The Last Colony вбиос-3 Read online

  "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 a]l 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 Zoe' 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 Zoe I would take her down to Phoenix today. Either of you want to come? It's me, Zoe 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 Zoe's parents," I said. "The other ones."

  I stood at the gravestone that bore the name of Zoe's father and mother, and of Zoe herself. Zoe'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. Zoe 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," Zoe 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," Zoe said. "That you planned to live together."

  "We were," I said. "We did. But it was complicated."

  "Everything about our little family is complicated," Zoe 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," Zoe said. "By day, typical kid. By night, adored by an entire alien race."

  "There are worse setups," I said.

  "I suppose," Zoe 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.

  Zoe 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," Zoe 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," Zoe 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."

  Zoe 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 lime 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," Zoe' 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," Zoe 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," Zoe said. "There's one girl who seems to want to get to know me. Gretchen Trujillo."


  "Trujillo, you say," I said.

  Zoe nodded. "Why? You know her?"

  "I think I may know her father," I said.

  "It's a small world," Zoe said.

  "And it's about to get a lot smaller," I said.

  "Good point," Zoe 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."

  Zoe 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 Zoe 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. Zoe 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, Zoe spied a trio of teenage girls and waved; one waved back and beckoned her over. I wondered if it was Gretchen Trujillo. Zoe left me with a quick backward glance good-bye. I wandered around the deck, watching my fellow colonists. Soon enough 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."

  "You're saying we're patsies," I said.

  "I'm saying that you and your wife are intelligent, competent and politically expendable," Trujillo said. "When the colony fails, the blame will fall on you, not on Bell."

  "Even though she chose us," I said.

  "Did she?" Trujillo said. "I heard you were suggested by General Rybicki. He's well enough insulated from political fallout because he's CDF, and they're not required to care about politics. No, when the shit hits, Perry, it's going to roll downhill, right onto you and your wife."

  "You're sure the colony will fail," I said. "And yet, here you are."

  "I'm sure the colony could fail," Trujillo said. "And I'm sure there are those—Secretary Bell among them—who would be happy to see it fail, as payback against their political enemies and to cover up their own incompetence. They certainly designed it to fail. What can keep it from failing are people with the will and experience to help it survive."

  "Someone like you, for example," I said.

  Trujillo took a step closer to me. "Perry, I understand it's easy to think that this is all just about my ego. Really, I do. But I want you to consider something else for a moment. There are twenty-five hundred people on this ship who are here because six years ago I stood up in the CU representative chamber and demanded our colonization rights. I am responsible for their being here, and because I was powerless to stop Bell and her cronies from jury-rigging this colony to self-destruct, I'm responsible for putting these people in danger. This morning, I wasn't suggesting you let us help with colony administration just because I need to run things. I was suggesting it because given what the DoC has given you to work with, you're going to need all the help you can get, and those of us in that room with you this morning have been living with this for years. If we don't help you, the alternative is failure, straight and sure."

  "I appreciate the confidence in our leadership skills," I said. "You're not hearing what I'm saying," Trujillo said. "Damn it, Perry, I want you to succeed. I want this colony to succeed. The very last thing I want to do is undermine the leadership of you and your wife. If I did that, I'd be jeopardizing the lives of everyone in the colony. I'm not your enemy. I want to help you fight the people who are."

  "You're saying the Department of Colonization would put twenty-five hundred people at risk to get back at you," I said.

  "No," Trujillio said. "Not to get back at me. But to counter a threat to its colonial practices? To help the CU keep the colonies in their place? Twenty-five hundred colonists are not too many for a thing like that. If you know anything about colonization, you know twenty-five hundred colonists is the standard size for a seed colony. We lose seed colonies from time to time; we expect to lose a few. We're used to it. It's not twenty-five hundred people, it's just one seed colony.

  "But this is where it gets interesting. One seed colony lost is well within expectations for DoC colonization protocols. But the colonists come from ten different CU worlds, all of which are colonizing for the first time. Each of those worlds will feel the failure of the colony. It's a blow to the national psyche. And then the DoC can turn around and say, this is why we don't let you colonize. To protect you. They'll spoon-feed that argument to the colonies, all the colonies will swallow it down, and we'll be back to the status quo."

  "It's an interesting theory," I said.

  "Perry, you were in the Colonial Defense Forces for years," Trujillo said. "You know the end results of CU policies. Can you honestly tell me, with all your experience, that the scenario I've outlined for you is completely outside the realm of possibility?"

  I kept quiet. Trujillo smiled grimly. "Food for thought, Perry," he said. "Something for you to consider the next time you and your wife are slamming the door on the rest of us at one of our advisory meetings. I trust you'll do what you think is best for the colony." He glanced over my shoulder, looking at something beyond it. "I think our daughters have met," he said.

  I turned around to see Zoe' talking animatedly wit
h one of the girls I had seen earlier; she was the one who had beckoned Zoe over. "It appears they have," I said.

  "They seem to get along," Trujillo said. "Our Roanoke colony starts there, I think. Maybe we can follow their example."

  "I'm not sure I can swallow the idea of a selfless Manfred Trujillo," Jane said. She had propped herself up in bed. Babar lolled at the end of the bed, his tail thumping contentedly.

  "That's two of us," I said. I was sitting in the chair next to the bed. "The problem is I can't entirely discount what he's saying, either."

  "Why not?" Jane said. She began to reach for the pitcher of water she had at the bedside table, but was awkwardly positioned. I took the pitcher and the glass next to it and started pouring.

  "You remember what Hickory said about Roanoke planet," I said, handing her the glass.

  "Thanks," she said, and downed the entire glass in about five seconds.

  "Wow," I said. "You sure you're feeling better?"

  "I'm fine," she said. "I'm just thirsty." She handed the glass back to me; I poured her more water. She sipped this one more moderately. "Roanoke planet," she said, prompting me.

  "Hickory said that Roanoke planet was still under the control of the Obin," I said. "If the Department of Colonization really thinks this colony is going to fail, that might actually make sense."

  "Why trade for a planet you know your colonists aren't going to keep," Jane said.

  "Exactly" I said. "And there's another thing. I was in the cargo hold today going over the manifest with the cargo chief, and he mentioned that we were packing a whole lot of obsolete equipment."

  "That's probably to do with the Mennonites," Jane said, and sipped her water again.

  "That's what I said, too,' I said. "But after I talked to Trujillo I went through the manifest again. The cargo chief was right. There's more obsolete equipment there than we can chalk up to the Mennonites."

  "We're underequipped,' Jane said.

  "That's the thing," I said. "We're not underequipped. We have a whole bunch of obsolete equipment, but it's not in place of more modern equipment, it's there in addition to it."