by J. J. Green
He glanced back toward the flitter to check that he hadn’t gone too far. As in the mountains, he was determined not to let the vehicle out of his sight. When he couldn’t see it immediately, he began to retrace his steps. His footprints were plain to see in the soft soil so it wasn’t difficult to return along exactly the same route.
Each step that he took, Ethan expected to catch sight of the flitter, but it didn’t appear. His heart began to pound. Where had it gone? He should have been able to see it minutes previously.
The black soil reverted to powdery beach sand and the plants shrank to head height and still there was no sign of the flitter. Ethan ran the last few meters. He reached the same river bank he’d left only minutes ago, but it was bare. He sped over to the spot where he’d left the flitter and saw that the sand was disturbed. Long grooves led down to the water. Ethan walked to the water’s edge but he couldn’t see anything breaking the pale brown surface or beneath it.
Had the flitter moved by itself? It didn’t seem possible. Ethan was sure that he’d turned it off before he left it. And the area was too flat for the vehicle to simply slide into the water. He looked up and around, just in case the flitter had somehow risen upward by itself. The skies were clear.
The only explanation was that his vehicle was in the river. That was what the grooves in the sand indicated anyway. Had something in the water dragged off his vehicle, his only way of returning to the settlement? All Ethan knew was that he was alone on the beach and the flitter was gone.
Chapter Seven
Cariad did a little research before she went to meet the Gen called Osias who had won the election. The new Leader was young—only in his late twenties—and he was a mechanic who had worked under Garwin, as Montfort had said.
Whether he’d been Garwin’s friend or not, perhaps some of the older man’s previous charm had rubbed off on him. From what Cariad could tell from his campaign speeches, he seemed to be a good choice. Like his previous supervisor, he was sociable and always ready with a smile, yet he seemed level-headed too. And he was focused on integrating the Woken and the Gens.
Already, only a short time after banding together to reject the Guardians’ interference, divisions were opening up again. The Woken spent most of their time aboard the Nova Fortuna while the Gens rarely ventured up to the ship, despite the fact that the previous restrictions on travel had been lifted. They were busy with the restocking and continued building of the settlement. Due to the division of labor between the Woken’s scientific endeavors and the mainly physical work of the Gens, Cariad could easily envisage a return to the times when the Woken thought the Gens were inferior to themselves and in need of guidance. In turn, the Gens would begin to become annoyed at the Wokens’ aloofness and bossiness. Someone needed to do something to encourage the groups to mix.
Only a day into his tenancy, one of the first actions Osias had taken was to claim the Leader’s traditional office aboard the Nova Fortuna and to open another for his use within the settlement. As was the custom, whether aboard the ship or planetside, if he was in his office, anyone would be able to visit him during the working day to discuss their problems relating to colony life.
Cariad was one of the first at the new Leader’s door. She’d chosen to visit him at his settlement office. She was spending as much time as she could planetside to buck the trend the reclusive Woken were setting, though she hated to leave her techs to work alone in the reproductive lab. They had a lot to do.
When it was finally her turn to see the Leader, Cariad walked through to his private office. Osias was on a vid call as she entered, so she waited for him to finish.
“Sorry. Sit down,” he said, closing his interface. “It’s Cariad, right? I thought I might see you quite soon.” He stood up and leaned over the desk, holding out his hand. He was wiry, not the kind of build Cariad would have expected to see in a mechanic. When she shook his hand, however, his grip was powerful. He went on, “I know I’m not supposed to have favorites, but you’re my favorite Woken.”
Cariad laughed. “You make us sound like pets.”
“Well I didn’t mean it like that,” said Osias, smiling, “but you are a group apart from us, aren’t you? We Gens like to watch you from afar.”
“I know,” Cariad replied. Osias was putting it politely, but she knew what he meant about the aura of mystique that the Woken seemed to hold for the Gens. “We’re a slice of history to you, just like the Guardians seemed to come from the future.”
“Exactly,” Osias said. “So how can I help you? I’m guessing you aren’t here to complain about the sanitation in the new residences or to ask to change your profession.”
“No, actually. I’m entirely satisfied with both my sanitation and my job.” She smiled. “Seriously, I wanted to propose something. It’s an idea I had about safety in the settlement. Feel free to shoot it down. You are the Leader after all.”
“Please, go ahead. I’m very interested to hear what you have to say.”
“I was wondering if you’d given any thought to the policing of the settlement.”
Osias’ expression darkened. “No, I hadn’t, actually. I thought we’d had enough policing from the Guardians.”
“I thought so too. Only I’m not sure we’ve seen the last of the Natural Movement.”
“Wasn’t Twyla the saboteur?” Osias asked. “Otherwise why did she commit suicide?”
“You might be interested to hear Garwin’s take on that,” replied Cariad. “But anyway, it isn’t certain that Twyla was acting alone. Garwin might have been in on it too, and though he’s under arrest it’s possible there are others. I already have a list of potential suspects. I think it would be prudent to act as though we still have saboteurs among us.”
“Where did you get your suspects from?”
“Er, I can’t tell you that. I’m sorry.”
