Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “Tell me about the drugs,” Luc says when they’re far enough away from the center of town, where the ramshackle huts are spaced further apart.

  “I don’t use them,” Sasha says, shrugging even as she swings her arms mid-stride. “I’m not that dumb.”

  “Good for you,” Luc says. The exhaustion and strain are catching up with him, and he’s about to keel over. He’s famished, too, which means he’s becoming a real citizen of Newfoundland.

  “Every now and then, Hoffman’s peacekeepers turn the town upside down, looking for the source. She gives speeches. And they’ve actually executed a few drug-dealers, just beheaded them. But you gotta understand, we’ve been starving a long time. People need something to distract them from the inevitable.”

  “Even here.” Luc is clenching his fists, staring at the worry-lined earth. Not dirt. Dead microorganisms. “Even here. Goddamnit.”

  “From what I hear, they have a recipe,” says Sasha. “The ship’s engine still had a lot of coolant left over after landing, and they siphoned everything out of the cryo-units, except yours, of course. Plus some fungi that grow on the coast have hallucinogenic properties, in very tiny doses. They trade it for food rations, or bits of Earth clothing and personal items.”

  A few weeks of the year, the nearest continent cools down enough for humans to travel there and do some big game hunting. But the last expedition never made it back, and the colony won’t survive long enough to make another hunting trip, Sasha says.

  Sasha’s mother is a cheerful, leather-faced woman named Clarissa, with curly hair that was probably dirty blonde but has gone platinum thanks to the unrelenting sun. She insists that Luc sit down at her dining-room table, which is made of that same rock as the table back in the conference room. She gives him some of her dead husband’s clothes, including a decent pair of boots that made the trip from Earth. (Luc’s own personal effects from Earth were stolen years ago.) Like every other adult here, her tongue is swollen, making her diction hard to understand at first. She fusses over Luc, feeding him a watery stew with some tough roots in it. Then she insists that Luc should rest—there’s a kind of hammock in the front room of the four-room house, that he can sleep in.

  Luc lays on the hammock, but he can’t close his eyes without seeing Rene bleeding out, now filtered through his cryogenic visions. The broken-off piece of rock inside his stomach that kept him going out every night and pummeling criminals is back, sharper than ever, since he spent a hundred and twenty years having the same nightmare.

  8.

  In the morning, Sasha’s mother is gone, but Sasha gives Luc a single strip of pungent jerky left over from some great beast they killed on their last successful sortie to the jungle continent to the north. “Save your food,” Luc says, but she insists and he chews a bit of it. The best he can say is that digesting it will keep his stomach busy for hours. The house is dusty—that loose soil gets everywhere—and it makes him itch. Soil erosion. Wooden structures everywhere, but no trees.

  “They gave me a few days off my chores and studies,” Sasha says, “to help you acclimate, since I was the one who brought you back. This ought to be planting season, but that’s been delayed indefinitely.”

  Luc walks around the colony, trying to get used to the gravity, letting everyone get an eyeful of him. Something about that cryo-freeze has recharged his healing mojo. Old aches hurt less, even in 1.27-G. Looking everybody in the eyes, he sees signs of long-term starvation, worse even than what he saw in Arkansas—but also lots of dilated pupils (painful in this more intense sunlight, he guesses), no teeth, and puncture scars. Junkies: They assault anyone who comes too close, with a terrifying fury but no strength. Too far gone. Even if he could feed those people, he can’t save most of them.

  Becky Hoffman shows Luc the last of the seed vault, with Sasha on tiptoes behind them. Corn, wheat, some sorghum. But not much of any. Even with a bumper crop, you couldn’t plant enough to feed 3,000 people for another 15 months.

  “Don’t tell anybody what you’ve seen here,” Hoffman whispers. “I’m frankly terrified of what will happen if people discover how hopeless it is. We already have a huge drug problem, and a lot of unrest.” A lot of people took to eating the clay near the river last year, just to feel full, until dysentery and some excruciating thistle-shaped parasite killed a few dozen within a month, she says.

