Playing God(3)

Lynn watched Praeis step off the fountain's edge into the arms of her Dedelphi sisters, and the Others. Mother Praeis Shin the Townbuilder, said those who liked her. Praeis the Cold-Blooded, said those who couldn't understand why she didn't get furious at the drop of the hat in the normal Dedelphi fashion. Praeis, who, unlike the other inhabitants of Crater Town, was not a refugee. She was an exile. The ones who knew that had worse names for her, and some of them might have gone for blood. But—Lynn glanced again at the Human security guards on the roofs and highest balconies—Praeis's planning had made sure that Crater Town had law enforcement mat was beyond the influence of the Dedelphi's fractious anger, as much for her family's sake as for the good of the colony.

Lynn went back to the worktable. Obviously, no more work was getting done today. The crowd in the streets would be cheering and debating for hours, and Praeis would be in the thick of it. Lynn touched the keys on the table's edge to save the city map they'd been working with. She subvocalized the record command to her camera implant and stored an additional working copy, in case she had any brilliant ideas on the way home.

Three waves of the plague had hit Crater Town. The sickness had been brought in by refugee ships, and despite steadily tightened quarantine controls, transmitted through families. Now, between thirty and forty percent of the colony's housing stood empty. The Building Committee had decided to raze the empty buildings as potential health hazards. Lynn and Praeis had met that morning to try to come up with plans for how to use the empty spaces the demolition would create.

Thirty percent. Lynn closed her eyes against the memories of the mass funerals, the dead and dying in their isolation beds, the wailing of the sisters left behind. Hundreds of Human doctors, armed with the best defenses years of research and biotech could devise, had volunteered themselves to help the fight, but they'd only made a small dent in the death tolls. Praeis had lost two sisters and four daughters, and Lynn had been there to watch.

Lynn's fingers hurt. She opened her eyes and looked down. Her gloved hands clenched the edge of the worktable like they were trying to break it off. Feeling moderately foolish, she let go and finished storing the maps.

Praeis liked to try to give Lynn credit for the success of the Crater Town colony, but Lynn would just shake her head. “I just helped out with the gardening,” she said. “You're the one who got people to actually live here.”

When the original Dedelphi refugees had shown up, they weren't fleeing plague, they were fleeing war. They arrived in the ships of Human mercenary pilots. They stood torn between fear and pride at the customs stations of enclaves, space stations, colonies, and city-ships—anybody who'd let them land and would agree to give them a berth of some variety in return for work or good publicity.

Then came Praeis and her sisters, Jos and Shorie. They saw the scattered, meek Dedelphi population in the Solar system, and they got to work. They found a crater that the Martian enclaves hadn't bothered to foliate. They convinced twelve separate boards and committees that it would be an incredible act of public charity to give it to the Dedelphi so the Dedelphi could have a home where they could be safe from the Human poison that was a constant danger to themselves, their sisters, their daughters.

Praeis and her sisters tramped all over the system gathering donations, equipment, and skilled help. The refugee Dedelphi responded tentatively at first, but then with growing enthusiasm, especially since many of them had daughters who had never been out of their clean-suits.

Lynn's family, famous for their re-creation of Earth's Florida peninsula, were recruited to foliate the crater in a style that would be comfortable for the Dedelphi. It was the work of a number of years. Lynn, her portable screen still warm from receiving her doctorate, had fallen in love with the job, and fallen into friendship with Praeis Shin. When the rest of her family left, Lynn stayed behind. The foliation wasn't complete, she said at the time. There wasn't nearly enough variety in the fields and gardens. They didn't have a trained maintenance force yet.

Her family had nodded sagely at each other, hugged her, and let her stay. Everybody knew what was going on, and approved. Back in Florida, Lynn would be tweaking work that had been completed fifty or seventy-five years ago. Here, she had her own projects, and they were worthwhile ones. Not one relative said one word to protest her basing herself on an entirely different planet.

Her decision had won her the gratitude of the Dedelphi, a number of awards from assorted enclaves, and a handful of really bad nightmares from the plagues. But it was real, and important, and she loved it.

And now … And now what comes next? Lynn wondered toward the windows. What if they all do go home? What am I going to do?