The Last Colony Read online

  “You’re loaded for bear,” Ferro said. “You’re going to be fine. But some of your stuff is a little weird. There’s stock on your manifest I haven’t seen shipped before. You’ve got containers full of obsolete equipment.” Ferro handed back the manifest to me. “Look, you have everything you need for a blacksmith’s shop. In 1850. I didn’t even think this stuff existed outside a period recreation fair.”

  I looked at the manifest. “Some of our colonists are Mennonites,” I said. “They prefer not to use modern technology if they can avoid it. They think it’s a distraction.”

  “How many of your colonists are whatever it is you just said?” Ferro asked.

  “About two hundred, two hundred and fifty,” I said, handing back the PDA.

  “Huh,” Ferro said. “Well, then, it seems you’re pretty much prepared for everything, up to and including time travel back to the Wild West. If the colony fails, you can’t blame it on the inventory.”

  “So it’ll be all my fault,” I said.

  “Probably,” Ferro said.

  “I think the one thing we can all say is that we don’t want to see this colony fail,” said Manfred Trujillo. “I don’t think we’re in danger of that. But I do worry about some of the decisions that have been made. I think they make things more difficult.”

  Around the conference table was a round of nods. At my right, I saw Savitri take notes, marking which heads were nodding. On the other end of the table, Jane sat impassively, but I knew she was counting heads, too. She was in intelligence. This is what she does.

  We were coming to the close of the inaugural official meeting of the Roanoke Council, which consisted of me and Jane as the colony heads, and the ten representatives of the colonists themselves, one for each world, who would act as our deputies. Theoretically, at least. Here in the real word, the jockeying for power had already begun.

  Manfred Trujillo was primary among them. Trujillo had started the push to allow colony worlds to seed a new colony several years earlier, from his perch as Erie’s representative to the CU legislature. He had been miffed when the Department of Colonization took his idea but neglected to install him as leader; he’d been even more miffed when the colony leaders turned out to be us, whom he did not know, and who did not seem to be especially impressed with him. But he was smart enough to mask his frustration in general terms, and spent most of the meeting trying to undermine Jane and me in the most complimentary way possible.

  “For example, this council,” said Trujillo, and looked up and down the table. “Each of us is charged with representing the interests of our fellow colonists. I don’t doubt each of us will do that job admirably. But this council is an advisory council to the colony heads—advisory only. I wonder if that allows us to best represent the needs of the colony.”

  We’re not even out of the dock and he’s already talking revolution, I thought. Back in the days when I still had a BrainPal, I could shoot that entire thought over to Jane; as it was she caught my glance to her, which told her well enough what I was thinking.

  “New colonies are administered under Department of Colonization regulations,” Jane said. “The regulations require colony leaders to wield sole administrative and executive power. Things will be chaotic enough when we arrive that mustering a quorum for every decision is not ideal.”

  “I’m not suggesting that you two not do your jobs,” Trujillo said. “Merely that our input should be more than symbolic. Many of us have been involved with this colony since the days it was only on the drawing board. We have a wealth of experience.”

  “Whereas we only have a couple months of involvement,” I prompted.

  “You are a recent and valuable addition to the process,” Trujillo said. Smooth. “I would hope you would see the advantages to our being part of the decision-making process.”

  “It seems to me that the Colonization regulations are there for a reason,” I said. “The DoC has overseen the colonization of dozens of worlds. They might know how to do it.”

  “Those colonists came from disadvantaged nations back on Earth,” Trujillo said. “They do not have many of the advantages that we have.”

  I sensed Savitri tense up next to me; the arrogance of the old-line colonies, which had been founded by Western countries before the CU took over colonization, had always appalled her.

  “What advantages are those?” Jane said. “John and I just spent seven years living among ‘those colonists’ and their descendants. Savitri here is one of them. I’m not sensing any notable advantages among those at this table to them.”

