Exiled to the Stars

by Zellmann, William

  Cesar looked around the table at the grim, frowning, and even angry faces. If the results of Susan’s proposal on the Council were any indication, it would be simply impossible to convince all of the 227 women and their husbands and lovers of the necessity.

  The wrangling went on for over an hour, but simply confirmed Cesar’s belief that the proposal would fail. He used his authority as Chairman to prevent it from coming to a vote. There might be a way to make the plan workable. If so, they could always bring it up later. But if the Council had already voted the proposal down, it would be much more difficult to resurrect it. Ryles scented blood in the water, but was unable to prevent Cesar from tabling the proposal and moving on.

  “Susan is almost certainly right,” Cesar said. “Genetic diversity is probably the single most dangerous threat to the survival of the colony. But it is a long-term threat, a time bomb. We must certainly take her recommendations seriously, and devise ways to overcome our peoples’ natural resistance to some sort of breeding plan, but we have many other, more urgent threats with which we must deal.

  “Foremost among them is overcoming the shock and despair of the plague. Nearly everyone has lost one or more loved ones, and in a very short time. People are moping around, dull, listless, and passive.

  “We cannot afford that! Before he died, Vincent warned me that we must finish the dam and either set up circulating pumps or cut a channel to link Gouge Lake to the river. Otherwise, within a year we may be living next to a stagnant, useless, and maybe dangerous pond, and eventually a swamp. We have the equipment to turn the lake into a reservoir that could benefit generations of our people. But that is not going to happen by itself.”

  “I dunno,” put in Tom Abbott, now a Council member. “I’m not sure I can recommend the pump idea.” He shrugged. “Our pumps are good, and could circulate the water for years. But the pipe to the river solution is permanent. Just put some filters in the pipe, and we’ve got drinking water for generations.”

  Cesar frowned with irritation. “Whichever solution we choose, we’re not going to have it if we don’t make it. The lake is now about three and a half meters deep, and our dam some six meters high. But you all know that Vincent recommended a minimum of a fifteen-meter dam. We have not yet experienced a Crashlanding winter, but I’m certain we can expect to experience heavy rains as we move toward it. At the moment, the pumps are working flawlessly, and the ship and colony are mostly safe.

  “But we are having trouble getting people moving! The equipment we desperately need to clear and prepare farmland is rusting away at the dam, because we don’t have volunteers to learn to operate it. We are falling behind in patching the remaining leaks in the upper parts of the ship, and molds are beginning to appear. You all know that things like simple molds could get into the food service machinery, or the computer’s auxiliary systems, and kill us all.”

  He slammed a palm on the table. “We can survive here, but not by sitting around grieving and feeling sorry for ourselves! I lost two children and three grandchildren. I will never stop mourning for my loved ones. But we cannot waste our own lives moaning and crying about those who died. My granddaughter Kia would slap my face if she thought I would give up on my own life to grieve over the loss of hers. There is too much to do, ladies and gentlemen. We cannot afford to waste our lives in grief. If you, any of you, feel that you will be unable to overcome your grief and mourning enough to help this colony survive, then I beg you, resign from the Council. Let us elect someone who will use their minds to help us survive, not simply sit around this table wallowing in self-pity!”

  “What Cesar is saying,” Vlad said loudly, “is that it’s time to get off your lazy butts and get your people back to work, or get the hell out of the way! The only people still working around here are Boyet’s militia and scouts, and that’s only because he keeps bullying them. And worse, we’re still losing people! You all know about the man that died yesterday. He wandered too close to a plains rat colony mound. We all heard his screams, but by the time the militia got there, all that was left were bones. Oh, I think he poisoned the whole colony; we haven’t seen any movement there today at all. But that’s no comfort to him, or to his young son.”

  He shrugged. “And two days ago, we had another fool trigger a thorn tree. Apathy, listlessness and hopelessness lead to carelessness.” He slammed a fist on the table, and rose to his feet. “I don’t intend to die because a bunch of fools on this Council want to give up! If you want to lie down and die, by all means, go ahead. But don’t try to drag me down with you! Or Susan. Or Cesar. Now,” he continued in a suddenly brisk tone, “Which of you wants to get the hell out of the way and go join the deadheads?”

  There was an angry murmur, but no one objected loudly. Each of the Councilors, with the possible exception of Douglas Ryles, was guiltily aware that they actually had been slacking off. After all the fear, all the terror, all the dying, it was not easy to simply pick up where they’d left off. Husbands, wives, sons, daughters, grandchildren, none had been spared. Entire families had been wiped out, and others had only one survivor. But unless they got the colony back on track, there would be no survivors! Most of the Councilors forced down their grief, and set grimly to work.

  ******

  Andrea Cruz walked haltingly through the decaying field. What was she to do now? Andrea was no stranger to hardship, or to farm life. Their small farm in Concepcion, Pampanga in the Philippines had supported Carlos, her, and the two kids, but just barely.

  Tears were streaming down her face. They had saved for two months to be able to afford the trip to Angeles City, to visit the market. They had barely begun shopping when the line of blue-helmeted thugs appeared, and within hours they had been herded into the Classification Center. The man had asked Carlos a lot of questions about their farm, but in the end, they had been classed as "Nonproductive" and then "colonists".

