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Most people who have reached their eighties without raising children have every right to believe that they will go on not raising them, and Judith and I were no different until the day they turned up with the social worker, neatly scrubbed and pressed inside their vac-suits and carrying cases with all their remaining worldly possessions. There were three of them like stairsteps, their black hair cut in fringes across their foreheads and their dark eyes shining out disconcertingly familiar at me. But it wasn't until the social worker said, “Mr. Chao and Ms. Goldstein, these are your grandchildren, Enid, Richard, and Harry,” that I remembered, sheepishly, about the genes we had given all those years ago, to that nice couple from New New Prague, before they left for the Oort Cloud.

I gaped like the tank fish I grow. Judith murmured in kind confusion. It was Enid who settled them all, gently and efficiently, in what used to be our spare room. Later it occurred to me that she was very practiced at it for a ten-year-old, but later I knew why.

The paperwork was lengthy, and some of it required actual paper, reminding us why it had been called that. I thought that was cheeky, given that the social worker was dumping the children on us without even a message to warn us, but you can't give people children without at least some protocol. Even I understood that. And I had known about the collapse of the Oort Cloud economy, in a vague news-feed sort of way. I had just not thought to connect it with myself, much less my guest bedrooms.

Judith peered at them in her mild dismay when the social worker had left. “What … sorts of things do you eat?” she asked, the bundle of questions on her mind turning to the most immediately practical matter.

“We're omnivores, thank you,” said Enid. Not only her composure but also her vocabulary was so much older than ten.

“But—what do you
like
?” said Judith.

“We don't propose to be any trouble,” said Enid, but her brother Harry said, “Noodles. We really like noodles.”

“
You
do,” said Richard, rolling his eyes.

“We will eat,” Enid insisted, “whatever it is convenient to make. I can help if you like. And the boys, they're big enough to do easy things. We won't be a bother.”

I crouched down next to her. “Now, look,” I said, and she flinched back, just a tiny bit, but enough that I could see it. I had never made a little girl flinch just by talking to her before. I tried to make my tone even more gentle. “Let's get this straight. We never expected to have you. You know that, there's no sense in pretending. You never expected to have us, either. But that doesn't mean we're going to be beastly to each other now that we've got each other. All right? Harry can have his noodles.”

Judith started flipping through her pasta recipes unobtrusively on her viewer. “Dears,” she said, her voice very deliberately vague and distracted, “where are your parents, exactly?”

“Mother's in jail,” said Harry.

“Shoosh,” said Enid.

“Well, she is.”

“Mother's in jail for civil disobedience,” said Richard. “
They
thought it was a great deal less civil than she did, she says. She had no idea they would take us away from our cousins, or she'd never have done it.”

“What exactly…,” I started to ask, and thought better of it. “And your father?”

Enid glared at her brothers as if it was their fault. “We don't know.”

“I see.”

“They didn't catch him with Mother when—when—” She flinched again, this time internally caused. Judith and I exchanged glances.

“When they broke up your family,” said Judith gently.

“It's not that we don't have anybody,” said Enid. “I don't want you to be confused. We had Mother and Father and also our cousins Hector and Yolande and Philomel. We have
people
.”

“Of course,” said Judith. I nodded gravely, as though I had any idea who Hector and Yolande and Philomel might be, what they might be like to these children as family.

“It's just our father's parents are dead,” said Enid. “And the in-system governments…”

“Don't recognize the rest of your family as related,” I finished. “The social worker was clear about that part.” Without it, I did not mention to the children, we would not have been assigned their care. Even with middle age extended through the end of the century mark for most in-system residents, eighty somethings with no child-rearing experience would have been no one's first choice if they could think of another.

“They'll get it fixed,” said Richard. “Yolande won't let them keep us away from her.”

Enid lifted her chin defiantly and met my eyes. “Go wash up for dinner. Ms.—uh—”

“Grandma Judith,” said Judith quietly, and I knew she was just as sunk as I was.

“Grandma Judith is making you noodles. We'll show her that we appreciate it.”