  “I may have phrased that poorly,” Trujillo said, beginning what I suspected was another concilitory knife-twisting.

  “You may have,” I said, cutting him off. “However, I’m afraid the point is academic. DoC regulations don’t give us much flexibility on the administration of first-wave colonies, nor do they make allowances for the previous national affiliation of its colonists. We are obliged to treat all colonists equally, no matter where they come from. I think that’s a wise policy, don’t you?”

  Trujillo paused for a beat, clearly annoyed at the turn of rhetorical events. “Yes, of course.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. So for the moment, we’ll continue to follow regulations. Now,” I said before Trujillo could ramp himself up again, “anyone else?”

  “Some of my people are complaining about their berth assignments,” said Paulo Gutierrez, Khartoum’s representative.

  “Is there something wrong?” I asked.

  “They’re unhappy that they’re not closer to other colonists from Khartoum,” he said.

  “The entire ship is only a few hundred meters long,” I said. “And berth information is readily accessible through PDAs. They shouldn’t have any problems locating each other.”

  “I understand that,” Gutierrez said. “I just think the expectation would be that we would be berthed together in our groups.”

  “That’s why we didn’t do it that way,” I said. “You know, once we set foot on Roanoke, none of us will be from Khartoum, or from Erie, or from Kyoto.” I nodded toward Hiram Yoder, who nodded back. “We’re all going to be from Roanoke. Might as well get a head start on that. There’s only twenty-five hundred of us. That’s a little small for ten separate tribes.”

  “That’s a nice sentiment,” said Marie Black, from Rus. “But I don’t think our settlers are going to very quickly forget where they came from.”

  “I don’t expect them to,” I said. “I don’t want them to forget where they came from. I would hope that they would focus on where they are. Or will be, soon enough.”

  “Colonists are represented here by their worlds,” Trujillo said.

  “It makes sense to do it that way,” Jane said. “For now, at least. Once we’re on Roanoke, we may revisit this.” That tidbit sat in the air for a few seconds.

  Marta Piro, from Zhong Guo, raised her hand. “There’s a rumor that two Obin are coming with us to Roanoke,” she said.

  “It’s not a rumor,” I said. “It’s true. Hickory and Dickory are members of my household.”

  “Hickory and Dickory?” asked Lee Chen, from Franklin.

  “Our daughter Zoë named them when she was younger,” I said.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, how is it two Obin are members of your household?” Piro asked.

  “Our daughter keeps them as pets,” Jane said. This got an uneasy laugh. That wasn’t so bad. After an hour of being not-so-subtly hammered on by Trujillo, it wouldn’t hurt to be seen as the sort of people who could keep terrifying aliens as domestic companions.

  “You need to push that son of a bitch Trujillo out of a shuttle bay,” Savitri said after the room had cleared.

  “Relax,” I said. “Some people are just no good at not being in charge.”

  “Gutierrez, Black and Trujillo have made their own political party,” Jane said. “And of course, Trujillo’s gone running to Kranjic to spill the details of this meeting. They’ve gotten very
cozy.”

  “But it doesn’t cause us any problems,” I said.

  “No,” Jane said. “None of the rest of the representatives seems to have much truck with Trujillo, and the individual colonists are still boarding; he’s had no time to get known to any of them who aren’t from Erie. Even if he had, there’s no way the DoC would replace us. Secretary Bell hates Trujillo and has since they were representatives. Taking his idea and installing us as colony leaders is just another way she has of sticking it to him.”

  “General Rybicki warned us things have gotten political,” I said.

  “General Rybicki has a way of not quite telling us everything we need to know,” Jane said.

  “You may be right,” I said. “But on this point he was right on the nose. Anyway, for now let’s not worry about it too much. We’ve got enough to do and after the Magellan leaves Phoenix Station we’re going to get even busier. Speaking of which, I promised Zoë I would take her down to Phoenix today. Either of you want to come? It’s me, Zoë and the Obin twins.”