  Life aboard the ship had not been bad, just boring. But there was always food, and this new "Bingo" was fun. But Alyanna had turned fifteen aboard ship, and none of the young men in their dorm pleased Carlos. They agreed to wait until they landed to find her a husband.

  Then came that horrible crash, and Anthony died. Carlos and Andrea clung to Alyanna, and vowed to have another child, a boy, to replace Anthony. They had been given a fine, large farm, and Carlos and Andrea had carefully sowed the Earth-descended grass seed. Carlos had been talking with the Kano Tara, and was certain he could farm an entire hectare. The future looked bright.

  Then, from nowhere, the plague appeared, and in three months Andrea's world ended. Both Carlos and Alyanna had died. Andrea could not even give them the traditional week-long wake, or bury them properly. There were so many dead that only cremation was practical.

  She had reached the edge of the field that had been their future. The darker green of the Earth grasses was encroaching on the lighter-colored, native grass. A few meters away, a large mound, resembling an irregular concrete pillar, rose starkly. She sighed, staring into the distance.

  And what was she to do now? Carlos might have been able to farm a hectare, but she certainly couldn't. Oh, food was still provided on the ship, but it was such a long walk that she only made it once a day. She was thirty-eight years old, and certainly no beauty queen. The privations of her life showed in her face and body. Even the farm would be no attraction to a prospective husband; with all the deaths, farms could be claimed merely by asking.

  Of course, she was not approaching menopause, and could still bear children. Perhaps a man who had lost his own family might be more interested in that than in the sagging of her butt.

  A movement in the grass caught her attention. An animal. They had been warned about the local animals, but this one didn't look dangerous. It simply crouched, watching her curiously.

  Actually, she decided, it was cute. Only about 25 cems long, it looked a lot like the pictures in some of the kids' books back home. She frowned. Yes. Rabbit. That was what it looked like, though its ears
were fan-shaped, not long and pointed like the pictures. And the legs were shorter, though there were six of them. The front legs had long claws, for digging, she decided.

  Andrea bent over and smiled. "Hello," she said in what she hoped was a soothing voice. "Aren't you cute? My Anthony would have loved you. He was six." As she spoke, she pulled a few blades of the native grass, and proffered them, bending over and smiling. "Would you like something to eat?" She took a few steps closer. The rabbit-animal didn't move, but she suddenly noticed another one a few cems away.

  She started to straighten, and suddenly the grass was flooded with the creatures. They raced toward her, and she turned to run, but some of the animals tripped her, and she fell into the writhing horde. And suddenly they were biting and slashing. All of them! Andrea screamed and thrashed, but her screams lasted less than a minute. In less than three, all that remained of Andrea was bones.

  She would never know that her Earthborn flesh had poisoned and killed the entire colony.

  ******

  The field of domes that had before so resembled a cluster of mushrooms now seemed empty, forlorn. The survivors were scattered among hundreds of vacant, empty homes.

  Surprisingly, it was Abdul Arheed’s successor who noticed this. He was a grim, cynical man named Terhoe. Mostly, he sat stone faced at Council meetings, gloomy and forbidding. Cesar wondered how he ever got elected to the Council. Still, he was an improvement on Arheed. He lacked Arheed’s reflexive negativism, and if convinced something was genuinely good for the colonists, could be a strong, effective advocate. Cesar even considered his cynicism a benefit to the Council. Terhoe could often raise negative points that the Council had not considered.

  “If you really want to help raise the peoples’ morale level,” he grated, “relocate ‘em. Now, we have a sprinkling of occupied domes, all full of memories of the dead, surrounded by hundreds of empty, decaying ones once occupied by their friends and families. The people have to walk past all that three times a day to eat, if nothing else. Three times a day they’re reminded of lost friends and family, reminded of the horror and what we’ve lost.

  “Move ‘em out. Tell ‘em we don’t have enough militia left to protect the whole layout, and try to convince ‘em to move in closer. Maybe even concentrate them on one side. Say, near the Colony Building.”

  The Colony Building was the large multi-domed structure near the main entrance to the ship. It had been created by intertwining three of the largest domes, to create a space large enough to hold the entire previous population of the colony. It was, of course, the largest building in the colony.

  Terhoe shrugged. “If we’re ever gonna get ‘em past this, we’ve gotta get ‘em away from the reminders of death. Most of ‘em are city people anyway; it shouldn’t be hard to convince them to gather together close the center of things.”

  The Council agreed unanimously. Even Doug Ryles voted to offer the colonists empty domes closer to the Colony Building. He was also one of the first to move. His dome was not far from the Colony Building anyway, but he was quick to snatch a large dome whose occupants, a family of five, had all died.

  The colonists were preceded by cleanup crews, whose job it was to remove all personal effects and belongings from the now-empty domes. Cesar had convinced the Council that it would be easier to move people into an empty standard dome than to one full of someone else’s personal belongings.

