Remnant Population

“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 touched 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 i

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? “Sssi

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.