Remnant Population

by Elizabeth Moon

  “Where are you—?” Ofelia began. “Ahshhh it,” Bluecloak said. Then, with great satisfaction, all the consonants emphasized, “Dddirrrttih! Ig iss ddirrttih, ahshhh it!”

  Ofelia recovered from astonishment in time to say, “Cold water!” to the creature departing with her sheets. “Wash blood in cold water.”

  Bluecloak’s eyes widened. “Kuh?” It pointed to itself. “Mih plud, mih ahshhh in kuh . . . ah . . . ssoo.”

  “You also wash off blood in cold water?” Ofelia had not realized they washed their clothes at all, though they didn’t stink like people who failed to wash.

  “Ahshhh in hah, plud tick.” Wash in hot, blood sticks, Ofelia translated. “Llihff pron.” Ofelia worried at that for a long moment. She had not heard even Bluecloak make an f sound before, and she didn’t think this was “lif” or “leaf.” Pron was probably bron . . . brown. Leave brown. Yes.

  “Ours too,” she said. She felt hungry now, and in the kitchen found that someone—Bluecloak?—had tried to make flatbread dough and made a mess instead. Bluecloak, when she looked at it, fluttered its eyelids.

  “Ssorrrih,” it said.

  “Thank you,” Ofelia said. “It was a kind thought, anyway.” It had also tried to clean up the mess, but it had left streaks of flour, pellets of something that was supposed to be dough, and wasn’t. Probably it had watched her making dough and thought it was easy. She scraped the residual mess off, then mixed the dough herself, her hands glad to take up familiar tasks. Bluecloak turned on the stove for her, and handed her the griddle just as she reached for it. Then it closed the containers she had left open, and put them away. She had shared kitchens with women less helpful. As she was laying the flatbread on the griddle, the kitchen door opened, and another creature—not the one who had taken the sheets—brought in two tomatoes and a handful of green beans, handling them carefully.

  “Thank you,” Ofelia said again, wondering what was going on. The creatures had been friendly enough before, but they had not gone out of their way to help her. She sliced the tomato, found that Bluecloak had fetched an onion from her bin, and chopped that. Onion fumes made her eyes water—they always had—but she could no more cook without onions than onions could grow without water. Again, Bluecloak anticipated what she would want next and handed her a stalk of parsley, one of cilantro, one of rosemary. She chopped the fresh herbs, mixed them with the tomato and onion, and folded the first round of flatbread around them.

  She felt better when she’d eaten. The side of her head was still sore, and she was still stiff, but she didn’t feel sick. As if they could sense that, Bluecloak and the other creature left her house while she cleaned the dishes, brushed her teeth, and wrapped a soft cloth around the oozing tear on her arm.

  The sun was well up when the humans returned. Only two of them this time, the stocky man—Ori something—and the older woman, Kira. Ofelia had gone back to work in her garden, both because it soothed her and because she had missed several days. One of the creatures was with her, eating the slimerods she found; another had insisted on pushing a broom in her house. The hot sun eased her bruises, though sweat stung in the scrapes . . . and then the creature churred, and she looked up.

  “Tuh-hoo,” it said. It held up two fingers in case she didn’t understand. What she didn’t understand was when this one had learned so much human speech.

  “Did Bluecloak teach you that?” she asked. It tipped its head to one side and said “Uhoo.”

  Ofelia didn’t believe that; she hadn’t spent much time with any of them trying to teach them her words, not since the beginning. But if it wanted to give her credit, that was polite.

  “Good morning,” the stocky man said, when he came close enough. “How are you today?”

  “Fine,” Ofelia said. She had a basket nearly full of tomatoes; they were ripening far faster than she could eat them. “Would you like some tomatoes? They’re not very big yet—”

  “They’re beautiful,” the man said. “We don’t get fresh foods like this on the ship, you know.”

  She didn’t know; she’d spent her ship time in cryo. But he might not know that.

  “Your arm—” the woman said. Ofelia glanced down; the sleeve didn’t quite cover the bruise and scab.

  “It’s nothing,” she said, looking away. She didn’t want to talk about it.

