Zoe's Tale

by John Scalzi

  I didn’t even want to think about how the Obin were handling our disappearance. I just hoped the Colonial Union ambassador to the Obin had on clean underwear when the Obin came to call.

  The second sacrifice was harder.

  “You’re here,” Jane said, as I walked up to her. She reached down to pet Babar, who had come bounding up to her.

  “Apparently,” I said. “Is it always like this?”

  “Like what?” Jane said.

  “Muddy,” I said. “Rainy. Cold. Sucky.”

  “We’re arriving at the beginning of spring here,” Jane said. “It’s going to be like this for a little while. I think things will get better.”

  “You think so?” I asked.

  “I hope so,” Jane said. “But we don’t know. The information we have on the planet is slim. The Colonial Union doesn’t seem to have done a normal survey here. And we won’t be able to put up a satellite to track weather and climate. So we have to hope it gets better. It would be better if we could know. But hoping is what we have. Where’s Gretchen?”

  I nodded in the direction I saw her go. “I think she’s looking for her dad,” I said.

  “Everything all right between you two?” Jane said. “You’re rarely without each other.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Everyone’s twitchy these last few days, Mom. So are we, I guess.”

  “How about your other friends?” Jane asked.

  I shrugged. “I haven’t seen too much of Enzo in the last couple of days,” I said. “I think he’s taking the idea of being stranded out here pretty badly. Even Magdy hasn’t been able to cheer him up. I went to go visit him a couple of times, but he doesn’t want to say much, and it’s not like I’ve been that cheerful myself. He’s sending me poems, still, though. On paper. He has Magdy deliver them. Magdy hates that, by the way.”

  Jane smiled. “Enzo’s a nice boy,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “I think I didn’t pick a great time to decide to make him my boyfriend, though.”

  “Well, you said it, everyone’s twitchy the last few days,” Jane said. “It’ll get better.”

  “I hope so,” I said, and I did. I did moody and depressed with the best of them, but even I have my limits, and I was getting near them. “Where’s Dad? And where’s Hickory and Dickory?” The two of them had gone down in one of the first shuttles with Mom and Dad; between them making themselves scarce on the Magellan and being away for the last few days, I was starting to miss them.

  “Hickory and Dickory we have out doing a survey of the surrounding area,” Jane said. “They’re helping us get a lay of the land. It keeps them busy and useful, and keeps them out of the way of most of the colonists at the moment. I don’t think any of them are feeling very friendly toward nonhumans at the moment, and we’d just as soon avoid someone trying to pick a fight with them.”

  I nodded at this. Anyone who tried to pick a fight with Hickory or Dickory was going to end up with something broken, at least. Which would not make the two of them popular, even (or maybe especially) if they were in the right. Mom and Dad were smart to get them out of the way for now.

  “Your dad is with Manfred Trujillo,” Jane said, mentioning Gretchen’s dad. “They’re laying out the temporary village. They’re laying it out like a Roman Legion encampment.”

  “We’re expecting an attack from the Visigoths,” I said.

  “We don’t know what to expect an attack from,” Jane said. The matter-of-fact way she said it did absolutely nothing to cheer me up. “I expect you’ll find Gretchen with them. Just head into the encampment and you’ll find them.”

  “It’d be easier if I could just ping Gretchen’s PDA and find her that way,” I said.

  “It would be,” Jane agreed. “But we don’t get to do that anymore. Try using your eyes instead.” She gave me a quick peck on the temple and then walked off to talk to the Magellan crew. I sighed and then headed into the encampment to find Dad.

  The second sacrifice: Every single thing we had with a computer in it, we could no longer use. Which meant we couldn’t use most things we had.

  The reason was radio waves. Every piece of electronic equipment communicated with every other piece of electronic equipment through radio waves. Even the tiny radio transmissions they sent could be discovered if someone was looking hard enough, as we were assured that they were. But just turning off the connecting capability was not enough, since we were told that not only did our equipment use radio waves to communicate with each other, they used them internally to have one part of the equipment talk to other parts.

  Our electronics couldn’t help transmitting evidence that we were here, and if someone knew what frequencies they used to work, they could be detected simply by sending the radio signal that turned them on. Or so we were told. I’m not an engineer. All I knew was that a huge amount of our equipment was no longer usable—and not just unusable, but a danger to us.

  We had to risk using this equipment to land on Roanoke and set up the colony. We couldn’t very well land shuttles without using electronics; it wasn’t the trip down that would be a problem, but the landings would be pretty tricky (and messy). But once everything was on the ground, it was over. We went dark, and everything we had in cargo containers that contained electronics would stay in those containers. Possibly forever.

  This included data servers, entertainment monitors, modern farm equipment, scientific tools, medical tools, kitchen appliances, vehicles and toys. And PDAs.

  This was not a popular announcement. Everyone had PDAs, and everyone had their lives in them. PDAs were where you kept your messages, your mail, your favorite shows and music and reading. It’s how you connected with your friends, and played games with them. It’s how you made recordings and video. It’s how you shared the stuff you loved, to the people you liked. It was everyone’s outboard brain.

