Remnant Population

by Elizabeth Moon

  Waking to the light filtering through shutters . . . she stretched luxuriously. Her skin itched slightly, and when she looked it had a faint flush. She would have to wear a shirt again today. But when she looked at her shirts, none of them pleased her. She thought of the houses she’d been in, the things left behind. At Linda’s, there’d been a fringed shawl. Somewhere near there—her mind refused to come up with the name—someone had left a soft blue shirt behind. Or she could make herself a shirt with the leftover fabric in the center.

  Not today. Today she would scavenge again, because she wanted to clear out more of the coolers and find what else useful had been left. She went out into the morning coolness and the fog left behind the rain, no longer worried that someone might see and criticize. The damp eased her sunburn; even when she found the blue shirt she remembered, embroidered with little pink flowers, she hesitated to put it on. Inside, she didn’t need it. She wore it like a cape that day, throwing it over her shoulders when she went from house to house and leaving it off inside.

  In the afternoon, she remembered again that she needed to look for the cattle on the other side of the settlement, near the river. She could check the pump intakes at the same time. She picked up a hat someone had discarded, and slung the shirt over her shoulders.

  The cattle had been pastured between the settlement and the river, where terraforming grasses grew rank in the damp soil. She had had nothing to do with them for years, and had not realized that a stout calf-pen had been built to confine the calves. No one had thought to release them, but two cows had jumped the gate. A third grazed nearby. Inside the pen were two healthy calves, and one that looked thin and ribby. As she watched, it tried to sneak a feed from one of the cows, who butted it away. Ofelia looked at the cow outside the pen. She was not a herder but she thought its udder already looked tighter than those of the cows inside. Farther off, by the river, she saw the brown backs of the other cattle grazing. Perhaps it would be all right. Ofelia didn’t want to worry about it. She opened the gate, standing behind it as the hungry cows surged forward, leading their calves out to grass. The other cow went to her calf, licked it all over. The calf grabbed a teat and started sucking, but Ofelia saw none of the milky foam on its muzzle that would mean it was getting milk.

  Her conscience scolded her. It’s your fault, Ofelia. If only you had bothered to look, even yesterday. It’s because you’re selfish. Willful. Vain. She walked over to check the water trough in the pen, even though she didn’t intend to close any animals in it again. She noticed that the voice of her conscience sounded less like her own and more like . . . whose? Barto’s? Humberto’s? No, because it was older and not completely male. It had shadings of feminine ire, too. She was too tired to worry about it; she only noticed that it had been gone for several days, and now it was back.

  That evening, in the cool twilight, she sat at the kitchen door sniffing the healthy smells from her garden. The new voice murmured, happily, much in the tone of the water that had run in the house-ditch. The old voice lay silent as a sleeping cat. The new voice talked to itself: free, free, free . . . quiet . . . lovely, free, free.

  She dreamed. She had a yellow dress, with ruffles on the shoulders, and yellow socks that matched. She had two yellow bows in her hair. She had a plaid bookbag . . . it was her first day of school. Her mother had stayed up late finishing the dress and the bows. She felt excited, eager. Last year Paulo had started school, and now it was her turn.

  The room smelled of children and steam; it was in the basement of the crowded school, and by noon the ruffles on her yellow dress hung limply. She didn’t care. They had computers here, real ones, and the children were allowed to touch them. Paulo had told her that, but she hadn’t believed him. Now she stood in front of the computer, her fingers splayed on the touchpad, laughing at the colors on the screen. The teacher wanted them to touch the color squares in order, but Ofelia had discovered that you could make the colors drift and merge, and the screen before her was a riot of color.

  Of course, it had been naughty. The teacher had said what to do, and she had done something else. That was wrong. She understood that now. But in her dream, the swirling colors escaped the screen and colored the room, making her memories more vivid than the reality had been. On the other screens, a square of color followed a square of color, pure and predictable, red, green, yellow, blue. On hers . . . a mess, the teacher had said, but she had already heard the other children exclaim over what she could see for herself. Magnificence, glory, all the things they weren’t supposed to have.

