Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [7]
Under the dome it was always cold, but the light was perpetually changing. In summer the dome glowed bluish white all the time, and pencils of lit air stood under the skylight shafts. In winter it was dark, and the dome flared with reflected lamplight, like the inside of a mussel shell. In spring and fall the light would dim in the afternoon to a gray and ghostly dusk, the colors only suggested by the many shades of gray, the bamboo leaves and pine needles all ink strokes against the faint white of the dome. In those hours the greenhouses were like big fairy lamps on the hills, and the kids would wander home crisscrossing like gulls, and head for the bathhouse. There in the long building beside the kitchen they would pull off their clothes and run into the steamy clangor of the big main bath, sliding around on the bottom tiles feeling heat buzz back into their hands and feet and faces, as they splashed friskily around the soaking ancients with their turtle faces and their wrinkled hairy bodies.
After that warm wet hour they dressed, and trooped into the kitchen, damp and pink-skinned, queueing up and filling their plates, sitting at the long tables scattered among the adults. There were 124 permanent residents, but usually about 200 people there at any given time. When everyone was seated they took up the water pitchers and poured each other’s water, and then they tore into the hot food with gusto, downing potatoes, tortillas, pasta, tabouli, bread, a hundred kinds of vegetables, occasionally fish or chicken. After the meal the adults would talk about crops or their Rickover, an old integral fast reactor they were very fond of, or about Earth— while the kids cleaned up and then played music for an hour and then games, as everyone began the slow process of falling asleep.
• • •
One day before dinner a group of twenty-two people arrived from around the polar cap. Their little dome had lost its ecosystem to what Hiroko called spiraling complex disequilibrium, and their reserves had run out. They needed sanctuary.
Hiroko put them in three of the newly mature treehouses. They climbed the staircases spiraling up the outsides of the fat round shoots, exclaiming at the cylindrical segments with their doors and windows cut into them. Hiroko put them to work finishing construction on new rooms, and building a new greenhouse at the edge of the village. It was obvious to all that Zygote was not growing as much food as they now needed. The kids ate as modestly as they could, imitating the adults. “Should have called the place Gamete,” Coyote said to Hiroko on his next time through, laughing harshly.
She only waved him away. But perhaps worry accounted for Hiroko’s more distant air. She spent all her days in the greenhouses at work, and seldom taught the children anymore. When she did they only followed her around and worked for her, harvesting or turning compost or weeding. “She doesn’t care about us,” Dao said angrily one afternoon as they walked down the beach. He directed his complaint at Nirgal. “She isn’t really our mother anyway.” He led them all to the labs by the tunnel hill greenhouse, chivvying them along as he could so well.
Inside he pointed to a row of fat magnesium tanks, something like refrigerators. “Those are our mothers. That’s what we were grown inside. Kasei told me, and I asked Hiroko and it’s true. We’re ectogenes. We weren’t born, we were decanted.” He glared triumphantly