by Sam Coulson
On Lee’s orders, Chen began the synthetic therapy the next morning. There were injections and sonar treatment sessions that shifted around my entrails. It wasn’t painful, but it was uncomfortable. As Chen explained it, they were using synthetic stem cells to build new organs to take over for my own organs which Chen referred to as “ornamental.”
After two weeks my artificial liver began to function. Chen was excited when it seemed to rouse the rest of my systems. Within three days I was a fully functional, eating and defecating human being.
“Well now Elicio, it seems we fixed you up right,” Chen was rightfully proud of his success.
“Thank you Chen,” as I spoke I put my hand on his shoulder and smiled. It was a gesture I had seen him make several times when conferring with other patients.
He smiled broadly, “Well, off to work with you! It was a pleasure having you here for the last few months. They are saying we have 190 days until winter sets in, so we’ll need to make sure that we’re ready. Lee said he’d send someone down to set you-ah, there she is. Ju-lin! Over here.”
Ju-lin was young and pretty with long brown hair and a small mouth. She looked familiar. I thought she had been another patient at some point; I’d seen dozens of people coming in and out of the hospital with scrapes, bruises, and broken bones.
“I see you found some clothes,” she said with an unceremonial nod. “Good. The green jumpsuit’s an improvement over the whole naked covered in mud and leaves thing.”
I flushed red with embarrassment. Of course, that’s where I knew her. The smaller one of Lee’s companions who had found me in the woods.
“Still haven't learned to talk, eh?” She rolled her eyes and gestured for me to follow her.
She didn’t wait, and was halfway across the room before I caught up to her.
“Chen says you understand Common well enough,” she continued as soon as I got within earshot. “So first, let me say, welcome to the Downs, as we have taken to calling it. Not the best name. But it’s a name, and every place needs a name.”
As she spoke we stepped out through the hospital doors into the sunlight. Ju-lin absently pulled a pair of dark sunglasses from her jacket and slipped them over her eyes. I squinted and shaded my eyes as I struggled to adjust to the light and look around. What had been a pile of storage crates unloaded from the colony ship a few weeks before had exploded into a small city. I turned behind me to look at the hospital, it was one of a dozen prefabricated buildings in the Downs. From my time with the Slate I had learned that most colonies landed with a dozen or so basic prefabricated structures, including a hospital, several sleeping barracks, a hydroponic greenhouse, cafeteria, a number of utility support structures to handle waste, water purification, and a 3D printing facility to create any tools the colony may need.
“Keep up Berry,” Ju-lin called over her shoulder without looking.
I decided to ignore the nickname and again jogged ahead to catch up.
“So, old man McCullough’s first rule of the colony: work. His second rule: work. And his third rule, any guesses?”
“Work?”
“See there, you can talk,” she nodded to the left and we turned between two large buildings, barracked by the look of them. On the north wall there was a large lean-to shelter where a small group was working on assembling some large equipment.
“What’s that?” I gestured toward the group of mechanics.
“You don’t know a hover-skiff?” for the first time, she turned and studied my face, her eyes hidden behind my reflection in her glasses. After a brief moment she turned forward again and kept talking. “It is a high-load hovercraft with some fancy gear attached, a crane, basic mineral processing, that sort of thing. It can chew up raw stone and shit out concrete. We have four for the colony, this one broke down. The other three are working up the river on the dam.”
“You’re damming the river?” I asked. “Why?”
This time she stopped and turned to face me. She was shorter than me, her head coming up roughly to my nose. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, but a stray strand was flitting lightly across her forehead in the breeze, she curled her lip upward and sent a brief puff of breath to blow it to the side. She exuded an anxious energy that made me feel both exhilarated and unnerved.
“You really don’t know anything do you?” She held out her arm, palm up, making a grand sweeping gesture at the colony and land around us. “This place may look all great and shiny, nice trees, fertile land, birds in the sky, berries to eat, but it’s not natural. More importantly, most of what you see doesn’t belong here.”
“You mean—” I stammered, her abruptness caught me off guard. “You don’t belong on this world?”
“Belong on this world? You are dense.” She rolled her eyes. “No, what I mean is that this world was probably a useless hunk of stone before MineWorks came along and terraformed it. The terraforming process may seed a world for life, but it doesn’t do it intelligently. Look around, see that forest of pines? It’s in the heart of the delta. That’s wrong. Do you get it?”
I didn’t, and said so.
She sighed dramatically.
“Next spring, inland snow will melt up in the mountains. The river will rise and this valley to flood. Now, tell me, if this was a natural world, how in the name of the Sower would there be a stand of trees right there?”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Look,” she was losing her patience. “If this were a natural world, then this valley would look completely different. There would be a field of thick grasses there. Every year, the river would flood, and every year, new grasses would grow. But instead, this world was terraformed. Terraforming may ‘plants the seeds of life’ across the world, but it does it stupidly. Most of what is on this world won’t survive the winter. There are tropical trees planted in the tundra, there is warm-water algae in lakes that freeze solid.”
I began to understand what she meant. All I could manage was a nod as I recalled the blue-green grasses and the world as it used to be. She was more right than she knew.
