The science exposition was held in one of the public halls and on the grounds outside it. The vaulted ceiling gave the hall a sense of something that had been grown more than built, and the acoustic controls kept what could have been an overwhelming din of voices and noise calm and reassuring. A thousand children from five years old to sixteen ran and talked and made groups, associating for the most part with people they already knew and who attended the same schools they’d come from.
The open schools all had their own stations in the hall, each one showing what the students had been studying in the last year and how it would add to the overall work of the empire. Some, like the water cycle demonstration, were basic, meant for the youngest children. Others, like the forest of life that compared the different ecosystems of the new worlds, and the programmable matter station that showcased the most recent materials science from Bara Gaon, were sophisticated enough to be interesting for her.
And Connor was there.
As the days passed, she found the sting of remembering Connor and Muriel being involved with each other grew a little less raw for her. Not painless. The image of them kissing—which she had very clearly in her mind for something she’d never actually seen—still bothered her. So when Connor nodded to her when she walked by and tried a little smile, she didn’t know what to make of it. Did he still like her? Was he trying to tell her that his connection with Muriel had been a mistake, or that he was glad that he and Teresa were still friends? She wasn’t sure which option she was hoping for. Or if she was hoping for any of them. Connor was confusing. Muriel and the others from her school had a booth about soil science and how to design microbes that could pass nutrients between organisms from different biomes, and Teresa was technically supposed to be with them. She didn’t want to be there. And really, she could go wherever she wanted. It wasn’t like someone was going to tell her she couldn’t.
Instead, she went to the puzzle station where younger children worked with blocks trying to re-create shapes or argued over how to fit circles into a square or build a complex structure with only gravity and friction to hold it together. She’d done all the puzzles a thousand times over when she was younger. She moved through, giving encouragement and hints to the frustrated, and wondered if Connor would follow her there.
A young girl—maybe six years old—sat at one of the tables by herself, scowling. Teresa sat across from her because she could see the place where Connor would be from there.
The girl looked up at Teresa and seemed to gather herself. When she spoke, it was with the stilted formality of someone who had been coached in what to say and how to say it.
“Hello. My name is Elsa Singh. I’m pleased to meet you.”
“I’m Teresa Duarte,” Teresa said.
“Are you a teacher?” Elsa asked.
“No, I live here.”
“No one will play with me,” Elsa said, scowling at her.
“I could teach you something, if you want.”
“All right,” Elsa said, and seemed to settle deeper into her little wooden chair. Teresa glanced over toward the school display. Muriel and Connor were talking, but Muriel was doing most of it, her lips moving fast like she was fighting to keep his attention. To her surprise, she felt a little pang of sympathy for the girl. If Connor had convinced Muriel to alienate Teresa Duarte, daughter of the high consul and maybe someday ruler of the Laconian Empire, and then gone cold on her? That would be a shitty thing to do. Effective too, because the pang passed as quickly as it had come. Muriel could deal with her mistakes on her own.
“All right, Elsa,” she said, refocusing. She pulled up her handheld. “This is called the prisoner’s dilemma. Look at this . . .”
Teresa built a table like the one Ilich had built with her, explained the rules—each player would decide to cooperate or defect, and they’d each be better off if they defected, but it would be better in the long term to cooperate. Elsa seemed only mildly interested, but willing to follow along.
Connor started moving away from his group just as a new bunch of presenters arrived, washing through the hall with delight and gabbling. He seemed to disappear behind the flood, but she caught a glimpse of his brown hair. She thought he was coming toward her. Her heart started beating a little faster. She wasn’t sure she was more worried that he would find her or that he wouldn’t.
She played the game with the little girl, pretending to care about it more deeply than the stream of humanity over Elsa’s shoulder. They both cooperated for a few rounds, and then, when Teresa felt like it was time for the rest of the tit-for-tat lesson, she defected. Elsa looked at the handheld with the results as if it didn’t make sense.
“Now,” Teresa said. “The thing is, once someone defects like that, you have to decide what—”
“You cheated!” The little girl’s voice was more than just loud. It was a shriek of rage. Her face was twisted in a vicious scowl and dark with blood just under the skin. “You said we should be nice!”
“No,” Teresa said. “It’s part of the lesson . . .”
“Fuck your fucking lesson,” Elsa said. Out of a child that young, the profanity was like a slap. Elsa grabbed the handheld and threw it into the crowd, standing up so fast her chair toppled, clattering on the ground. Before Teresa could do anything, Elsa collapsed and started weeping on the floor.
Security personnel were already moving through the crowd toward them, but Teresa waved them off. She felt trapped between wanting to comfort Elsa or get her handheld back or leave in humiliation and shame. Elsa’s mouth was square and gaping as her sobs turned into screams again. Someone nearby shouted, Monster! and Teresa thought for a second they meant her. Then the woman was there. Older, with eyes the same shape as Elsa’s, the same skin tone. Elsa’s mother scooped the girl up in her arms, rocking her.
“It’s okay, Monster,” the mother said, and hushed her gently. “It’s all right. Mama’s here. I’m right here. It’s okay.”
Elsa clamped her hands over her ears, closed her eyes, and buried her head in her mother’s embrace. The mother rocked her, gently making cooing sounds to soothe her. Teresa took a step forward.
“I’m so sorry,” the mother said. “Elsa gets overstimulated. It won’t happen again.”
“No,” Teresa said. “It was my fault. She’s fine. It was me. I didn’t explain the game well enough.”
The mother smiled and turned her attention back to Elsa. Teresa waited for the mother to start asking questions of the little girl. What just happened? and What mistake did you make? and What would you do differently next time? All the things her father would have asked her to make the moment meaningful. But Elsa’s mother did none of that. She only calmed her daughter and told her that everything would be all right. That she was loved. Teresa watched with a sensation she couldn’t quite recognize.
She didn’t notice Colonel Ilich coming up to her until he touched her shoulder.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said. “Your father is asking to see you. Now, if you can.”
“Of course,” she said, and followed, only pausing to retrieve her handheld.
Her father’s private office was small. A small desk with a monitor built into the surface that could display flat on the surface or volumetrically over it. As she came in, it was showing a schematic of the slow zone—the gates, the alien station at their center, Medina Station, and a few dozen ships scattered through 750 trillion cubic kilometers. A space smaller than the interior of a star. Her father was still as stone, looking at it. It was like he didn’t need to breathe anymore. “Is everything okay?” she asked.
“What do you remember about the experiment in Tecoma system?”
Teresa sat on the little couch, folding her legs up under her. She tried to recall everything she could of the science briefings she’d been in, but all she could think of was the crying little girl and her mother.
“It’s where we were doing the first tit-for-tat experiment,” she finally said. “To see if the enemy can be negotiated with.” It seemed ominous that she’d just been reviewing the prisoner’s dilemma, and that it had gone badly.
“To see if we can make it change its behavior, yes,” her father said, then gave a small, rueful chuckle. “There’s good news and bad there.” He gestured at his monitor, throwing a report to her handheld. “Look this over. Tell me what you make of it.”
Teresa opened the report like it was a test from Colonel Ilich. Her father watched her while she read through it, looked at the datasets, tried to make it all make sense. She tried not to read Admiral Sagale’s summary at the end, because that felt like cheating. She should be able to draw the conclusions herself.