Acknowledgements
This book is dedicated to my husband, Andy Presby, who is directly responsible for parts of the story I like best.
I also need to thank my girls for all the times they played quietly while I wrote just one more page and my soon-to-be-born boy for patiently staying in utero long enough for me to get this manuscript ready to print.
Many thanks to the wonderful team at Baen Books, especially: Toni Weisskopf, Griffin Barber, Joy Freeman, Leah Brandtner, Rabbit, and Jason Cordova. Special thanks to Chris Weuve and Tom Pope for last-minute first-reader feedback and copyediting support. These people have all helped to make this a much better book.
Finally, my deepest gratitude to you, dear reader. Thank you for buying this book. It is only through your continued support that I get to keep doing my dream job. You are the best!
Prologue
Captain, the VIP shuttle…there were no survivors.”
Jules Sadou stared blankly at his technician, Ronnie Aanderson, for too long until the poor man added a stumbling addition: “We did recover their call logs and the embryos. They had all the frozen ones from the clinic in a custom transfer pod. It has a triple layered cocoon design and appears to be sized for ready slotting into that special interior cargo hold. The call logs are interesting. It’s not the routine chatter with Luna Base or even final letters to loved ones. I think it’s for us. They were…Well you should just see. It looks like they were messaging each other back and forth in the shuttle. There was a written note on top of it: ‘Deliver to the Saturn Mission Commander, whoever that ends up being. Jules: If you won’t take the job, make sure whoever does reads this and follows it.’”
“They did what?”
“Well, it looks like they did the math on emergency recovery options and decided to spend their last minutes planning for Saturn’s future success instead of urging us to try to save them. Since everybody knew we couldn’t. Neither one was expected to survive the inter-planetary trip anyway…”
The young man seemed to realize that he was talking to a relative of the two people who had died on that shuttle and not just one of the voyeuristic masses interested in the doings of the powerful, and he shut up.
Jules hadn’t, quite, decided he was going to turn down the command of the ship about to take the likely doomed first attempt to settle Saturn’s Rings.
But he was serving as the overall general manager for the construction phase of the ambitiously named Ring System Craft Chawla (RSC Chawla). He’d go ahead and read the dead great aunt and great uncle’s logs. The Sadou Family board members who had decided against joining the First Crew would want a report. As would the ones who had not yet said they weren’t going to go. Well, that wasn’t fair. There’d be at least a few Sadous who joined the crew. The RSC Chawla would launch.
Adamou—
Don’t you know me by now? I’m never reading all that legalese. Give me the short version. What have your smart kids come up with?
—Pascaline
P— You have to read the actual contract details. My summary will just give you what I think is in there. I need a second set of eyes.
—Adamou
Fine. I’ll read it.
Oh, by the way, they aren’t going to be getting us out of here.
Pascaline—
Yes, I can do math too.
Let’s at least leave them with this part worked out. Heaven knows we worked hard enough to make sure the Sadous too chicken to come won’t be able to stop the ones with the guts to go.
What all of humanity really needs is to bring back the adolescent solo lion hunt as a way to show who is really ready to be an adult and who should never get a vote about what the tribe does or doesn’t do. My hope is that we’ve created Saturn’s version of lion hunting: necessary but dangerous work for the good of the group rewarded with both respect and authority.
So, what do you think? Will it work? You know how people like Old Benoit managed to twist things. Is this Benoit-proof?
—Adamou
Adamou—
Nothing in all the whole Solar System is Benoit-proof. Let’s pray our descendants have stupider adversaries and brighter cousins.
But it’s as good as we can reasonably do without creating worse problems.
I’m concerned about the possibility of a serf class for Saturnians who arrive later and aren’t allowed to go lion hunting. But we’ve got to protect the rights of the First Crew too.
About how to make sure second and umpteenth generations don’t suck: yeah, let’s have Formal Adulthood be based on completing work useful to the station, or, God willing, stations, not some dumb age thing. Call it a Maturity Test and we codify it right now.
