The Last Colony Read online

  “That still leaves the problem of neither of us having any experience running a seed colony,” I said. “When I was doing my public relations tour of the colonies way back when, I went to a seed colony on Orton. Those people never stopped working. You don’t just throw people into that situation without training.”

  “You have training,” Rybicki said. “Both of you were officers. Christ, Perry, you were a major. You commanded a regiment of three thousand soldiers across a battle group. That’s larger than a seed colony.”

  “A colony isn’t a military regiment,” I said.

  “No it’s not,” Rybicki agreed. “But the same skills are required. And since you’ve been discharged, both of you have worked in colony administration. You’re an ombudsman—you know how a colony government works and how to get things done. Your wife is the constable here and is responsible for maintaining order. Between the two of you, you have pretty much all the skills you’ll need. I didn’t just pull your names out of a hat, Major. These are the reasons I thought of you. You’re about eighty-five percent ready to go as it is, and we’ll get you the rest of the way there before the colonists head for Roanoke. That’s the name we’ve chosen for the colony,” he added.

  “We have a life here,” Jane said. “We have jobs and responsibilities, and we have a daughter who has her own life here as well. You’re casually asking us to uproot ourselves to solve your little political crisis.”

  “Well, I apologize about the casual part,” Rybicki said. “Normally you would have gotten this request by Colonial diplomatic courier, along with a full load of documents. But as it happened, I was on Huckleberry for entirely different reasons and thought I would kill two birds with one stone. I honestly didn’t expect I’d be pitching you this idea standing in the middle of a field of sorghum.”

  “All right,” Jane said.

  “And as for it being a little political crisis, you’re wrong about that,” Rybicki said. “It’s a medium-sized political crisis, on its way to becoming a large one. This has become more than just another human colony. The local planetary governments and press have built this up as the biggest colonization event since humans first left Earth. It’s not—trust me on that—but that fact doesn’t really matter at this point. It’s become a media circus and a political headache, and it’s put the DoC on the defensive. This colony is getting away from us because so many others have a vested interest in it. We need to get on top of it again.”

  “So it’s all about politics,” I said.

  “No,” Rybicki said. “You misunderstand me. The DoC doesn’t need to get back on top of this because we’re counting political coup. We need to get back on top of this because this is a human colony. You both know what it’s like out there. Colonies live or die—colonists live or die—based on how well we prepare and defend them. The DoC’s job is to get the colonists as prepared as we can get them before they colonize. The CDF’s job is to keep them safe until they get a foothold. If either side of that equation breaks down, that colony is screwed.

  “Right now, the department’s side of the equation isn’t working because we haven’t provided the leadership, and everyone else is trying to keep anyone else from filling the vacuum. We’re running out of time to make it work. Roanoke is going to happen. The question is whether we manage to do it right. If we don’t—if Roanoke dies—there’s going to be hell to pay. So it’s better that we do it right.”

  “If this is such a political hot potato, I don’t see why throwing us into the mix is going to help things,” I said. “There’s no guarantee anyone will be happy with us.”

  “Like I said, I didn’t just pull your names out of a hat,” Rybicki said. “Over at the department we ran a slate of potential candidates that would work for us and would work for the CDF. We figured if the two of us could sign off on someone, we could make the colony governments accept them. You two were on the list.”

  “Where on the list?” Jane asked.

  “About halfway down,” Rybicki said. “Sorry. The other candidates didn’t work out.”

  “Well, it’s an honor just to be nominated,” I said.

  Rybicki grinned. “I never did like your sarcasm, Perry,” he said. “I understand I’m dropping a lot on you at once. I don’t expect you to give me an answer now. I have all the documents here,” he tapped his temple, signifying he’d stored the information in his BrainPal, “so if you have a PDA I can send them to, you can take a look at them at your leisure. As long as your leisure is no longer than a standard week.”

  “You’re asking us to walk away from everything here,” Jane said again.

