Zoe's Tale

by John Scalzi

  So you’ve conditioned the soil and kept all your animals and dumb humans from gorging on the poisonous scenery: Now it’s time to plant, plant, plant your crops like your life depended on it, because it does. To bring this point home, the colonist training material is filled with pictures of gaunt colonists who messed up their plantings and ended up a lot thinner (or worse) after their planet’s winter. The Colonial Union won’t bail you out—if you fail, you fail, sometimes at the cost of your own life.

  You’ve planted and tilled and harvested, and then you do it again, and you keep doing it—and all the while you’re also building infrastructure, because one of the major roles of a seed colony is to prepare the planet for the next, larger wave of colonists, who show up a couple of standard years later. I assume they land, look around at everything you’ve created, and say, “Well, colonizing doesn’t look that hard.” At which point you get to punch them.

  And through this all, and in the back of your mind, is this little fact: Colonies are at their most vulnerable to attack when they’re new. There’s a reason humans colonize Class Six planets, where the biosystem might kill them, and even Class Twelve planets, where just about everything else will kill them too. It’s because there are a lot of other intelligent races out there who have the same habitation needs as we have, and we all want as many planets as we can grab. And if someone else is already there, well. That’s just something to work around.

  I knew this very well. And so did John and Jane.

  But it was something I wonder if other people—either my age or older—really understood; understood that Class Six planet or not, conditioned soil or not, planted crops or not, everything they’ve done and worked for doesn’t matter much when a spacecraft shows up in your sky, and it’s filled with creatures who’ve decided they want your planet, and you’re in the way. Maybe it’s not something you can understand until it happens.

  Or maybe when it comes down to it people just don’t think about it because there’s nothing to do about it. We’re not soldiers, we’re colonists. Being a colonist means accepting the risk. And once you’ve accepted the risk, you might as well not think about it until you have to.

  And during our week on the Magellan, we certainly didn’t have to. We were having fun—almost too much fun, to be honest about it. I suspected we were getting an unrepresentative view of colony life. I mentioned this to Dad, while we watched the final game of the dodgeball tournament, in which the Dragons were raining rubbery red doom on the previously undefeated Slime Molds, the team Magdy was on. I was perfectly fine with this; Magdy had gotten insufferable about his team’s winning streak. Humility would be a good thing for the boy.

  “Of course this is unrepresentative,” Dad said. “Do you think you’re going to have time to be playing dodgeball when we get to Roanoke?”

  “I don’t just mean dodgeball,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “But I don’t want you to worry about it. Let me tell you a story.”

  “Oh, goody,” I said. “A story.”

  “So sarcastic,” Dad said. “When I first left Earth and joined the Civil Defense Forces, we had a week like this. We were given our new bodies—those green ones, like General Rybicki still has—and we were given the order to have fun with them for an entire week.”

  “Sounds like a good way to encourage trouble,” I said.

  “Maybe it is,” Dad said. “But mostly it did two things. The first was to get us comfortable with what our new bodies could do. The second was to give us some time to enjoy ourselves and make friends before we had to go to war. To give us a little calm before the storm.”

  “So you’re giving us this week to have fun before you send us all to the salt mines,” I said.

  “Not to the salt mines, but certainly to the fields,” Dad said, and motioned out to the kids still hustling about on the dodge-ball court. “I don’t think it’s entirely sunk into the heads of a lot of your new friends that when we land, they’re going to be put to work. This is a seed colony. All hands needed.”

  “I guess it’s a good thing I got a decent education before I left Huckleberry,” I said.

  “Oh, you’ll still go to school,” Dad said. “Trust me on that, Zoë. You’ll just work, too. And so will all your friends.”

  “Monstrously unfair,” I said. “Work and school.”

  “Don’t expect a lot of sympathy from us,” Dad said. “While you’re sitting down and reading, we’re going to be out there sweating and toiling.”

  “Who’s this ‘we’?” I said. “You’re the colony leader. You’ll be administrating.”

  “I farmed when I was ombudsman back in New Goa,” Dad said.

  I snorted. “You mean you paid for the seed grain and let Chaudhry Shujaat work the field for a cut.”

  “You’re missing the point,” Dad said. “My point is that once we get to Roanoke we’ll all be busy. What’s going to get us through it all are our friends. I know it worked that way for me in the CDF. You’ve made new friends this last week, right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Would you want to start your life on Roanoke without them?” Dad asked.

  I thought of Gretchen and Enzo and even Magdy. “Definitely not,” I said.

  “Then this week did what it was supposed to do,” Dad said. “We’re on our way from being colonists from different worlds to being a single colony, and from being strangers to being friends. We’re all going to need each other now. We’re in a better position to work together. And that’s the practical benefit to having a week of fun.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I can see how you weaved a subtle web of interpersonal connection here.”

  “Well, you know,” Dad said, with that look in his eye that said that yes, he did catch that snarky reference. “That’s why I run things.”

  “Is that it?” I asked.

  “It’s what I tell myself, anyway,” he said.

  The Dragons made the last out against the Slime Molds and started celebrating. The crowd of colonists watching were cheering as well, and getting themselves into the mood for the really big event of the night: the skip to Roanoke, which would happen in just under a half hour.

