Old Man's War 03 - The Last Colony (v1.5)

by Scalzi, John

  “Stormy marriage,” I said.

  “Apparently,” Beata said.

  “We must refuse,” Hickory said to me. It and Dickory and I were in the Black Box. I figured that when I told the two Obin that they needed to give up their wireless consciousness implants, they should be allowed to be conscious to hear it.

  “You’ve never refused an order of mine before,” I said.

  “None of your orders has ever violated our treaty,” Hickory said. “Our treaty with the Colonial Union allows the two of us to be with Zoe. It also allows us to record those experiences and share them with other Obin. Ordering us to surrender our consciousness interferes with this. It violates our treaty.”

  “You could choose to surrender your implants,” I said. “That would solve the problem.”

  “We would not choose to,” Hickory said. “It would be an abdication of our responsibility to the other Obin.”

  “I could tell Zoe to tell you to give them up,” I said. “I can’t imagine you’d ignore her order.”

  Hickory and Dickory leaned in together for a moment, then leaned out again. “That would be distressful,” Hickory said. I reflected that it was the first time I had ever heard that word provide such apocalyptic gravity.

  “You understand I have no desire to do this,” I said. “But our orders from the Colonial Union are clear. We can’t let anything provide easy evidence we’re on this world. The Conclave will exterminate us. All of us, including, you two and Zoe.”

  “We have considered the possibility,” Hickory said. “We believe the risk to be negligible.”

  “Remind me to show you a little video I have,” I said.

  “We have seen it,” Hickory said. “It was provided to our government as well as yours.”

  “How can you see that and not see that the Conclave represents a threat to us?” I asked.

  “We viewed the video carefully,” Hickory said. “We believe the risk to be negligible.”

  “It’s not your decision to make,” I said.

  “It is,” Hickory said. “By our treaty.”

  “I am the legal authority on this planet,” I said.

  “You are,” Hickory said. “But you may not abrogate a treaty for your convenience.”

  “Not getting an entire colony slaughtered is not a convenience,” I said.

  “Removing all wireless devices to avoid detection is a convenience,” Hickory said.

  “Why don’t you ever talk?” I said to Dickory.

  “I have yet to disagree with Hickory,” Dickory said.

  I stewed.

  “We have a problem,” I said. “I can’t force you to surrender your implants, but I can’t let you run around with them, either. Answer me this: Is it a violation of your treaty for me to require you to stay here, in this room, so long as I have Zoe visit you on a regular basis?”

  Hickory thought about it. “No,” it said. “It is not what we prefer.”

  “It’s not what I prefer, either,” I said. “But I don’t think I have a choice.”

  Hickory and Dickory conferred again for several minutes. “This room is covered in wave-masking material,” Hickory said. “Give us some. We can use use it to cover our devices and ourselves.”

  “We don’t have any more right now,” I said. “We need to make more. It might take some time.”

  “As long as you agree to this solution we will accommodate the production time,” Hickory said. “During that time we will not use our implants outside this room, but you will ask Zoe to visit us here.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “You are welcome,” Hickory said. “Maybe this will be for the best. Since we have been here, we have noticed she has not had as much time for us.”

  “She’s being a teenager,” I said. “New friends. New planet. New boyfriend.”

  “Yes. Enzo,” Hickory said. “We feel deeply ambivalent about him.”

  “Join the club,” I said.

  “We can remove him,” Hickory said.

  “Really, no,” I said.

  “Perhaps later,” Hickory said.

  “Rather than killing off Zoe’s potential suitors, I’d prefer the two of you focus on helping Jane find whatever it is that’s out there pawing on our perimeter,” I said. “It’s probably less emotionally satisfying, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s going to be more useful.”

  Jane plopped the thing down on the floor of the Council meeting. It looked vaguely like a large coyote, if coyotes had four eyes and paws with opposable thumbs. “Dickory found this one inside one of the excavations. There were two others with it but they ran off. Dickory killed this one as it was trying to get away.”