  “Yes,” Rybicki said. “I am. And I’m appealing to your sense of duty, too, since I know you have one. The Colonial Union needs smart, capable and experienced people to help us get this colony going. You two fit the bill. And what I’m asking of you is more important than what you’re doing here. Your jobs here can be handled by others. You’ll leave and someone else will come in and take your place. Maybe they won’t be as good, but they’ll be good enough. What I’m asking of you two for this colony isn’t something that just anyone else could do.”

  “You said we were in the middle of your list,” I said.

  “It was a short list,” Rybicki said to me. “And there’s a steep drop-off after you two.” He turned back to Jane. “Look, Sagan, I can see this is a tough sell for you. I’ll make you a deal. This is going to be a seed colony. That means that the first wave gets in and spends two or three years preparing the place for the next wave. After the second wave comes in, things will probably be settled enough that if you want, you and Perry and your daughter can come back here. The DoC can make sure your house and jobs will be waiting for you. Hell, we’ll even send someone to get in your crop.”

  “Don’t patronize me, General,” Jane said.

  “I’m not,” Rybicki said. “The offer is genuine, Sagan. Your life here, every part of it, will be waiting for you. You won’t lose any of it. But I need the two of you now. The DoC will make it worth your while. You’ll get this life back. And you’ll be making sure Roanoke colony survives. Think about it. Just decide soon.”

  I woke up and Jane wasn’t beside me; I found her standing in the road in front of our house, staring up at the stars.

  “You’re going to get hit, standing in the road like that,” I said, coming up behind her, and placing my hands on her shoulders.

  “There’s nothing to get hit by,” Jane said, taking my left hand in hers. “There’s hardly anything to get hit by during the day. Look at them,” she pointed to the stars with her right hand, and began tracing out constellations. “Look. The crane. The lotus. The pearl.”

  “I have a hard time with the Huckleberry constellations,” I said. “I keep looking for the ones I was born with. I look up and some part of me still expects to see the Big Dipper or Orion.”

  “I never looked at stars before we came here,” Jane said. “I mean, I saw them, but they didn’t mean anything to me. They were just stars. Then we came here and I spent all that time learning these constellations.”

  “I remember,” I said. And I did remember; Vikram Banerje, who had been an astronomer back on Earth, had been a frequent visitor to our house in our first years in New Goa, patiently tracing out the patterns in the sky for Jane. He died not too long after he finally taught her all the Huckleberry constellations.

  “I didn’t see them at first,” Jane said.

  “The constellations?” I asked.

  Jane nodded. “Vikram would point them out to me, and I’d just see a clump of stars,” she said. “He’d show me a map and I’d see how the stars were supposed to connect together, and then I’d look up at the sky and just see . . . stars. And it was like that for a long time. And then one night, I remember walking home from work and looking up and saying to myself ‘there’s the crane,’ and seeing it. Seeing the crane. Seeing the constellations. That’s when I knew this place was my home. That’s when I knew I had come here to stay.
That this place was my place.”

  I slid my arms down Jane’s body and held her around the waist.

  “But this place isn’t your place, is it?” Jane asked.

  “My place is where you are,” I said.

  “You know what I mean,” Jane said.

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “I like it here, Jane. I like the people. I like our life.”

  “But,” Jane said.

  I shrugged.

  Jane felt it. “That’s what I thought,” she said.

  “I’m not unhappy,” I said.

  “I didn’t say you were,” Jane said. “And I know you’re not unhappy with me or Zoë. If General Rybicki hadn’t shown up, I don’t think you would have noticed that you’re ready to move on.”

  I nodded and kissed the back of her head. She was right about that.

  “I talked to Zoë about it,” Jane said.

  “What did she have to say about it?” I asked.

  “She’s like you,” Jane said. “She likes it here, but this isn’t her home. She likes the idea of going to a colony that’s just starting out.”

  “It appeals to her sense of adventure,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Jane said. “There’s not a lot of adventure here. That’s one thing I like about it.”

  “That’s funny coming from a Special Forces soldier,” I said.

