The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2019 Edition

Intervention ^{Kelly Robson}

When I was fifty-seven, I did the unthinkable. I became a crèche manager.

On Luna, crèche work kills your social capital, but I didn’t care. Not at first. My long-time love had been crushed to death in a bot malfunction in Luna’s main mulching plant. I was just trying to find a reason to keep breathing.

I found a crusty centenarian who’d outlived most of her cohort and asked for her advice. She said there was no better medicine for grief than children, so I found a crèche tucked away behind a water printing plant and signed on as a cuddler. That’s where I caught the baby bug.

When my friends found out, the norming started right away.

“You’re getting a little tubby there, Jules,” Ivan would say, unzipping my jacket and reaching inside to pat my stomach. “Got a little parasite incubating?”

I expected this kind of attitude from Ivan. Ringleader, team captain, alpha of alphas. From him, I could laugh it off. But then my closest friends started in.

Beryl’s pretty face soured in disgust every time she saw me. “I can smell the freeloader on you,” she’d say, pretending to see body fluids on my perfectly clean clothing. “Have the decency to shower and change after your shift.”

Even that wasn’t so bad. But then Robin began avoiding me and ignoring my pings. We’d been each other’s first lovers, best friends since forever, and suddenly I didn’t exist. That’s how extreme the prejudice is on Luna.

Finally, on my birthday, they threw me a surprise party. Everyone wore diapers and crawled around in a violent mockery of childhood. When I complained, they accused me of being broody.

I wish I could say I ignored their razzing, but my friends were my whole world. I dropped crèche work. My secret plan was to leave Luna, find a hab where working with kids wasn’t social death, but I kept putting it off. Then I blinked, and ten years had passed.

Enough delay. I jumped trans to Eros station, engaged a recruiter, and was settling into my new life on Ricochet within a month.

I never answered my friends’ pings. As far as Ivan, Beryl, Robin, and the rest knew, I fell off the face of the moon. And that’s the way I wanted it.

Richochet is one of the asteroid-based habs that travel the inner system using gravity assist to boost speed in tiny increments. As a wandering hab, we have no fixed astronomical events or planetary seasonality to mark the passage of time, so boosts are a big deal for us—the equivalent of New Year’s on Earth or the Sol Belt flare cycle.

On our most recent encounter with Mars, my third and final crèche—the Jewel Box—were twelve years old. We hadn’t had a boost since the kids were six, so my team and I worked hard to make it special, throwing parties, making presents, planning excursions. We even suited up and took the kids to the outside of our hab, exploring Asteroid Iris’s vast, pockmarked surface roofed by nothing less than the universe itself, in all its spangled glory. We played around out there until Mars climbed over the horizon and showed the Jewel Box its great face for the first time, so huge and close it seemed we could reach up into its milky skim of atmosphere.

When the boost itself finally happened, we were all exhausted. All the kids and cuddlers lounged in the rumpus room, clipped into our safety harnesses, nestled on mats and cushions or tucked into the wall netting. Yawning, droopy-eyed, even dozing. But when the hab began to shift underneath us, we all sprang alert.

Trésor scooted to my side and ducked his head under my elbow.

“You doing okay, buddy?” I asked him in a low voice.

He nodded. I kissed the top of his head and checked his harness.

I wasn’t the only adult with a little primate soaking up my body heat. Diamant used Blanche like a climbing frame, standing on her thighs, gripping her hands, and leaning back into the increasing force of the boost. Opale had coaxed her favorite cuddler Mykelti up into the ceiling netting. They both dangled by their knees, the better to feel the acceleration. Little Rubis was holding tight to Engku’s and Megat’s hands, while on the other side of the room, Safir and Émeraude clowned around, competing for Long Meng’s attention.

I was supposed to be on damage control, but I passed the safety workflow over to Bruce. When we hit maximum acceleration, Tré was clinging to me with all his strength.

The kids’ bioms were stacked in the corner of my eye. All their hormone graphs showed stress indicators. Tré’s levels were higher than the rest, but that wasn’t strange. When your hab is somersaulting behind a planet, bleeding off its orbital energy, your whole world turns into a carnival ride. Some people like it better than others.

I tightened my arms around Tré’s ribs, holding tight as the room turned sideways.

“Everything’s fine,” I murmured in his ear. “Ricochet was designed for this kind of maneuver.”

Our safety harnesses held us tight to the wall netting. Below, Safir and Émeraude climbed up the floor, laughing and hooting. Long Meng tossed pillows at them.

Tré gripped my thumb, yanking as if it were a joystick with the power to tame the room’s spin. Then he shot me a live feed showing Ricochet’s chief astronautics officer, a dark-skinned, silver-haired woman with protective bubbles fastened over her eyes.

“Who’s that?” I asked, pretending I didn’t know.

“Vijayalakshmi,” Tré answered. “If anything goes wrong, she’ll fix it.”

“Have you met her?” I knew very well he had, but asking questions is an excellent calming technique.

“Yeah, lots of times.” He flashed a pointer at the astronaut’s mirrored eye coverings. “Is she sick?”

“Might be cataracts. That’s a normal age-related condition. What’s worrying you?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Why don’t you ask Long Meng about it?”

Long Meng was the Jewel Box’s physician. Ricochet-raised, with a facial deformity that thrust her mandible severely forward. As an adult, once bone ossification had completed, she had rejected the cosmetic surgery that could have normalized her jaw.

“Not all interventions are worthwhile,” she’d told me once. “I wouldn’t feel like myself with a new face.”

