The Last Colony

by John Scalzi

  The Obin desired consciousness enough that they were willing to risk a war with the Colonial Union to get it. The war was a demand of Charles Boutin, a scientist who was the first to record and store a human consciousness outside the supporting structure of the brain. Boutin was killed by Special Forces before he could give the Obin consciousness on an individual level, but his work was close enough to completion that the Colonial Union was able to strike a deal with the Obin to finish the work. The Obin went from foe to friend overnight, and the Colonial Union came through on Boutin’s work, creating a consciousness implant based on the CDF’s existing BrainPal technology. It was consciousness as an accessory.

  Humans—the few who know the story, anyway—naturally regard Boutin as a traitor, a man whose plan to topple the Colonial Union would have caused the slaughter of billions of humans. The Obin equally and naturally regard him as one of their great racial heroes, a Prometheus figure who gave them not fire but awareness. If you ever needed an argument that heroism is relative, there it is.

  My own feelings on the matter were more complicated. Yes, he was a traitor to his species and deserved to die. He’s also the biological father to Zoë, who I think is as wonderful a human as I’ve met. It’s hard to say that you’re glad the father of your beautiful and terribly clever adopted daughter is dead, even when you know it’s better that he is.

  Given how the Obin feel about Boutin, it’s not in the least surprising they would feel possessive about Zoë; one of their primary treaty demands was, essentially, visitation rights. What eventually got agreed to was a situation where two Obin would live with Zoë and her adopted family. Zoë named them Hickory and Dickory when they arrived. Hickory and Dickory were allowed to use their consciousness implants to record some of their time with Zoë. Those recordings were shared among all the Obin with consciousness implants; in effect, they all shared time with Zoë.

  Jane and I allowed this under very limited conditions while Zoë was too young to really understand what was going on. After Zoë was old enough to grasp the concept it was her decision. Zoë allowed it. She likes the idea of her life being shared with an entire species, although like any teenager she has extended periods of wanting to be left alone. Hickory and Dickory turn their implants off when that happens; no point wasting perfectly good consciousness on time not spent with Zoë. Their wanting to be conscious talking to me alone was something new.

  There was a slight lag between the moment Hickory and Dickory activated their collars, which stored the hardware that housed their consciousness, and the moment the collar communicated with the neural overlay in their brains. It was like watching sleepwalkers wake up. It was also a little creepy. Although not as creepy as what came next: Hickory smiling at me.

  “We will be deeply sad to leave this place,” Hickory said. “Please understand we have lived our entire conscious life here. We feel it strongly within us, as do all Obin. We thank you for allowing us to share your lives with us.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. This seemed a trivial thing for the two Obin to want to discuss with me. “You sound as if you were leaving us. I thought you were to be coming with us.”

  “We are,” Hickory said. “Dickory and I are aware of the burden we carry both to attend to your daughter and to share our experiences with all other Obin. It can be overwhelming. We cannot keep our implants engaged for long, you know. The emotional strain is so great. The implants are not perfect, and our brains have difficulties. We get . . . overstimulated.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “We would not wish to burden you with it,” Hickory said. “And it was not important for you to know. We managed it so that you would not need to know. But recently, both Dickory and I have found that when we turn on our implants, we are immediately overwhelmed with emotion for Zoë, and for you and Lieutenant Sagan.”

  “It’s a stressful time for all of us,” I said.

  Another Obin smile, even more ghastly than the first. “My apologies,” Hickory said. “I have been unclear. Our emotion is not formless anxiety over leaving this place or this planet, or excitement or nervousness about traveling to a new world. It is a very specific thing. It is concern.”

  “I think we all have concerns,” I began, but then stopped when I saw a new expression on Hickory’s face, one I had never noticed before. Hickory looked impatient. Or possibly it was frustrated with me. “I’m sorry, Hickory. Please continue.”

  Hickory stood there for a minute, as if debating something with itself, then abruptly turned from me to confer with Dickory. I spent the time reflecting that suddenly the names that a small child puckishly gave these two creatures several years ago no longer seemed to fit in the slightest.

  “Forgive me, Major,” Hickory said, finally, returning its attention to me. “I regret I may be blunt here. We may be unable to fully express our concern. You may be ignorant of certain facts and it may not be our place to provide them to you. Let me ask you: What do you think is the status of this part of space? The portion in which we the Obin and you the Colonial Union reside among other species.”

  “We’re at war,” I said. “We have our colonies and we try to keep them safe. Other species have their colonies and try to keep them safe, too. We all fight over planets that fit our species’ needs. We all fight each other.”

  “Aah,” Hickory said. “We all fight each other. No alliances? No treaties?”

  “Obviously there are a few,” I said. “We have one with the Obin. Other races may have treaties and allies with a few other species. But generally, yes. We all fight. Why?”

