Remnant Population

Then it was time to plant the late garden. For the first time, Ofelia really missed the others, when she struggled with the smallest of the tillers. She had never done the tilling herself; one of the strongest colonists had usually tilled for the whole community, trading that work for credits on the others. She got the little tiller out of the storage shed, but rolling it up the gently sloping lane to her house made her breathless and sweaty; her shoulders and hips hurt already.

When she turned the machine on, the loud raucous noise hurt her ears, and the machine dug itself a hole. She had to bounce all her weight on the handles to get the spi

With the planting done, she spent more time at the center, reading and revising the old logs again. She had almost forgotten Molly Suppert until she ran across the death notice: poor Molly, who had not been part of the original colony, but an assigned special technician. For five years, Molly had run the health clinic alone, as she trained her replacements from among the colonists. She was supposed to have been evacuated after five years, but when the ship came, Molly was dead.

Ofelia had never known what world Molly came from, but they had all known it was someplace strange, if its inhabitants had been anything like Molly, with her bone-white skin and yellow-green eyes, her orange frizzy hair. And her attitudes. It had been Molly who suggested that girls need not marry so young, that children need not be slapped into obedience. If she had stuck to giving immunizations and pregnancy tests, and teaching midwives how to use the diagnostic machines, she would not have been found with a knife in her neck out behind the center.

It had taken considerable work to make it appear that she had fallen on a scythe while chasing cattle down by the river, and Ofelia had wondered if the Company really believed that. She had rather liked Molly, although she had not been foolish enough to confide in her, like the younger girls. It was all very well to say those things Molly had said, but the world was the way it was, and had always been, slapped children and all.

In the log, she added what she remembered about Molly. She had never known for sure who killed her, and she wasn’t about to accuse without certainty. But the sun in her frizzy hair, that she put down, the way it glowed in a halo around her head as if she were a saint, but she wasn’t a saint because she cursed vividly in two languages. At least, Ofelia supposed that from the tone and vigor with which she spoke in her native tongue, whatever it was. She remembered none of the words; she had never really understood.

CHAPTER FIVE

It had been so long that when she heard the voices she did not know what they were. They sounded alien as the shrieks and squawks that came from the distant forest. She stood still in the street, her heart pounding. What? Where?

Her ears led her to the center, to the control rooms, where one of the gray boxes emitted a gabble that her brain finally sorted into words. She stared at the box for some time before realizing that it was not speaking to her, and it was not the machines speaking to the human caretakers they expected. “Correct your course, eighteen-six-forty one—” The speaker had an accent different enough that she had to strain to follow it, but it was the language she knew. A male voice. A voice she could tell was used to command.

“Done,” said another voice. “Shuttle One Sapphire, correcting. Get a six-oh-two and a thirty-twelve.” A hiss and crackle, then, “—Any sign of the other colony?”

“Sticks out on infrared like a blasted beacon,” said the first voice. “The boundary between terraformed and indigenous vegetation looks stable. Shuttle field. Some buildings. Why? We aren’t going near it.” “Just wondered. They—” Hiss, crackle.

A longish pause, then: “Well, we haven’t made that mistake,” from the first voice. “They were idiots to pick a tropical site anyway. I heard that they retrieved fewer colonists than they inserted.” A pause, as if someone had asked a question, though Ofelia couldn’t hear anything but the open, soft hissing. “No, not renegades — that many losses. Poor chills. Not like ours.”

Ofelia sat, hardly aware of the sudden cold sweat that ran down her ribs. Shuttle? Coming down? Chills?

Colonists?

They would find her. They would find her and send her away, back to space, to some cryo tank… or, almost as bad, they would expect her to join them. They would expect her to fit her schedule to theirs, to do what she was told.

Her heart fluttered; she felt shaky and cold. She did not want that; she did not want to be caught, caged, ordered here and there. She tried to think what she could do. Move into the forest again? She might have the time to gather more things, but she could not live in the forest; she could not eat anything that grew there.

She went outside and looked up. Of course she could see nothing. The sky was a pale blue dome streaked with white clouds. If a ship hung up there in orbit, she could not see it. Could it see her? Unlikely, she thought, in daylight. But at night?

She could not turn on the lights. Although she had chosen to do without them many a summer evening, now she felt confined by the dark. She had things to do, if she was going to escape, and she needed the light. She sat in the dark that night, peering up at the stars. Could they see her even without light? Infrared… that was heat, she remembered; the colonists had once had goggles for seeing animals in the dark, but over the years these had failed. So the spaceship up there might see her anyway, would certainly see the heat plume of the waste recycler. Would they believe it had been working by itself since the other colony left? That someone had merely forgotten to turn off the automatics? After the months alone, it was hard to fit her thoughts to the shape someone else’s mind might make. If it were Barto up there, what would he be thinking? How long until the shift is over… when is it my turn… is supper ready?

Dawn woke her; she had fallen asleep sitting against the wall, and her neck hurt. Her eyes felt gummy. She stretched slowly, painfully, and finally levered herself up beside the wall. Inside the center, it was just light enough to find her way from room to room. She went into the offices, and stared at the gray box, from which no voices came. Just as she began to wonder if she’d dreamed it, it crackled again and the voices resumed.