Remnant Population

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.

“Local sunrise,” said another male voice. Ofelia wondered where they were; the sun would not rise here for another hour. East of her? Only the sea lay to the east, unless you traveled far to the north. She flicked on the weather screen, which generated a map of the continent, showing the dawnline. Somewhere along that line was the place they’d landed. It had to be over a thousand kilometers away.

Perhaps they would never find her. They would be too busy. In all the forty years of this colony, none of them had ventured more than a few kilometers from the base. They had planned to go farther, but things happened. She might be safe yet.

“Eight-eight will drop the heavies in two.”

“On it.”

Ofelia spent that day hunched over the receiver, following the invasion—she could not help thinking of it like that—in the half-understood comments. She remembered enough of her own landing to know the necessary sequence. The first shuttles could land without prepared ground; they carried the mechbots that scraped out a shuttle field. Then the main cargo shuttles could land, with the construction crews that quickly set up the temporary structures for storage and surfaced the strip. Finally, the passenger shuttles, with the newly-wakened colonists, in order of specialty. She imagined another woman like her young self, waking from the cryo tank, trying to comfort her children as they were revived, trying to keep them calm as they were herded into a shuttle . . . they had landed in the rain, she remembered, and Barto had screamed and butted his hard round head into her breast.

But that would be later. Today, somewhere east and north, the hard shuttles were unloading mechbots, and the big construction machines were gouging the native plants—she wondered if it was forest or brush up there—to make a longer landing strip.

That night, she went back to her house to sleep, trusting that she would hear any shuttle landing at the nearby field. She didn’t turn any lights on—that would be stupid, as long as she knew a ship hung up there, watching. But it would leave, eventually, and the colonists would have hard work to do in their own place. Then she could turn the lights on. She began to be sure that they would not find her. She had heard them say that the tropical site had been a stupid choice; that should mean they wouldn’t want to explore that way. And by the time they did—in ten or twenty years, in thirty years or forty—she would be safely dead.

They might read the colony logs—her additions to them, as well. It made her grin, lying there in the darkness, to think of them reading the truth, the stories of real people, instead of the official version, all dates and names.

“Pass six. On course.” Just like all the others, Ofelia thought. Five passenger shuttles had already landed; she had listened less tensely than before. Clearly no one was paying any attention to the site of an abandoned colony they had no use for. She had even left the center to tend the gardens, to cook and eat her meals, to sleep in her own comfortable bed. Although she had started to assemble a survival pack to take into the forest, she had not finished it. Now she relaxed in a chair in the sewing room, with the volume up high on the radio as she strung the beads she’d painted.

“Cleared to land.” A new voice, no doubt one of the colonists with special training, wakened first and put to work as soon as she landed. Ofelia tried to picture the woman in her mind. Young, of course. Did she have children? She sounded earnest, someone very serious about her work. If she had children, their clothes would always be neat. Ofelia looked at the pattern of beads she was making, and decided to put another blue one between the greens. That meant sliding off a yellow and a green; she squinted at the thread. “We’ve got trouble,” she heard. The voice was trying to stay calm, and not succeeding. Ofelia looked up, half-expecting to see someone in the doorway talking to her. No. It was still in the gray box, happening somewhere else, whatever it was.

“What?” Bored, unworried response from the orbiting ship.

“There’s some kind of—it’s—there’s not supposed to be any intelligent life, but that’s—”

“Make sense, will you?”

“There’s about a hundred or so big . . . brownish animals. Moving toward us. In formation. Bright patterns on them, and some kind of—” A noise Ofelia did not recognize, though it sounded dangerous, a noise her body understood before her brain could analyze it. “—They’re trying to kill—” Incredulity from that voice. Ofelia felt the same way. Something—some animals—trying to kill them? Ridiculous! Storms, yes, floods and droughts and fevers, but not animals. Nothing capable of real damage had attacked the original colony in forty years; the planet had been surveyed; they were crazy up there.

She put down the beads and went into the control room. If these people were transmitting video as well as audio, she might be able to see them. She tried one channel after another, but found no images. She would have to listen.

Even her imagination could not make it clear. What the creatures were, no one seemed to know. More than one voice, in the next hours, said they were big. More than one exclaimed over their speed. How big was big? How fast was fast? Ofelia no more than those who actually saw them could guess if they were more like mammals or reptiles, how intelligent they were.

However intelligent, the creatures seemed determined to kill the colonists. Ofelia hunched over the speakers, listening to the now-familiar sounds: she had heard from the voices that this was an explosive, and that was the impact of stones hurled by some kind of machine. People were dead already, killed by the falling stones, the explosions. Only a few of the people had weapons. Some of them cowered in the shuttle presently on the ground; the pilot asked permission to return to space.