Osias gave her a long look that belied his young years. Cariad felt as though he was searching her for evidence of deceit. While she gazed steadily back at him, she wondered what he’d made of his former supervisor.
Osias leaned back in his seat. “You’ve taken over the investigation from the Guardians?”
Cariad nodded, tense with the knowledge of how a Gen might view her actions as further interference by the Woken. “I thought I would take on the responsibility. I was involved quite closely when the Guardians were working on it.”
“I see,” Osias said, his tone implying he was reserving judgment for the moment. “Well, if we are going to police the settlement, the law enforcers will be Gens.”
“Of course.”
He nodded. “Okay. I’ll think about it. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help with the investigation. There are spare rooms in this building, for instance, if you need somewhere planetside to work.”
“Thanks,” Cariad said. “I won’t take up any more of your time.”
She left the Leader’s office more light-hearted than she’d felt in a long time. The man’s intelligence and open-mindedness were a refreshing change from Anahi’s anxiety-ridden attempt at leadership. Also she felt instinctively that Osias was someone the Woken would warm to.
It was time for Cariad to return to the Nova Fortuna. She had to check in with her techs. As a team they’d removed the fertilization and gestation equipment out of storage and restarted the reproductive processes. She’d wasted no time in analyzing the gene pool of living, fertile Gens and Woken. Some gametes also remained in storage from the ones collected from donors on Earth. She found their viability was still good despite one hundred and eighty-four years spent frozen. And other sex cells had been collected from Gen volunteers during the course of the voyage. Based on the data, she’d selected the best matches to ensure the maximum heterogeneity and healthiness of new colonists. Her techs were working on creating the embryos.
Cariad had always felt uncomfortable about the section of the Manual that stated that Gens had to be chemically prevented from reproducing naturally until a
couple of years prior to Arrival. Donating eggs or sperm had been the only way open to them to pass something of themselves on to posterity, though the identity of their offspring was concealed.
She understood the necessity of the anonymity rule. People who were parents had a disincentive to stick to the colonization plan. Faced with the prospect of their own children being forced to live out their lives aboard a starship would have made them more likely to rebel. During the first one or two generations, the Gens might have tried to turn the Nova Fortuna around and return to Earth so that even if they never saw blue skies or smelled grass again, their children might. Later generations might have tried to take the ship off course to investigate the possibility of finding a closer habitable planet. Although this possibility wasn’t fantastical, the data on the planet they’d been on course for was the most rigorously assessed and the safest bet in the gamble of deep space colonization.
Though Cariad appreciated the rationale behind the decision to not allow any Gens except the Final Generation to bear their own children, that didn’t prevent her guilty feelings. Each natural pregnancy and birth that had occurred since she’d been revived from cryo was a source of pleasure to her.
Still, Cariad had a special enjoyment of her job too. She especially liked decanting the new infants. So although the reason for re-opening the reproduction facilities was regrettable, she had no problems with returning to the task of stocking the colony with new humans.
***
Cariad hadn’t ever really noticed the smell of the Nova Fortuna until she’d spent time aboard the Guardians’ Mistral, which was almost clinically clean. Now, each time she stepped off a shuttle onto the old colony ship, it smelled stale and moldy to her. This wasn’t surprising given the ship’s age and the fact that many thousands of humans had lived and died on it, but that didn’t stop Cariad from noticing it.
Cariad walked the familiar route to the Fertilization Lab and went inside.
“Hey, Cariad,” said one of her two techs, a Gen called Cassie.
“Cariad?” another said. He was a Woken called Florian. “Who’s that? Never heard of her.”
“Oh, you know who she is,” said Cassie. “She used to work here, like, years ago.”
“Come on guys,” Cariad said. “Cut me some slack. I haven’t been gone that long. I’ve had a lot to do. I had to say goodnight to that final creepy Guardian for one thing.”
“You did?” Cassie asked. “What was it like? And where did they all go? I mean, I keep thinking they’re going to spring out of hiding all of a sudden and kill us all in our sleep.”
“That isn’t likely,” Cariad said. “I locked the room they went into. But to answer your first question, it was pretty eerie. They all just turned themselves off. Standing up, too, and wearing their uniforms. Some of them didn’t even bother to close their eyes.”
Cassie looked horrified. “Well thanks for that, Cariad. Now I feel a whole lot better.”
“Sorry, but you did ask. So, what are you both up to? Have you implanted the first batch of embryos?”
“Yes,” Florian replied, “and they all took. Isn’t that great?”
“That is great,” said Cariad. “Well done. You can’t get much better than a zero percent failure rate. So the Gestation Room is full. Where are you going to put the ones you’re making now?”
“We cleared out a couple of extra rooms like you said,” Cassie replied. “The soil biologists weren’t too pleased. They were using them to grow microorganisms they’d found in Concordian soil. But I explained that the future of the colony depended on, you know, actual colonists, and they couldn’t argue with that.”
“Microorganisms?” Cariad said. “I’m not sure those are the best rooms to be growing babies in.”
“Don’t worry,” Florian said. “We sterilized both rooms top to bottom. The only thing that’ll be growing in there from now on is fetuses.”