As a pediatric specialist, Long Meng was responsible for the health and development of twenty crèches, but we were her favorite. She’d decided to celebrate the boost with us. At that moment, she was dangling from the floor with Safir and Émeraude, tickling their tummies and howling with laughter.

I tried to mitigate Tré’s distress with good, old-fashioned cuddle and chat. I showed him feeds from the biodiversity preserve, where the netted megafauna floated in mid-air, riding out the boost in safety, legs dangling. One big cat groomed itself as it floated, licking one huge paw and wiping down its whiskers with an air of unconcern.

Once the boost was complete and we were back to our normal gravity regime, Tré’s indicators quickly normalized. The kids ran up to the garden to check out the damage. I followed slowly, leaning on my cane. One of the bots had malfunctioned and lost stability, destroying several rows of terraced seating in the open air auditorium just next to our patch. The kids all thought that was pretty funny. Tré seemed perfectly fine, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d failed him somehow.

The Jewel Box didn’t visit Mars. Martian habs are popular, their excursion contracts highly priced. The kids put in a few bids but didn’t have the credits to win.

“Next boost,” I told them. “Venus in four years. Then Earth.”

I didn’t mention Luna. I’d done my best to forget it even existed. Easy to do. Ricochet has almost no social or trade ties with Earth’s moon. Our main economic sector is human reproduction and development—artificial wombs, zygote husbandry, natal decanting, every bit of art and science that turns a mass of undifferentiated cells into a healthy young adult. Luna’s crèche system collapsed completely not long after I left. Serves them right.

I’m a centenarian, facing my last decade or two. I may look serene and wise, but I’ve never gotten over being the butt of my old friends’ jokes.

Maybe I’ve always been immature. It would explain a lot.

Four years passed with the usual small dramas. The Jewel Box grew in body and mind, stretching into young adults of sixteen. All six—Diamant, Émeraude, Trésor, Opale, Safir, and Rubis—hit their benchmarks erratically and inconsistently, which made me proud. Kids are supposed to be odd little individuals. We’re not raising robots, after all.

As Ricochet approached, the Venusian habs began peppering us with proposals. Recreation opportunities, educational seminars, sightseeing trips, arts festivals, sporting tournaments—all on reasonable trade terms. Venus wanted us to visit, fall in love, stay. They’d been losing population to Mars for years. The brain drain was getting critical.

The Jewel Box decided to bid on a three-day excursion. Sightseeing with a focus on natural geology, including active volcanism. For the first time in their lives, they’d experience real, unaugmented planetary gravity instead of Ricochet’s one-point-zero cobbled together by centripetal force and a Steffof field.

While the kids were lounging around the rumpus room, arguing over how many credits to sink into the bid, Long Meng pinged me.

You and I should send a proposal to the Venusian crèches, she whispered. A master class or something. Something so tasty they can’t resist.

Why? Are you trying to pad your billable hours?

She gave me a toothy grin. I want a vacation. Wouldn’t it be fun to get Venus to fund it?

Long Meng and I had collaborated before, when our numbers had come up for board positions on the crèche governance authority. Nine miserable months co-authoring policy memos, revising the crèche management best practices guide, and presenting at skills development seminars. All on top of our regular responsibilities. Against the odds, our friendship survived the bureaucracy.

We spent a few hours cooking up a seminar to tempt the on-planet crèche specialists and fired it off to a bunch of Venusian booking agents. We called it ‘Attachment and Self-regulation in Theory and Practice: Approaches to Promoting Emotional Independence in the Crèche-raised Child.’ Sound dry? Not a bit. The Venusians gobbled it up.

I shot the finalized syllabus to our chosen booking agent, then escorted the Jewel Box to their open-air climbing lab. I turned them over to their instructor and settled onto my usual bench under a tall oak. Diamant took the lead position up the cliff, as usual. By the time they’d completed the first pitch, all three seminars were filled.

The agent is asking for more sessions, I whispered to Long Meng. What do you think?

“No way.” Long Meng’s voice rang out, startling me. As I pinged her location, her lanky form appeared in the distant aspen grove.

“This is a vacation,” she shouted. “If I wanted to pack my billable hours, I’d volunteer for another board position.”

I shuddered. Agreed.

She jogged over and climbed onto the bench beside me, sitting on the backrest with her feet on the seat. “Plus, you haven’t been off this rock in twenty years,” she added, plucking a leaf from the overhead bough.

“I said okay, Long Meng.”

We watched the kids as they moved with confidence and ease over the gleaming, pyrite-inflected cliff face. Big, bulky Diamant didn’t look like a climber but was obsessed with the sport. The other five had gradually been infected by their crèche-mate’s passion.

Long Meng and I waved to the kids as they settled in for a rest mid-route. Then she turned to me. “What do you want to see on-planet? Have you made a wish list yet?”

“I’ve been to Venus. It’s not that special.”

She laughed, a great, good-natured, wide-mouthed guffaw. “Nothing can compare to Luna, can it, Jules?”

“Don’t say that word.”

“Luna? Okay. What’s better than Venus? Earth?”

“Earth doesn’t smell right.”

“The Sol belt?”

“Never been there.”

“What then?”

“This is nice.” I waved at the groves of trees surrounding the cliff. Overhead, the plasma core that formed the backbone of our hab was just shifting its visible spectrum into twilight. Mellow light filtered through the leaves. Teenage laughter echoed off the cliff, and in the distance, the steady droning wail of a fussy newborn.

I pulled up the surrounding camera feeds and located the newborn. A tired-looking cuddler carried the baby in an over-shoulder sling, patting its bottom rhythmically as they strolled down a sunflower-lined path. I pinged the baby’s biom. Three weeks old. Chronic gas and reflux unresponsive to every intervention strategy. Nothing to do but wait for the child to grow out of it.

