The Last Colony

by John Scalzi

  “What’s going to happen to Stross?” Jane said. She wasn’t looking at me; she sat at the stateroom table, tapping it gently.

  “He said he was going to ‘hang out,’ ” I said. Jane looked up at me quizzically. I shrugged. “He’s adapted to live in space,” I said. “That’s what he’s going to do. He said his doctorate research would keep him busy until someone came to get him.”

  “He thinks someone is coming to get him,” Jane said. “That’s optimism for you.”

  “It’s nice someone has optimism,” I said. “Although Stross didn’t really seem to be the pessimist type.”

  “Yeah,” Jane said. Her tapping changed rhythm. “What about the Obin?”

  “Oh, well,” I said, remembering my earlier conversation with Hickory and Dickory. “That. Seems the two of them know all about the Conclave, but were forbidden from sharing the information because we didn’t know anything about them. Basically, not unlike some spouses of mine I could name.”

  “I’m not going to apologize for that,” Jane said. “It was part of the deal I made to be with you and Zoë. It seemed fair at the time.”

  “I’m not asking you to apologize,” I said, as gently as I could. “I’m just frustrated. From what I read in the files Stross gave us this Conclave has hundreds of races in it. It’s the single largest organization in the history of the universe as far as I can see. It’s been coming together for decades, since back when I was on Earth. And I learned about its existence only now. I don’t know how that’s possible.”

  “You weren’t meant to know,” Jane said.

  “This is something that spans all of our known space,” I said. “You can’t hide something like this.”

  “Of course you can,” Jane said, and her tapping suddenly stopped. “The Colonial Union does it all the time. Think about how colonies communicate. They can’t talk to each other directly; there’s too much space between them. They have to compile their communication and send it in spaceships from one colony to another. The Colonial Union controls all ship travel in human space. All information bottlenecks into the Colonial Union. When you control communication, you can hide anything you want.”

  “I don’t think that’s really true,” I said. “Sooner or later, everything leaks. Back on Earth—” Jane suddenly snorted. “What?” I asked.

  “You,” Jane said. “ ‘Back on Earth.’ If any place in human space can be described as profoundly ignorant, it’s Earth.” She motioned her hand, encompassing the room. “How much of any of this did you know about, back on Earth? Think back. You and every other CDF recruit signed up completely ignorant of how things are out here. You didn’t even know how they were going to make it possible for you to fight. The Colonial Union keeps Earth isolated, John. No communication with the rest of the human worlds. No information either way. The Colonial Union doesn’t just hide the rest of the universe from Earth. It hides Earth from the rest of the universe.”

  “It’s humanity’s home,” I said. “Of course the CU wants to keep its profile low.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Jane said, genuinely irritated. “You can’t possibly be so stupid as to believe that. The CU doesn’t hide Earth because it has sentimental value. The CU hides Earth because it’s a resource. It’s a factory that spits out an endless supply of colonists and soldiers, none of whom has the smallest idea what’s out here. Because it’s not in the Colonial Union’s interest to have them know. So they don’t. You didn’t. You were just as ignorant as the rest of them. So don’t tell me you can’t hide these things. The surprising thing isn’t that the Colonial Union hid the Conclave from you. The surprising thing is that it’s telling you about it at all.”

  Jane resumed her tapping for a moment and then slapped her hand down on the table, hard. “Fuck!” she said, and put her head in her hands and sat there, clearly furious.

  “I really want to know what’s going on with you right now,” I said.

  “It’s not you,” she said. “I’m not angry with you.”

  “That’s good to hear,” I said. “Although since you just called me ignorant and stupid, you can understand why I wonder if you’re telling me the truth about that.”

  Jane reached out a hand to me. “Come here,” she said. I walked over to the table. She put my hand on it.

  “I want you to do something for me,” she said. “I want you to hit the table as hard as you can.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Please,” Jane said. “Just do it.”

  The table was standard carbon fiber with the veneer of printed wood: cheap, durable and not easily breakable. I made my hand into a fist and brought it down hard on the table. It made a muffled thump, and my forearm ached a bit from the impact. The table rattled a bit but was otherwise fine. From the bed, Babar looked over to see what idiocy I was up to.

  “Ow,” I said.

  “I’m about as strong as you,” Jane said, tonelessly.

  “I suppose,” I said. I stepped away from the table, rubbing my arm. “You’re in better shape than me, though. You might be a bit stronger.”

  “Yeah,” Jane said, and from her sitting position hammered her hand down on the table. The table broke with a report like a rifle shot. Half the tabletop sheared off and spun across the room, putting a divot in the door. Babar whined and backed himself up on the bed.

  I gaped at my wife, who stared impassively at what remained of the table.

  “That son of a bitch Szilard,” she said, invoking the name of the head of the Special Forces. “He knew what they had planned for us. Stross is one of his people. So he had to know. He knew what we would be up against. And he decided to give me a Special Forces body, whether I wanted one or not.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “We had lunch,” Jane said. “He must have put them in my food.” Colonial Defense Forces bodies were upgradable—to an extent—and the upgrades were often accomplished with injections or infusions of nanobots that would repair and improve tissues. The CDF didn’t use nanobots to repair normal human bodies, but there was no technical bar to doing it—or using the nanobots to make body changes. “It had to have been a tiny amount. Just enough to get them in me, where more could grow.”