“You’re overloaded for return—unload your cargo—”

“—Can’t. They won’t go out—we can make it—”

“Marginal. You’ve got to—”

“If they blow a hole in the strip, we won’t have a chance; we have to go now—” No answer, but Ofelia heard the pilot mutter. “Damned idiots—c’mon Tig, get that booster primed, we’re going to need every bit of it—”

Then an explosion that hurt Ofelia’s ears even attenuated by distance and the speakers’ dampers. A few seconds of silence, then a call from the ship.

“—Come in—Carver, answer!”

“—Too late, you bastards—they got the shuttle and the strip!” That from one of the other local sources. Ofelia felt a pressure in her chest. The creatures had blown up a shuttle? “Get us out of here!”

“Three hours until another shuttle can make it.” A new voice from the ship, older, with more authority. “That will be after local sunset . . . they’ll need lights for landing. We’ve put every trained person aboard—”

“In three hours, we won’t be here to save!” the voice said. “Lights—how can we—Dammit, do something now! These things are coming in—we can’t—”

Ofelia felt wetness on her face and tasted it. Tears. She was crying for them, for the hopeless, helpless colonists, waked from cryo to be killed on a planet they had not even met. It was far worse than her own fate, far worse than working forty years for nothing. She knew, as they would learn, that Company ships hanging safe in space never risked themselves down in the dirty atmosphere for mere colonists. Cheaper to lose a few colonists than a deep-space carrier.

“We don’t have any space-to-surface weapons,” the ship’s voice said. “Recommend you lay out a defensive perimeter—”

“With what?” The bitterness in that made Ofelia wince. “I’ll leave this on transmit, and you can get your precious record—tell whoever surveyed this place they were blind, deaf, and crazy—”

Ofelia hardly breathed as the distant sounds made clear what happened. The creatures overran the landing site; Ofelia could hear screaming, most of it incoherent, and sounds she supposed were made by the creatures themselves. The last sound transmitted was the thud, then crunch, of something knocking over and squashing the transmitter. Ofelia went outside; it was dusk, dusk of the same day. She heard a distant roar, then a crashing boom: a shuttle coming down fast, not on the course of the others.

She went back inside to listen. The shuttle crew was reporting to the orbiting ship. “Visible light, yes. Thermal profile suggests burning debris, not any civilized source of light. Lots of infrared—thousands, tens of thousands of whatever-they-are. Recording in all frequencies. It’s—Gods, look at that! Get us UP, Shin!”

And, over a gabble of returning questions from the ship, “—No doubt at all they’re intelligent. Tool-users, absolutely. No way we can set down there in the dark. In the morning—”

“—Make a full report to the Ministry,” the calm voice from the ship said. “A daylight survey, high-altitude. No use risking more lives. The Company can get a refund, I’m sure, on grounds of misrepresentation by the former franchise holder, and let the pols decide if they want to send a diplomatic expedition. Not our problem.”

“—consider old colony landing site?”

“No. If there’s an indigenous intelligent species, the rules have changed. We won’t touch it; we’ll report. If your data are good enough, we won’t even bother with the daylight survey. We’ve got the direct transmissions from the landing site, anyway.”

“I’d like to know how they missed this—these whatevers.”

“Not our problem.”

Ofelia had heard that tone before. Whoever it was up there in the safe, air-conditioned space ship, never considered it his problem when people were dying somewhere else. Her lip curled. She would like to tell him what she thought. The transmission switch suddenly caught her eye; she had not even considered it before. Now, though: if she could hear them, they could hear her. If she spoke.

It would do no good. It would only get her in trouble.

For a day or so, she could believe nothing had changed. The threat was gone; the new colony didn’t exist. If the creatures had not found her in over forty years, why would they now? She could go on as before, living peacefully in the deserted village, stringing beads, playing with paints, gardening the small amount necessary to grow her own food.

Resolutely, she walked out among the animals, strolled the margin of the grassy pastures. In the sun, in the haze of pollen blown from the flowering grass, she could pretend nothing had happened. The sun warmed her shoulders; the sheep smelled like sheep, and the cattle . . . the cattle wagged their ears at her, snuffed with wet black noses, and edged away. The bull huffed, swinging his head back and forth. Not at her. At something across the river.

They were no more nervous than usual. She told herself that even as her breath came short and the back of her neck itched. She went back to the sheep, telling herself they were more restful, and then all of them jerked their heads up at once, staring at one point in the forest where she saw and heard nothing at all.