The kids summited, waved to us, then began rappelling back down. Long Meng and I met them at the base.

“Em, how’s your finger?” Long Meng asked.

“Good.” Émeraude bounced off the last ledge and slipped to the ground, wave of pink hair flapping. “Better than good.”

“Let’s see, then.”

Émeraude unclipped and offered the doctor their hand. They were a kid with only two modes: all-out or flatline. A few months back, they’d injured themselves cranking on a crimp, completely bowstringing the flexor tendon.

Long Meng launched into an explanation of annular pulley repair strategies and recovery times. I tried to listen but I was tired. My hips ached, my back ached, my limbs rotated on joints gritty with age. In truth, I didn’t want to go to Venus. The kids had won their bid, and with them off-hab, staying home would have been a good rest. But Long Meng’s friendship was important, and making her happy was worth a little effort.

Long Meng and I accompanied the Jewel Box down Venus’s umbilical, through the high sulphuric acid clouds to the elevator’s base deep in the planet’s mantle. When we entered the busy central transit hub, with its domed ceiling and slick, speedy slideways, the kids began making faces.

“This place stinks,” said Diamante.

“Yeah, smells like piss,” said Rubis.

Tré looked worried. “Do they have diseases here or something?”

Opale slapped her hand over her mouth. “I’m going to be sick. Is it the smell or the gravity?”

A quick glance at Opale’s biom showed she was perfectly fine. All six kids were. Time for a classic crèche manager-style social intervention.

If you can’t be polite around the locals, I whispered, knocking my cane on the ground for emphasis. I’ll shoot you right back up the elevator.

If you send us home, do we get our credits back? Émeraude asked, yawning.

No. You’d be penalized for non-completion of contract.

I posted a leaderboard for good behavior. Then I told them Venusians were especially gossipy, and if word got out they’d bad-mouthed the planet, they’d get nothing but dirty looks for the whole trip.

A bald lie. Venus is no more gossipy than most habs. But it nurses a significant anti-crèche prejudice. Not as extreme as Luna, but still. Ricochet kids were used to being loved by everyone. On Venus, they would get attitude just for existing. I wanted to offer a convenient explanation for the chilly reception from the locals.

The group of us rode the slideway to Vanavara portway, where Engku, Megat, and Bruce were waiting. Under the towering archway, I hugged and kissed the kids, told them to have lots of fun, and waved at their retreating backs. Then Long Meng and I were on our own.

She took my arm and steered us into Vanavara’s passeggiata, a social stroll that wound through the hab like a pedestrian river. We drifted with the flow, joining the people-watching crowd, seeing and being seen.

The hab had spectacular sculpture gardens and fountains, and Venus’s point-nine-odd gravity was a relief on my knees and hips, but the kids weren’t wrong about the stench. Vanavara smelled like oily vinaigrette over half-rotted lettuce leaves, with an animal undercurrent reminiscent of hormonal teenagers on a cleanliness strike. As we walked, the stench surged and faded, then resurfaced again.

We ducked into a kiosk where a lone chef roasted kebabs over an open flame. We sat at the counter, drinking sparkling wine and watching her prepare meal packages for bot delivery.

“What’s wrong with the air scrubbers here?” Long Meng asked the chef.

“Unstable population,” she answered. “We don’t have enough civil engineers to handle the optimization workload. If you know any nuts-and-bolts types, tell them to come to Vanavara. The bank will kiss them all over.”

She served us grilled protein on disks of crispy starch topped with charred vegetable and heaped with garlicky sauce, followed by finger-sized blossoms with tender, fleshy petals over a crisp honeycomb core. When we rejoined the throng, we shot the chef a pair of big, bright public valentines on slow decay, visible to everyone passing by. The chef ran after us with two tulip-shaped bulbs of amaro.

“Enjoy your stay,” she said, handing us the bulbs. “We’re developing a terrific fresh food culture here. You’ll love it.”

In response to the population downswing, Venus’s habs had started accepting all kinds of marginal business proposals. Artists. Innovators. Experimenters. Lose a ventilation engineer; gain a chef. Lose a surgeon; gain a puppeteer. With the chefs and puppeteers come all the people who want to live in a hab with chefs and puppeteers, and are willing to put up with a little stench to get it. Eventually, the hab’s fortunes turn around. Population starts flowing back, attracted by the burgeoning quality of life. Engineers and surgeons return, and the chefs and puppeteers move on to the next proposal-friendly hab. Basic human dynamics.

Long Meng sucked the last drop of amaro from her bulb and then tossed it to a disposal bot.

“First night of vacation.” She gave me a wicked grin. “Want to get drunk?”

When I rolled out of my sleep stack in the morning, I was puffy and stiff. My hair stood in untamable clumps. The pouches under my eyes shone an alarming purple, and my wrinkle inventory had doubled. My tongue tasted like garlic sauce. But as long as nobody else could smell it, I wasn’t too concerned. As for the rest, I’d earned every age marker.

When Long Meng finally cracked her stack, she was pressed and perky, wrapped in a crisp fuchsia robe. A filmy teal scarf drifted under her thrusting jawline.

“Let’s teach these Venusians how to raise kids,” she said.

In response to demand, the booking agency had upgraded us to a larger auditorium. The moment we hit the stage, I forgot all my aches and pains. Doctor Footlights, they call it. Performing in front of two thousand strangers produces a lot of adrenaline.

We were a good pair. Long Meng dynamic and engaging, lunging around the stage like a born performer. Me, I was her foil. A grave, wise oldster with fifty years of crèche work under my belt.