  A light clicked on my head. “You had a fever.”

  Jane nodded, still not looking at me. “The fever. And I was hungry and dehydrated the entire time.”

  “When did you notice this?” I asked.

  “Yesterday,” Jane said. “I kept bending and breaking things. I gave Zoë a hug and I had to stop because she complained I was hurting her. I tapped Savitri on the shoulder and she wanted to know why I hit her. I felt clumsy all day. And then I saw Stross,” Jane almost spat the name, “and I realized what it was. I wasn’t clumsy, I was changed. Changed back to what I was. I didn’t tell you, because I didn’t think it mattered. But since then it’s been in my head. I can’t get it out of there. I’m changed.”

  Jane looked up at me, finally. Her eyes were wet. “I don’t want this,” she said, fiercely. “I left it when I chose a life with Zoë and with you. It was my choice to leave it, and it hurt to leave it. To leave everyone I knew behind.” She tapped the side of her head to signify the BrainPal she no longer carried. “To leave their voices behind after having them with me. To be alone like that for the first time. It hurt to learn the limits of these bodies, to learn all the things I couldn’t do anymore. I but chose it. Accepted it. Tried to see the beauty of it. And for the first time in my life I knew my life was more than what was directly in front of me. I learned to see the constellations, not just the stars. My life is your life and Zoë’s life. All of our lives. All of it. It made it worth everything I left.”

  I went to Jane and held her. “It’s all right,” I said.

  “No, it’s not,” Jane said. She gave a small, bitter laugh. “I know what Szilard was thinking, you know. He thought he was helping me—helping us— by making me more than human. He just doesn’t know what I know. When you make someone more than
human, you make them less than human, too. I’ve spent all this time learning to be human. And he takes it away without a second thought.”

  “You’re still you,” I said. “That doesn’t change.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Jane said. “I hope that it’s enough.”

  SIX

  “This planet smells like an armpit,” Savitri said.

  “Nice,” I said. I was still putting on my boots when Savitri had walked up. I finally yanked them on and stood.

  “Tell me I’m wrong,” Savitri said. Babar roused himself and walked over to Savitri, who gave him a pat.

  “It’s not that you’re wrong,” I said. “I just thought you might have a little more awe at being on an entirely new world.”

  “I live in a tent and pee in a bucket,” Savitri said. “And then I have to carry the bucket across the entire camp to a processing tank so we can extract the urea for fertilizer. Maybe I’d have more awe for the planet if I didn’t spend a fair portion of my day hauling my own waste across it.”

  “Try not to pee so much,” I said.

  “Oh, thanks,” Savitri said. “You’ve just sliced through the Gordian knot with that solution. No wonder you’re in charge.”

  “The bucket thing is only temporary, anyway,” I said.

  “That’s what you told me two weeks ago,” Savitri said.

  “Well, I apologize, Savitri,” I said. “I should have realized that two weeks is more than enough time for an entire colony to go from founding to baroque indolence.”

  “Not having to pee in a bucket is not indolence,” Savitri said. “It’s one of the hallmarks of civilization, along with having solid walls. And taking baths, which everyone in this colony has taken too few of recently, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Now you know why the planet smells like an armpit,” I said.

  “It smelled like an armpit to start,” Savitri said. “We’re just adding to the funk.”

  I stood there and inhaled greatly through my nostrils, making a show of enjoying the air. Rather unfortunately for me, however, Savitri was right; Roanoke did, in fact, smell all too much like an armpit, so it was all that I could do not to gag after filling my lungs. That being said, I was enjoying the sour look on Savitri’s face too much to admit to swooning from the smell.

  “Aah,” I said, exhaling. I managed not to cough.

  “I hope you choke,” Savitri said.

  “Speaking of which,” I said, and ducked back into the tent to retrieve my own nightpail, “I’ve got some business of my own to take care of. Walk with me to dump this?”

  “I’d prefer not to,” Savitri said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I made that sound like a question. Come on.” Savitri sighed and walked with me down the avenue of our little village of Croatoan, toward the waste digester, Babar tagging along at our heels, except when he broke off to say hello to kids. Babar was the only dog in the colony who was a herding dog; he had the time to make friends. This made him both popular and chunky.

  “Manfred Trujillo told me that our little village is based on a Roman legion camp,” Savitri said, as we walked.

  “It’s true,” I said. “It was his idea, actually.” And a good one. The village was rectangular, with three avenues running the length of the camp parallel to each other and a fourth avenue (Dare Avenue) bisecting them. In the center was a communal mess hall (in which our carefully monitored food supply was doled out in shifts), a small square where the kids and teens tried to keep themselves occupied and the administrative tent that doubled as home for me, Jane and Zoë.

  On either side of Dare Avenue were rows of tents, each housing up to ten people, usually a pair of families plus any additional singles or couples we could stick in. Sure, it was inconvenient, but it was also crowded. Savitri had been bunked in a tent with three families of three, all of whom had infant and toddler-aged children; part of the reason for her sour disposition was that she was running on about three hours of sleep a night. Since the days on Roanoke were twenty-five hours, eight minutes long, this wasn’t a good thing.