  “That’s—” the woman began; Ofelia saw the man hush her with a gesture. So much for that one’s arrogance; she still had to be quiet when a man told her to hush. Ofelia found another slimerod and clicked to get the creature’s attention. It came eagerly, and gulped the slimerod down. Ofelia glanced at the humans. They were wide-eyed. The man recovered first.

  “You . . . get along well with them,” he said.

  Ofelia shrugged, then wished she hadn’t. Her shoulder was still sore, and the man might think a shrug was rude. “They’re good neighbors,” she said. “They don’t bother me.”

  “You can talk to them?”

  “It’s not so much talk,” Ofelia said. “We understand things.” She gestured with one hand. “We use our hands a lot.”

  “Can you tell us which is the leader?” the man asked. “Is it the one you call Bluecloak?”

  Ofelia wondered if Bluecloak thought it was the leader, in the way this man clearly meant. “Bluecloak is . . . the one good at learning new things,” she said finally. “Learning words, for instance. I understand Bluecloak best.”

  “But is Bluecloak the one in charge?” the woman asked.

  Ofelia shook her head, another mistake. For an instant, the world whirled around her, then steadied again. “Only on some things,” she said, when she could speak again. She knew she couldn’t really explain which things; she was only feeling her way into that understanding herself.

  “It’s a small group,” the man murmured to his companion. “It may be government by consensus; they may just hash it out.”

  “Surely not everything,” the woman said. “After all, they attacked the colony landing; that had to have organization, leadership. And those coastal cities . . .”

  “Cities?” Ofelia said. “They have cities?” She felt betrayed; Bluecloak had said nothing about cities, any of the times he’d seen the pictures of cities in her books.

  “We saw them from the shuttle flights,” the woman said. “Some of them live along the northern coast of this continent, in what look like stone and wood-built cities. They have boats—”

  Ofelia remembered the boats she had seen. But she could not imagine her creatures, the ones she knew, living in cities. Something about their attitude toward this village suggested that they had no settled home. Except the nestmass.

  “We won’t keep you,” the man said, as she was wondering whether or not to mention the nestmass. “A couple of your lovely tomatoes, and we’ll be on our way. We’ll be surveying the area today, just wandering around looking at things. We won’t touch anything of yours,” he added, as if his being here weren’t intrusion enough.

  Ofelia held the basket over the fence and they each picked out a tomato.

  “If it’s convenient,” the man said, “I’d like to interview you later. After all, you were the first contact, even if you weren’t trained for it.” He chuckled, in a way that he probably intended to sound good-natured. It did sound good-natured; Ofelia could not have said why it made her so angry. She wanted to hit him, and that frightened her. She had never been one to hit people.

  “I am always here,” she said, not quite rudely. He smiled, and nodded at her, and turned away, already biting into the tomato. Ofelia looked down the lane; she saw nothing of the other humans. Maybe now she could go across and look at Gurgle-click-cough’s babies.

  Her escort of creatures followed her, and exchanged greetings with the door guards; Ofelia noticed that today the door guards had their knives out. In the bedroom, Bluecloak lounged on the old bedstead, singing with eyes half-closed. He rose when Ofelia came in, and reached out to her hands. He lifted them gently, and touc
hed his tongue to her palms.

  “Click-kaw-keerrr.” It was greeting and commentary both; Ofelia felt cheered. She turned to the closet. Gurgle-click-cough looked out, alert and calm; Ofelia wondered how she was reading the expression so well. Gurgle-click-cough held out a hand, and Ofelia came nearer. The babies were piled in an untidy heap in the middle of the nest, between their mother’s legs. Ofelia could not tell which striped tail belonged to which set of spindly legs . . . but she would have sworn they’d grown noticeably since the day before.