Much of our seminar was inspirational. Crèche work is relentless no matter where you practice it, and on Venus it brings negative social status. A little cheerleading goes a long way. We slotted our specialty content in throughout the program, introducing the concepts in the introductory material, building audience confidence by reinforcing what they already knew, then hit them between the eyes with the latest developments in Ricochet’s proprietary cognitive theory and emotional development modelling. We blew their minds, then backed away from the hard stuff and returned to cheerleading.

“What’s the worst part of crèche work, Jules?” Long Meng asked as our program concluded, her scarf waving in the citrus-scented breeze from the ventilation.

“There are no bad parts,” I said drily. “Each and every day is unmitigated joy.”

The audience laughed harder than the joke deserved. I waited for the noise to die down, and mined the silence for a few lingering moments before continuing.

“Our children venture out of the crèche as young adults, ready to form new emotional ties wherever they go. The future is in their hands, an unending medium for them to shape with their ambition and passion. Our crèche work lifts them up and holds them high, all their lives. That’s the best part.”

I held my cane to my heart with both hands.

“The worst part is,” I said, “if we do our jobs right, those kids leave the crèche and never think about us again.”

We left them with a tear in every eye. The audience ran back to their crèches knowing they were doing the most important work in the universe, and open to the possibility of doing it even better.

After our second seminar, on a recommendation from the kebab chef, we blew our credits in a restaurant high up in Vanavara’s atrium. Live food raised, prepared, and served by hand; nothing extruded or bulbed. And no bots, except for the occasional hygiene sweeper.

Long Meng cut into a lobster carapace with a pair of hand shears. “Have you ever noticed how intently people listen to you?”

“Most of the time the kids just pretend to listen.”

“Not kids. Adults.”

She served me a morsel of claw meat, perfectly molded by the creature’s shell. I dredged it in green sauce and popped it in my mouth. Sweet peppers buzzed my sinuses.

“You’re a great leader, Jules.”

“At my age, I should be. I’ve had lots of practice telling people what to do.”

“Exactly,” she said through a mouthful of lobster. “So what are you going to do when the Jewel Box leaves the crèche?”

I lifted my flute of pale green wine and leaned back, gazing through the window at my elbow into the depths of the atrium. I’d been expecting this question for a few years but didn’t expect it from Long Meng. How could someone so young understand the sorrows of the old?

“If you don’t want to talk about it, I’ll shut up,” she added quickly. “But I have some ideas. Do you want to hear them?”

On the atrium floor far below, groups of pedestrians were just smudges, no individuals distinguishable at all. I turned back to the table but kept my eyes on my food.

“Okay, go ahead.”

“A hab consortium is soliciting proposals to rebuild their failed crèche system,” she said, voice eager. “I want to recruit a team. You’d be project advisor. Top position, big picture stuff. I’ll be project lead and do all the grunt work.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “It’s Luna.”

Long Meng nodded. I kept a close eye on my blood pressure indicators. Deep breaths and a sip of water kept the numbers out of the red zone.

“I suppose you’d want me to liaise with Luna’s civic apparatus too.” I kept my voice flat.

“That would be ideal.” She slapped the table with both palms and grinned. “With a native Lunite at the helm, we’d win for sure.”

Long Meng was so busy bubbling with ideas and ambition as she told me her plans, she didn’t notice my fierce scowl. She probably didn’t even taste her luxurious meal. As for me, I enjoyed every bite, right down to the last crumb of my flaky cardamom-chocolate dessert. Then I pushed back my chair and grabbed my cane.

“There’s only one problem, Long Meng,” I said. “Luna doesn’t deserve crèches.”

“Deserve doesn’t really—”

I cut her off. “Luna doesn’t deserve a population.”

She looked confused. “But it has a population, so—”

“Luna deserves to die,” I snapped. I stumped away, leaving her at the table, her jaw hanging in shock.

Halfway through our third and final seminar, in the middle of introducing Ricochet’s proprietary never-fail methods for raising kids, I got an emergency ping from Bruce.

Tré’s abandoned the tour. He’s run off.

I faked a coughing fit and lunged toward the water bulbs at the back of the stage. Turned my back on two thousand pairs of eyes, and tried to collect myself as I scanned Tré’s biom. His stress indicators were highly elevated. The other five members of the Jewel Box were anxious too.

Do you have eyes on him?

Of course. Bruce shot me a bookmark.

Three separate cameras showed Tré was alone, playing his favorite pattern-matching game while coasting along a nearly deserted slideway. Metadata indicated his location on an express connector between Coacalco and Eaton habs.

He looked stunned, as if surprised by his own daring. Small, under the high arches of the slideway tunnel. And thin—his bony shoulder blades tented the light cloth of his tunic.

Coacalco has a bot shadowing him. Do we want them to intercept?

I zoomed in on Tré’s face, as if I could read his thoughts as easily as his physiology. He’d never been particularly assertive or self-willed, never one to challenge his crèche mates or lead them in new directions. But kids will surprise you.

Tell them to stay back. Ping a personal security firm to monitor him. Go on with your tour. And try not to worry.

Are you sure?

I wasn’t sure, not at all. My stress indicators were circling the planet. Every primal urge screamed for the bot to wrap itself around the boy and haul him back to Bruce. But I wasn’t going to slap down a sixteen-year-old kid for acting on his own initiative, especially since this was practically the first time he’d shown any.

Looks like Tré has something to do, I whispered. Let’s let him follow through.