That’ll keep the people who aren’t smart enough or brave enough to be of good value to their station from having voting power. It’s not quite “He who won’t work, won’t eat.” But it’s close enough to that. With the amount of helium-three we hope to make available from the upper reaches of Saturn and our fuel conversion processes, any station that survives long enough to feed itself will be able to transfer quitters back to Earth orbit—or anti-socials or whoever really needs to be rejected. They won’t have to choose between tolerating and executing people who refuse to work.
By the way, that bit about the Station Council being able to administer competency testing to get those who passed the Maturity Test sometime back but are in mental decline out of power is important too. And very good that the council doesn’t inherit the voting shares of whoever they deem incompetent.
—Pascaline
P— What about the part where we don’t let people vote their shares anymore if they go back to Earth, and we make the shares get distributed to their next of kin if they are gone for more than ten years?
Not ten. It’s two.
Oh, right. We changed it to two years to make it so that you couldn’t head back to Earth or someplace else from Saturn and keep voting rights.
I suppose if our Saturnian Ringers end up sending a Ben Franklin type back to negotiate with whatever numbskulls run the major powers too dumb to move off Earth, he/she will have family loyal enough to take his/her shares and also give them back when he/she returns. If the Ringer Benny Franklin hasn’t got that, he/she sucked too much to be a decent ambassador anyway.
But what about that bit combined with the aging out of being able to hold a voting share based on mental decline? Our researchers think this new dementia variant the lunar centenarians get might be from cumulative radiation. If that’s so, our Saturnians might be inclined to get sunsetters too.
One of my legal boys pointed out that if a particular family has only a few aged workers left on station and they get that or another untreatable dementia, they aren’t going to have eligible next-of-kin around. And worse, if they don’t get sunsetters and whoever’s on their Station Council gets greedy, they might get legally robbed?
Any ideas?—Adamou
Embryo rights. Including property rights. Their next of kin will be in the freezer waiting to be born. So we write the contract so that their unborn family member inherits from grandma and grandpa before the Council does.
Pascaline,
Not that again. If we arrange it so our fertilized embryos are property owners, there’d be a scramble for who gets to gestate them. We want most people to be having their own natural babies on that station!
—Adamou
Yeah, let them think it’s all about us. But this is a protection for all the singles or non-fertile couples who spend their whole lives as hard-working ringers. Those folks can, if they want, fertilize some embryos and put them in cryo with ours to inherit their own voting rights after the kids are born and pass a Maturity Test.
Besides, our embryos deserve to get as much chance as anyone else’s to get born. And what about the children of the other crew on the ship who won’t have as much wealth? We want them to get a chance to be born too.
We don’t know how dangerous this trip will turn out to be. But we know what happened to the Mars missions before Mars Ship Salt Lake’s Own finally had their brilliant success. It’s reasonable to expect that taking every precaution for the future children by separating them from our own bodies will help. And for those crew who don’t live to reach the Rings, we want to ensure that their posterity gets what is due them.
Pascaline!
It won’t work. No one is going to gestate the last member of the scullery worker’s blood line. Even with all we can do to protect the wee blastocysts, the womb mothers are going to have to take highly uncomfortable drugs to get their uteruses ready to possibly accept implantation, there is going to be a way higher than usual hypertension rate —especially in cases where the womb mother shares no DNA at all with the genetic mother or genetic father of the blastocyst—and also data suggests these pregnancies are going to have extreme miscarriage rates on top of everything else.
I had the lawyers try to come up with schemas where the parents or even the womb mothers alone get paid for the gestation attempt, but intentional miscarriage after the blood work shows that the fetus is a sanitation crew’s baby are just way too likely. We can’t depend on the descendants being saintly.
Got it. I adjusted the terms.
Now it is going to be illegal to compare genetic testing to the voter database, born or not, until a person has passed a Maturity Test.
And I made it so everyone on the RSC Chawla has to sign this before launch. Surprised the air lasted this long.
I love you.
I love y…
* * *
Jules Sadou signed on as First Crew Commander without making a report to anyone. He claimed the right to be the first to sign the Pascaline-Adamou Compact.
Ronnie Aanderson and his wife Cynthia signed in the days that followed before launch as did every other member of the RSC Chawla First Crew.