  The personal belongings were moved to the Colony Dome. Personal holos and vids were destroyed, but other belongings were made available to the colonists. It was one thing to move into a house full of someone else’s stuff; it was quite another to visit the colony ‘yard sale’ and pick up a few things. Especially if those few things were not associated with your own friends and neighbors.

  Apathetic survivors were rounded up and goaded, encouraged, and pleaded into resuming work. Some were completely hopeless, so mired in shock, terror and apathy that they could not be roused. There were four suicides.

  But slowly, agonizingly slowly, life flowed back into the colony. Some colonists, the strongest, were able to push their anguish deep inside, and force themselves to once again become involved in life. Others found a blessed surcease of their suffering by burying themselves desperately in study or hard labor.

  The stalled dam once again began to grow toward the fifteen-meter level as newly-trained operators restored the rusting construction machines to action.

  Cesar relieved Boyet as Commander of the Scouts, replacing him with professional hunter from the African District named Jerlson, and he promptly put Tara in charge of farm training. She found seven other westerners that had been farmers in the developed world, and with Cesar’s support, they began bullying the Asian farmers into learning to use the modern techniques and machines. Few of the Asians had much experience with livestock, and the westerners were kept busy.

  The final step in the dam's construction was to run two, one meter pipes from Gouge Lake to the river they had located a klick from the colony site. One was simply an overflow, to make certain the dam would not be overrun. The other pipe was equipped with a pump and filters, which could provide a source of fresh water to keep the lake from stagnating. Now the lake, fed by mostly by rainwater supplemented by river water if necessary, would provide a reservoir for fresh water that could be purified and used for drinking water by the colony.

  The ship was stocked with a variety of aquatic life, of course, and it was hoped that at least some of it would survive on Crashlanding and help prevent the lake from stagnating. The pipes were a precaution. Only time would tell whether the fish and other creatures and plants would survive, and the Council was unwilling to take any chances. Still, the river now provided insurance that a drought or other water emergency would not kill the colony.

  The dam’s completion freed up equipment to begin clearing additional land for farming. It also touched off a near-war on the Council. Douglas Ryles led a faction that favored turning the freed-up equipment to the building of fortifications.

  "We're on a strange and hostile world," Ryles proclaimed. "We've just survived a plague that killed as many of us as the crash. What other threats are waiting for us? We must fortify our position, and build a defense force! We cannot afford to lose even one more colonist!"

  "Ridiculous," Cesar replied. "We're still living on ship's rations. Our most urgent need is to become able to feed ourselves. We have no time to waste in building a wall around the colony. And we certainly do not have the population to waste on building an armed defense force.

  "Once our food supply is secure, then we might consider some sort of Explorer corps, or something. It is important that we begin learning about our new home. But we cannot afford the time, effort, and resources necessary to build some kind of walled city here, and building an army is just absurd."

  "Protecting our people is absurd?" Ryles jeered, "If you're unwilling to defend them, perhaps you should resign, and let someone take over who wants the colony to survive."

  "You've said a lot of stupid things since you joined the Council, Messer Ryles," Vlad said, "But I think you've just set a personal record for stupidity!"

  But the people were frightened of the unknown, and the unknown was all about them. Eventually, Ryles' faction forced approval to fortify the colony, though they were unable to push through the establishment of an armed militia. A Councilman consulted the computer, and returned with the design for a six-sided wall, with diamond-shaped extensions at each corner, boasting that the extensions made it possible for the colony's weapons to cover any part of the wall, thus preventing assaults.

  Cesar shook his head in disgust. "An incredible waste of effort and resources," he complained. "There was a reason they stopped building forts on Earth. The development of aircraft made them useless." But his protests were in vain, and construction began on a fortified wall encircling both the ship and the colony around it.

  Predators were an ongoing concern as they learned about their new world. And pre
dators there were. So far, six people had lost their lives to native life forms. In every case, the life form died as well, poisoned by the human flesh, but that was no consolation to the victim.

  Most worrisome was the small animal the colonists named ‘prairie rat’. Jerlson claimed that they were about the size of Earth rabbits, and closely resembled those creatures, though with claws and razor-sharp pointed teeth in the front of their mouths, and crushing molars near the back.

  The prairie rat was omnivorous, and lived in groups of thousands in large burrows topped by large mounds. Individually, the creatures were no threat to anything as big as a man; but if a man strayed too close to the home burrow or mound, hundreds of the creatures would erupt from holes in the mound or the ground itself, snapping and tearing in a ravening horde. They could strip a man to the bone in less than three minutes. The mounds themselves were obvious and not hard to avoid; but the burrows often extended meters beyond the mound, underground and unnoticeable. It was wise to give prairie-rat mounds a wide berth!

  The alpha predator seemed to be something the colonists were calling “wolf lizards.” Overall, they most closely resembled two-meter lizards, with muscular tails and eight long, wide-set, spidery legs. The front legs were adapted for grasping and slashing, and the head and jaws more closely resembled the terrestrial wolf than a terrestrial crocodilian. For short distances, it could run faster than a man. This was no lazy, cold-blooded ambush hunter, but a fast, savage predator. It was also large enough to view man as prey.