I returned to my chair. Tried to focus on the curriculum but couldn’t concentrate. Long Meng could only do so much to fill the gap. The audience became restless, shifting in their seats, murmuring to each other. Many stopped paying attention. Right up in the front row, three golden-haired, rainbow-smocked Venusians were blanked out, completely immersed in their feeds.

Long Meng was getting frantic, trying to distract two thousand people from the gaping hole on the stage that was her friend Jules. I picked up my cane, stood, and calmly tipped my chair. It hit the stage floor with a crash. Long Meng jumped. Every head swiveled.

“I apologize for the dramatics,” I said, “but earlier, you all noticed me blanking out. I want to explain.”

I limped to the front of the stage, unsteady despite my cane. I wear a stability belt, but try not to rely on it too much. Old age has exacerbated my natural tendency for a weak core, and using the belt too much just makes me frailer. But my legs wouldn’t stop shaking. I dialed up the balance support.

“What just happened illustrates an important point about crèche work.” I attached my cane’s cling-point to the stage floor and leaned on it with both hands as I scanned the audience. “Our mistakes can ruin lives. No other profession carries such a vast potential for screwing up.”

“That’s not true.” Long Meng’s eyes glinted in the stage lights, clearly relieved I’d stepped back up to the job. “Engineering disciplines carry quite the disaster potential. Surgery certainly does. Psychology and pharmacology. Applied astrophysics. I could go on.” She grinned. “Really, Jules. Nearly every profession is dangerous.”

I grimaced and dismissed her point.

“Doctors’ decisions are supported by ethics panels and case reviews. Engineers run simulation models and have their work vetted by peers before taking any real-world risks. But in a crèche, we make a hundred decisions a day that affect human development. Sometimes a hundred an hour.”

“Okay, but are every last one of those decisions so important?”

I gestured to one of the rainbow-clad front-row Venusians. “What do you think? Are your decisions important?”

A camera bug zipped down to capture her answer for the seminar’s shared feed. The Venusian licked her lips nervously and shifted to the edge of her seat.

“Some decisions are,” she said in a high, tentative voice. “You can never know which.”

“That’s right. You never know.” I thanked her and rejoined Long Meng in the middle of the stage. “Crèche workers take on huge responsibility. We assume all the risk, with zero certainty. No other profession accepts those terms. So why do we do this job?”

“Someone has to?” said Long Meng. Laughter percolated across the auditorium.

“Why us, though?” I said. “What’s wrong with us?”

More laughs. I rapped my cane on the floor.

“My current crèche is a sixteen-year sixsome. Well integrated, good morale. Distressingly sporty. They keep me running.” The audience chuckled. “They’re on a geography tour somewhere on the other side of Venus. A few minutes ago, one of my kids ran off. Right now, he’s coasting down one of your intra-hab slideways and blocking our pings.”

Silence. I’d captured every eye; all their attention was mine.

I fired the public slideway feed onto the stage. Tré’s figure loomed four meters high. His foot was kicked back against the slideway’s bumper in an attitude of nonchalance, but it was just a pose. His gaze was wide and unblinking, the whites of his eyes fully visible.

“Did he run away because of something one of us said? Or did? Or neglected to do? Did it happen today, yesterday, or ten days ago? Maybe it has nothing to do with us at all, but some private urge from the kid’s own heart. He might be suffering acutely right now, or maybe he’s enjoying the excitement. The adrenaline and cortisol footprints look the same.”

I clenched my gnarled, age-spotted hand to my chest, pulling at the fabric of my shirt.

“But I’m suffering. My heart feels like it could rip right out of my chest because this child has put himself in danger.” I patted the wrinkled fabric back into place. “Mild danger. Venus is no Luna.”

Nervous laughter from the crowd. Long Meng hovered at my side.

“Crèche work is like no other human endeavor,” I said. “Nothing else offers such potential for failure, sorrow, and loss. But no work is as important. You all know that, or you wouldn’t be here.”

Long Meng squeezed my shoulder. I patted her hand. “Raising children is only for true believers.”

Not long after our seminar ended, Tré boarded Venus’s circum-planetary chuteway and chose a pod headed for Vanavara. The pod’s public feed showed five other passengers: a middle-aged threesome who weren’t interested in anything but each other, a halo-haired young adult escorting a floating tank of live eels, and a broad-shouldered brawler with deeply scarred forearms.

Tré waited for the other passengers to sit, then settled himself into a corner seat. I pinged him. No answer.

“We should have had him intercepted,” I said.

Long Meng and I sat in the back of the auditorium. A choir group had taken over the stage. Bots were attempting to set up risers, but the singers were milling around, blocking their progress.

“He’ll be okay.” Long Meng squeezed my knee. “Less than five hours to Vanavara. None of the passengers are going to do anything to him.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Nobody would risk it. Venus has strict penalties for physical violence.”

“Is that the worst thing you can think of?” I flashed a pointer at the brawler. “One conversation with that one in a bad mood could do lifelong damage to anyone, much less a kid.”

We watched the feed in silence. At first the others kept to themselves, but then the brawler stood, pulled down a privacy veil, and sauntered over to sit beside Tré.

“Oh no,” I moaned.

I zoomed in on Tré’s face. With the veil in place, I couldn’t see or hear the brawler. All I could do was watch the kid’s eyes flicker from the window to the brawler and back, monitor his stress indicators, and try to read his body language. Never in my life have I been less equipped to make a professional judgement about a kid’s state of mind. My mind boiled with paranoia.

After about ten minutes—an eternity—the brawler returned to their seat.

“It’s fine,” said Long Meng. “He’ll be with us soon.”

Long Meng and I met Tré at the chuteway dock. It was late. He looked tired, rumpled, and more than a little sulky.