  Dad stood up. “This is my cue,” he said. “I’ve got to get ready to do the award presentation to the Dragons. A shame. I was pulling for the Slime Molds. I love that name.”

  “Try to make it through the disappointment,” I said.

  “I’ll try,” he said. “You going to stay around for the skip?”

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “Everyone’s going to stay around for the skip. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

  “Good,” Dad said. “Always a good idea to confront change with your eyes open.”

  “You think it’s really going to be that different?” I asked.

  Dad kissed the top of my head and gave me a hug. “Sweetie, I know it’s going to be that different. What I don’t know is how much more different it’s going to be after that.”

  “I guess we’ll find out,” I said.

  “Yes, and in about twenty-five minutes,” Dad said, and then pointed. “Look, there’s your mom and Savitri. Let’s ring in the new world together, shall we?”

  PART II

  TWELVE

  There was a rattle and then a thump and then a whine as the shuttle’s lifters and engines died down. That was it; we had landed on Roanoke. We were home, for the very first time.

  “What’s that smell?” Gretchen said, and wrinkled her nose.

  I took a sniff and did some nose wrinkling of my own. “I think the pilot landed in a pile of rancid socks,” I said. I calmed Babar, who was with us and who seemed excited about something; maybe he liked the smell.

  “That’s the planet,” said Anna Faulks. She was one of the Magellan crew, and had been down to the planet several times, unloading cargo. The colony’s base camp was almost ready for the colonists; Gretchen and I, as children of colony leaders, were being allowed to come down on one of the last
cargo shuttles rather than having to take a cattle car shuttle with everyone else. Our parents had already been on planet for days, supervising the unloading. “And I’ve got news for you,” Faulks said. “This is about as pretty as the smells get around here. When you get a breeze coming in from the forest, then it gets really bad.”

  “Why?” I asked. “What does it smell like then?”

  “Like everyone you know just threw up on your shoes,” Faulks said.

  “Wonderful,” Gretchen said.

  There was a grinding clang as the massive doors of the cargo shuttle opened. There was a slight breeze as the air in the cargo bay puffed out into the Roanoke sky. And then the smell really hit us.

  Faulks smiled at us. “Enjoy it, ladies. You’re going to be smelling it every day for the rest of your lives.”

  “So are you,” Gretchen said to Faulks.

  Faulks stopped smiling at us. “We’re going to start moving these cargo containers in a couple of minutes,” she said. “You two need to clear out and get out of our way. It would be a shame if your precious selves got squashed underneath them.” She turned away from us and started toward the rest of the shuttle cargo crew.

  “Nice,” I said, to Gretchen. “I don’t think now was a smart time to remind her that she’s stuck here.”

  Gretchen shrugged. “She deserved it,” she said, and started toward the cargo doors.

  I bit the inside of my cheek and decided not to comment. The last several days had made everyone edgy. This is what happens when you know you’re lost.

  On the day we skipped to Roanoke, this is how Dad broke the news that we were lost.

  “Because I know there are rumors already, let me say this first: We are safe,” Dad said to the colonists. He stood on the platform where just a couple of hours earlier we had counted down the skip to Roanoke. “The Magellan is safe. We are not in any danger at the moment.”

  Around us the crowd visibly relaxed. I wondered how many of them caught the “at the moment” part. I suspected John put it in there for a reason.

  He did. “But we are not where we were told we would be,” he said. “The Colonial Union has sent us to a different planet than we had expected to go to. It did this because it learned that a coalition of alien races called the Conclave were planning to keep us from colonizing, by force if necessary. There is no doubt they would have been waiting for us when we skipped. So we were sent somewhere else: to another planet entirely. We are now above the real Roanoke.

  “We are not in danger at the moment,” John said. “But the Conclave is looking for us. If it finds us it will try to take us from here, again likely by force. If it cannot remove us, it will destroy the colony. We are safe now, but I won’t lie to you. We are being hunted.”

  “Take us back!” someone shouted. There were murmurings of agreement.

  “We can’t go back,” John said. “Captain Zane has been remotely locked out of the Magellan’s control systems by the Colonial Defense Forces. He and his crew will be joining our colony. The Magellan will be destroyed once we have landed ourselves and all our supplies on Roanoke. We can’t go back. None of us can.”

  The room erupted in angry shouts and discussions. Dad eventually calmed them down. “None of us knew about this. I didn’t. Jane didn’t. Your colony representatives didn’t. And certainly Captain Zane didn’t. This was kept from all of us equally. The Colonial Union and the Colonial Defense Forces have decided for reasons of their own that it is safer to keep us here than to bring us back to Phoenix. Whether we agree with this or not, this is what we have to work with.”

  “What are we going to do?” Another voice from the crowd.

  Dad looked out in the direction the voice came from. “We’re going to do what we came here to do in the first place,” he said. “We’re going to colonize. Understand this: When we all chose to colonize, we knew there were risks. You all know that seed colonies are dangerous places. Even without this Conclave searching for us, our colony would still have been at risk for attack, still a target for other races. None of this has changed. What has changed is that the Colonial Union knew ahead of time who was looking for us and why. That allowed them to keep us safe in the short run. It gives an advantage in the long run. Because now we know how to keep ourselves from being found. We know how to keep ourselves safe.”