  The nest smelled better too. Fresh herbs packed the inner surface. Ofelia wondered if the Terran-origin herbs would hurt the babies. One of them opened its eyes, and peeped, a sharp imperative. Gurgle-click-cough leaned closer; the tiny mouth opened, and its mother spit into it. Ofelia almost gagged, but choked it down. Spit? Vomit? She didn’t want to know, really, and it was none of her business. The baby swallowed again and again, blinking its eyes. Then it hissed contentedly, and curled up again. Gurgle-click-cough picked it up, and handed it to Ofelia. Ofelia cradled it, no longer flinching when it licked her wrist with its catlike tongue.

  Bluecloak said something; Ofelia turned, and he gestured her over. She sat on the bedstead beside him, the baby in her lap. It seemed content, and Gurgle-click-cough was feeding one of the others now. She looked at it closely, in more light than she’d had yesterday. The bold stripes on back and tail were dark brown on cream. Its head was large for its size, but nowhere near as large as a human baby’s. Bluecloak hummed; the baby cocked its little head at the sound. When the hum became rhythmic, the baby’s left foot twitched in rhythm.

  Left foot drumming meant agreement . . . the baby was learning to agree, or . . . or what? “Sssinng,” Bluecloak said. “Click-kaw-keerrr sssinng.”

  She didn’t know what to sing to an alien’s child with stripes and a tail; the only songs she knew were the cradle songs she had sung her own children. She started, self-conscious at first until the baby’s intent stare took all her concentration.

  “Baby, baby, go to sleep . . .” It didn’t; it crouched in her lap watching her face, its gaze flicking from eyes to mouth to eyes again. “Little sweetling, never weep . . .” She had no sense that these babies wept; it seemed almost tingling with eagerness for something . . . for life itself?

  She sang herself hoarse, and stopped with a crick in her back and the little creature still watching her, showing no sign of boredom or tiredness. She levered herself up, and carried it back to the nest stiffly. She couldn’t possibly do that with all of them . . . but Gurgle-click-cough was asleep herself, and the one Ofelia carried squirmed into the central pile without waking any of the others and closed its eyes.

  “Click-kaw-keerrr,” Bluecloak said, and it came outside with her.

  Down the lane, she saw the young woman talking to one of the creatures. Ofelia’s stomach knotted; she looked at Bluecloak, but it seemed not to care. The creature stood awkwardly, like a halfwit, Ofelia thought, which it was not. The tall man, the one in charge, stood in the lane outside the center, looking west; Ofelia could see nothing beyond him but the lane itself dwindling into grass. He turned, caught sight of her, and frowned.

  “I was looking for you,” he said, as if she had missed an appointment. Ofelia did not want to be ungracious, but there was nothing to say to that. They had not looked where she was; they had not called loudly enough to get her attention. That was not her fault. She smiled, as tension and resentment knotted her belly. “You need to understand how we’ll go about our mission,” he said, after a moment. “We will study and make official contact with these . . . indigenes. I’m sure you think you have already made contact, but after all you have had no training in this sort of thing. You were a . . . a what? . . . housewife?”

  Ofelia did not correct him. Whatever she had been, on the work rolls of the company, that was long ago, and it made no difference. Whatever training she had had would mean nothing to such a one.

  “It’s not your responsibility, is what I’m trying to say,” he went on, his face shining in the sun. “You did very well, I’m sure, to have gotten along peacefully with them, but now we’re here, and we’ll take it off your hands.” He took a deep breath, as if to say more, then let it out slowly. “You do understand, don’t you?”

  She didn’t understand all, but she understood enough. She didn’t matter, she didn’t count, she was nothing. Exactly right, the old voice said to her. This is how it is; this is how it has always been. Accept it, and they will accept you as what you are. Old woman. Nothing.

  “And we’ll have to figure out something . . .” he said vaguely, not looking at her. “About the machines . . .”

  Fear chilled her. She needed the machines. “What about the machines?” she asked, though she was afraid she knew.

  He made an impatient gesture. “Advanced technology. They shouldn’t have it. They shouldn’t even have seen it. Part of our mission was to shut it all down. I suppose we can find you a place somewhere—it’s Sims’ fault; they’ll have to pay some kind of fine, and that should be enough for a place in some residence . . .”

  “You mean . . . leave?” Her vision darkened; she forced herself to breathe. She would not faint in front of this person.