“Venus is stupid,” he said.

“That’s ridiculous, a planet can’t be stupid,” Long Meng snapped. She was tired, and hadn’t planned on spending the last night of her vacation waiting in a transit hub.

Let me handle this, I whispered.

“Are you okay? Did anything happen in the pod?” I tried to sound calm as I led him to the slideway.

He shrugged. “Not really. This oldster was telling me how great his hab is. Sounded like a hole.”

I nearly collapsed with relief.

“Okay, good,” I said. “We were worried about you. Why did you leave the group?”

“I didn’t realize it would take so long to get anywhere,” Tré said.

“That’s not an answer. Why did you run off?”

“I don’t know.” The kid pretended to yawn—one of the Jewel Box’s clearest tells for lying. “Venus is boring. We should’ve saved our credits.”

“What does that mean?”

“Everybody else was happy looking at rocks. Not me. I wanted to get some value out of this trip.”

“So you jumped a slideway?”

“Uh huh.” Tré pulled a protein snack out of his pocket and stuffed it in his mouth. “I was just bored. And I’m sorry. Okay?”

“Okay.” I fired up the leaderboard and zeroed out Tré’s score. “You’re on a short leash until we get home.”

We got the kid a sleep stack near ours, then Long Meng and I had a drink in the grubby travelers’ lounge downstairs.

“How are you going to find out why he left?” asked Long Meng. “Pull his feeds? Form a damage mitigation team? Plan an intervention?”

I picked at the fabric on the arm of my chair. The plush nap repaired itself as I dragged a ragged thumbnail along the armrest.

“If I did, Tré would learn he can’t make a simple mistake without someone jumping down his throat. He might shrug off the psychological effects, or it could inflict long-term damage.”

“Right. Like you said in the seminar. You can’t know.”

We finished our drinks and Long Meng helped me to my feet. I hung my cane from my forearm and tucked both hands into the crease of her elbow. We slowly climbed upstairs. I could have pinged a physical assistance bot, but my hands were cold, and my friend’s arm was warm.

“Best to let this go,” I said. “Tré’s already a cautious kid. I won’t punish him for taking a risk.”

“I might, if only for making me worry. I guess I’ll never be a crèche manager.” She grinned.

“And yet you want to go to Luna and build a new crèche system.”

Long Meng’s smile vanished. “I shouldn’t have sprung that on you, Jules.”

In the morning, the two young people rose bright and cheery. I was aching and bleary but put on a serene face. We had just enough time to catch a concert before heading up the umbilical to our shuttle home. We made our way to the atrium, where Tré boggled at the soaring views, packed slideways, clustered performance and game surfaces, fountains, and gardens. The air sparkled with nectar and spices, and underneath, a thick, oily human funk.

We boarded a riser headed to Vanavara’s orchestral pits. A kind Venusian offered me a seat with a smile. I thanked him, adding, “That would never happen on Luna.”

I drew Long Meng close as we spiraled toward the atrium floor.

Just forget about the proposal, I whispered. The moon is a lost cause.

A little more than a year later, Ricochet was on approach for Earth. The Jewel Box were nearly ready to leave the crèche. Bruce and the rest of my team were planning to start a new one, and they warmly assured me I’d always be welcome to visit. I tried not to weep about it. Instead, I began spending several hours a day helping provide round-the-clock cuddles to a newborn with hydrocephalus.

As far as I knew, Long Meng had given up the Luna idea. Then she cornered me in the dim-lit nursery and burst my bubble.

She quietly slid a stool over to my rocker, cast a professional eye over the cerebrospinal fluid-exchange membrane clipped to the baby’s ear, and whispered, We made the short list.

That’s great, I replied, my cheek pressed to the infant’s warm, velvety scalp.

I had no idea what she was referring to, and at that moment I didn’t care. The scent of a baby’s head is practically narcotic, and no victory can compare with having coaxed a sick child into restful sleep.

It means we have to go to Luna for a presentation and interview.

Realization dawned slowly. Luna? I’m not going to Luna.

Not you, Jules. Me and my team. I thought you should hear before the whole hab starts talking.

I concentrated on keeping my rocking rhythm steady before answering. I thought you’d given that up.

She put a gentle hand on my knee. I know. You told me not to pursue it and I considered your advice. But it’s important, Jules. Luna will restart its crèche program one way or another. We can make sure they do it right.

I fixed my gaze pointedly on her prognathous jaw. You don’t know what it’s like there. They’ll roast you alive just for looking different.

Maybe. But I have to try.

She patted my knee and left. I stayed in the rocker long past hand-over time, resting my cheek against that precious head.

Seventy years ago I’d done the same, in a crèche crowded into a repurposed suite of offices behind one of Luna’s water printing plants. I’d walked through the door broken and grieving, certain the world had been drained of hope and joy. Then someone put a baby in my arms. Just a few hours old, squirming with life, arms reaching for the future.

Was there any difference between the freshly detanked newborn on Luna and the sick baby I held on that rocker? No. The embryos gestating in Ricochet’s superbly optimized banks of artificial wombs were no different from the ones Luna would grow in whatever gestation tech they inevitably cobbled together.

But as I continued to think about it, I realized there was a difference, and it was important. The ones on Luna deserved better than they would get. And I could do something about it.

First, I had my hair sheared into an ear-exposing brush precise to the millimeter. The tech wielding the clippers tried to talk me out of it.

“Do you realize this will have to be trimmed every twenty days?”

“I used to wear my hair like this when I was young,” I reassured him. He rolled his eyes and cut my hair like I asked.