  Luc glances over at Sasha, and can’t read anything from her face.

  Many colonies, back on Earth, died within one generation. Of the ten extrasolar planets that humans have colonized thus far, only three still have people living on them. Including Newfoundland.

  The seed vault, behind the town hall, is one of two places in Newfoundland that has a guard, wearing body armor and toting a Brazelton fast-repeater, the kind they used for crowd control back on Earth. The other place is the food dispensary right off the town square, where Sasha goes once per day to collect her family’s food rations in a red box while two people with clubs and guns watch carefully.

  Luc heads into the fields, stretching out to the horizon, where Cargill irrigated using river water, and can’t find egregious fault with Cargill’s work. The soil, though, is toxic, arid, acrid, a dead waste. He kneels in the dirt, his skin getting burnt and then unburning as the healing mojo works. He leans against a wooden post.

  The sun goes down and the first of three moons is already up. Sasha comes to find Luc, who is kicking the dirt and cursing, punching the wooden post until his hand is bleeding and crammed with splinters.

  “Hey, calm down,” Sasha says. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  Luc’s only answer is a roar and another swing of his fist, hard enough to smash the wood to splinters. He looks at his own bloody hand and backs off, shaking off Sasha’s attempt to see to him.

  “It’s hopeless,” he says. “I could have done something. I could have stopped this. You didn’t all have to die. But somebody sabotaged my capsule. Whoever did that has murdered this colony, and I’m here just in time to watch it rot. And they’re probably the same person who’s profiting off all this misery. Selling drugs to people who are living in hell.”

  The wounds on Luc’s hand are already closing. He sits in the dirt, convulsed with pure anger, lurching into his own knees again and again. He can’t think, he can’t see a way forward. Nothing but dead soil all around him.

  “For the first time ever,” he says when his rage has spun down, “I believe my son was lucky.”

  Sasha sits near him, but keeps her distance, probably because he looks as if he’ll take her head off if she gets too close.

  “I’m sorry,” Luc says. “I didn’t mean to go nuts on you.”

  “It’s okay,” Sasha says. “I guess this is a big adjustment. You get used to seeing people lose their minds, around here.” She hesitates, then: “Hey, I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Sure.”

  She’s studying him. “When I first got you out of your coffin, you said something about your main skill being justice. I can’t remember the exact words. What were you talking about?”

  “I lost someone, back on Earth. The people who did it needed to pay. So I turned myself into something else. A crime-fighter. I spent millions of dollars to become this whole other creature. When I got out of my casket and it was twenty years too late, I had a moment of bravado. It was like a defense mechanism. Forget it happened.”

  “So you’re not going to get justice? For your cryo-unit, and everything else?”

  “I don’t know,” Luc says, realizing that’s the truth. “I’ve been biding my time these last couple days, but now I’m not sure what the point would be. The guilty and the innocent will both die the same way, soon enough.”

  “When I was working on your cryo-pod, I had this idea that I would wake you up, and you would burst out of there and save us all. Maybe with a fanfare, like in that videox they let me watch before the ship’s entertainment system finally gave out. And when I did wake you up and you said all that
stuff, part of me was thrilled because you really sounded like . . . I don’t know, like someone who saves people.”

  The light of the first moon draws shadows under her eyes, while a second moon sneaks up on her, illuminating her hair and her rough jacket. She looks as if she’s in the middle of one of those rite-of-passage moments where you surrender some of your illusions on the way to adulthood. Something is breaking forever inside her. He has no idea what he’s supposed to do about this.

  What would Palm Strike do? He wouldn’t be sitting here in the dirt kissing his knees. Palm Strike would find a way to save the colony and take down the pushers.

  “Can you help me get some gear?” he asks Sasha. “I need a helmet, body armor, gloves. It needs to be black, or I need some dye. Do you know where I can score some?”

  She stares at him, her eyes ginormous. Then, slowly, she nods.

  9.