  “I’ll pass,” Savitri said. “I’m still getting used to Hickory and Dickory.”

  “You’ve known them for nearly eight years,” I said.

  “Yes,” Savitri said. “Nearly eight years, for five minutes at a time. I need to work up to extended visits.”

  “Fine,” I said, and turned to Jane. “What about you?”

  “I’m supposed to meet with General Szilard,” she said, referring to the commander of Special Forces. “He wants to catch up.”

  “All right,” I said. “You’re missing out.”

  “What are you doing down there?” Jane asked.

  “We’re going to visit Zoë’s parents,” I said. “The other ones.”

  I stood at the gravestone that bore the name of Zoë’s father and mother, and of Zoë herself. Zoë’s dates, based on the belief she had died in a colony attack, were obviously incorrect; less obviously, so were her father’s. Her mother’s dates were accurate. Zoë had crouched down to get close to the names; Hickory and Dickory had connected their consciousnesses just long enough to have a ten-second ecstasy at the idea of being at the death marker of Boutin, then disconnected and stood at a distance, impassive.

  “I remember the last time I was here,” Zoë said. The small bouquet of flowers she brought lay propped up on the gravestone. “It was the day Jane asked me if I wanted to come live with you and her.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You found out you were going to live with me before I found out I was going to live with either of you.”

  “I thought you and Jane were in love,” Zoë said. “That you planned to live together.”

  “We were,” I said. “We did. But it was complicated.”

  “Everything about our little family is complicated,” Zoë said. “You’re eighty-eight years old. Jane is a year older than I am. I’m the daughter of a traitor.”

  “You’re also the only girl in the universe with her own Obin escort,” I said.

  “Speaking of complicated,” Zoë said. “By day, typical kid. By night, adored by an entire alien race.”

  “There are worse setups,” I said.

  “I suppose,” Zoë said. “You’d think being the object of worship for a whole alien race would get me out of homework now and then. Don’t think I haven’t noticed that it doesn’t.”

  “We didn’t want it to go to your head,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she said. She pointed to the gravestone. “Even this is complicated. I’m alive, and it’s my father’s clone who is buried here, not my father. The only real person here is my mother. My real mother. It’s all very complicated.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Zoë shrugged. “I’m used to it by now. Most of the time it’s not a bad thing. And it gives you perspective, doesn’t it? I’d be at school, listening to Anjali or Chadna complain about how complicated their lives were, and I’d be thinking to myself, girl, you have no idea what complicated is.”

  “Good to hear you’ve handled it well,” I said.

  “I try,” Zoë said. “I have to admit it wasn’t a very good day when the two of you told me the truth about Dad.”

  “It wasn’t much of a fun day for us, either,” I said. “But we thought you deserved to know the truth.”

  “I know,” Zoë said, and stood up. “But you know. I woke up one morning thinking my real dad was just a scientist and went to bed knowing he could have wiped out the entire human race. It messes with you.”

  “Your father was a good man to you,” I said. “Whatever else he was and whatever else he did, he got that thing right.”

  Zoë walked over to me and gave me a hug. “Thank you for bringing me here. You’re a nice man, ninety-year-old dad,” she said.

  “You’re a great kid, teenage daughter,” I said. “You ready to go?”

  “In a second,” she said, and walked back over to the gravestone, knelt quickly and kissed it. Then she stood up and suddenly looked like an embarrassed teen. “I did that the last time I was here,” she said. “I wanted to see if it made me feel the same.”

  “Did it?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, still embarrassed. “Come on. Let’s go.” We walked toward the gates of the cemetery; I took out my PDA and signaled for a taxi to come pick us up.

  “How do you like the Magellan?” I asked, as we walked.

  “It’s interesting,” Zoë said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been on a spaceship. I forgot what it was like. And this one’s so big.”

  “It has to fit twenty-five hundred colonists and all of their stuff,” I said.