  And suddenly they were gone; every single PDA among the colonists—slightly more than one per person—was collected and accounted for. Some folks tried to hide them; at least one colonist tried to sock the Magellan crew member who’d been assigned to collect them. That colonist spent the night in the Magellan brig, courtesy of Captain Zane; rumor had it the captain cranked down the temperature in the brig and the colonist spent the night shivering himself awake.

  I sympathized with the colonist. I’d been without my PDA for three days now and I still kept catching myself reaching for it when I wanted to talk to Gretchen, or listen to some music, or to check to see if Enzo had sent me something, or any one of a hundred different things I used my PDA for on a daily basis. I suspected that part of the reason people were so cranky was because they’d had their outboard brains amputated; you don’t realize how much you use your PDA until the stupid thing is gone.

  We were all outraged that we didn’t have our PDAs anymore, but I had this itchy feeling in the back of my brain that one of the reasons people were so worked up about their PDAs was that it kept them from having to think about the fact that so much of the equipment we needed to use to survive, we couldn’t use at all. You can’t just disconnect the computers from our farm equipment; it can’t run without it, it’s too much a part of the machine. It’d be like taking out your brain and expecting your body to get along without it. I don’t think anyone really wanted to face the fact of just how deep the trouble was.

  In fact, only one thing was going to keep all of us alive: the two hundred and fifty Colonial Mennonites who were part of our colony. Their religion had kept them using outdated and antique technology; none of their equipment had computers, and only Hiram Yoder, their colony representative, had used a PDA at all (and only then, Dad explained to me, to stay in contact with other members of the Roanoke colonial council). Working without electronics wasn’t a state of deprivation for them; it’s how they lived. It made them the odd folks out on the Magellan, especially among us teens. But now it was going to save us.

  This didn’t reassure everyone. Magdy and a few of his less appealin
g friends pointed to the Colonial Mennonites as evidence that the Colonial Union had been planning to strand us all along and seemed to resent them for it, as if they had known it all along rather than being just as surprised as the rest of us. Thus we confirmed that Magdy’s way of dealing with stress was to get angry and pick nonexistent fights; his near-brawl at the beginning of the trip was no fluke.

  Magdy got angry when stressed. Enzo got withdrawn. Gretchen got snappish. I wasn’t entirely sure how I got.

  “You’re mopey,” Dad said to me. We were standing outside the tent that was our new temporary home.

  “So that’s how I get,” I said. I watched Babar wander around the area, looking for places to mark his territory. What can I say. He’s a dog.

  “I’m not following you,” Dad said. I explained how my friends were acting since we’d gotten lost. “Oh, okay,” Dad said. “That makes sense. Well, if it’s any comfort, if I have the time to do anything else but work, I think I would be mopey, too.”

  “I’m thrilled it runs in the family,” I said.

  “We can’t even blame it on genetics,” Dad said. He looked around. All around us were cargo containers, stacks of tents under tarps and surveyor’s twine, blocking off where the streets of our new little town will be. Then he looked back to me. “What do you think of it?”

  “I think this is what it looks like when God takes a dump,” I said.

  “Well, yes, now it does,” Dad said. “But with a lot of work and a little love, we can work our way up to being a festering pit. And what a day that will be.”

  I laughed. “Don’t make me laugh,” I said. “I’m trying to work on this mopey thing.”

  “Sorry,” Dad said. He wasn’t actually sorry in the slightest. He pointed at the tent next to ours. “At the very least, you’ll be close to your friend. This is Trujillo’s tent. He and Gretchen will be living here.”

  “Good,” I said. I had caught up with Dad with Gretchen and her dad; the two of them had gone off to look at the little river that ran near the edge of our soon-to-be settlement to find out the best place to put the waste collector and purifier. No indoor plumbing for the first few weeks at least, we were told; we’d be doing our business in buckets. I can’t begin to tell you how excited I was to hear that. Gretchen had rolled her eyes a little bit at her dad as he dragged her off to look at likely locations; I think she was regretting taking the early trip. “How long until we start bringing down the other colonists?” I asked.

  Dad pointed. “We want to get the perimeter set up first,” he said. “We’ve been here a couple of days and nothing dangerous has popped out of those woods over there, but I think we want to be safer rather than sorrier. We’re getting the last containers out of the cargo hold tonight. By tomorrow we should have the perimeter completely walled and the interior blocked out. So two days, I think. In three days everyone will be down. Why? Bored already?”

  “Maybe,” I said. Babar had come around to me and was grinning up at me, tongue lolling and paws caked with mud. I could tell he was trying to decide whether or not to leap up on two legs and get mud all over my shirt. I sent him my best don’t even think about it telepathy and hoped for the best. “Not that it’s any less boring on the Magellan right now. Everyone’s in a foul mood. I don’t know, I didn’t expect colonizing to be like this.”

  “It’s not,” Dad said. “We’re sort of an exceptional case here.”

  “Oh, to be like everyone else, then,” I said.

  “Too late for that,” Dad said, and then motioned at the tent. “Jane and I have the tent pretty well set up. It’s small and crowded, but it’s also cramped. And I know how much you like that.” This got another smile from me. “I’ve got to join Manfred and then talk to Jane, but after that we can all have lunch and try to see if we can’t actually enjoy ourselves a little. Why don’t you go in and relax until we get back. At least that way you don’t have to be mopey and windblown.”