  Savitri pointed to the edge of the village. “I guess the Roman legions didn’t use storage containers as a perimeter barrier,” she said.

  “Probably not,” I said. “But that was their loss.” Using the storage containers as a perimeter had been Jane’s idea. In the Roman days, the legionnaires’ camp would be encircled by a ditch and a palisade, to keep out the Huns and the wolves. We didn’t have any Huns, or their equivalent (yet), but there had been some reports of large animals wandering out in the grass, and we also didn’t want kids or teens (or certain incautious adults, who had already made their presence known) wandering off into the vegetation a klick away from the village. The storage containers were ideal for this purpose; they were tall and sturdy and there were lots of them—enough to circle the encampment twice, with appropriate spacing between the two layers to allow our angry, marooned cargo hold crew to unload inventory when needed.

  Savitri and I made it to the western border of Croatoan, beyond which lay a small and fast stream. For that reason this edge of the village held its only plumbing so far. In the northwest corner a pipe carried in water to a filtration cistern, which churned out potable water for drinking and cooking; it also fed into two shower stalls at which a one-minute time limit for individuals (and three minutes for families) was strictly enforced by everyone else waiting in line. At the southwest corner was a septic digester—a small one, not the one Chief Ferro pointed out to me—into which every colonist dumped their nightpails. During the day they availed themselves of the portable toilets that surrounded the digester. There was almost always a line at these, too.

  I walked over to the digester and poured the contents down a chute, holding my breath as I did so; the digester did not smell of roses. The digester took our waste and processed it into sterile fertilizer that was being collected and stored, and also into clean water, most of which was dumped into the stream. There was some discussion about whether to reroute the processed water back into the camp’s supply; the general feeling was that clean or not, the colonists were under enough stress without having to drink or bathe in their own processed pee. It was a fair point. A small amount of the water, however, was held back to rinse and clean the nightpails. It’s life in the big city.

  Savitri jerked her thumb down the west wall as I walked back to her. “Planning to shower anytime soon?” she asked. “I mean, no offense, but for you smelling like an armpit would be a step up.”

  “How long are you planning to be like this?” I asked.

  “Until the very day I get indoor plumbing,” Savitri said. “Which, in itself, would imply I had an indoor in which to put it.”

  “It’s the Roanoke dream,” I said.

  “Which isn’t going to be able to start until we get all these colonists out of this tent city and into their homesteads,” Savitri said.

  “You’re not the first person to mention this to me,” I said. I was about to say more but was interrupted as Zoë crossed our path. “There you are,” she said, and then thrust her hand at me, which was filled with something. “Look. I found a pet,” she said.

  I looked at the something in her hand. It stared back. It looked a little like a rat that got caught in a taffy puller. Its most distinguishing characteristics were its four oval eyes, two on either side of its head, and the fact that it, like every other vertebrate creature we’d seen on Roanoke so far, had opposable thumbs on its three-fingered hands. It was using them to balance on Zoë’s hand.

  “Isn’t he cute?” Zoë asked. The thing appeared to belch, which Zoë took as a sign to feed it a cracker she had stored in a pocket. It grabbed it with one hand and started chomping away.

  “If you say so,” I said. “Where did you find it?”

  “There’s a bunch of them outside the mess hall,” Zoë said, showing it to Babar. He sniffed at the thing; it hissed back. “They’ve been watching us as we eat.” This rang a bell with me; sudden
ly I was aware I had been seeing them too over the last week. “I think they were hungry,” Zoë continued. “Gretchen and I went out to feed them, but they all ran away. Except for this guy. He came right up and took a cracker from me. I think I’ll keep him.”

  “I’d prefer you didn’t,” I said. “You don’t know where it’s been.”

  “Sure I do,” Zoë said. “He’s been around the mess hall.”

  “You’re missing my point,” I said.

  “I got your point, ninety-year-old dad,” Zoë said. “But come on. If it were going to inject me with poison and try to eat me, it probably would have done it by now.” The thing in her hand finished its cracker and burped again, and then suddenly leapt out of Zoë’s hand and scurried off in the direction of the storage container barricade. “Hey!” Zoë cried.

  “Loyal like a puppy, that thing is,” I said.

  “When he comes back, I’m going to tell him all the horrible things you’ve said,” Zoë said. “And then I’m going to let him poo on your head.”

  I tapped the nightpail. “No, no,” I said. “That’s what this is for.”

  Zoë curled her lip at the sight of the nightpail; she was not a big fan. “Yuck. Thanks for the image.”

  “Don’t mention it,” I said. Out of the blue, it struck me that Zoë was missing a couple of shadows. “Where are Hickory and Dickory?” I asked.

  “Mom asked them to come with her to look at something,” Zoë said. “Which is actually why I came looking for you. She wanted you to come look at something. She’s on the other side of the barricade. By the north entrance.”

  “All right,” I said. “Where will you be?”

  “I’ll be in the square, of course,” Zoë said. “Where else is there to be?”