by Scalzi, John
“Is it done?” I asked.
“As far as you know, yes,” Savitri said.
“Then I think I’ll relax and bask in my superior management skills,” I said.
“I’m glad you didn’t use the wastebasket to vomit earlier,” Savitri said. “Because now there’s a place for mine to go.” She retreated back to her desk before I could think up a good retort.
We’d been like this since after the first month we’d worked together. It took her that first month to get used to the fact that even though I was former military I wasn’t actually a colonialist tool, or at the very least if I was, I was one with common sense and a reasonable sense of humor. Having established I wasn’t there to spread my hegemony over her village, she relaxed enough to start mocking me. It’s been our relationship for seven years, and it’s a good one.
With all the paperwork done and all the problems of the village solved, I did what anyone in my position would do: I took a nap. Welcome to the rough and tumble world of colonial village ombudsmanning. It’s possible it’s done differently elsewhere, but if it is, I don’t want to know.
I woke up in time to see Savitri closing up the office for the day. I waved good-bye to her and after a few more minutes of immobility hauled my own ass out of the chair and through the door, on the way home. Along the way I happened to see the constable coming toward me on the other side of the road. I crossed the road, walked up to the constable and kissed my local law enforcement official full on the lips.
“You know I don’t like it when you do that,” Jane said, after I was done.
“You don’t like it when I kiss you?” I asked.
“Not when I’m on the job,” Jane said. “It erodes my authority.”
I smiled at the thought of some malfeasant thinking Jane, a former Special Forces soldier, was soft because she kissed her husband. The ass-kicking that would ensue would be terrible in its magnitude. However, I didn’t say that. “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll try not to erode your authority anymore.”
“Thank you,” Jane said. “I was coming to see you, anyway, since you didn’t return my call.”
“I was incredibly busy today,” I said.
“Savitri briefed me on just how busy you were when I called back,” Jane said.
“Oops,” I said.
“Oops,” Jane agreed. We started walking in the direction of our home. “What I was going to tell you is that you could expect Gopal Boparai to come by tomorrow to find out what his community service would be. He was drunk and disorderly again. He was yelling at a cow.”
“Bad karma,” I said.
“The cow thought so, too,” Jane said. “It butted him in the chest and sent him through a shop window.”
“Is Go okay?” I asked.
“Scratches,” Jane said. “The pane popped out. Plastic. Didn’t break.”
“This is the third time this year,” I said. “He should be up in front of the actual magistrate, not me.”
“That’s what I told him, too,” Jane said. “But he’d be up for a mandatory forty days in the district gaol and Shashi is due in a couple of weeks. She needs him around more than he needs gaol.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll figure out something for him.”
“How was your day?” Jane asked. “Besides the nap, I mean.”
“I had a Chengelpet day,” I said. “This time with a goat.”
Jane and I chatted about our day on our walk home, like we do every day on our walk home, to the small farm we keep just outside the village proper. As we turned onto our road we ran into our daughter Zoe, walking Babar the mutt, who was typically deliriously happy to see us.
“He knew you were coming,” Zoe said, slightly out of breath. “Took off halfway down the road. Had to run to keep up.”
“Nice to know we were missed,” I said. Jane petted Babar, who wagged up a storm. I gave Zoe a peck on the cheek.
“You two have a visitor,” Zoe said. “He showed up at the house about an hour ago. In a floater.”
No one in town had a floater; they were ostentatious and impractical for a farming community. I glanced over to Jane, who shrugged, as if to say, I’m not expecting anyone. “Who did he say he was?” I asked.
“He didn’t,” Zoe said. “All he said was that he was an old friend of yours, John. I told him I could call you and he said he was happy to wait.”
“Well, what does he look like, at least?” I asked.
“Young,” Zoe said. “Kinda cute.”
“I don’t think I know any cute guys,” I said. “That’s more your department, teenage daughter.”
Zoe crossed her eyes and gave a mock sneer. “Thanks, ninety-year-old dad. If you had let me finish speaking, you would have heard the clue that tells me you might actually know him. Which is that he’s also green.”