Sheep were stupid. Cattle were flighty. Ofelia glared at the forest, and went back to her garden. It was only accident that she kept ending up in the corner nearest the kitchen, hoeing the same bit of ground, staring across the tangle of dayvines on the fence she had never quite mended at the pasture and the brush beyond it.

Perhaps she had dreamed the whole thing. She had heard, in school, that no one could live long alone without going crazy, without thinking they heard and saw other people. She had never believed it, but she had been told. So if she had gone crazy, without noticing it, she could have imagined the whole thing. The other ship had never really come, and nothing had happened to it. Why she had imagined such a gruesome fate for its colonists she did not know; it must be some evil streak in her, probably the same one that made her decide to stay here alone.

That idea, once rooted, bore tempting fruit: it would be easy to find out the truth. The machines would have recorded the transmissions, if there had been transmissions. All she had to do was play them back. Or play back nothing, and know she had made it all up.

She knew what she knew; she didn’t need any machine to tell her the truth. Day after day, she went into the center to check the gauges, the weather, to record the necessary items in the log. Day after day, she eyed the machine records and did not play them back.

It was, in the end, an accident. She had meant to check the date she’d planted carrots the year before. Something interrupted; her finger slipped off the control that reversed the calendar search.

“—With what?” asked a frightened, angry voice that was not her own.

It was real. It had happened. The machines did not lie, could not lie, and that meant the voice on the tape had been a real person, real in fright and pain.

And now was dead. She began to shake without realizing it; her hands and then her arms, her feet and then her legs, her whole body, shaking with the same fear, with the same shock. They had been human—people she could have known, could have talked to—and now they were all dead.

With shaking hands, she fumbled over the controls until she turned the recording off. Silence rushed in on her, the silence she had grown used to, that she had thought of as peace. No voices. No voices anymore.

Slowly, slowly, her breath steadied. She felt tired; she wanted to go to sleep. When she looked at her hands, with their red, swollen knuckles and knotted veins and age spots, they looked more fragile than flowers. Her gaze slid downwards, caught on the fringed drape she had made for herself. It seemed more indecent than her body; she yanked it off as she stood, balled it in her hands and threw it on the floor.

“They’re dead!” she said aloud, in a voice she hardly remembered using. Her mind divided like water running down a slope: she wondered why she was outraged, she wondered why she was afraid, why she was not more afraid. She would not have killed them, those strangers, though she had not wanted them here.

She went outside again, into another day that insisted on being like any other. Again it was hot, humid, the sky clotted with clouds moving slowly before a steady wind. Why did it matter if they were all dead? They had come; they had gone; she was alone again, and she had wanted to be alone.

It was not the same.

It would never be the same.

Something—no, someone, some creatures—lived on this world that wanted to kill her—that had killed humans—and she had not known any such danger existed. She could not unknow it, struggle though she might.

The air stank of strange smoke; a grassfire burned on in the distance, its smoke plume mourning the nests. Though the grass would return and cover the nakedness of the land with her shawl, the People would always know where the scars were. This smell would last.

Defeat, drummed the righthand. Not defeat, victory: they are gone and we are here, drummed the lefthand. One by one, the righthand changed places, until the lefthand drumming carried all the power of the People.

Far above, a sinuous white streak where the monster had flown, scarring the very air. The righthand reminded that generations ago such streaks had been seen far off to the south. The lefthand continued drumming Victory, victory, safety, haven, return.

The scar in the sky blew away to nothing. No more monster noises from the air, no more bad smells. The People danced, winding around the burnt earth, sending out a long spiral coil of dancers to find live sprigs of grass, passed from one to another inward, until the site had been replanted. They danced on, drumming and dancing, until the wind drums answered, until the sky people gathered to dance in their own coils and spirals, weeping at the monster tracks, filling them with sweet tears that nourished the grass.

On the move again after the rain, following the wind drums across the grass, laden with the gourds of skylight-maker, drum-beater, the youngest troop of the People called questions to each other. Why scars in the sky? Why monsters in gray and green? Why flat-faced? Why wingless, toeless—

Not toeless, one called back. Short-toed, foot-clothed in toeless garments.

Garments, not shells?

Not shells, garments.

None without them . . . shells.

No flesh-bond. Garments.

Then—the sky creatures also garments? A lively debate followed, whether the stinking corpses of great flyers had been shells or garments or separate creatures, allies of the monsters. One held out for machines, no more than complicated mechanisms like those of the stone-tossers. The others laughed scornfully. A city tale, something the shore-dwellers thought up when their brains were smoke-dimmed. Machines could not fly . . . who could draw the strings tightly enough to have the wings flap.