“This may be the new Garden of Eden, but without our help, and without our hard work, the garden will wither and die, taking us with it,” she turned back forward and started walking again, satisfied that she had gotten my attention. “You don’t talk much do you?”
I didn’t answer.
“So we work,” she continued. “We’re using the large hover-skiffs to build a dam upstream so that we can control the flooding of the river. We’ll also use the dam as a power source. There are three other colonies like this one. One of them is Ridgecrest. We’re working with them and pooling our resources with Bodford, their Governor, to build the dam. The hydroelectric will provide more than enough power to keep both colonies humming-as long as we get it built before the wet season comes and washes us all out to sea.”
“I’d like to see that.” Hydroelectric dams, hovers, concrete: I was making a mental list of all of the things I would look up on the Slate next time I had the opportunity.
She threw me a startled look.
“I mean the dam.”
“I bet you would,” she smiled wickedly as we approached a broad stretch of land on the edge of the colony. “Especially after you’re done today. Here we are. The Governor wants you on plow duty. We need to get some fruits and vegetables planted. Tomatoes and peas. You can see there that the surveyor has already marked out the lanes, it’s up to you to get the field plowed for planting.”
I looked around, there was a sharp-bladed plow blade lying in the grass nearby. On one end were two handles, the other had hitches to connect it to a beast of burden, or perhaps a small hovercraft of some kind.
“Well?” She looked at the plow and then back at me, impatiently. “What are you waiting for? The bio group hasn’t finished bringing the livestock out of cryo yet. So we won’t have any oxen to help pull the big plows until next spring, and we need to get the seeds in the ground soon if we’re going to have any
thing to eat when the stocks of freeze dried rations start getting low.”
“Isn’t there a machine or something?” I looked out; the survey marks on the field seemed to stretch out forever.
“Machine? Yes there are. But none to spare, not until we get the dam built. The Governor wants us all to minimize our power use. Besides, as he’ll tell you, ‘the human machine is the only machine that you can count on’.”
She turned to leave.
“Ju-lin,” I hesitated. I wasn’t sure why I had spoken.
“Elicio.” She turned and looked at me. Her voice was tinged with mockery. Her eyes were brown with specks of yellow mixed in. After several breaths she continued. “You do know that it’s customary to say something after calling someone’s name?”
“Th-thanks.”
“For what? Assigning you to hard labor?” Her demeanor softened further. “Look, you’re not the only one that is stuck here without understanding why. Believe me, the last place I want to be is a land-locked flowerpot on the edge of civilized space. Hell, the Collective traders don’t even come out this far, and they go everywhere. But it doesn’t seem like either of us have a choice.”
“Not even you? I thought you were in charge?”
“In charge? Me? Ha-” she threw her hands up. “That’s rich. No, I’m only here because I had no choice. I’m 17, which means that even though I passed my secondary course tests early, I need my parent’s permission to enlist in the fleet. My mother’s dead, and my father decided to drag me and my brother out here to the ass-end of space to make sure that we can’t have a life of our own.”
“Your father?”
“Ju-lin McCulloch, at your service,” she raised her hand as if to tip an imaginary hat and turned to leave without another word.
I stared dumbly as she walked away. I was startled to realize that her absence made me feel particularly alone. I picked up the hand-plow and began to work.
Chapter 6.
“A tired body houses a contented mind,” the memory of my voice echoed in my mind as I repeated the mantra. I was using a plane to mold the length of the log. I worked the edge of a knot, layer by layer I shaved through the deep rings of the tree until the knot was ground down and the section of the log was smooth. The muscles in my arms burned as the sun was setting.
“A tired body builds a contented mind,” I repeated again as I looked up the length of the log. I still had a third of the way to go. It would be a long night. I was tempted to speed up and not take as much care, but then I remembered what had happened before. There had been imperfections in my plane, I had crossed the grains. The log was imperfect, and had to be burned. So I had been sent to do it again, and do it right.
“A tired body builds a contented mind,” I continued to carve, slowly, and evenly.
I spent several weeks plowing, tilling, planting, and weeding the field. Through the work, I let my fear, confusion, and anger melt out through the sweat of my brow. There was something ancient, familiar, and calming about working the land. Most days I worked alone. Everyone in the colony had a job to do. The engineering crews were busy building the dam and installing power, electric, and sewage lines: all of the basic components of civilization. Other teams were busy at work following the plans that Lee had laid out for the city. The core of the Downs was the prefabricated buildings: the workshops, the cafeteria, and barracks. Though, aside from the dam, Lee’s second priority was to build houses. Three construction teams were working daily to build the simple three bedroom wooden-log homes.
Workers cleared the stand of misplaced trees that Ju-Lin had pointed out, and used the lumber to build new homes. The cleared land would be used to grow wheat. It was an efficient operation, well planned, and well executed. Lee was a man of vision and direction, and the colonists were all former miners and did not seem to be strangers to hard work. At night I returned to the men’s barracks with the bachelors as the families moved into the newly built houses.