  Hickory’s smile passed from ghastly into rictus territory. “We will tell you what we can,” Hickory said. “We can tell you about things already spoken of. We know that your Secretary of Colonization has claimed that the colony you are calling Roanoke was given to you by the Obin. The planet we call Garsinhir. We know that it is claimed we have taken a planet from you in return.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “There is no such agreement,” Hickory said. “Garsinhir remains Obin territory.”

  “That can’t be right,” I said. “I’ve been to Roanoke. I’ve walked the ground where the colony will be. I think you may be mistaken.”

  “We are not mistaken,” Hickory said.

  “You must be,” I said. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but you two are companions and bodyguards to a teenage human. It’s possible whoever your contacts are at your level don’t have the best information.”

  A flicker of something crossed over Hickory’s face; I suspect it was amusement. “Be assured, Major, that the Obin do not send mere companions to guard and care for Boutin’s child or her family. And be assured that Garsinhir remains in Obin hands.”

  I thought about this. “You’re saying that the Colonial Union is lying about Roanoke,” I said.

  “It’s possible your Secretary of Colonization may be misinformed,” Hickory said. “We cannot say. But whatever the cause of the error, there is an error of fact.”

  “Maybe the Obin are allowing us to colonize your world,” I said. “I understand that your body chemistry makes Obin susceptible to native infections. Having an ally there is better than leaving the world unoccupied.”

  “Perhaps,” Hickory said. Its voice was noncommittal in a very studied way.

  “The colony ship leaves Phoenix Station in two weeks,” I said. “Another week beyond that and we’ll be landing in Roanoke. Even if what you say is true, there’s not anything I can do about it now.”

  “I must apologize again,” Hickory said. “I did not mean to suggest there was anything you could or should do. I would only wish for you to know. And to know at least some of the nature of our concern.”

  “Is there more than that?” I asked.

  “We have said what we can,” Hickory said. “Except for this. We are at your service, Major. Yours, Lieutenant Sagan’s and especially and always Zoë’s. Her father gave us the gift of ourselves. H
e asked a high price, which we willingly would have paid.” I shuddered slightly at this, remembering what the price had been. “He died before that price, that debt could be repaid. We owe that debt now to his daughter, and the new debt accrued in her sharing her life with us. We owe it to her. And we owe it to her family.”

  “Thank you, Hickory,” I said. “I know we are grateful that you and Dickory have served us so well.”

  Hickory’s smile returned. “I regret to say you misunderstand me again, Major. Certainly I and Dickory are at your service and always shall be. But when I say we are at your service, I mean the Obin.”

  “The Obin,” I said. “As in, all of you.”

  “Yes,” said Hickory. “All of us. Until the last of us, if necessary.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry, Hickory. I’m not quite sure what to say to that.”

  “Say that you’ll remember it,” Hickory said. “When the time comes.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “We would ask you to keep this conversation in confidence,” Hickory said. “For now.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “Thank you, Major,” Hickory said. It looked back at Dickory and then back at me. “I fear we have made ourselves overly emotional. We will turn off our implants now, with your permission.”

  “Please,” I said. The two Obin reached up to their necks to switch off their personalities. I watched as the animation slid from their faces, replaced with blank intelligence.

  “We rest now,” Hickory said, and it and its partner left, leaving me in an empty room.

  THREE

  Here’s one way to colonize: You take two hundred or three hundred people, allow them to pack what supplies they see fit, drop them off on the planet of their choice, say “see you,” and then come back a year later—after they’ve all died of malnutrition brought on by ignorance and lack of supplies, or have been wiped out by another species who wants the place for themselves—to pick up the bones.

  This isn’t a very successful way to colonize. In our all-too-short ramp-up period, both Jane and I read enough reports on the demise of wildcat colonies that were designed in just this fashion to be convinced of this salient fact.

  On the other hand you don’t want to drop a hundred thousand people onto a new colony world either, complete with all the comforts of civilization. The Colonial Union has the means to do something like this, if it wanted to. But it doesn’t want to. No matter how close a planet’s gravitational field, circumference, land mass, atmosphere or life chemistry is to Earth’s, or to any other planets humans have as yet colonized, it isn’t Earth, and there’s no practical way of knowing what sort of nasty surprise a planet has in store for humans there. Earth itself has a funny way of devising new diseases and ailments to kill off unwary humans, and there we’re a native species. We’re foreign bodies when we land on new worlds, and we know what any life system does to a foreign body in its midst: it tries to kill it as quickly as possible.

  Here’s an interesting bit of trivia I learned about failed colonies: Not counting wildcat colonies, the number one cause of abandoned human colonies is not territorial disputes with other species; it’s native bugs killing off the settlers. Other intelligent species we can fight off; that’s a battle we understand. Battling an entire ecosystem that’s trying to kill you is an altogether trickier proposition.

  Landing a hundred thousand colonists on a planet just to watch them all die of a fast-moving native infection you can’t cure in time is just a waste of perfectly good colonists.