  Palm Strike never had a sidekick. For a while, he let Josiah create a fake identity as his partner No-Shadow, not to do any actual fighting but to talk to the cops once they stopped trying to kill Palm Strike. No-Shadow’s outfit was all cape and full-face mask, plus some gloves with spikes coming out of them. Ridiculous.

  One night, Palm Strike got back from busting heads but No-Shadow was nowhere to be found. Turned out No-Shadow had gone on a ride-along with a pair of detectives, Lancaster and Marsh, so they could talk his ear off.

  “They think you’re doing more harm than good,” Josiah explained when he got home. “You shut down the Street Commanders and took out some of the Shardlings, but in the process you’ve only strengthened Dark Shard. Both by eliminating his competition and culling his weakest people.”

  “You shouldn’t judge an exterminator halfway through a job,” Luc grunted.

  “But that’s the thing. It’s like, during the Great Leap Forward, Mao sent every peasant in China out to kill sparrows, on the theory that sparrows were eating seeds and reducing the harvests. But once the sparrows were all gone, turned out they had been eating locusts, which had been eating the grain. It was an ecosystem. When all the sparrows were gone, everybody starved.”

  Josiah said these things while he was making a sandwich for Luc, still wearing his big black cape and unfeasibly spiky gloves as he stood at the marble kitchen counter.

  “Maybe Palm Strike isn’t the best solution,” Luc said after he stopped laughing at No-Shadow. “But he’s all I’m capable of, right now.”

  The next few days, Luc spends every waking hour traveling around and taking soil samples, and every night watching the rotating cast of hoodlums selling drugs in the town square. He hasn’t seen much in the way of “peacekeepers” in this town of three thousand souls, but the dealers are there from sundown to sunup. They mostly trade drugs for food, which means there’s a stockpile somewhere.

  You wouldn’t want to be the only one eating when everyone else is starving to death. You’d find out the hard way that nobody is an island.

  One day, when Luc’s sitting in front of the house, Clarissa comes out and sits with him. He is trying to nibble his breakfast so he can give most of it to Sasha. She’s growing, and he has his healing mojo. “Starvation isn’t as cool as when I was a teenager trying to be a ballerina back on Earth,” Clarissa says, with sympathy. “It’s more like a chronic pain, and exhaustion. I can’t think straight and I feel like I’m constantly getting sick. It just sucks.”

  “Starvation was pretty widespread back on Earth, too,” Luc says. “It’s just that here, there’s no class of people who aren’t starving. It’s more egalitarian.”

  “God, this colony is such a clusterfuck.” Clarissa kicks the white dirt. “We all had jobs, most of which turned out to be irrelevant. I was supposed to be the marine biologist. We’ve barely studied the ocean here. We cannibalized the diving equipment early on and we haven’t been able to catch any marine life at all. It’s a joke. So now I’m Becky Hoffman’s assistant instead.”

  “I bet Hoffman’s an okay boss,” Luc says. Clarissa just snorts.

  There’s a long pause, both of them watching the sky turn pale. “Be careful with Sasha,” Clarissa says out of nowhere. “That whole time she was working on your pod, she was trying to develop her mechanic skills. But I also caught her looking at your face sometimes, as if she thought you were going to replace her dad or something.”

  “I’m very comfortable having people project onto me,” said Luc.

  “Just don’t break her heart, okay?” she says. Luc nods, slowly.

  At night, down near the dirtiest part of the river, people gather in a three-walled structure and sing, holding hands and swaying on their feet. Luc hears their muffled chanting as he stakes out the drug dealers, hiding behind the Town Hall’s partially disassembled ancillary cockpit.

  Two dawns in a row, Luc tries to follow the dealers when they leave the town square with their ill-gotten food supply. But both nights, the food disappears. He can’t see where they’re stashing it. They leave their cozy perch, walk around that ugly sculpture, go through the tight space between the two municipal buildings, then out toward the polluted estuary that runs through Hopetown. By that point, they’ve ditched their crate of food and they’re swinging their unladen arms, eager to crash out. Their route takes them right near the guard watching the food dispensary, but she doesn’t worry about people carrying food around, just about them taking food from the communal store. Luc searches every spot the dealers passed on their route. No sign.