  More murmurings from the crowd. Just to the right of me a woman asked, “And just how are we going to keep ourselves safe?”

  “Your colonial representatives are going to explain that,” John said. “Check your PDAs; each of you has a location on the Magellan where you and your former worldmates will meet with your representative. They’ll explain to you what we’ll need to do, and answer the questions you have from there. But there is one thing I want to be clear about. This is going to require cooperation from everyone. It’s going to require sacrifice from everyone. Our job of colonizing this world was never going to be easy. It’s just become a lot harder.

  “But we can do it,” Dad said, and the forcefulness with which he said it seemed to surprise some people in the crowd. “What’s being asked of us is hard, but it’s not impossible. We can do it if we work together. We can do it if we know we can rely on each other. Wherever we’ve come from, we all have to be Roanokers now. This isn’t how I would have chosen for this to happen. But this is how we are going to have to make it work. We can do this. We have to do this. We have to do it together.”

  I stepped out of the shuttle, and put my feet on the ground of the new world. The ground’s mud oozed over the top of my boot. “Lovely,” I said. I started walking. The mud sucked at my feet. I tried not to think of the sucking as a larger metaphor. Babar bounded off the shuttle and commenced sniffing his surroundings. He was happy, at least.

  Around me, the Magellan crew was on the job. Other shuttles that had landed before were disgorging their cargo; another shuttle was coming in for a landing some distance away. The cargo containers, standard-sized, littered the ground. Normally, once the contents of the containers were taken out, the containers would be sent back up in the shuttles to be reused; waste not, want not. This time, there was no reason to take them back up to the Magellan. It wasn’t going back; these containers wouldn’t ever be refilled. And as it happened, some of these containers wouldn’t even be unpacked; our new situation here on Roanoke didn’t make it worth the effort.

  But it didn’t mean that the containers didn’t have a purpose; they did. That purpose was in front of me, a couple hundred meters away, where a barrier was forming, a barrier made from the containers. Inside the barrier would be our new temporary home; a tiny village, already named Croatoan, in which all twenty-five hundred of us—and the newly-resentful Magellan crew—would be stuck while Dad, Mom and the other colony leaders did a survey of this new planet to see what we needed to do in order to live on it.

  As I watched, some of the Magellan crew were moving one of the containers into place into the barrier, using top lifters to set the container in place and then turning off their power and letting the container fall a couple of millimeters to the ground with a thump. Even from this distance I felt the vibration in the ground. Whatever was in that container, it was heavy. Probably farming equipment that we weren’t allowed to use anymore.

  Gretchen had already gotten far ahead of me. I thought about racing to catch up with her but then noticed Jane coming out from behind the newly placed container and talking to one of the Magellan crew. I walked toward her instead.

  When Dad talked about sacrifice, in the immediate term he was talking about two things.

  First: no contact between Roanoke and the rest of the Colonial Union. Anything we sent back in the direction of the Colonial Union was something that could give us away, even a simple skip drone full of data. Anything sent to us could give us away, too. This meant we were truly isolated: no help, no supplies, not even any mail from friends and loved ones left behind. We were alone.

  At first this didn’t seem like much of a big deal.
After all, we left our old lives behind when we became colonists. We said good-bye to the people who we weren’t taking with us, and most of us knew it would be a very long time if ever until we saw those people again. But even for all that, the lines weren’t completely severed. A skip drone was supposed to leave the colony on a daily basis, carrying letters and news and information back to the Colonial Union. A skip drone was supposed to arrive on a daily basis, too, with mail, and news and new shows and songs and stories and other ways that we could still feel that we were part of humanity, despite being stuck on a colony, planting corn.

  And now, none of that. It was all gone. The no new stories and music and shows were what hit you first—a bad thing if you were hooked on a show or band before you left and were hoping to keep up with it—but then you realized that what it really meant was from now on you wouldn’t know anything about the lives of the people you left behind. You wouldn’t see a beloved baby nephew’s first steps. You wouldn’t know if your grandmother had passed away. You wouldn’t see the recordings your best friend took of her wedding, or read the stories that another friend was writing and desperately trying to sell, or see pictures of the places you used to love, with the people you still love standing in the foreground. All of it was gone, maybe forever.

  When that realization hit, it hit people hard—and an even harder hit was the realization that everyone else that any of us ever cared about knew nothing about what happened to us. If the Colonial Union wasn’t going to tell us where we were going in order to fool this Conclave thing, they certainly weren’t going to tell everyone else that they had pulled a fast one with our whereabouts. Everyone we ever knew thought we were lost. Some of them probably thought we had been killed. John and Jane and I didn’t have much to worry about on this score—we were each other’s family, and all the family we had—but everyone else had someone who was even now mourning them. Savitri’s mother and grandmother were still alive; the expression on her face when she realized that they probably thought she was dead made me rush over to give her a hug.