  She woke up with tears still wet on her cheeks, and blinked them out of her eyes. Something vividly red swung in and out of view at the window. Dayvine trumpets, in the breeze—the vine on that side of the house must have grown a foot overnight. Barto had insisted on keeping the house free of vines; she lay there and felt a deep happiness work out from her bones at the sight of those flowers dancing in the sunlight.

  FOUR

  Internal memo: Gaai Olaani, Sims Bancorp representative aboard sublight vessel Diang Zhi, to Division Head, Colonial Operations.

  “In accordance with instructions, Colony 3245.12 was evacuated as per regulations. See enclosed appendices A for personnel list, B for equipment abandoned as uneconomic to recover, C for evidence of indigenous biological inhibition of standard terraforming biochemistry, perhaps explaining colony failure, including inadequate reproductive rate. Further research into the effect of local biologicals on the terraforming process should precede an attempt at recolonization. Whoever picks up the franchise might have a claim on us if we don’t file this.”

  Internal memo: Moussi Shar, Vice President for Xenexploration to Guillermo Ansad, Project Manager.

  “I don’t care how reliable your agent, this is something they concocted to worry us. We know Sims didn’t give adequate support of materiel or personnel and they planted their people in a flood plain in the path of tropical storms. If the cows and sheep are still alive, the terraforming didn’t fail. Stick to the schedule.”

  Ofelia was not even sure which day it was that she lost track of time. She had been so busy those first few days—four? Five? And then, when she had all the coolers clean and disconnected, when she had checked each building for fire hazards, when she had established a routine that felt comfortable, she spent some days in a haze of pleasure.

  Day after day, she was doing what she wanted. No interruptions. No angry voices. No demands that she quit this and start that. Day by day the tomatoes swelled from tiny green buttons to fat green globes. Beans pushed out of the wrinkled dry bean flowers, lengthened into fattening green strings. Early squash formed under the flamboyant flowers and puffed up, balloon-like. She worked in the gardens every morning, picking off suckers and leaf-eaters, snapping the slimerods, hardly having to think at all.

  In the afternoons, she made a regular check of the machinery: the waste recycler, the powerplant, the pumps and filters. Though it had not been her duty for years, she had no trouble remembering what to do. So far all the gauges and readouts were in green zones. The power never flickered; the water never ran yellow or murky from the taps. After that daily check, she continued to gather what she wanted from the various buildings, storing things mostly in the center’s sewing rooms. She felt comfortable there; she dozed off sometimes, toward late afternoon, waking when the sun sank behind the trees, alert and ready to look for the animals.

  That bothered her a little; she did not want the animals to be like children, expecting her care. But she would need them, she supposed. She would want meat, more than lay frozen in the big center lockers. She would want new wool to spin. She did not look forward to washing and carding it. But the sheep had already been sheared; she would not have to worry about that until next spring.

  Meantime, she made sure every day that she knew where the animals were. Neither sheep nor cattle strayed from the pastures; they could not eat the native plants. The sheep had been skittish for days after her return; she supposed the Comp
any reps had been noisy and clumsy hunting the ones they killed for their feast. But they went back to their earlier blind trust in her; she had been familiar to them, and now their own shepherds were gone. The cattle, more standoffish to begin with, watched her with alert eyes and spread ears when she walked through the water meadows, but they did not run.

  When she thought about it, she was angry all over again with the Company reps. If they had wanted fresh meat, they could have taken it from the community freezers; they hadn’t had to spook the sheep and leave the mess for her to clean up. Even though they had not known she would be there to do the work, they should not have left such a mess.

  In the evenings, before she was tired enough to sleep, she made herself comfortable clothes from the scraps and ends of others. With no one watching, she found her fingers straying to brighter colors than she had worn for years. The dayvine’s red, the remembered yellow of that childhood dress, the fiery green of young tomato leaves, the cool pearly green of the swelling globes. Barto’s hacked-off trousers went into the recycler; she had her own shorts now, fringed at the bottom.

