“We all voted—except for you.”
“Mmm, good point.” Dinah glanced down at the countdown timer. The screen was getting more difficult to read, since she was nearing the terminator—the knife-sharp line between sunlight and shadow—and the bright canyon wall above her was reflecting from the screen. Tilting it for a better view, she saw that it was just about to drop through the sixty-second mark. “It’s okay, I still have a minute to make my decision.”
“Well, do you want to know what the rest of us agreed on?”
“I trust you. But sure.”
“We’re all going to try to have babies just like you, Dinah.”
“Very funny.” Dinah crossed over the terminator, and the sun rose. She raised her free hand and flipped down the sun visor on her helmet.
“Moira’s working on it now.”
“Is that why A?da was being such a drama queen about it?”
“Exactly.”
Thirty-five seconds.
“What did you really decide?”
“One free gene change for each mommy.”
“Oh yeah? So what are you going to do? Make really smart little straight arrow bitches?”
“How’d you guess?”
“Just an intuition.”
“What about you, Dinah?” Dinah could hear the beginnings of anxiety in her friend’s voice. She looked down into the crevasse, saw humanity’s cradle welded helplessly into place, imagined for a moment throwing the demolition charge down on it, like a vindictive goddess hurling a lightning bolt.
She was thinking of Markus. Of the kids she should have had with him. What would they have been like?
Markus had been kind of a jerk in some ways, but he knew how to control it.
Really—she now understood—what had prompted her to slam the table and get up and storm out of the Banana a few minutes ago had not been A?da at all. A?da was provocative, yes. But more infuriating had been a slow burn that had started with Camila, and her remarks about aggression. Remarks that Dinah now saw as aimed not so much at Dinah as at Markus. She wished she could grab Camila by the scruff of the neck and sit her down in front of a display and make her watch the way Markus had spent the last minutes of his life.
Markus was a hero. It seemed to Dinah that Camila wanted to strip humanity of its heroes. She’d couched what she’d said in terms of aggression. But by doing so, Camila was just being aggressive in a different way—a passive-aggressive way that Dinah, raised as she’d been raised, couldn’t help seeing as sneaky. More destructive, in the end, than the overt kind of aggression.
It was this that had made her so flustered that she’d had to leave the meeting.
“Dinah?” Ivy said.
“I’m going to breed a race of heroes,” Dinah said. “Fuck Camila.”
“It’s going to be . . . interesting . . . sharing confined spaces with a race of heroes for hundreds of years.”
“Markus knew how to do it,” Dinah said. “He was a jerk, but he had a code. It’s called chivalry.”
She gave the demolition charge a toss straight up.
“Did you just vote yes?”
“Oh yeah,” she said, watching it dwindle against the stars. The red lights of the LED timer glittered like rubies.
“We’re unanimous,” Ivy said. Dinah understood that Ivy was announcing it to the other women in the Banana.
For the first and last time, Dinah thought.
The red light had shrunk to a pinprick. Like the planet Mars, she thought, except sharper and more brilliant. Then, silently, it turned into a ball of yellow light that darkened as it spread.
Part Three
THE HABITAT RING CIRCA A+5000
FIVE THOUSAND YEARS LATER
KATH TWO WAS STARTLED AWAKE BY PATCHES OF ORANGE-PINK light cavorting across the taut fabric above her. A very old instinct, born on the savannahs of Old Earth, read it as danger: the flitting shadows, perhaps, of predators circling her tent. During the five thousand years of the Hard Rain, that instinct had lain dormant and useless. Here on the surface of New Earth, just beginning to support animals big and smart enough to be dangerous, it was once again troubling her sleep. Her shoulder twitched, in the way that it did sometimes when you were half awake, and not sure whether you were really moving or dreaming of it. She had thought of reaching under her pillow for the weapon. But coming fully to, she found that her arm had not really moved, other than the twitch. Through the thin padding beneath her head she could still feel the hard shape of the katapult.