  “All right,” I said. I gave Dad a peck on the cheek, and then he headed off toward the creek. I went inside the tent, Babar right behind.

  “Nice,” I said to Babar, as I looked around. “Furnished in tasteful Modern Refugee style. And I love what they’ve done with those cots.”

  Babar looked up at me with that stupid doggy grin of his and then leaped up on one of the cots and laid himself down.

  “You idiot,” I said. “You could have at least wiped off your paws.” Babar, notably unconcerned with criticism, yawned and then closed his eyes.

  I got on the cot with him, brushed off the chunkier bits of mud, and then used him as a pillow. He didn’t seem to mind. And a good thing, too, since he was taking up half my cot.

  “Well, here we are,” I said. “Hope you like it here.”

  Babar made some sort of snuffling noise. Well said, I thought.

  Even after everything was explained to us, there were still some folks who had a hard time getting it through their heads that we were cut off and on our own. In the group sessions headed by each of the colonial representatives, there was always someone (or someones) who said things couldn’t be as bad as Dad was making them out to be, that there had to be some way for us to stay in contact with the rest of humanity or at least use our PDAs.

  That’s when the colony representatives sent each colonist the last file their PDAs would receive. It was a video file, shot by the Conclave and sent to every other race in our slice of space. In it, the Conclave leader, named General Gau, stood on a rise over-looking a small settlement. When I first saw the video I thought it was a human settlement, but was told that it was a settlement of Whaid colonists, the Whaid being a race I knew nothing about. What I did know was that their homes and buildings looked like ours, or close enough to ours not to matter.

  This General Gau stood on the rise just long enough for you to wonder what it was he was looking at down there in the settlement, and the settlement disappeared, turned into ash and fire by what seemed like a thousand beams of light stabbing down from what we were told were hundreds of spaceships floating high above the colony. In just a few seconds there was nothing left of the colony, or the people who lived in it, other than a rising column of smoke.

  No one questioned the wisdom of hiding after that.

  I don’t know how many times I watched the video of the Conclave attack; it must have been a few dozen times before Dad came up to me and made me hand over my PDA—no special privileges just because I was the colony leader’s kid. But I wasn’t watching because of the attack. Or, well, I should say that wasn’t really what I was looking at when I watched it. What I was looking at was the figure, standing on the rise. The creature who ordered the attack. The one who had the blood of an entire colony on his hands. I was looking at this General Gau. I was wondering what he was thinking when he gave the order. Did he feel regret? Satisfaction? Pleasure? Pain?

  I tried to imagine what it would take to order the deaths of thousands of innocent people. I felt happy that I couldn’t wrap my brain around it. I was terrified that this general could. And that he was out there. Hunting us.

  THIRTEEN

  Two weeks after we landed on Roanoke, Magdy, Enzo, Gretchen and I went for a walk.

  “Watch where you land,” Magdy told us. “There are some big rocks down here.”

  “Great,” Gretchen said. She shined her pocket light—acceptable technology, no computer equipment in it, just an old-fashioned LED—at the ground, looking for a place to land, and then hopped down from the edge of the container wall, aiming for her preferred spot. Enzo and I heard the oof as she landed, and then a bit of cursing.

  “I told you to watch where you landed,” Magdy said, shining his light on her.

  “Shut it, Magdy,” she said. “We shouldn’t even be out here. You’re going to get us all in trouble.”

  “Yeah, well,” Magdy said. “Your words would have more moral authority if you weren’t actually out here with me.” He flicked his light up off of Gretchen and toward me and Enzo, still
up on the container wall. “You two planning to join us?”

  “Will you please stop with the light?” Enzo said. “The patrol is going to see it.”

  “The patrol is on the other side of the container wall,” Magdy said. “Although if you don’t hurry it up, that’s not going to be the case for long. So move it.” He flicked the light back and forth quickly in Enzo’s face, making an annoying strobe effect. Enzo sighed and slid down off the container wall; I heard the muffled thump a second later. Which left me, feeling suddenly very exposed on the top of the containers that were the defensive perimeter around our little village—and also the frontier beyond which we were not allowed to go at night.

  “Come on,” Enzo whispered up to me. He, at least, remembered we weren’t supposed to be out and modulated his voice accordingly. “Jump down. I’ll catch you.”

  “Are you dumb?” I asked, also in a whispery voice. “You’ll end up with my shoes in your eye sockets.”

  “It was a joke,” Enzo said.

  “Fine,” I said. “Don’t catch me.”

  “Jeez, Zoë,” Magdy said, in a definite nonwhisper. “Will you jump already?”

  I hopped off the container wall, down the three meters or so from the top, and tumbled a little when I landed. Enzo flicked his light on me, and offered me a hand up. I took it and squinted up at him as he pulled me up. Then I flicked my own light over to where Magdy was. “Jerk,” I told him.

  Magdy shrugged. “Come on,” he said, and started along the perimeter of the wall toward our destination.