This got another shared glance between me and Jane. CDF members had green skin, a result of modified chlorophyll that gave them extra energy for combat. Both Jane and I had had green skin once; I was back to my original hue and Jane was allowed to choose a more standard skin tone when she changed bodies.
“He didn’t say what he wanted?” Jane asked Zoe.
“Nope,” Zoe said. “And I didn’t ask. I just figured I’d come find you and give you advance warning. I left him on the front porch.”
“Probably sneaking around the house by now,” I said.
“Doubtful,” Zoe said. “I left Hickory and Dickory to watch him.”
I grinned. “That should keep him in one place,” I said.
“My thought exactly,” Zoe said.
“You are wise beyond your years, teenage daughter,” I said.
“Makes up for you, ninety-year-old dad,” she said. She jogged back to the house, Babar padding behind.
“Such attitude,” I said to Jane. “She gets it from your side.”
“She’s adopted,” Jane said. “And I’m not the smart-ass in the family.”
“These are details,” I said, and took her hand. “Come on. I want to see just how scared shitless our guest is.”
We found our guest on the porch swing, watched intently and silently by our two Obin. I recognized him immediately.
“General Rybicki,” I said. “This is a surprise.”
“Hello, Major,” Rybicki said, referring to my former rank. He pointed to the Obin. “You’ve made some interesting friends since the last time I saw you.”
“Hickory and Dickory.” I said. “They’re my daughter’s companions. Perfectly nice, unless they think you’re a threat to her.”
“And then what happens?” Rybicki asked.
“It varies,” I said. “But it’s usually quick,”
“Wonderful,” Rybicki said. I excused the Obin; they went off to find Zoe.
“Thank you,” Rybicki said. “Obin make me nervous.”
“That’s the point,” Jane said.
“I realize that,” Rybicki said. “If you don’t mind me asking, why does your daughter have Obin bodyguards?”
“They’re not bodyguards, they’re companions,” Jane said. “Zoe is our adopted daughter. Her biological father is Charles Boutin.” This got a raised eyebrow from Rybicki; he was of sufficiently advanced rank to know about Boutin. “The Obin revere Boutin, but he’s dead. They have a desire to know his daughter, so they sent these two to be with her.”
“And this doesn’t bother her,” Rybicki said.
“She grew up with Obin as nannies and protectors,” Jane said. “She’s comfortable with them.”
“And it doesn’t bother you,” Rybicki said.
“They watch and protect Zoe,” I said. “They help out around here. And their presence with us is a part of the treaty the Colonial Union has with the Obin. Having them here seems like a small price to pay for having them on our side.”
“That’s true enough,” Rybicki said, and stood up. “Listen, Major. I have a proposition for you.” He nodded to Jane. “For both of you, actually.”
“What is it?” I asked.
Rybicki motioned with his head toward the house, in the direction Hickory and Dickory just went. “I’d rather not talk about it where those two might hear, if it’s all the same. Is there some place we can talk privately?”
I glanced over at Jane. She smiled thinly. “I know a place,” she said.
“We’re stopping here?” General Rybicki asked as we pulled up short, halfway across the field.
“You asked if we had someplace where we could talk privately,” I said. “You’ve now got at least five acres of grain between us and the next set of ears, human or Obin. Welcome to privacy, colonial style.”
“What kind of grain is this?” General Rybicki asked, pulling at a stalk.
“It’s sorghum,” Jane said, standing next to me. Babar sat next to Jane and scratched his ear.
“It sounds familiar,” Rybicki said, “but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen it before.”
“It’s a staple crop here,” I said. “It’s a good crop because it’s heat and drought tolerant, and it can get pretty hot around here in our summer months. People here use it for a bread called bhakri and for other things.”
“Bhakri,” Rybicki said, and motioned toward town. “These folks are mostly from India, then.”