  “I get that,” Zoë said. “I’m just saying it’s large. It’s starting to fill up, though. The colonists are there now. I’ve met some of them. The ones my age, I mean.”

  “Meet any you like?” I asked.

  “A couple,” Zoë said. “There’s one girl who seems to want to get to know me. Gretchen Trujillo.”

  “Trujillo, you say,” I said.

  Zoë nodded. “Why? You know her?”

  “I think I may know her father,” I said.

  “It’s a small world,” Zoë said.

  “And it’s about to get a lot smaller,” I said.

  “Good point,” Zoë said, and looked around. “I wonder if I’ll ever make it back here.”

  “You’re going to a new colony,” I said. “Not the afterlife.”

  Zoë smiled at this. “You weren’t paying attention to the gravestone,” she said. “I’ve been to the afterlife. Coming back from that’s not a problem. It’s life you don’t get over.”

  “Jane’s taking a nap,” Savitri said, as Zoë and I returned to our stateroom. “She said she wasn’t feeling well.”

  I raised my eyebrows at this; Jane was the healthiest person I knew, even after she had been transferred into a standard human body. “Yes, I know,” Savitri said, catching the eyebrow. “I thought it was odd, too. She said she’d be fine, but not to disturb her for at least a few hours.”

  “All right,” I said. “Thanks. Zoë and I were going to go to the rec deck anyway. You want to come along?”

  “Jane asked me to work on some things before I got her up,” Savitri said. “Some other time.”

  “You work harder for Jane than you ever did for me,” I said.

  “It’s the power of inspiring leadership,” Savitri said.

  “Nice,” I said.

  Savitri made shooing motions. “I’ll ping your PDA when Jane is up,” Savitri said. “Now, go. You’re distracting me.”

  The Magellan’s recreation deck was arrayed like a small park, and was packed with colonists and their families, sampling the diversions the Magellan would offer them on our week-long journey to skip distance, thence to Roanoke. As we arrived, Zoë spied a trio of teenage girls and waved; one waved back and beckoned her over. I wondered if it was Gretchen Trujillo. Zoë left me with a quick backward glance good-bye. I wandered around the deck, watching my fellow colonists. Soon enoug
h most of them would recognize me as the colony leader. For now, however, I was safely and happily anonymous.

  At first glance the colonists seemed to be moving freely among each other, but after a minute or two I noticed some clumping, with groups of colonists standing apart. English was the common language of all the colonies, but each world also had its secondary languages, largely based on the stock of its original colonists. I heard snatches of these languages as I walked: Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, German.

  “You hear them, too,” someone said behind me. I turned and saw Trujillo. “All the different languages,” he said, and smiled. “Residue from our old worlds, I guess you would say. I doubt people will stop speaking them when we get to Roanoke.”

  “This your subtle way of suggesting that the colonists won’t be in a rush to trade in their own nationalities to become newly minted Roanokers,” I said.

  “It’s just an observation. And I’m sure in time we all will become . . . Roanokers,” Trujillo said, pronouncing that last word as if it were something spiky that he’d been required to swallow. “It will just take some time. Possibly more time than you now suspect. We are doing something different here, after all. Not just creating a new colony from the old-line colony worlds, but mixing ten different cultures into one colony. To be entirely honest about it, I have my reservations I think the Department of Colonization should have taken my original suggestion and let just one of the colonies field settlers.”

  “That’s bureaucracy for you,” I said. “Always messing up perfect plans.”

  “Yes, well,” Trujillo said, and waved his hand slightly, to encompass the polyglot settlers, and possibly me. “We both know this is as much about my feud with Secretary Bell as anything else. She was against Roanoke from the start, but there was too much momentum from the colonies for her stop this from happening. But there was nothing stopping her from making it as impractical as possible to manage. Including offering the colony leadership to a pair of well-meaning neophytes who have no idea where the landmines are in this situation, and who will make convenient scapegoats if the colony fails.”