“Hmmm… okay,” said Cariad, though she remained uncomfortable. She wished her assistants had chosen disused storage rooms or something similar. Concordia remained mostly a closed book to all the scientists. They couldn’t assume they could predict the properties or behavior of anything they found there. But the embryos her team were creating had to go somewhere, so she didn’t have any choice but to allow them to go into gestation bags in the rooms that had been selected. “How many bags did you find room for?”
Florian replied, “Seventy-three in the extra rooms.”
“Right,” said Cariad. “So with the fetuses you started yesterday, that brings us up to one hundred and twenty-three new colonists in nine months’ time. That isn’t enough to entirely replenish the pool.”
“Don’t forget the pregnancies planetside,” said Cassie. “The last I heard, we were up to twenty-one, and one of them is twins.”
“Twins?” said Cariad. “Cool! They’ll be the first twins ever born on Concordia.”
“Providing they make it that far,” said Florian. “Hate to put a downer on the news, but twins do have a higher rate of complications. Better not to count our chickens yet.”
“Count our what?” Cassie asked.
“Chickens,” Florian repeated. “You know.” He made his arms into wings and clucked around the lab, pecking at imaginary corn.
Cassie laughed so hard, she couldn’t catch her breath. She wiped her eyes. “No, I don’t know, and I don’t think I want to. You Woken have some strange sayings. Earth must have been a crazy place. I’m glad I’m going to live on a normal planet.”
“I’m glad you’re going to live on a normal planet too,” said Cariad, also chuckling at Florian’s antics. “But if we’re going to make a success of that we need to grow some more people. And you’re both doing fantastically to help with that. I forgot to remind you, though, to be gentle with the equipment. It’s nearly a couple of centuries old. I’d been hoping to never have to use it again.”
“Yeah,” said Florian. “We know. It’s almost as old as you and I, Cariad. We’re taking the most care we can.”
“Great,” Cariad said. “So, twenty-one pregnancies planetside, hopefully resulting in twenty-two babies, brings us up to one hundred and forty-five new people. It still isn’t enough. All in all, we’ve lost three hundred and fifty-two colonists. And it will take at least eighteen years for the babies we have now to grow old enough to reproduce.”
“And it wouldn’t be a good idea to encourage them to have babies so young,” said Florian.
“Very true,” Cariad agreed. “We need to up the numbers now, rather than later. On the other hand, a hundred and twenty-three new babies aboard the ship is a lot to handle. The facilities are only set up to handle fifty at a time.”
“I’m pretty sure the Gens will make up the shortfall over the next few years,” said Cassie. “The people I speak to are getting over the “icky” aspect of natural reproduction and they’re thinking about having their own babies.”
“That’s good to hear,” said Cariad. “I wouldn’t want to try to force them, but the colony needs all the people it can get right now. Ideally, I’d like to be matching couples for maximum genetic diversity, but I don’t think that would go down too well.”
“Er, no,” said Cassie. “I think the Gens have had enough interference from the Woken to last a lifetime.” As she realized what she’d said, the tech turned bright red. “Sorry. I didn’t mean… ”
“It’s okay,” Cariad said. “For what it’s worth, I entirely agree.”
“Yeah, don’t worry about it,” said Florian cheerfully. “The Gens will soon be breeding like rabbits.”
“Rabbits?” Cassie queried. “Are they the animals that purr and sit in your lap?”
“No,” Florian replied. “That’s cats.”
“Please,” said Cassie, sensing what was coming next. “No more animal impersonations.”
Undeterred, Florian went on, “You know, miaooowww!”
Laughing, Cariad said, “I’m going to go check on the new embryos.”
“Yeah, well, I’m going to have a look anyway.” Cariad caught a glimpse of Florian rolling his eyes at Cassie, but she chose to ignore it. She knew she had a rep for being overly attached to the babies she was responsible for growing. She didn’t care.
After putting on sterile over garments, she went into the dimly lit Gestation Room. The seemingly empty transparent sacs hung from the ceiling in rows, each containing a bundle of cells at its apex that would hopefully grow into a healthy baby.
The Gestation Room was one of Cariad’s favorite places aboard ship. One of the techs had already started up the recording of a mother’s heartbeat and the swish of blood through veins and arteries. Cariad found the sound soothing and she guessed that the babies did too. Cassie had been correct to say the embryos were still too small to see, especially in the dim red light that mimicked the interior of a uterus, but Cariad still took pleasure in walking up and down the rows, checking the bags and imagining the infants that would gradually fill them as they grew, until they would finally be decanted, slimy and squirming and perhaps uttering their first cries.
She recalled Cassie’s mention of the “ickiness” many Gens felt about pregnancy and birth. She understood the feeling. It was exactly how she’d always felt too, and the paradox between her sentiment and her role on the Nova Fortuna wasn’t lost on her. She wondered if she might ever feel differently. She wasn’t too old to have her own children if she chose to, and with the current state of the colony, she felt some of the pressure that all women of child-bearing age were probably feeling.
Her thoughts drifted sadly to memories of her parents and sisters, who she’d been forced to leave behind to take part in the Nova Fortuna Project. Her mother would have been delighted to have a grandchild. She hoped at least one of her sisters had been able to fulfill that desire.