Paladin Danse was willing to keep his side of the bargain, but he wasn't ready to start out immediately the next day. He wanted the deep range transmitter installed, tested, and to successfully communicate with Command before he accompanied them to the Galleria, which would have been fine except that it didn't work right the first time, or the second, or the third. Raina would have offered to help, but the antenna array was on the roof and her fear of heights would have kicked in.
After whiling away the morning waiting, with Rhys making nasty remarks while Danse and Haylen worked on the antenna, Raina and Nick's eyes met.
"Greygarden?" Raina asked. Nick nodded. Soon they were on their way to the robot-run homestead.
"This looks familiar," the agroecologist said as they mounted the hill to the farm.
"Well, we did pass by just yesterday," the detective pointed out.
"More familiar than that," she said, and Nick Valentine stole a glance at her face.
"You look like you're working out a chess move in your head or something," he observed, seeing her creased brow and noncommittal mouth.
Her face cleared. "You're the last person from whom I need to keep this a secret. Or keep any secrets from, at all. I—never explained why I'm like bread starter."
"You mean when you told me I'm a grafted tree? No, you didn't," he said.
"Well, now I'm telling why. Yeast used to be available in every grocery story, in cakes or dry granules, but now if you want raised bread, you have to have a crock of bread starter, a yeast culture, just like people did for thousands of years. Yeast is a living thing, so you have to keep bread starter alive by feeding it flour and water, storing it somewhere that's not too hot or too cold, and so on. When you go to make bread, you put the starter into the dough, let it sit and rise, punch it back down, let it rise again-but before you shape it into loaves and bake it, you take out a big lump of dough and put it back in the crock, for next time. Then it's renewed, but it's still the same bread starter. There's always some of the original culture in the starter, no matter how many loaves you make."
She paused and went on, "Another name for that kind of bread starter is a 'mother'. There's something of Theodosia left in me—and of Margaret, Constancia, Melisande, Catherine and Ulrike. Memory can be transmitted genetically, but only if the genes are not recombined during conception. That's our theory, anyway. Theodosia was here, and she was here more than once. I can tell. I think she knew Dr. Grey."
"You inherited memories?" he asked, a little stunned. "Geez, no wonder you understand what it is to be…to be me."
"It isn't equivalent," she said, staunchly. "For one thing, it was and is our choice. Mostly inherited memory applies to things my predecessors did a lot, so I was born knowing how to speak and read and write, knowing how to get around our vault—routine things. Learned memories. Personal memories are slippery, like trying to catch minnows in a stream with your bare hands. Which I have done, by the way, in the pond and stream environment chambers."
"Geez," he repeated. "I wonder if that's how the Institute makes Gen 3s with functioning memories straight out of the box. It obviously doesn't bother you much, if at all. How do you handle it?"
"For me it's perfectly normal," she shrugged as they continued their climb up the hill. "I am me, not Theodosia or any of those who came between her and me. It helps that we have a commonality of purpose—the Vault. But we do alternate donors so there's variation between sisters. If I could start up a younger sister in vitro, I wouldn't use my cells, I'd use Jo's and then Vicky's."
Jo and Vicky were her deceased sisters, he recalled. They had reached the house and garage attached to the property, both in typical condition for abandoned property in the Commonwealth. Part of the house had collapsed to the point where it looked to be inaccessible, and the rest….
"I'd be afraid to go in there for fear the floor would give way, a broken board would pierce a leg artery and I'd bleed out. If I still had leg arteries, that is," Nick commented.
"No need to go in there," Raina agreed. "It's the robots we want to talk to. I wonder if they'll recognize me." The greenhouse and fields around it were maintained impeccably, and they could see agribots working in the field.
Within the greenhouse were three Mr. Handys who differed in color from the agribots but also from each other. The nearest swiveled its eyestalks toward them, and then stopped what it was doing entirely, swooping in their direction. "Visitors! Darlings, it's so good—Doctor Queen? You are a parthenogenetic daughter of Theodosia Queen, it's unmistakable."
"Yes, I am. I'm Raina Queen," Raina admitted. "I have some of Theodosia's memories of this place. But how did you know about my family?" Her gaze fell upon the banks of mutfruit growing in planters. The plants in question had thick, gnarled trunks, like the original plants back in the vault, plants which were more than a century old. "One of my elder sisters came here!"
"Of course! It was your sister Constancia. Like you, she found she remembered Greygarden once she reached us. Green, Brown, it's one of the Doctors Queen, come to pay a call. Let me get the kettle on, and I'll make you a cup of hubflower tea."
As the robot swooped off toward the pump, Nick leaned over to ask Raina, "Help an old flatfoot out, would ya? What the heck does 'party-o-gene-whatsis' mean?"
"Literally, virgin birth—and no jokes about it, please. Practically speaking, it means reproduction without sex or without genetic contribution from a second parent. It happens naturally with creatures like bees, where unfertilized eggs hatch out into worker bees. I guess cloning could be considered a form of it."
"Ya learn something new every day…" the detective said.
Once the tea was ready, Supervisor White explained, "To begin at the beginning, Dr. Grey and Dr. Theodosia Queen were both part of the Concord Seed Exchange Bank, which became your Envirovault. In fact, he donated a substantial portion of the funds for its construction."
"How did he afford it?" Nick asked, ever with an edge of cynicism.
"He was a senior research scientist for RobCo, darling. His heart was in the land, though. He and Doctor Theodosia were good friends, despite the age difference—they interacted much as the two of you do. She often visited here—and he was very upset when she disappeared. Then, of course, the war happened. We buried him in the field out there," Supervisor White pointed. "It was what he would have wanted. As you can tell, he modified our programming rather extensively, so we could operate autonomously—and so we have been."
"I noticed the lack of servility that most Mr. Handys show," Raina said. "I'm glad of it. It isn't right to code it into your personality."
"Thank you, darling. It's been a boon to us—so many of our kind go completely round the bend without humans to serve. Yet one does want direction in life—which was why we were so glad when Dr. Constancia Queen found us. Dr. Constancia brought us mutfruit—before that, we were cultivating wild melons and gourds, hardly nutritionally balanced. She asked us to grow mutfruit and spread them through trade and sale, so we did.
"Then she left for Diamond City—and she never returned. We never learned what happened to her," Supervisor White finished.
"Neither did we," Raina said. She set her teacup down on the patio table. "I have a mission planned-the reforestation of the Glowing Sea with Gingko Biloba seedlings genetically engineered to thrive in areas with high radiation and clear them of radioactivity. Would you be willing to assist me by helping plant these trees as you helped Constancia with the mutfruit?"
"Of course, darling. We aren't about to simply go looking for any old human to give us direction, but Dr. Theodosia was practically one of the family, and since for all intents and purposes, you are her—well, that makes all the difference."
"Really? You want to help? We don't have to fight our way through an industrial plant full of hostile synths first and you aren't going to suddenly turn on us or- -," Raina began.
"Well, if you want to be a dear, our ground water here is simply terrible. There is the old water treatment plant not too far away from here-if you were to repair the pumps, the entire region would have running water again," Supervisor White suggested.
Raina sighed just a little while Nick got out the map. "If you could mark it, ma'am, we'll look into it."
A/N: A short chapter to get back into the swing. Sorry about the delay. There were several factors, the most important of which are finals, final papers, and...new cats! I adopted a pair of littermates, two grey and white boys about a year old, who are now named Bogart and Brando, because I do love classic movies. All hail my new feline overlords! It took a while to get over the death of my old guy, and I waited until it felt right. Now my ribs hurt from laughing at their antics. Young cats are pure energy.