“Some of them,” I said. “Most of them were born here. This particular village is sixty years old. Most of the active colonization here on Huckleberry is on the Clemens continent now. They opened it up around the same time we arrived.”
“So there’s no tension about the Subcontinental War,” Rybicki said. “With you being American and them being Indian.”
“It doesn’t come up,” I said. “People here are like immigrants everywhere. They think of themselves as Huckleberries first and Indians second. In another generation none of it will matter. And Jane’s not American, anyway. If we’re seen as anything, we’re seen as former soldiers. We were a curiosity when we arrived, but now we’re just John and Jane, with the farm down the road.”
Rybicki looked at the field again. “I’m surprised you farm at all,” he said. “The two of you have real jobs.”
“Farming is a real job,” Jane said. “Most of our neighbors do it. It’s good for us to do it too so we can understand them and what they need from us.”
“I meant no offense,” Rybicki said.
“None taken,” I said, interjecting myself back into the conversation. I motioned to the field. “We’ve got about forty acres here. It’s not a lot—and not enough to take money away from the other farmers—but it’s enough to make the point that the concerns of New Goa are our concerns, too. We’ve worked hard to become New Goans and Huckleberries ourselves.”
General Rybicki nodded and looked at his sorghum stalk. As Zoe had noted, he was green, good-looking and young. Or at least gave the appearance of youth, thanks to the CDF body he still had. He’d look twenty-three years old for as long as he had it, even though his real age was some number over one hundred by now. He looked younger than me, and I was his junior by fifteen years or more. But then, when I left the service, I traded my CDF body for a new, unmodified body based on my original DNA. I looked at least thirty by now. I could live with that.
At the time I had left the CDF, Rybicki had been my superior officer, but he and I went back before that. I met him on my first day of combat, back when he was a lieutenant colonel and I had been a private. He’d offhandedly called me son, as a reference to my youth. I was seventy-five at the time.
This was one of the problems with the Colonial Defense Forces: all that body engineering they do really messes with your age sense. I was in my nineties; Jane, born an adult as part of the CDF Special Forces, was sixteen or so. It can hurt your head if you think about it.
“It’s time you tell us why you’re here, General,” Jane said. Seven years of living with naturally-occurring humans had not blunted her Special Forces-bred way of ramming through social courtesies and getting right to the point.
Rybicki grinned wryly, and tossed his sorghum to the ground. “All right,” he said. “After you left the service, Perry, I got a promotion and a transfer. I’m with the Department of Colonisation now; the folks who have the job of seeding and supporting new colonies.”
“You’re still CDF,” I said. “It’s the green skin that gives you away. I thought the Colonial Union kept its civilian and military wings separate.”
“I’m the liaison,” Rybicki said. “I get to keep things coordinated between the both of them. This is about as fun as you might think it is.”
“You have my sympathy,” I said.
“Thank you, Major,” Rybicki said. It’d been years since anyone referred to me by my rank. “I do appreciate it. The reason I’m here is because I was wondering if you—the two of you—would do a job for me.”
“What kind of job?” Jane asked.
Rybicki looked over to Jane. “Lead a new colony,” he said.
Jane glanced over to me. I could tell she didn’t like this idea already. “Isn’t that what the Department of Colonization is for?” I asked. “It should be filled with all sorts of people whose job it is to lead colonies.”
“Not this time,” Rybicki said. “This colony is different.”
“How?” Jane said.
“The Colonial Union gets colonists from Earth,” Rybicki said. “But over the last few years the colonies—the established colonies, like Phoenix and Elysium and Kyoto—have been pushing the CU to let their people form new colonies. Folks from those places have made the attempt before with wildcat colonies, but you know how those go.”
I nodded. Wildcat colonies were illegal and unauthorized. The CU turned a blind eye to wildcatters; the rationale was that the people who were in them would otherwise be causing trouble at home, so it was just as well to let them go. But a wildcat colony was well and truly on its own; unless one of your colonists was the kid of someone high up in the government, the CDF wouldn’t be coming when you called for help. The survival statistics for wildcat colonies were impressively grim. Most didn’t last six months. Other colonizing species generally did them in. It wasn’t a forgiving universe.
