by John Scalzi
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 Their religion had kept them using outdated and antique technology; none of their equipment had computers, and only Hiram Yoder, their colony representative, had used a PDA at all (and only then, Dad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 appealing 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 Enzo got withdrawn.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 thousan
ds 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.
A few minutes later we were all flashing our lights into a hole.
"Wow," Gretchen said. "We've just broken curfew and risked being accidentally shot by the night guard for this. A hole in the ground. I'm picking our next field trip, Magdy."
Magdy snorted and knelt down into the hole. "If you actually paid attention to anything, you'd know that this hole has the council in a panic," Magdy said. "Something dug this out the other night while the patrol wasn't watching. Something was trying to get in to the colony from out here." He took his light and moved it up the nearest container until he spotted something. "Look. There are scratches on the container. Something tried to go over the top, and then when it couldn't it tried to go under."
"So what you're saying is that we're out here now with a bunch of predators," I said.
"It doesn't have to be a predator," Magdy said. "Maybe it's just something that likes to dig."
I flicked my light back up to the claw marks. "Yeah, that's a reasonable theory."
"We couldn't have seen this during the day?" Gretchen asked. "When we could see the things that can leap out and eat us?"
Magdy motioned his light over to me. "Her mom had her security people around it all day long. They weren't letting anybody else near it. Besides, whatever made this hole is long gone now."
"I'll remind you that you said that when something tears out your throat," Gretchen said.
"Relax," Magdy said. "I'm prepared. And anyway, this hole is just the opening act. My dad is friends with some of the security folks. One of them told him that just before they closed everything up for the night, they saw a herd of those fanties over in the woods. I say we go look."
"We should get back," Enzo said. "We shouldn't even be out here, Magdy. If they find us out there, we're all going to catch hell. We can see the fanties tomorrow. When the sun is up, and we can actually see them."
"Tomorrow they'll be awake and foraging," Magdy said. "And there's no way we're going to be able to do anything other than look at them through binoculars." Magdy pointed at me again. "Let me remind you that her parents have kept us cooped up for two weeks now, waiting to find out if anything might bruise us on this planet."
"Or kill us," I said. "Which would be a problem."
Magdy waved this away. "My point is that if we actually want to see these things—actually get close enough to them that we can get a good look at them—we have to do it now. They're asleep, no one knows we're gone, and we'll be back before anyone misses us."
"I still think we should go back," Enzo said.
"Enzo, I know this is taking away from valuable make-out time with your girlfriend," Magdy said, "but I thought you might want to explore something other than Zoë's tonsils for once."
Magdy was very lucky he wasn't in arm's reach when he made that comment. Either my arm or Enzo's.
"You're being an ass again, Magdy," Gretchen said.
"Fine," Magdy said. "You guys go back. I'll see you later. I'm going to see me some fanties." He started toward the woods, waving his pocket light in the grass (or grasslike ground cover) as he walked. I shined my light over to Gretchen. She rolled her eyes in exasperation and started walking after Magdy. After a minute Enzo and I followed.
* * *
Take an elephant. Make it just a little smaller. Lose the ears. Make its trunk shorter and tentaclly at the end. Stretch out its legs until it almost but not quite seems impossible that they could support the weight. Give it four eyes. And then do other assorted weird things to its body until it's not that it looks like an elephant, it's just that it looks more like an elephant than it looks like anything else you can think of.
That's a fantie.
In the two weeks we'd been trapped in the colony village, waiting for the "all clear" to actually begin colonization, the fanties had been spotted several times, either in the woods near the village or just barely in the clearing between the village and the woods. A fantie spotting would bring up a mad rush of children to the colony gate (a gap in the container wall, closed up at night) to look and gawk and wave to the creatures. It would also bring a somewhat more studiously casual wave of us teenagers, because we wanted to see them too, we just didn't want to seem too interested, since that would mess with our credibility with all our new friends.
Certainly Magdy never gave any indication of actually caring about the fanties at all. He'd allow himself to be dragged to the gate by Gretchen when a herd passed by, but then he spent most of his time talking to the other guys who were also happy to make it look like they had gotten dragged to the gate. Just goes to show, I suppose. Even the self-consciously cool had a streak of kid in them.
There was some argument as to whether the fanties we saw were a local group that lived in the area, or whether we'd seen a number of herds that were just migrating through. I had no idea which theory was right; we'd only been on planet for a couple of weeks. And from a distance, all the fanties looked pretty much the same.
And up close, as we quickly discovered, they smelled horrible.
"Does everything on this planet smell like crap?" Gretchen whispered to me as we glanced up at the fanties. They waved back and forth, ever so slightly, as they slept standing on their legs. As if to answer her question, one of the fanties closest to where we were hiding let rip a monumental fart. We gagged and giggled equally.
"Shhhh," Enzo said. He and Magdy were crouched behind another tall bush a couple of meters over from us, just short of the clearing where the fantie herd had d
ecided to rest for the night. There were about a dozen of them, all sleeping and farting under the stars. Enzo didn't seem to be enjoying the visit very much; I think he was worried about us accidentally waking the fanties. This was not a minor concern; fantie legs looked spindly from a distance but up close it was clear they could trample any one of us without too much of a problem, and there were a dozen fanties here. If we woke them up and they panicked, we could end up being pounded into mincemeat.
I think he was also still a little sore about the "exploring tonsils" comment. Magdy, in his usual less-than-charming way, had been digging at Enzo ever since he and I officially started going out. The taunts rose and fell depending on what Magdy's relationship with Gretchen was at the moment. I was guessing at the moment Gretchen had cut him off. Sometimes I thought I needed a graph or maybe a flow chart to understand how the two of them got along.
Another one of the fanties let off an epic load of flatulence.
"If we stay here any longer, I'm going to suffocate," I whispered to Gretchen. She nodded and motioned me to follow her. We snuck over to where Enzo and Magdy were.
"Can we go now?" Gretchen whispered to Magdy. "I know you're probably enjoying the smell, but the rest of us are about to lose dinner. And we've been gone long enough that someone might start wondering where we went."
"In a minute," Magdy said. "I want to get closer to one."
"You're joking," Gretchen said.
"We've come this far," Magdy said.
"You really are an idiot sometimes, you know that?" Gretchen said. "You don't just go walking up to a herd of wild animals and say hello. They'll kill you."
"They're asleep," Magdy said.
"They won't be if you walk right into the middle of them," Gretchen said.
"I'm not that stupid," Magdy said, his whispered voice becoming louder the more irritated he became. He pointed to the one closest to us. "I just want to get closer to that one. It's not going to be a problem. Stop worrying."