The three of them filed out. I regarded my love of the last fifty years with mingled bemusement and despair. “What on earth will we do with them?”

“They're children,” said Judith firmly. “We'll teach them things. That's what one does with children.”

Privately I wondered whether I had learned anything at all in eighty years that would be worth teaching these quiet, self-possessed children. But they had never been to Mars before. We would start with Mars.

I let them have a quiet morning the next day while I fed and checked on the fish and made notes on the new crossbreeds. They all looked surprised when I came in and sat down in the rocking chair we kept in the guest room.

“Were we too loud?” said Enid.

“Not at all,” I said. “No. Of course not. I had just finished my work—or at least as much of it as I absolutely have to do today—and was thinking I would take you to see some of Mars.”

“That's very kind of you,” said Enid.

“What would you like to do today?”

“I'm sure whatever you like will be fine,” said Enid, showing no emotional reaction whatsoever.

“Erin said that if we had to live on a planet, there were compensations, like ice-skating,” said Harry.

“If you
had
to live on a planet!” I repeated, bemused. We could find out who Erin was later.

Enid shot him one of her quelling looks. “Of course Mars is the very nicest of the planets,” she said. “We're very lucky to live here, and I'm sure we're just starting to find out all the lovely things about living on a planet.”

“Mostly we know the nasty ones,” Richard agreed. “Can't change the gravity. Can't fix the air filtration.”

“The same things out the windows
all the time
,” added Harry mournfully.

Poor Enid was nearly beside herself trying to convey to her brothers with only her eyebrows that they should shut it. She still didn't trust that we would keep them.

I'm not sure she wanted us to, except that she knew very well that many places would be worse.

“I would have to look into ice-skating,” I said. “I don't know what the hours are at the rink. I was thinking of more like the genetic engineering and terraforming museum.”

“Is that in another dome? Will we need our suits?” said Enid.

Well, at least they knew that much. Not like Earth children. Our next-door neighbor Bill had cousins from Earth, and they were like tadpoles, just darting about without a concern for anything sensible like what they might breathe or who they might inconvenience. My grandchildren at least knew how to present themselves in a tidy and orderly fashion, filters checked and suits in their proper bags in case of emergency.

At the museum, they were quiet at first and then more openly inquisitive. When they realized that I knew a fair amount about genetic engineering because of my fish, they picked me dry. “They're like piranhas,” I told Judith when we got home. “They will gnaw any hint of flesh off you and crack the smaller bones.”

“That's a good sign,” she said. “Perhaps they'll relax a bit.”

I thought about how proper they had been, how careful. “Harry might. He's still little. But Enid and Richard—I don't know what they've been through. I feel like trying to ask is the wrong way to get them comfortable. But—do you think they're all that buttoned up, out there in the Oort Cloud?”

Judith frowned and turned from wiping down the kitchen counters to put her hand on her hip. “I have never known an Oorter to be like that. But—things are different out there now for a lot of people, Torulf. Even just being taken away from their families might be enough, poor mites.”

I knew my expression mirrored hers. “I wish I knew what to do. I never—I don't know what kids do. They were talking about ice-skating. They heard it was one of the rare compensations for the hardship of living on a planet.”

Judith snorted. “Poor us, planet-bound! Well, I have some time off coming to me. I don't mind using it to show the children how things aren't so bad on planets. Or at least on this planet.”

After that we went to the first landing site, and after
that
we took an entire weekend-long trip to go to Olympus Mons, to go up it and look out at the entire planet as our domain. The thing about Olympus Mons—and maybe you think you have mountains like this where you're from, but trust me, you don't—is that it feels like you've gone halfway to space. Like you could just hop a little and make it out to orbit. I thought the little ones might like that, and Harry did. Richard and Enid looked white eyed and skittish.

“Is anything wrong?” I whispered to Richard.

“Planets are very exposed,” he said. “I've just realized.”

His sister overheard him and nodded vigorously, keeping careful hold of the handrail there at the summit. “You can't steer them. If you end up on a collision course with a comet or something, you have to fix the other thing because you can't fix
you
.”