  “He shot it?” asked Marta Piro.

  “He killed it with a knife,” Jane said. This caused some uneasy muttering; most of the Council and colonists were still deeply uncomfortable with the Obin.

  “Do you think this is one of the predators you were concerned about?” Manfred Trujillo asked.

  “It might be,” Jane said.

  “Might be,” Trujillo said.

  “The paws are the right shape for the marks we’ve seen,” Jane said. “But it seems small to me.”

  “But small or not, something like this could have made the marks,” Trujillo said.

  “It’s possible,” Jane said.

  “Have you seen any larger ones?” asked Lee Chen.

  “No,” Jane said, and looked over to me. “I’ve been out on the night watch on the last three days and last night was the first time we’ve seen anything approach the barrier at all.”

  “Hiram, you’ve been out past the barrier almost every day,” Trujillo said. “Have you seen anything like this?”

  “I’ve seen some animals,” Hiram said. “But they’ve been plant eaters, as far as I could see. I haven’t seen anything that looks like this thing. But then I’ve not been out past the barrier at night, either, and Administrator Sagan here thinks these are active during the night.”

  “But she hasn’t seen any more of them,” Marie Black said. “We’re holding off settling because of phantoms.”

  “The scratches and holes were real enough,” I said.

  “I’m not arguing that,” Black said. “But maybe they were isolated incidents. Perhaps a pack of these animals was just passing through several days ago and was curious about the barrier. Once they couldn’t get through, they moved on.”

  “It’s possible,” Jane said again. From her tone I could tell she didn’t think much of Black’s theory.

  “How much longer are we going to hold off on settling because of this?” Paulo Gutierrez asked. “I’ve got people who are going insane waiting for us to stop farting around. The last few days people have started getting in each other’s faces about idiotic things. And we’re running against time now, aren’t we? It’s spring here now, and we’ve got to start planting crops and readying grazing fields for the livestock. We’ve already eaten through two weeks of food. If we don’t start colonizing, we’re going to be in deep shit.”

  “We haven’t been farting around,” I said. “We’ve been dropped onto a planet about which we know nothing. We had to take the time to make sure it wasn’t going to flat-out kill us.”

  “We’re not dead yet,” Trujillo said, interjecting himself. “So that’s a good sign. Paolo, step back for a minute. Perry is absolutely right. We couldn’t have just wandered out into this planet and started setting up farms. But Paolo’s right, too, Perry. We’re at a point where we can’t stay stuck behind a barricade. Sagan’s had three days to find more evidence of these creatures, and we’ve killed one of them. We need to be cautious, yes. And we need to keep studying Roanoke. But we need to get colonizing, too.”

  The entire Council was staring at me, waiting to hear what I would say. I glanced over at Jane, who gave one of her nearly imperceptible shrugs. She wasn’t entirely convinced that there wasn’t a real threat out there, but aside from the one dead creature, she had nothing de
finitive. And Trujillo was right; it was time to get colonizing.

  “Agreed,” I said.

  “You let Trujillo take that meeting away from you,” Jane said, as we got ready for bed. She kept her voice low; Zoe was already asleep. Hickory and Dickory were standing impassively on the other side of our screen in the administrative tent. They were wearing full body suits made from the first bolt of the newly produced nanobotic mesh. The suits locked in the wireless signals; they also turned the Obin into walking shadows. They might have been asleep as well; it was hard to tell.

  “I suppose I did,” I said. “Trujillo’s a professional politician. He’ll do that sometimes. Especially when he’s right. We do need to move on getting people out of the village.”

  “I want to make sure each wave of homesteaders has some weapons training,” Jane said.

  “I think that’s a fine idea,” I said. “You’re not likely to convince the Mennonites, however.”

  “I have concerns about that,” Jane said.

  “You’re just going to have to be concerned, then,” I said.

  “They’re our knowledge base,” Jane said. “They’re the ones who know how to operate all the nonautomated machinery and make things without pressing buttons. I don’t want them getting eaten.”

