“It does matter!” John cried. “We’ve got as much chance as anyone does of directing what happens here.”
Sax shook his head, but the others were listening to John, and most seemed to agree with him: Arkady, Ann, Maya, Vlad, each from their different perspective. . . . It could be done, John could see it in their faces. Only Hiroko he could not read; her face was a blank, closed in a way that brought back a sharp pang of recollection. She had always been that way to John, and suddenly it made him ache with frustration and remembered pain, and he got annoyed.
He stood, and waved a hand outward. It was nearing sunset, and the enormous curved plate of the planet was dappled with an infinite texture of shadows. “Hiroko, can I have a word with you in private? Just for a second. We can go down into the tent below here. I just have a couple questions, and then we can come right back up.”
The others stared at them curiously. Under that gaze Hiroko finally bowed, and walked ahead of John to the tube down to the next tent.
• • •
They stood at one tip of that tent’s crescent, under the gazes of their friends above, and the occasional observer below. The tent was mostly empty; people were respecting the first hundred’s privacy by leaving a gap.
“You have suggestions for how I can identify the saboteurs?” Hiroko said.
“You might start with the boy named Kasei,” John said. “The one that is a mix of you and me.”
She would not meet his eye.
John leaned toward her, getting angry. “I presume there’s kids from every man in the first hundred?”
Hiroko tilted her head at him, and shrugged very slightly. “We took from the samples everyone gave. The mothers are all the women in the group, the fathers all the men.”
“What gave you the right to do all these things without our permission?” John asked. “To make our children without asking us— to run away and hide in the first place— why? Why?”
Hiroko returned his gaze calmly. “We have a vision of what life on Mars can be. We could see it wasn’t going to go that way. We have been proved right by what has happened since. So we thought we would establish our own life—”
“But don’t you see how selfish that is? We all had a vision, we all wanted it to be different, and we’ve been working as hard as we can for it, and all that time you’ve been gone, off creating a little pocket world for your little group! I mean we could have used your help! I wanted to talk to you so often! Here we have a kid between us, a mix of you and me, and you haven’t talked to me in twenty years!”
“We didn’t mean to be selfish,” Hiroko said slowly. “We wanted to try it, to show by experiment how we can live here. Someone has to show what you mean when you talk about a different life, John Boone. Someone has to live the life.”
“But if you do it in secret then no one can see it!”
“We never planned to stay secret forever. The situation has gotten bad, and so we’ve stayed away. But here we are now, after all. And when we are needed, when we can help, we will appear again.”
“You’re needed every day!” John said flatly. “That’s how social life works. You’ve made a mistake, Hiroko. Because while you’ve been hiding, the chances for Mars remaining its own place have gone way down, and a lot of people have been working to speed that disappearance, including some of the first hundred. And what have you done to stop them?”
Hiroko said nothing. John went on: “I suppose you’ve been helping Sax a little in secret. I saw one of your notes to him. But that’s another thing I object to— helping out some of us and yet not others.”
“We all do that,” Hiroko said, but she looked uncomfortable.
“Have you had the gerontological treatments in your colony?”
“Yes.”
“And you got the process from Sax?”
“Yes.”
“Do these kids of yours know their parentage?”
“Yes.”
John shook his head, exasperated and more. “I just can’t believe you would do these things!”
“We do not ask for your belief.”
“Obviously not. But aren’t you the least bit concerned about stealing our genes and making kids by us without our knowledge or consent? About bringing them up without giving us any part in their upbringing, any part in their childhood?”
She shrugged. “You can have your own kids if you want. As for these, well. Were any of you interested in having children twenty years ago? No. The subject never came up.”
“We were too old!”
“We were not too old. We chose not to think of it. Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people. You did not want children, and so you did not know about late birth. But we did, and so we learned the techniques. And when you meet the results, I think you will see it was a good idea. I think you will thank us. What have you lost, after all? These children are ours. But they have a genetic link to you, and from now on they will exist for you, as an unexpected gift, say. As a quite extraordinary gift.” Her Mona Lisa smile appeared and disappeared.