-four light-years away. Scary, huh?”
He reached around with his free hand, and poked her just below the ribs, where he knew she was sensitive.
“Ow!” Liz screwed her face up, and retaliated by scooping up a giant piece of pudding.
“Hey!” he protested. “I’ve barely had a mouthful yet.”
“Life’s a bitch, then you rejuvenate and do it all over again.”
SIXTEEN
It was midday on America’s eastern seaboard. The sun had reached its zenith, allowing it to shine directly onto the streets lurking at the bottom of Manhattan’s concrete canyons. Looking down on Fifth Avenue from the two hundred twenty-fifth floor of the Commonwealth Exploration and Development Office, Nigel Sheldon could see the city’s perpetual traffic battle in action. All along that massive historical thoroughfare, yellow cabs and matte-black limousines were jammed together, two entirely separate and antagonistic species contesting dominance of the available lanes. Urban myth told it that the city’s cabs had illicit aggressor software installed in their drive arrays. It wouldn’t surprise Nigel given the times his limo had to brake to make way for a cab veering out in front of him. And they were the ones who benefited most from this brief visitation of light, hundreds of them gleaming splendidly amid their somber opponents, right now they looked victorious.