Chapter 69

Dear Willow and family,

I really don't mean to be stuffy. But since your concubines wrote me when you were delayed in returning I decided that they should be included in my greetings. I do want them to know that we do think of them as individual people, not as disposable parts.

I think we have both hit on the same solution to making our family work. Mainly that seems to be to listen, and I do mean really listen to our concubines. Holly wants to try to put on a play. I'm not sure just what sort of play but in some ways it ought to be easier than any other. After all we can effectively load the dialogue into our brains using a sleep-trainer. Not having to work on memorizing the lines should help us get the rest of the play down. The others in the house, including myself have fairly much thrown ourselves into the idea. I've been looking at costumes, and various patterns. The main play that Holly has been discussing has been 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', she really wants to do a comedy and that one is fairly well known.

Honestly I don't care who uses the weapons I design. I just hope that they are effective in killing Sa'arm. I've been told to expect to have to ride one of our stretched Stagecoach ships out to pick up a bunch of concubines who have lost their sponsors. Lily is disconsolate that we won't allow her to go with me. But given what you've told me and what I've experienced in some of the places I've had to visit here I just don't think that taking someone who still prefers to be on a leash is a good idea.

I know that for her it represents protection. But for many of the concubines that I've had to deal with a leash means that someone has treated them like disposable property. I'm absolutely sure that some sponsors don't think about the possibility that the behavior that they exhibit toward their concubines will affect the children in their houses. Yet when I started looking, in houses that the sponsor considers his concubines to be property there seems to be a marked decrease in the level of the CAP scores of all the children in the house. Part of it may be the attitude that such concubines take, that they really don't need to get any sort of education, but I'm betting that at least part of it is the children seeing how women (since most concubines are women) are treated by the men of the house.

In our house we do our best to have at least one meal a day where all of us are together and have time to talk about what may be bothering us. I'm as certain as I can be of anything that doing that has helped us form a working family dynamic. One on one time is important too, or at least it seems that way to me. Sure Lily seems to demand and get most of my off work attention, but inviting Ron out to my workshop after dinner seems to have firmed up the bond between us. He's both more and less than another brother to me. Since you said you could use better armor I've had the version you use installed on my mockup. One thing that living in domes creates is frustration about the amount of space that is available to do anything. I need to be able to set up various tests for the armor, and I simply cannot do it inside. We don't know what the Sa'arm are using to create the flechette weapons they used on you. I did send out a couple of ideas for light, strong armor to places where it can be tested against the various weapons that we have managed to capture. I got one back that I'm going to send to you. It should be about the same weight as the armor you're using now and help turn the vibrating knives that the Sa'arm use. Whether it will be effective against the flechette weapon I don't know. After all the only thing that we have to test it against so far is the Sa'arm knives. That doesn't mean that you, or anyone else should unduly risk their safety in an attempt to capture any other Sa'arm weapons!

Mom came by the other day, she's been involved in some of the farm work and our dome is near one of the farm domes. It is really weird to see her so pregnant, and to think that Willow and Wendy will have aunts or uncles who are younger than them. Hannah and Grace seem to be in a hurry to catch up to their older sisters, they're already rolling over and scooting. They look up and watch all the time, and they too are starting to try to sign. Of course we encourage that a lot! After all we believe that one of the many factors in the CAP test is the exercise of language skills. We aren't sure how to do it yet but we want to encourage our kids to learn courage as well. We don't know that it is or isn't a factor in the CAP test, yet people who are courageous seem to be more willing to take a risk and we do know that willingness to take a risk is part of a passing CAP score. Our goal is to have children who are able to go to the stars aboard the Confederacy provided ships until we can provide our own. On that front Marissa is directing a whole workshop full of people who are combing through what the Confederacy considers its obsolete files. We don't have to have the most modern (though I expect that more innovations will come from this war than the Confederacy has seen in 10,000 years) equipment to start with. Just equipment that works. In a way it is the same thing we are doing with making power plants that are not dependent on the AIs in order to be sure our domes are not deathtraps due to the growlers that we seem to regularly have here. We've put out at least a thousand seismic monitors trying to track just what is happening with the crust of Atlantis-at, those and a swarm of GPS type of satellites that ping them and tell us how the whole of the planet is moving. The last thing we want to do is build a dome, or leave in place a dome that crosses an active fault line. And with the way that we seem to be having constant growlers here there must be a lot of very active fault lines. Therefore before we build much more here we must learn much more about our world. How much the crust moves, and how often, are questions we must answer. As well as where the fault lines are, and what can be done to avoid straddling them as it were. One thing we (or the governor) did do was send out a warning that we couldn't take nearly as many colonists as was first projected because of the obvious instability of the crust of our world.