  “Well, you can’t stay here,” he said, as if that were obvious. “Even if we have a permanent mission . . . there’s no post for someone like—someone your age, you see. And the need to secure the technology, prevent cultural contamination . . . it will be difficult, even for trained personnel. You can move aboard the shuttle with us; then we can shut down the powerplant—”

  “Not now,” Ofelia said, hating the quaver in her voice that left her desire as vulnerable to his will as her naked skin had been to his eyes.

  “Oh, not today,” the man said, as if it didn’t matter. “I suppose they’ve been here for some time; it’s not as if we could prevent what they’ve already seen. But they can’t have understood much of it, and the longer we let them have access, the more chance they’ll learn too much. When the preliminary work’s done . . . then you should prepare to leave.” He smiled, the wide smile of someone whose decisions cannot be changed. “Don’t worry . . . uh . . . Sera Falfurry . . . we’ll take care of you. You won’t be alone anymore.”

  He went into the center, his body swinging, satisfied with the power he’d shown. Ofelia could not have moved if someone had poked her; she wished she could be blown away in a gust of wind. She was not so lucky; no wind stirred the leaves. Bluecloak chirped, and she looked at it. It nodded at the departed human.

  “Kuss-cough-click,” it said.

  “Stuck-up bossy lout,” Ofelia said; she had no doubt they meant the same thing.

  In her own house, alone because Bluecloak called the others out and set them as guards at her door, she raged silently, yanking clean sheets onto the bed, slamming pillows down. She would not leave. She had not left before, and she would not leave now. They could not make her.

  They can, said the old voice. They will. They know you evaded once; you can’t do that again.

  It isn’t fair, she wailed silently. I worked so hard; I did so much; it’s their fault.

  It doesn’t matter, said the old voice. You are nothing to them; they have the power, and they will take you away. The old voice reminded her how much her protests sounded like those Rosara and others had made, protests she had been contemptuous of, back when she thought she could escape. She raged at that, too.

  Finally, exhausted, she lay down and napped, waking to quiet afternoon. She heard voices outside, human voices; when she peeked out the front windows, the two women were walking along side by side, so much like her former neighbors that she almost called out to them.

  They were not neighbors. They were enemies who would take her away. They were enemies who would destroy everything she had worked for, the life she had made for herself, the new friends she had found.

  The next morning, the shorter man, Ori, appeared at her garden fence to interview her. He w
as willing to ask his questions and listen while she worked; he even asked intelligent questions about the varieties of beans and tomatoes and corn she chose to grow. Despite herself, she found it easy to tell him which strains had been supplied by the Company, and which the colonists had developed on their own.

  “Then you had geneticists among you?” he asked. If he had had ears, they would have been pricked up, alert.

  “Not . . . like in colleges,” Ofelia said. How to explain? “They taught us all what they thought we could use,” she said finally. “Practical things. How to choose the best progeny for seeds. How to repair the pumps and powerplant and waste recycler. But they wouldn’t tell us why, on most things.”

  “Did that bother you?” he asked, this time without much interest. Ofelia was surprised at her own ability to tell that; she didn’t know how she knew.

  “Not really,” she said. “We had much to learn, and little time.” It had not seemed like little time, all those nights in class or studying, when the children were small and she could have been mending or cleaning or simply resting. But in terms of absolute hours, they had had too much practical material to fit in to allow of much theoretical digression.

  Ori leaned back, satisfied with her answer; she did not explain further.

  “Now—the first time you saw the creatures, what did you do? What did you think? Did you recognize them right away?”

  The first time . . . she had to start with the sea-storm, with her attempt to ready the village. That bored him, though he didn’t say so; his eyes drifted away, seeing something else entirely, something beyond her head. When Bilong crossed her own view, a minute or two later, she knew what it had been.

  She told of that first storm-bound afternoon and night, the first few days. At first he let her talk on without interruption, only urging her to continue when she stopped. But then he wanted to ask questions. How had she first noticed that they were intelligent? How did she know who was in charge? What had she learned of their social structure? How territorial were they?