  “I say it because I am Special Forces,” Jane said. “I had nine years of nonstop adventure. I was born into it and if it wasn’t for you and Zoë I would have died in it, and not had anything else. Adventure is overrated.”

  “But you’re thinking of having some more anyway,” I said.

  “Because you are,” Jane said.

  “We haven’t decided anything,” I said. “We could say no. This is your place.”

  “ ‘My place is where you are,’ ” Jane said, echoing me. “This is my place. But maybe somewhere else could be, too. I’ve only had this one place. Maybe I’m just frightened of leaving it.”

  “I don’t think you’re frightened by much,” I said.

  “I’m frightened by different things than you are,” Jane said. “You don’t notice because sometimes you’re not too observant.”

  “Thanks,” I said. We stood there in the road, entwined.

  “We can always come back,” Jane said, eventually.

  “Yes,” I said. “If you want.”

  “We’ll see,” Jane said. She leaned back to kiss my cheek, untangled herself from my grasp and began to walk down the road. I turned back toward the house.

  “Stay with me,” Jane said.

  “All right,” I said. “I’m sorry. I thought you wanted to be by yourself.”

  “No,” Jane said. “Walk with me. Let me show you my constellations. We have time enough for that.”

  TWO

  The Junipero Serra skipped and suddenly a green and blue world hovered large outside the window of the Serra’s observation theater. In the seats, a couple hundred invited guests, reporters and Department of Colonization officials oohed and aahed as if they’d never seen a planet from the outside before.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Karin Bell, Secretary of Colonization, “the new colony world of Roanoke.” The room burst into applause, which faded into the hiss of reporters quickly whispering notes into recorders. In doing so most of them missed the sudden appearance in the middle distance of the Bloomington and the Fairbanks, the two CDF cruisers that were accompanying this little press junket in the stars. Their presence suggested to me that Roanoke might not be as entirely domesticated as the Colonial Union would like to suggest; it wouldn’t do to have the Secretary of Colonization—not to mention the aforementioned reporters and invited guests—blown out of the sky by some alien raider.

  I noted the appearance of the cruiser to Jane with a flick of my eyes; she glanced and nodded almost imperceptibly. Neither of us said anything. We were hoping to get through this entire press thing without having to say anything. We had discovered that neither of us were particularly good with the press.

  “Let me give you just a little background on Roanoke,” Bell said. “Roanoke has an equatorial diameter of just under thirteen thousand kilometers, which means it’s larger than either Earth or Phoenix, but not as large as Zhong Guo, which retains the title the CU’s largest colonized planet.” This prompted a halfhearted cheer from a couple of Zhong Guo reporters, followed by a laugh. “Its size and composition means the gravity is ten percent heavier here than on Phoenix; most of you will feel like you’ve put on a kilo or two when you go down. The atmosphere is the usual nitrogen-oxygen mix, but it’s unusually heavy on the oxygen: close to thirty percent. You’ll feel that, too.”

  “Who did we take the planet from?” asked one of the reporters.

  “I’m not there yet,” Bell said, and there was a little grumbling. Bell was apparently known for giving dry press conferences off notes, and she was in fine form here.

  The image of Roanoke’s globe disappeared, replaced with a delta, in which a small river joined in with a much larger one. “This is where the colony will settle,” Bell said. “The smaller river here we’ve named the Ablemare; the larger one here is the Raleigh. Raleigh drains this entire continent, like the Amazon does back on Earth or the Anasazi does on Phoenix. A couple hundred kilometers to the west”—the image scrolled—“and we’re at the Virginian Ocean. Plenty of room to grow.”

  “Why isn’t the colony at the shore?” someone asked.

  “Because it doesn’t have to be,” Bell said. “This isn’t the sixteenth century. Our ships are crossing stars, not oceans. We can put colonies in places where it makes sense for them to be. This place”—Bell rewound to the original location—“is far enough inland to be insulated from the cyclones that hit at the mouth of the Raleigh, and has other favorable geological and meteorological advantages as well. Also, the life on this planet has incompatible chemistry to ours. The colonists can’t eat anything from here. Fishing is out. It makes more sense to put the colony on an alluvial plain, where it has space to grow its own food, than it does on a coast.”