And so I worked day after day, and used my Slate to learn about my new humanity each night. I learned about the long history of wars on Earth, about the Great Expansion and the founding of the great Earthborn Society which now claimed three dozen star systems, and the Earthborn Protectorate Fleet that stood guard to keep it safe. In studying history, I found that leadership was a fickle thing. Many times, the people best suited for leadership were the ones who wanted it least. The people who were clever and creative avoided responsibility and authority, while the brutish and strong craved power.
Weeks passed, and I didn’t see Ju-lin again after she left me in the field, and the mid-level work-team bosses, whom I dealt and lived with, tended to be the more brutish sort. They would take authority where they could. The bosses and foreman would order others around and take extra rations, using the power they could obtain to get as much as they could. But Lee was different. I found that, though the colonists would complain about him, they would never contradict his direction. Where some men worked to gain and hold authority over others, Lee simply held it.
In the evenings I spent my time listening to the other colonists talk and studying the Slate. I found that nearly all of the colonists were from Lagrange VI, a small mining world owned and operated by the MineWorks Corporation. The whole planet was devoted to chemical processing and mineral refining. In order to meet the ever-increasing demand for processed minerals and precious metals, MineWorks had steadily increased production at the refinery since it was first colonized over a hundred years ago. The refining was so intense that the outdoor air on the world had become toxic. When the conditions got bad enough that the colonists started to get sick, MineWorks ignored their complaints. Not long after that two young children died, and the colonists banded together and threatened to take their story to the media if MineWorks didn’t relocate the four small mining communities on Lagrange VI.
At first, their cries were ignored, but when there were more deaths, the colonists began to complain louder and more often. And then there were rumors around the NewsNets that MineWorks had been engaging in illegal trade with the pirates and smugglers operating outside the law of the Earthborn Protectorate. Unable to handle the growing surge of bad coverage, MineWorks folded to the colonists’ demands to keep them quiet.
It took two years for MineWorks to locate a suitable planet that was far enough from existing shipping lanes and system traffic so that the colonist’s story wouldn’t spread. Eventually, everyone from Lagrange VI was settled onto Eridani III. It was a planet that required minimal terraforming that was located in a remote series of star systems known as the Nymphs on the edge of the Protectorate territory, far from the heavily-traveled frontier worlds between the Protectorate and the Domari Collective. Eridani was close enough that MineWorks could monitor the colony, but far enough to keep the colonists out of the public eye.
The colonists were a tight-knit community. On Lagrange VI, they had all supported the refineries in one way or another; most were mechanics or industrial workers. They were not particularly well educated, but all were hardworking. On Lagrange VI, the colonists had grown their own food using hydroponic pods and lived all of their lives within an isolated series of buildings and tunnels in the shadow of the huge refinery facilities. There were a lot of things they were not used to: wide open spaces, clean blue skies, and strangers.
I was surprised to learn that t I wasn’t the only stranger in their midst. The McCulloughs were also outsiders. Colonists regularly complained about Lee, but they did so without malice or anger, more like how a child complains about their parents or a teacher. He was a man of vision and purpose. From the moment they stepped out of the colony ship, he had assumed command easily and efficiently. Overwhelmed by the clean new world and the hard work ahead of them, they didn’t have time to question him.
By the time they had gained their footing on the new world, Lee had already helped them to build and establish a growing and thriving community. Daily the ranks in the barracks grew smaller as new houses were f
inished and more families were able to settle into their new homes. Lee knew how to get tangible results, and it won him the colonist’s respect, if not their love.
Though they quickly learned to accept Lee’s direction, the men in the barracks still complained when the lights went out. But their complaints were mixed with a sense of shared pride. Lee may be a pain in the ass, but he was their pain in the ass. His success was their success. Though the colonists learned to accept Lee as one of their own, the colonists weren’t quite as accepting of Ju-Lin, or her brother, Marin.
Lee had tasked Ju-Lin with leading the team to install the power infrastructure from the new dam to the Downs. Ju-Lin led her team of 15 at a breakneck pace, pushing them to regularly work over 10 hours per day knee-deep in the mud. Though she worked harder than anyone else, she did so with contempt. She made it clear every day that “being in the ass-end of space on some nameless rock with a two thousand refugee grease monkeys” wasn’t her idea of a good time.
Marin had been the third person with Lee and Ju-Lin when they had first found me huddled under the bush. He was a few years older than Ju-Lin, and recently graduated with a post-secondary degree from an academy on one of the central Protectorate worlds.
He was a brisk young man, always purposeful and direct. While most of the colonists, including myself, wore light and comfortable jumpsuits and were always covered in mud, grease, or worse, Marin always wore crisp black pants and jacket. Lee had put him in charge of compliance. He monitored all of the work crews to make sure they were on schedule and following the colony development plans, but Marin took it a step further.
“Fancies himself as the Marshal of the Downs!” The voice belonged to a man named Jager who worked as foreman for one of the building crews. I was lying silently on my bunk, listening. “He came down this afternoon with his Slate and surveyor’s scope, checked our sightlines, and told us we had to move the foundation because we were off by six inches. Six damned inches. He didn’t bother to ask why we had moved it, or he would have found out about the boulder just under the surface. But bastard just assumed we couldn’t read the plans.”