  The first tomatoes to change color startled her with a recognition of time passing. How long had it been? She tried to count back, but she had no events to prick her memory after the first few days. The machines could tell her, she realized after the first panic. They had an indelible calendar function. And she could enter things in the log, if she wished.

  She didn’t care, really. She would need to know when to plant, although in this climate some plants grew year round, and the machines could tell her. No one would read her report if she did log it, and she was sure she would not want to read her own words.

  Finally she opened the log file and looked. It had been thirty-two days. That seemed too long. She tapped the screen suspiciously. The numbers didn’t change. She scrolled back, to the last regular log report, counting the days on her fingers to be sure. Yes: the last entry had been thirty-two days back, a terse comment. “Log copied onto cube for transport; colony abandoned; surviving personnel evacuated.” Back another thirty days, to the entries before the Company reps arrived. She had never been one to waste time reading the log, let alone writing it, but once she began the entries fascinated her. Someone had bothered to check the machines four times a day and enter all the gauge readings; someone had checked the river level, the temperature, the rainfall, the windspeed. There were brief mentions of the animals—“Another stillborn calf today”—and plants—“No bluemold on corn seedlings this season.”

  Yet so much had been left out. She kept scrolling, looking for the events she remembered. Births were there, and deaths, family transfers, serious illnesses, trauma . . . but no mention of what lay behind them. From “C. Herodis transferred from K. Botha to R. Stephanos” you would think someone had picked up a sack of personal belongings and moved across the street. Ofelia remembered the years of quarrels that had preceded Cara’s departure from the Botha house. The stillborn children, the way Kostan accused her of witchcraft, the way she accused Kostan of withholding his seed for the benefit of “that whore Linda” . . . and Linda’s subsequent revenge on Cara, that had cost the colony their last remaining chickens. Reynaldo was the only man who would dare take Cara in after Kostan threw her out . . . and then she had died a half-year later, and no one had wanted to investigate too closely how someone could fall forward and hit the back of her head on the stone hard enough to kill.

  It made no sense, to have a log that told nothing but numbers and dates. Ofelia hesitated. It had been impressed on all of them that this was the official log, that no one was to enter anything but those assigned the duty, those with training. No one would see what she did, but . . . but it could be right. She could know it was right.

  She peered at the controls. The machine might not accept her changes. But she found the right combination; the display shifted to show only one day’s entry, with an arrow pointing to a space where she could insert something.

  It took most of that day to get the story of Cara and Kostan the way she wanted it. She knew how to tell stories; she knew the shape such a story should have. But to put the words down with her hands, to see them come up on the screen, that was much harder. She kept going back to explain: Kostan’s mother had never liked Cara. His father had. His brother had been involved with Linda. Everything connected, everything had to be in the story, and things she could have conveyed with a wink, a tilt of the head, a shift in voice now looked clumsy and even unbelievable set down in bookwords.

  When she quit, it was already dark. She had spent thirty-two days alone on the planet without noticing it, and today she had not done any of the maintenance. Her back ached; her hips hurt so much it took her a long time to stand. How did those people who worked at desks all day do it? She would not make that mistake again. She went home through a night that felt much darker, though when she looked up she could see the stars clearly. No storms tonight; the air felt mild and moist all around her body.

  Her foot landed on a slimetrail, and she grunted. She hated slipping and sliding, and besides it would make her foot itch. In her own house, she showered, scrubbing at the foot, bracing herself on the wall so she wouldn’t fall. She was aware that she had not worried about that before. All through supper, she could feel that she was holding something away, not letting herself think something. She scraped the plate, washed the dishes, and closed the shutters. Though it was almost too warm inside, she wanted to feel closed-in.