  Which is not to underestimate territorial disputes. A human colony is exponentially more likely to be attacked in the first two or three years of its lifespan than it is at any other point in time. The colony is focused on creating itself and is vulnerable to attack. The Colonial Defense Forces’ presence at a new colony, while not insignificant, is still a fraction of what it will be once a space station is built above the colony a decade or two later. And the simple fact that someone has colonized a planet makes it rather more attractive to everyone else, because those colonists have done all the hard work of colonization for you. Now all you have to do is scrape them off the planet and take it for your own.

  Landing a hundred thousand colonists on a planet just to have them scraped off it is also a waste of perfectly good colonists. And despite the Colonial Union essentially farming Third World countries on Earth for colonists, if you start losing a hundred thousand colonists every time a new colony fails, eventually you run short of colonists.

  Fortunately there is a happy medium between these two scenarios. It involves taking twenty-five hundred or so colonists, landing them on a new world in the early spring, providing them sustainable and durable technology to address their immediate needs, and giving them the task of both becoming self-sufficient on the new world, and of preparing the world, two or three years down the line, for roughly ten thousand more new colonists. Those second wave colonists will have another five years or so to help prepare for fifty thousand new colonists, and so on.

  There are five formal and initial waves of colonists, by which time the colony ideally has a population of a million or so, spread out over numerous small towns and one or two largish cities. After the fifth wave becomes established and the colony’s infrastructure is established, everything switches to a rolling colonization process. When the population reaches ten million or thereabouts, immigration stops, the colony gets limited self-rule within the CU federal system, and humanity has another bulwark against racial extinction at the hands of a callous universe. That is, if those initial twenty-five hundred survive a hostile ecosystem, attacks from other races, humanity’s own organizational shortcomings and simple, ever-present damn bad luck.

  Twenty-five hundred colonists are numerous enough to start the process of making a world a human world. They are few enough that if they die, the CU can shed a tear and move on. And, indeed, the tear-shedding part of that is strictly optional. It’s an interesting thing, to be both critical and expendable to humanity’s effort to populate the stars. On the whole, I thought, I might have been smarter to stay on Huckleberry.

  “All right, I give up,” I said, pointing to the massive container that was being maneuvered into the cargo hold of the Ferdinand Magellan. “Tell me what that is.”

  Aldo Ferro, the cargo foreman, checked the manifest on his PDA. “That contains all the mixin’s for your colony’s sewage treatment plant,” he said, and pointed at a row of containers. “And those are your sewer pipes, septic tanks and waste transports.”

  “No outhouses for Roanoke,” I said. “We’re going to poo in style.”

  “It’s not a matter of style,” Ferro said. “You’re going to a class-six planet, complete with a noncompatible ecological system. You’re going to need all the fertilizer you can get. That sewage treatment system will take all your biological waste, from crap to carcasses, and make sterile compost for your fields. It’s probably the single most important thing you have on this manifest. Try not to break it.”

  I smiled. “You seem to know a lot about sewage,” I said.

  “Yeah, right,” Ferro said. “More like I know about packing a new colony. I’ve been working in this cargo hold for twenty-five years, and we’ve been transporting new colonies all that time. Give me a manifest and I can tell you what sort of planet the colony’s going to, what its seasons are, how heavy its gravity is and whether that colony is going to make it through its first year. You want to know how I knew your colony had a noncompatible ecosystem? Besides the sewage plant, I mean. That’s standard on any colony.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Ferro tapped something on the PDA screen and handed the screen to me, with a list of containers. “Okay, first off,” Ferro said. “Food stores. Every colony ships with a three-month supply of dry goods and basic foodstuffs for every member of the colony, and another month supply of dry rations, to allow the colony time to start hunting and producing its own food. But you have a six-month supp
ly of foodstuffs and two months of dry rations per colonist. That’s the sort of load out you see for a noncompatible ecosystem, because you can’t eat off the land right away. In fact, it’s actually more than usual for an NCE; usually there’s a four-month supply of dry goods and six weeks of rations.”

  “Why would they give us more food than usual?” I asked. I actually knew the answer to this—I was supposed to be running the colony, after all—but I wanted to see if Ferro was as good as he thought he was.

  Ferro smiled. “Your clue is right in front of you, Mr. Perry. You’re also shipping with a double load of soil conditioners and fertilizers. That tells me the soil there is no good, as is, for growing human food. That extra food buys you time if some idiot doesn’t condition a field properly.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Yup,” Ferro agreed. “Final thing: You’ve got more than the usual load out in your medical supplies for poison treatment, which is typical for NCEs. You’ve also got a hell of a lot of veterinary detoxifiers, too. Which reminds me,” Ferro took back the PDA and pulled up a new list of containers. “Double load of feed for your livestock.”

  “You are a master of manifests, Ferro,” I said. “You ever think of colonizing?”

  “Hell, no,” Ferro said. “I’ve seen enough of these new colonies go out to know that some of them don’t make it. I’m happy to load you up and load you out and then wave good-bye and come home to Phoenix to my wife and cat. No offense, Mr. Perry.”

  “None taken,” I said, and nodded to his manifest. “So, you said you can tell from a manifest whether a colony is going to make it. How about us?”