  “If you want to keep an extra close watch on the Mennonites, I don’t have a problem with that,” I said. “But if you think you’re going to get them to stop being who they are, you’re in for a surprise. And it’s because of who they are that they’re in a position to save our collective bacon.”

  “I don’t understand religion,” Jane said.

  “It makes more sense from the inside,” I said. “Anyway you don’t have to understand it. You just have to respect it.”

  “I respect it,” Jane said. “I also respect the fact this planet still has ways to kill us we haven’t figured out yet. I wonder if other people respect that.”

  “There’s one way to find out,” I said.

  “You and I haven’t talked about whether we plan to do any farming ourselves,” Jane said.

  “I don’t think it would be a smart use of our time,” I said. “We’re colony administrators now, and we don’t have automated equipment here we can use. We’ll be busy enough. After Croatoan empties out a bit we’ll build a nice little house. If you want to grow things, we can have a garden. We should have a garden anyway, for our own fruits and vegetables. We can put Zoe in charge of it. Give her something to do.”

  “I want to grow flowers, too,” Jane said. “Roses.”

  “Really,” I said. “You’ve never really been into pretty things before.”

  “It’s not that,” Jane said. “This planet smells like an armpit.”

  * * *

  SEVEN

  « ^ »

  Roanoke revolves around its sun every 305 days. We decided to give the Roanoke year eleven months, seven with twenty-nine days and four with thirty. We named a month for each of the colony worlds our settlers came from, plus one for the Magellan. We dated the first day of the year to the day we arrived above Roanoke, and named the first month Magellan. The Magellan crew was touched, which was good, but by the time we named the months, it was already Magellan twenty-ninth. Their month was already almost over. They weren’t entirely pleased about that.

  Shortly after our decision to start allowing the colonists to homestead, Hiram Yoder approached me for a private meeting. It was clear, he said, that the majority of the colonists were not qualified to farm; they had all trained on modern farming equipment and were having difficulties with the more labor-intensive farm equipment the Mennonites were familiar with. Our stores of fast-growing, genetically modified seed would allow us to begin harvesting crops within two months—but only if we knew what we were doing. We didn’t, and we were looking a potential famine in the face.

  Yoder suggested we allow the Mennonites to cultivate crops for the entire colony, thus ensuring that the colony wouldn’t turn into an interstellar Donner party three months down the line; the Mennonites would apprentice the other colonists so they could receive on-the-job training. I readily agreed to this. By the second week of Albion, the Mennonites had taken our soil studies and used them to plant fields of wheat, maize and any other number of vegetables; they woke honeybees from their slumber to begin doing their pollination dance, pastured the livestock and were teaching the colonists of nine other worlds (and one ship) the advantages of intensive and companion planting, carbon and calorie farming and the secrets of maximizing yields in the smallest amount of space. I began to relax a little; Savitri, who had been making jokes about “long pig,” found something new to snark about.

  In Umbria, the fuglies discovered that fast-growing potatoes were good eatin’, and we lost several acres in the space of three days. We had our first agricultural pest. We also completed the medical bay, with all its equipment in its own black box. Dr. Tsao was delighted when within hours she was using her surgery ‘bot to reattach a finger a colonist had inadvertently sliced off with a bandsaw during a barn raising.

  In the first weekend of Zhong Guo, I presided over Roanoke’s first wedding, between Katherine Chao, formerly of Franklin, and Kevin Jones, formerly of Rus. There was much rejoicing. Two weeks later I presided over Roanoke’s first divorce, fortunately not of Chao and Jones. Beata had finally gotten her fill of antagonizing Jann Kranjic and let him off the hook. There was much rejoicing.

  By Erie tenth, we had finished our first major crop harvests. I declared a national holiday and day of thanksgiving. The colonists celebrated by building the Mennonites a meeting house, for which they only occasionally needed to ask for advice from the Mennonites themselves. The second set of crops was into the ground less than a week later.