Rybicki caught my acknowledgment and went on. “The CU would prefer the colonies keep to their own knitting, but it’s become a political issue and the CU can’t brush it off anymore. So the DoC suggested that we open up one planet for second-generation colonists. You can guess what happened then.”
“The colonies started clawing each other’s eyes out to be the one whose people got to colonize,” I said.
“Give the man a cigar,” Rybicki said. “So the DoC tried to play Solomon by saying that each of the agitants could contribute a limited number of colonists to the first wave colony. So now we have a seed colony of about twenty-five hundred people, with two hundred and fifty from ten different colonies. But now we don’t have anyone to lead them. None of the colonies want the other colonies’ people in charge.”
“There are more than ten colonies,” I said. “You could recruit your colony leaders from one of those.”
“Theoretically that would work,” Rybicki said. “In the real universe, however, the other colonies are pissed off that they didn’t get their people on the colony roster. We’ve promised that if this colony works out we’ll entertain the idea of opening other worlds. But for now it’s a mess and no one else is inclined to play along.”
“Who was the idiot who suggested this plan in the first place?” Jane asked.
“As it happens, that idiot was me,” Rybicki said.
“Well done,” Jane said. I reflected on the fact it was a good thing she wasn’t still in the military.
“Thank you, Constable Sagan,” General Rybicki said. “I appreciate the candor. Clearly there were aspects of this plan I didn’t expect. But then, that’s why I’m here.”
“The flaw with this plan of yours—aside from the fact that neither Jane nor I have the slightest idea how to run a seed colony—is that we’re colonists now, too,” I said. “We’ve been here for
nearly eight years.”
“But you said it yourself: you’re former soldiers,” Rybicki said. “Former soldiers are a category all their own. You’re not really from Huckleberry. You’re from Earth, and she’s former Special Forces, which means she’s not from anywhere. No offense,” he said to Jane.
“That still leaves the problem of neither of us having any experience running a seed colony,” I said. “When I was doing my public relations tour of the colonies way back when, I went to a seed colony on Orton. Those people never stopped working. You don’t just throw people into that situation without training.”
“You have training,” Rybicki said. “Both of you were officers. Christ, Perry, you were a major. You commanded a regiment of three thousand soldiers across a battle group. That’s larger than a seed colony.”
“A colony isn’t a military regiment,” I said.
“No it’s not,” Rybicki agreed. “But the same skills are required. And since you’ve been discharged, both of you have worked in colony administration. You’re an ombudsman—you know how a colony government works and how to get things done. Your wife is the constable here and is responsible for maintaining order. Between the two of you, you have pretty much all the skills you’ll need. I didn’t just pull your names out of a hat, Major. These are the reasons I thought of you. You’re about eighty-five percent ready to go as it is, and we’ll get you the rest of the way there before the colonists head for Roanoke. That’s the name we’ve chosen for the colony,” he added.
“We have a life here,” Jane said. “We have jobs and responsibilities, and we have a daughter who has her own life here as well. You’re casually asking us to uproot ourselves to solve your little political crisis.”
“Well, I apologize about the casual part,” Rybicki said. “Normally you would have gotten this request by Colonial diplomatic courier, along with a full load of documents. But as it happened, I was on Huckleberry for entirely different reasons and thought I would kill two birds with one stone. I honestly didn’t expect I’d be pitching you this idea standing in the middle of a field of sorghum.”
“All right,” Jane said.
“And as for it being a little political crisis, you’re wrong about that,” Rybicki said. “It’s a medium-sized political crisis, on its way to becoming a large one. This has become more than just another human colony. The local planetary governments and press have built this up as the biggest colonization event since humans first left Earth. It’s not—trust me on that—but that fact doesn’t really matter at this point. It’s become a media circus and a political headache, and it’s put the DoC on the defensive. This colony is getting away from us because so many others have a vested interest in it. We need to get on top of it again.”