  Sasha has found him a banged-up helmet, a chest-plate, and a single ancient glove. “When do we make our move?” she asks every few minutes.

  Luc keeps thinking about Mao and the sparrows. The pests that turned out to be essential. And then he thinks about the terraforming process.

  On the fourth morning since he woke from his long sleep, he gets up and tells Sasha he needs to do something on his own. Then he takes off walking, toward the polar geyser. He walks for hours, until his feet are throbbing and the sunburn overtaxes his healing mojo. He hasn’t taken a long walk in the wilderness since Rene was born, and he’s forgotten how giant the sky can loom, or how it feels to be miles away from other people. His mind empties as the landscape unfolds, ridge after ridge, and he’s weirdly calm. But he’s also stewing. He’s jaw-grinding mad at Sasha for waking him up in the first place, at Clarissa for telling him not to break Sasha’s heart, and at this whole colony for being so perfectly self-destructive. He keeps yelling at people in his head. As he passes the geyser, it seems totally inert, a dry depression, but it could blow without warning. He keeps walking, the sun in his eyes, until he sees the first silhouettes on the horizon. The sun is behind him by the time he gets to the trees.

  Up close, the white spikes rise up so far they seem to converge in the sky. Thousands of them, singing with the wind. Zigzag spikes extend from them, and they remind him of a power-staff Palm Strike experimented with wielding for a few months. Luc hasn’t felt anything like joy since he lost Rene, but he feels an unaccustomed thrill of wonder in the middle of all this.

  Then he crouches down and opens his bag of equipment. Time to get to work. He grabs a soil sample and adds nanosensors to it.

  The sun’s almost gone and two moons are taunting him, and he still can’t make sense of how these things live, or what they’re doing. They have no roots, no leaves. They fix the soil and make it fertile, that much is clear from his first samples—but they’re too far from the colony’s current site to farm here without relocating everyone. Which could actually be impossible, given that the colony only has a few small ATVs, and the exertion of moving would kill most of the colonists even quicker.

  But if Luc could figure out what these things are, and how they live . . . He takes samples of their “bark,” he digs around them, he makes scans. He has a grinding headache, but he keeps working.

  It’s almost a relief when Luc hears a loud crack and feels a gouging pain in his chest, and looks down to realize he’s been shot. He keels over, painting the white du
st crimson. His chest is spurting blood like that geyser. He feels everything going black for a moment.

  A moment later, he hears three sets of footsteps, feels their heavy tread as they stand around him. “We’ll bury him out here,” one woman says. “They’ll never know.”

  “They better not find out,” a man says. “They still think this clown can feed the starving masses.”

  “We had no choice,” a second man responds. “He was getting too close to the truth.”

  The man who spoke last kicks Luc’s body. And Luc grabs his foot with both hands and twists, snapping the man’s ankle. As Luc rises, he flings the first man at the second, and they both fall in a tangle. The woman is the one with the gun, and she’s raising it to aim at his head. He knocks it out of her grasp.

  Fighting in high gravity is everything Luc feared. He keeps misjudging his swings and overbalancing. And then just as he finally connects with the second guy’s neck, he remembers to pull his punch. His whole fighting style is adapted to a world of paramedics and ambulances. But even a fairly minor injury could wind up being fatal this far from any doctors, and he has no idea how bad sepsis can be here with the local bacteria. So he can’t afford to hurt these people too much, even as they’re trying to kill him. They take turns kicking him and lashing him with their fists, with each blow landing harder than it would on Earth. Luc’s head rings, and it dawns on him that he’s on a pretty good trajectory to lose this fight.

  The one bright spot is they’ve lost their only gun somewhere down in the billowing dirt. He finds it first, with his foot, and he steps down on it until he hears metal splinter. After that, he staggers out of the way of the larger man’s roundhouse and grabs him, bringing his head and the woman’s together with as much gentleness as he can manage. They fall on either side of him. The last man, the one whose ankle he broke, cowers as Luc grabs his stubbly throat.