I changed my comfortable smock for a lunar grey trouser-suit with enough padding to camouflage my age-slumped shoulders. My cling-pointed cane went into the mulch, exchanged for a glossy black model. Its silver point rapped the floor, announcing my progress toward Long Meng’s studio.

The noise turned heads all down the corridor. Long Meng popped out of her doorway, but she didn’t recognize me until I pushed past her and settled onto her sofa with a sigh.

“Are you still looking for a project advisor?” I asked.

She grinned. “Luna won’t know what hit it.”

Back in the rumpus room, Tré was the only kid to comment on my haircut.

“You look like a villain from one of those old Follywood dramas Bruce likes.”

“Hollywood,” I corrected. “Yes, that’s the point.”

“What’s the point in looking like a gangland mobber?”

“Mobster.” I ran my palm over the brush. “Is that what I look like?”

“Kinda. Is it because of us?”

I frowned, not understanding. He pulled his ponytail over his shoulder and eyed it speculatively.

“Are you trying to look tough so we won’t worry about you after we leave?”

That’s the thing about kids. The conversations suddenly swerve and hit you in the back of the head.

“Whoa,” I said. “I’m totally fine.”

“I know, I know. You’ve been running crèches forever. But we’re the last because you’re so old. Right? It’s got to be hard.”

“A little,” I admitted. “But you’ve got other things to think about. Big, exciting decisions to make.”

“I don’t think I’m leaving the crèche. I’m delayed.”

I tried to keep from smiling. Tré was nothing of the sort. He’d grown into a gangly young man with long arms, bony wrists, and a haze of silky black beard on his square jaw. I could recite the dates of his developmental benchmarks from memory, and there was nothing delayed about them.

“That’s fine,” I said. “You don’t have to leave until you’re ready.”

“A year. Maybe two. At least.”

“Okay, Tré. Your decision.”

I wasn’t worried. It’s natural to feel ambivalent about taking the first step into adulthood. If Tré found it easier to tell himself he wasn’t leaving, so be it. As soon as his crèchemates started moving on, Tré would follow.

Our proximity to Earth gave Long Meng’s proposal a huge advantage. We could travel to Luna, give our presentation live, and be back home for the boost.

Long Meng and I spent a hundred billable hours refining our presentation materials. For the first time in our friendship, our communication styles clashed.

“I don’t like the authoritarian gleam in your eye, Jules,” she told me after a particularly heated argument. “It’s almost as though you’re enjoying bossing me around.”

She wasn’t wrong. Ricochet’s social conventions require you to hold in conversational aggression. Letting go was fun. But I had an ulterior motive.

“This is the way people talk on Luna. If you don’t like it, you should shitcan the proposal.”

She didn’t take the dare. But she reported behavioral changes to my geriatric specialist. I didn’t mind. It was sweet, her being so worried about me. I decided to give her full access to my biom, so she could check if she thought I was having a stroke or something. I’m in okay health for my extreme age, but she was a paediatrician, not a gerontologist. What she saw scared her. She got solicitous. Gallant, even, bringing me bulbs of tea and snacks to keep my glucose levels steady.

Luna’s ports won’t accommodate foreign vehicles, and their landers use a chemical propellant so toxic Ricochet won’t let them anywhere near our landing bays, so we had to shuttle to Luna in stages. As we glided over the moon’s surface, its web of tunnels and domes sparkled in the full glare of the sun. The pattern of the habs hadn’t changed. I could still name them—Surgut, Sklad, Nadym, Purovsk, Olenyok…

Long Meng latched onto my arm as the hatch creaked open. I wrenched away and straightened my jacket.

You can’t do that here, I whispered. Self-sufficiency is everything on Luna, remember?

I marched ahead of Long Meng as if I were leading an army. In the light lunar gravity, I didn’t need my cane, so I used its heavy silver head to whack the walls. Hitting something felt good. I worked up a head of steam so hot I could have sterilized those corridors. If I had to come home—home, what a word for a place like Luna!—I’d do it on my own terms.

The client team had arranged to meet us in a dinky little media suite overlooking the hockey arena in Sklad. A game had just finished, and we had to force our way against the departing crowd. My cane came in handy. I brandished it like a weapon, signaling my intent to break the jaw of anyone who got too close.

In the media suite, ten hab reps clustered around the project principal. Overhead circled a battery of old, out-of-date cameras that buzzed and fluttered annoyingly. At the front of the room, two chairs waited for Long Meng and me. Behind us arced a glistening expanse of crystal window framing the rink, where grooming bots were busy scraping blood off the ice. Over the arena loomed the famous profile of Mons Hadley, huge, cold, stark, its bleak face the same mid-tone grey as my suit.

Don’t smile, I reminded Long Meng as she stood to begin the presentation.

The audience didn’t deserve the verve and panache Long Meng put into presenting our project phases, alternative scenarios, and volume ramping. Meanwhile, I scanned the reps’ faces, counting flickers in their attention and recording them on a leaderboard. We had forty minutes in total, but less than twenty to make an impression before the reps’ decisions locked in.

Twelve minutes in, Long Meng was introducing the strategies for professional development, governance, and ethics oversight. Half the reps were still staring at her face as if they’d never seen a congenital hyperformation before. The other half were bored but still making an effort to pay attention. But not for much longer.

“Based on the average trajectories of other start-up crèche programs,” Long Meng said, gesturing at the swirling graphics that hung in the air, “Luna should run at full capacity within six social generations, or thirty standard years.”

I’m cutting in, I whispered. I whacked the head of my cane on the floor and stood, stability belt on maximum and belligerence oozing from my every pore.

“You won’t get anywhere near that far,” I growled. “You’ll never get past the starting gate.”