Those wings did not flap.

That we saw.

It could work. The same enthusiast; they knew that eagerness for machines. The People had good machines; they were proud of this enthusiast. It could work, but it would need a new idea. They loped on, silent now. Never distract someone on the path of a new idea; it is like distracting a hunter on the trail of game, and means missing a feast.

The enthusiast fell behind; they knew what that meant. A time of sitting still, a time of seeking out other enthusiasts, a time of playing with sticks and little stones and sinew, and eventually there would be a new machine, something no one had ever seen. It did not concern the rest of them until then.

If there are others, someone called, free now to call.

Others? Where?

The legends. The sky-scars. Somewhere south. Others. Allies of allies, allies of monsters.

All alert, they crowded around. More monsters? More nest-burners, nest-scrapers? More thieves and children of thieves? It would be broodseasons before the nests just replanted were ready for young again; in the meantime they would have to nest elsewhere, which meant unfriendly seasons contesting for marginal sites with the others who roamed the grasslands. And would they come back, eager for the great nestmass, only to find more monsters?

An elder troop overheard their keening and swept them up. No monsters had been seen after that earlier sky-scar. Chances were it had been a scouting raid, no more.

No one ever looked.

Many broodseasons. Monsters are hasty. No need. No one ever looked. That from a youngling as enthusiastic this way as the machine-enthusiast had been. They all knew that, as they all knew everything about each other.

Too far. The desert. The thornbrush. Then too wet, and trees too tall. Worse than cities. The final insult, strong enough to discourage anyone but this youngling, who had the hunter’s own determination to follow any trail where it led.

Stinking trail, one of the oldest finally said. No good at the end. Empty belly, can’t eat monsters.

They had tried, only to be spectacularly sick in the burnt grass.

Nestmass, said one of the shy younglings. Many grumbled at that. If the shy ones started, the whole People might turn aside, and that at a time when new nests must come first.

Go . . . drummed the lefthand, passing the drumming from troop to troop on that flank, and then through the center. Go, go, go. Seek, seek. Take enough, but not too many.

After nesting? The youngling troop were not that eager to wander into dryness and salt and thorn and then swamp and tall trees for inedible monsters.

Now go, drummed the lefthand. Now, now, now. GO.

The youngling troop split, and split again. The enthusiast, not so enthusiastic now, but like any hunter intrigued with a new quarry. The shy youngling, only a broodseason from needing a nest. A few more of the raucous type which the older troops were glad enough to see leaving. And the elders who, on second or third thought decided that it might be an adventure, who had heard about the fishing on that more southern coast, who had a relative who had seen the sky-scar. With them, in the gourds and sacks and pouches of a nomad People, went their knowledge, their skills. However far they went, however long it took, the People relished travel, relished the chance to learn, the flavor and fiber of novelty.

As they went they discussed the monsters, reminding each other of every last detail, all that had been seen, heard, smelt, tasted (ugh! that disgusting flavor, turning the belly), surmised. Inbrooders, like the grasseaters they hunted? Likely. Two-formed, one with sticks and one with holes. Two-everything, except where on the ends of arms and legs the little bits stuck out in fives. Odd number, fives. Sacred to some, mostly fisheaters. How well could they see with those two eyes in the flat face? Well enough to aim fire tubes; they’d noticed that. Flaps on the side of the head: might be ears. Or tasters. Little ones big-headed, otherwise similar. Only a few little ones, most big ones. Big ones all dark-hairy on top, shades of earth-color. They passed the images back and forth. Yes. They would all know a monster if they saw one again.

The question of sense took longer. The monsters had sense enough to recognize threat, but so had most creatures, even the very stupid. Quick response meant nothing; the People knew that Carriers had little sense, although they responded quickly to anything, even training. Some of those things had been machines, some very large machines, but how hard was it to build a machine to carry dirt? Any child could do that.

It moved on its own.

It didn’t. It had a spell cast on it.

It didn’t. A monster guided it.

Who saw? The answer to that quelled all doubt; a monster had guided the machine that moved the dirt (and the nests! Filthy thieves!) and although no one had seen the twisted sinew or string, it must have been in there somewhere.

We should have looked harder.

Machine-lovers look at machines.

They would, too. That distraction shrugged off, they went back to considering whether monsters had sense. Had they known they were robbing nests? How could they not, with the People’s sigil in plain view, the braids and coils of grass that warned of nestmass and named the nest guardians. If they were not blind, they must have seen. If they had sense, they must have understood.

The arguments went back and forth, across the open grass, until someone scented game, and drummed a short signal.