  In Khartoum, Patrick Kazumi went with his friends to play by the stream behind Croatoan’s western wall. While running along the stream, he slipped, hit his head on a rock and drowned. He was eight years old. Most of the colony attended his funeral. On the last day of Khartoum, Anna Kazumi, Patrick’s mother, stole a heavy coat from a friend, placed rocks in her pockets and waded into the stream to follow her son. She succeeded.

  In Kyoto, it rained heavily four days out of every five, spoiling crops and interfering with the colony’s second harvest of the year. Zoe and Enzo had a somewhat dramatic breakup, as often happens when first loves finally get on each other’s nerves. Hickory and Dickory, overstimulated from Zoe’s relationship angst, began openly discussing how to solve the Enzo problem. Zoe finally told the two to stop it; they were creeping her out.

  In Elysium, the yotes, the coyote-like predators we’d discovered on our barrier, made their way back toward the colony, and attempted to work their way through the colony’s herd of sheep, a ready source of food. Colonists began working their way through the predators in return. Savitri relented after three months and went on a date with Beata. The next day Savitri described the evening as an “interesting failure” and refused to discuss it further.

  With Roanoke autumn in full swing, the last of the temporary housing tents folded for good, replaced with simple, snug houses in Croatoan and on the homesteads outside its walls. Half of the colonists still lived in Croatoan, learning trades from the Mennonites; the other half carved out their homesteads and waited for the new year to plant their own fields and yield their own crops.

  Savitri’s birthday—as measured on Huckleberry, translated to Roanoke dates—occurred on the twenty-third of Elysium; I gave her the gift of an indoor toilet for her tiny cottage, connected to a small and easily-drained septic tank. Savitri actually teared up.

  On the thirteenth of Rus, Henri Arlien battered his wife Therese on the belief that she was having an affair with a former tentmate. Therese responded by battering her husband with a heavy pan, breaking his jaw and knocking out three of his teeth. Both Henri and Therese visited Dr. Tsao; Henri then visited the hastily assembled jail, formerly a livestock hold. Therese asked for a divorce and then moved in with the former tentmat
e. She hadn’t been having an affair before, she said, but now it sounded like a damn fine idea indeed.

  The tentmate was a fellow by the name of Joseph Loong. On the twentieth of Phoenix, Loong went missing.

  “First things first,” I said to Jane, after Therese Arlien came in to report Loong’s disappearance. “Where has Henri Arlien been recently?”

  “He’s on work furlough during the day,” Jane said. “The only time he’s allowed to be by himself is when he has to pee. At night he’s back in his stall at the jail.”

  “That stall’s not exactly escape-proof,” I said. In its former life it had held a horse.

  “No,” Jane said. “But the livestock hold is. One door, one lock, and it’s on the outside. He doesn’t get anywhere overnight.”

  “He could get a friend to visit Loong,” I said.

  “I don’t think Arlien has friends,” Jane said. “Chad and Ari took statements from their neighbors. Pretty much all of them said Henri had got what he deserved when Therese hit him with that pan. I’ll have Chad check around, but I don’t think we’ll get much there.”

  “What do you think, then?” I asked.

  “Loong’s homestead borders the woods,” Jane said. “Therese said the two of them had gone for walks out there. The fanties are migrating through the area, and Loong wanted to get a closer look.” The fanties were the lumbering animals some of the folks saw at the edge of the woods not long after we landed; apparently they migrated, looking for food. We had caught the tail end of their stay when we arrived; now it was the early part. I thought they looked about as much like elephants as I did, but the name had stuck whether I liked it or not.

  “So Loong goes out to look at the fanties and gets lost,” I said.

  “Or gets trampled,” Jane said. “The fanties are large animals ”

  “Well, then, let’s get a search party together,” I said. “If Loong just got lost, if he has any sense, he’ll stay put and wait for us to find him.”

  “If he had any sense he wouldn’t be chasing after fanties in the first place,” Jane said.