“That’s a provocative statement,” said the principal. She was in her sixties, short and tough, with ropey veins webbing her bony forearms. “Would you care to elaborate?”

I paced in front of their table, like a barrister in one of Bruce’s old courtroom dramas. I made eye contact with each of the reps in turn, then leaned over the table to address the project principal directly.

“Crèche programs are part of a hab’s social fabric. They don’t exist in isolation. But Luna doesn’t want kids around. You barely tolerate young adults. You want to stop the brain drain but you won’t give up anything for crèches—not hab space, not billable hours, and especially not your prejudices. If you want a healthy crèche system, Luna will have to make some changes.”

I gave the principal an evil grin, adding, “I don’t think you can.”

“I do,” Long Meng interjected. “I think you can change.”

“You don’t know Luna like I do,” I told her.

I fired our financial proposal at the reps. “Ricochet will design your new system. You’ll find the trade terms extremely reasonable. When the design is complete, we’ll provide on-the-ground teams to execute the project phases. Those terms are slightly less reasonable. Finally, we’ll give you a project executive headed by Long Meng.” I smiled. “Her billable rate isn’t reasonable at all, but she’s worth every credit.”

“And you?” asked the principal.

“That’s the best part.” I slapped the cane in my palm. “I’m the gatekeeper. To go anywhere, you have to get past me.”

The principal sat back abruptly, jaw clenched, chin raised. My belligerence had finally made an impact. The reps were on the edges of their seats. I had them both repelled and fascinated. They weren’t sure whether to start screaming or elect me to Luna’s board of governors.

“How long have I got to live, Long Meng? Fifteen years? Twenty?”

“Something like that,” she said.

“Let’s say fifteen. I’m old. I’m highly experienced. You can’t afford me. But if you award Ricochet this contract, I’ll move back to Luna. I’ll control the gating progress, judging the success of every single milestone. If I decide Luna hasn’t measured up, the work will have to be repeated.”

I paced to the window. Mons Hadley didn’t seem grey anymore. It was actually a deep, delicate lilac. Framed by the endless black sky, its form was impossibly complex, every fold of its geography picked out by the sun.

I kept my back to the reps.

“If you’re wondering why I’d come back after all the years,” I said, “let me be very clear. I will die before I let Luna fool around with some half-assed crèche experiment, mess up a bunch of kids, and ruin everything.” I turned and pointed my cane. “If you’re going to do this, at least do it right.”

Back home on Ricochet, the Jewel Box was off-hab on a two-day Earth tour. They came home with stories of surging wildlife spectacles that made herds and flocks of Ricochet’s biodiversity preserve look like a petting zoo. When the boost came, we all gathered in the rumpus room for the very last time.

Bruce, Blanche, Engku, Megat, and Mykelti clustered on the floor mats, anchoring themselves comfortably for the boost. They’d be fine. Soon they’d have armfuls of newborns to ease the pain of transition. The Jewel Box were all hanging from the ceiling netting, ready for their last ride of childhood. They’d be fine too. Diamante had decided on Mars, and it looked like the other five would follow.

Me, I’d be fine too. I’d have to be.

How to explain the pain and pride when your crèche is balanced on the knife’s edge of adulthood, ready to leave you behind forever? Not possible. Just know this: when you see an oldster looking serene and wise, remember, it’s just a sham. Under the skin, it’s all sorrow.

I was relieved when the boost started. Everyone was too distracted to notice I’d begun tearing up. When the hab turned upside down, I let myself shed a few tears for the passing moment. Nothing too self-indulgent. Just a little whuffle, then I wiped it all away and joined the celebration, laughing and applauding the kids’ antics as they bounced around the room.

We got it, Long Meng whispered in the middle of the boost. Luna just shot me the contract. We won.

She told me all the details. I pretended to pay attention, but really, I was only interested in watching the kids. Drinking in their antics, their playfulness, their joyful self-importance. Young adults have a shine about them. They glow with untapped potential.

When the boost was over, we all unclipped our anchors. I couldn’t quite extricate myself from my deeply padded chair and my cane was out of reach.

Tré leapt to help me up. When I was on my feet, he pulled me into a hug.

“Are you going back to Luna?” he said in my ear.

I held him at arm’s length. “That’s right. Someone has to take care of Long Meng.”

“Who’ll take care of you?”

I laughed. “I don’t need taking care of.”

He gripped both my hands in his. “That’s not true. Everyone does.”

“I’ll be fine.” I squeezed his fingers and tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let go. I changed the subject. “Mars seems like a great choice for you all.”

“I’m not going to Mars. I’m going to Luna.”

I stepped back. My knees buckled, but the stability belt kept me from going down.

“No, Tré. You can’t.”

“There’s nothing you can do about it. I’m going.”

“Absolutely not. You have no business on Luna. It’s a terrible place.”

He crossed his arms over his broadening chest and swung his head like a fighter looking for an opening. He squinted at the old toys and sports equipment secured into rumpus room cabinets, the peeling murals the kids had painted over the years, the battered bots and well-used, colorful furniture—all the ephemera and detritus of childhood that had been our world for nearly eighteen years.

“Then I’m not leaving the crèche. You’ll have to stay here with me, in some kind of weird stalemate. Long Meng will be alone.”

I scowled. It was nothing less than blackmail. I wasn’t used to being forced into a corner, and certainly not by my own kid.

“We’re going to Luna together.” A grin flickered across Tré’s face. “Might as well give in.”

I patted his arm, then took his elbow. Tré picked up my cane and put it in my hand.

“I’ve done a terrible job raising you,” I said.