  In bed, in the dark, she relaxed her hold on her thoughts, and let them wander. Thirty-two days. A great fear stood like a mountain on the edge of her mind. Was it coming nearer? No—the odd thing was she had already climbed over it, without even realizing the size or shape of it. This had happened before, with other fears. When she and Caitano first made love . . . when she and Humberto married . . . when the first baby forced its way out of her . . . each time, afterwards, she had been aware of a great fear not so much faced as ignored, passed without notice, without recognition. Here, too.

  I was afraid. She remembered that one silent scream, forced back down her throat as if she had swallowed a child half-birthed. Now, in memory, she would have explored that mountain of her fear, but could not remember it. It stood there, vague and ominous, forever unknowable, at the end of her sight.

  It was better so. Don’t brood over things, her mother had always said. Don’t waste time on the past; it’s already gone, paper on the wind. She had meant the bad times; she also preached the value of remembering all the good.

  Ofelia stretched wide on the bed in the darkness, and considered what she was feeling right now. Her left hip hurt more than the right, and her shoulders felt stiff—she would like to have had someone knead them for her. But was she afraid? No, not anymore. The machines worked. The animals had not all died, and even if they did she would have food enough for years and years. She was not lonely either, not as most people meant it. She had not yet tired of the freedom from the demands others made on her. Yet the next morning, in the garden, she felt tears on her face. Why? She could not tell. The garden itself soothed her. The tomatoes, ripening day by day; one might be ready to eat this very afternoon. The green bean pods, the tall corn with its rich smell that always reminded her of Caitano’s body. It was not that she wanted anyone to talk to her, but she would have liked someone to listen . . . and that thought brought her back to the machine at the center, with its log so full of data and so empty of stories.

  It was too hard to put the stories down in full. It would take the rest of her life, and she would not have finished. She put clues to herself: Eva’s bad headaches. Rosara’s sister’s birthday when the pitcher broke. How she had felt when the second flood destroyed the last of their boats, and no one could venture to the far side of the river, even in the dry season.

  From these clues, she could fill in the whole story—the real story—later. She did not write every day; she wrote when she wanted to, when the memories itched worse than a slimerod trail, when s
he had to see them outside herself to be sure they had an end. Other days, she put only the official sort of entry, noting the readings from the machine gauges, the temperature, the rainfall, the harvest notes.

  She sat on the doorstep, eating another ripe tomato. This year, she would have far more than she could eat. The noon sun lay hot on her feet; she did not move them into the shade, but slid them backwards and forwards until the sun felt exactly like hot shoes, covering just so much of her toes and insteps. Her feet were browner now that she spent longer hours in the open. So were her arms and legs. She put one hand out into the sun, admiring the bracelet she had twined of the dayvine seed capsules. They rattled like tiny castanets. Something stung her back, and itched; she picked up the flyswitch she had made herself of a twig and fabric scraps and brushed her back with it.

  These were the easy days, she knew. It would not be so easy, half a year from now. But she could not believe that. It would always be easy, thanks to the machines. If they kept running. She had checked them every day, and every day they were running, and all the gauges showed green. It must be easier for them, with only one person to maintain.

  Away to the east, a bank of cloud rose to glaring turrets too bright to look at, but the bottoms had a dirty, smeared look. Sea-storms, the big storms of summer; it might rain for days. Some years they missed the colony entirely; some years they had suffered through two or three of them, losing most of a harvest. Though she usually slept in the heat of afternoon, she pushed herself to her feet, sighing, and picked up the basket. She would harvest anything ripe today, and check the machines yet again before the storm arrived.

  That afternoon, fitful gusts turned the leaves of the garden plants over, showing the pale undersides. She picked steadily, moving from house to house. At each, she checked that shutters and doors were closed and barred, that toolsheds were properly secured. A skin of cloud moved across the sky, high up, changing the warm yellow of the sun to a milky glare. The air thickened; she felt breathless, stifled yet shivering from time to time with an odd chill. The house filled with baskets of ripe tomatoes, beans, peppers, squash, gourds, melons; their rich scent lay in drifts. When the first spatter of rain fell, she left off picking, and went to the center.