  “Can we talk about who we took the planet from yet?” asked the first reporter.

  “I’m not there yet,” Bell repeated.

  “But we know all this stuff already,” said someone else. “It’s in our press packs. And our viewers are going to want to know who we took the planet from.”

  “We didn’t take the planet from anyone,” Bell said, clearly annoyed at being knocked off her pace. “We were given the planet.”

  “By whom?” asked the first reporter.

  “By the Obin,” Bell said. This caused a stir. “And I’ll be happy to talk about that more, later. But first—” The image of the river delta vanished, replaced by some furry tree-like objects that weren’t quite plants, not quite animals, but were the dominant life form on Roanoke. Most of the reporters ignored her, whispering into their recorders about the Obin connection.

  “The Obin called it Garsinhir,” General Rybicki had said to me and Jane a few days earlier, as we took his personal shuttle from our transport to Phoenix Station for our formal briefing, and to be introduced to some of the colonists who would act as our deputies. “It means seventeenth planet. It was the seventeenth planet they colonized. They’re not a very imaginative species.”

  “It’s not like the Obin to give up a planet,” Jane said.

  “They didn’t,” Rybicki said. “We traded. We gave them a small planet we took from the Gelta about a year back. They didn’t have much use for Garsinhir anyway. It’s a class-six planet. The chemistry of the life there is similar enough to the Obin’s that the Obin were always dying off from native viruses. We humans, on the other hand, are incompatible with the local life chemistry. So we won’t be affected by the local viruses and bacteria and whatnot. The Gelta planet the Obin are taking isn’t as nice but they can tolerate it better. It’s a fair trade. Now, have you two had a chance to look at the colonist files?”

 
“We did,” I said.

  “Any thoughts?” Rybicki said.

  “Yes,” Jane said. “The selection process is insane.”

  Rybicki smiled at Jane. “One day you’re going to be diplomatic and I’m not going to know what to do,” he said.

  Jane reached for her PDA and pulled up the information on the selection process. “The colonists from Elysium were selected from a lottery,” she said.

  “A lottery they could join after proving they were physically capable of the rigors of colonization,” Rybicki said.

  “Kyoto’s colonists are all members of a religious order that avoids technology,” Jane said. “How are they even going to get on the colony ships?”

  “They’re Colonial Mennonites,” Rybicki said. “They’re not whackjobs, and they’re not extremists. They just strive for simplicity. That’s not a bad thing to have on a new colony.”

  “The colonists from Umbria were selected through a game show,” Jane said.

  “The ones that didn’t win got the take-home game,” I said.

  Rybicki ignored me. “Yes,” he said, to Jane. “A game show that required the contestants to compete in several tests of endurance and intelligence, both of which will also come in handy when you get to Roanoke. Sagan, every colony was given a list of physical and mental criteria that every potential Roanoke colonist had to fulfill. Other than that we left the selection process up to the colony. Some of them, like Erie and Zhong Guo, did fairly standard selection processes. Some of them didn’t.”

  “And this doesn’t cause you any concern,” Jane said.

  “Not as long as the colonists passed our own set of requirements, no,” Rybicki said. “They presented their potential colonists; we checked them against our own standards.”

  “They all passed?” I asked.

  Rybicki snorted. “Hardly. The Albion colony leader chose colonists from her enemies list, and the colonist positions on Rus went to the highest bidder. We ended up supervising the selection process on both those colonies. But the end result is that you have what I think is an excellent class of colonists.” He turned to Jane. “They’re a damn sight better than colonists you’re going to get from Earth, I’ll tell you that much. We don’t screen them nearly as rigorously. Our philosophy there is that if you can walk onto a colony transport, you’re in. Our standards are a little higher for this colony. So relax. You’ve got good colonists.”