“Don’t you like oysters?” Joel asked.
“What?” Hwa blinked and put her knife down. “Oh. Sorry. I was just admiring the cutlery.”
“We’ll get you a set,” Joel said. “Dad, Hwa needs some more knives and forks at her new place.”
“Then she shall have them.” Zachariah drew a circle around his place setting with one finger, splayed all ten fingers at the setting, and made a pinch-and-throw motion in Hwa’s direction. Her watch purred, and there it was, an alert about the gift. The old man smiled. “Ten place settings. No plates, though.”
“I think I can manage the plates,” Hwa said. “And thanks.”
“Do you do a lot of entertaining, in Tower One?” Katherine asked.
Had anyone but Sunny raised Hwa, she might not have recognized the shade for what it was. But Sunny had accustomed her daughter to being despised. “Not as much as I’d like,” she said. “My friends work unpredictable hours.”
“Still keeping in touch, as it were?” Silas asked. Paris and London tittered.
“Oh, aye,” Hwa said. “On Fridays we have sleepovers. Pillow fights and practise-kissing. Then we sell the footage to the highest bidder.”
The table was silent. Hwa slurped her oyster. She dabbed her mouth with her napkin. “That was a joke.”
Zachariah guffawed. It was a surprisingly resonant sound, coming from such a fragile body. The old man did a good job of pretending not to be sick. He raised a flute of champagne in Hwa’s direction. “I do wish you would come to dinner more often, Miss Go. The one thing I forgot to engineer in my children was a sense of humour.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” Hwa said, and Zachariah laughed even harder.
They moved on through the soup course (pumpkin-coconut bisque, served in small gourds), and the salad (shaved fennel and blood orange, laced with olive oil and pink peppercorn), and the entrée (pork loin on whipped celeriac, with a black garlic gastrique).
“Let us talk about the future,” Zachariah said, after the soup was served. “Joel, tell your brothers and sisters about your science club project.”
“I’m designing a generation ship,” Joel said. “In the library immersion unit. It has the highest level of processing power we’re allowed for intramural competition.”
“Using the lessons gleaned from your experience here, no doubt,” his brother Paris said. “This city is a closed system, too, of sorts.”
“Of sorts,” Joel said. “It would be better if it were closed off entirely. That’s what Mr. Branch says. It would be better to be self-sufficient.”
“We thought the same, on the commune.” Zachariah slurped his soup noisily. “We grew our own food. Barrelled our own rainwater. What rainwater there was. It was too late, of course, for California. But California has always been a place where dreams go to live or die.”
“A dream is a wish the heart makes,” London Lynch said, and they all raised their glasses and drank, except Hwa, who was still nursing her gin and soda.
“Generation ships are a good thing to put your mind to, Joel,” Zachariah said, when they were done toasting. “Someday we’ll leave this whole planet behind, and we’ll need that kind of thinking.”
“And we’ll need the Lynch brand out there, too,” Silas added. “You and your little friends have any idea how to shrink the reactor we’re building, down there?” Silas stamped on the dining room floor to indicate the one several hundred miles below, in the Flemish Pass Basin. “Because that’s what you’d need, to power one of those ships you’re talking about.”
“I know,” Joel said. “But the spectral analysis probes are showing us rocky surfaces out there in the Kuiper. That means thorium. We just need to get to it first.”
Silas looked nonplussed. It didn’t translate to Hwa, either. But it made Joel happy to work on it, so she didn’t mind. Mostly all she cared about was that Mr. Branch wasn’t touching on him in a weird way, and that none of the other kids in the club locked him in a supply cabinet. She’d have felt the same no matter what he was working on, even if he randomly decided to take up knitting, or breeding rare iguanas, or chain-saw sculpture. That last one would actually be pretty good for his upper body strength.
“Of course, humanity will never make it to the stars,” Zachariah said. “Not as we are. We must change. Become more durable. Wouldn’t you agree, Miss Go?”
Hwa pretended to carefully examine the dripping red segment of blood orange trembling on the tines of her fork. “I don’t really feel any need to go to space.”
“You don’t want to ascend into the heavens, and be seated at the right hand of evolution?” Katherine asked. “Why ever not?”