The Darwin Elevator Read Online Free PDF Page A

with an Australian accent, as strong as ever, despite his time living in orbit. Tania found it charming.
    “Did Zane come with you? I haven’t seen him in so long.”
    “My brother is on Gateway, keeping the council at bay.”
    “Four months is a long time between visits,” she said, enunciating the words so that Neil would catch her chastising.
    He broke away from the insect parade and moved to sit next to her on the bench. “I’ve been preoccupied. But now, this climber blockade …”
    Tania knew then why he’d called, why he wanted a personal meeting in a tranquil place. A shift in priorities, an end to pet projects. Four months had passed since she’d made her request, four months of silence, and now he’d kill it officially.
    She bit her tongue, allowing her disappointment to fade. “The power fluctuation on the cord. It’s that serious, is it?”
    “Hah!” he barked. “Some sure want it to be. The self-styled king in Nightcliff has grasped the opportunity with both hands and shut everything down. Just the excuse he needed.”
    “Shut down until when?”
    Neil looked up as another waft of air stirred the branches. “Until he gets a satisfactory explanation.”
    “Well,” she said carefully, “it is unprecedented. We should have a team look into it.”
    He waved off her remark. “Relax, dear. I’m assigning Greg and Marcus to study that. You’ve got a more important project to work on.”
    A rush of excitement coursed through her, a feeling quickly dashed by anxiety. Neil swore her to secrecy every time the theory came up. She glanced over her shoulder toward the entrance.
    “We’re alone, dear. I gave the staff a few hours off. Except the ants, that is.”
    She took a long breath of the fragrant air, willing herself to be calm. “I thought perhaps you’d forgotten about it.”
    “Just the opposite. I can’t get the idea out of my head.”
    “I’d nearly given up on the theory, Neil,” she said, conscious of how meek her voice sounded. “You could have told me. Why wait so long?”
    He grimaced.
    Tania studied him closely, looking for any subtext in his expression, and as usual found little. She knew his face better than her own dad’s. Sometimes when she dreamt of her father, rest his soul, he wore Neil’s face.
    “Sorry about that,” he said. “I had preparations to make.”
    “Preparations?”
    He leaned back on the bench, tilting his face to the reflected sunlight, and closed his eyes. “Tania, you’re a brilliant scientist. The best I’ve got. But there’s politics to consider. If your theory is correct, the world is going to change. Again.”
    “Maybe. Until I’ve been able to analyze—”
    “I need to be ready for what happens if you’re right,” he said. His voice took on a full, sonorous tone, one Tania knew only from his speeches to the Orbitals, or the citizens of Darwin in times past. He’d never spoken that way to her before, not when they were alone.
    Since she first voiced the theory three years ago they’d discussed it often. Sometimes over hot tea in his opulent office on Platz Station, sometimes over terse interstation messages. Neil gave her the original spark, an offhand comment that the Builders “probably weren’t done,” though he maintained he’d said no such thing. Tania took the idea and ran with it, theorizing that they might be on a specific schedule. The disease had come almost twelve years after the Elevator, 11.7 to be precise, and it made sense to her that if they were to return it would be after a similar time period.
    “Maybe they’ll get lazy, take longer,” Neil had said in a message four months ago.
    Tania’s tunnel vision fell away with that remark. Or  …  what if they come sooner? What if they’re here and we missed it? She’d called Neil in a mild panic, asking him to find the data she needed right away. He’d said he would look into it, and avoided the topic since.
    “It’s just …” She paused. “Granted, we