The Last Colony Part 12

"I don't understand religion," Jane said.

"It makes more sense from the inside," I said. "Anyway you don't have to understand it. You just have to respect it."

"I respect it," Jane said. "I also respect the fact this planet still has ways to kill us we haven't figured out yet. I wonder if other people respect that."

"There's one way to find out," I said.

"You and I haven't talked about whether we plan to do any farming ourselves," Jane said.

"I don't think it would be a smart use of our time," I said. "We're colony administrators now, and we don't have automated equipment here we can use. We'll be busy enough. After Croatoan empties out a bit we'll build a nice little house. If you want to grow things, we can have a garden. We should should have a garden anyway, for our own fruits and vegetables. We can put Zoe in charge of it. Give her something to do." have a garden anyway, for our own fruits and vegetables. We can put Zoe in charge of it. Give her something to do."

"I want to grow flowers, too," Jane said. "Roses."

"Really," I said. "You've never really been into pretty things before."

"It's not that," Jane said. "This planet smells like an armpit."

SEVEN.

Roanoke revolves around its sun every 305 days. We decided to give the Roanoke year eleven months, seven with twenty-nine days and four with thirty. We named a month for each of the colony worlds our settlers came from, plus one for the Magellan Magellan. We dated the first day of the year to the day we arrived above Roanoke, and named the first month Magellan. The Magellan Magellan crew was touched, which was good, but by the time we named the months, it was already Magellan twenty-ninth. Their month was already almost over. They weren't entirely pleased about that. crew was touched, which was good, but by the time we named the months, it was already Magellan twenty-ninth. Their month was already almost over. They weren't entirely pleased about that.

Shortly after our decision to start allowing the colonists to homestead, Hiram Yoder approached me for a private meeting. It was clear, he said, that the majority of the colonists were not qualified to farm; they had all trained on modern farming equipment and were having difficulties with the more labor-intensive farm equipment the Mennonites were familiar with. Our stores of fast-growing, genetically modified seed would allow us to begin harvesting crops within two months-but only if we knew what we were doing. We didn't, and we were looking a potential famine in the face.

Yoder suggested we allow the Mennonites to cultivate crops for the entire colony, thus ensuring that the colony wouldn't turn into an interstellar Donner party three months down the line; the Mennonites would apprentice the other colonists so they could receive on-the-job training. I readily agreed to this. By the second week of Albion, the Mennonites had taken our soil studies and used them to plant fields of wheat, maize and any other number of vegetables; they woke honeybees from their slumber to begin doing their pollination dance, pastured the livestock and were teaching the colonists of nine other worlds (and one ship) the advantages of intensive and companion planting, carbon and calorie farming and the secrets of maximizing yields in the smallest amount of s.p.a.ce. I began to relax a little; Savitri, who had been making jokes about "long pig," found something new to snark about.

In Umbria, the fuglies discovered that fast-growing potatoes were good eatin', and we lost several acres in the s.p.a.ce of three days. We had our first agricultural pest. We also completed the medical bay, with all its equipment in its own black box. Dr. Tsao was delighted when within hours she was using her surgery 'bot to reattach a finger a colonist had inadvertently sliced off with a bandsaw during a barn raising.

In the first weekend of Zhong Guo, I presided over Roanoke's first wedding, between Katherine Chao, formerly of Franklin, and Kevin Jones, formerly of Rus. There was much rejoicing. Two weeks later I presided over Roanoke's first divorce, fortunately not of Chao and Jones. Beata had finally gotten her fill of antagonizing Jann Kranjic and let him off the hook. There was much rejoicing.

By Erie tenth, we had finished our first major crop harvests. I declared a national holiday and day of thanksgiving. The colonists celebrated by building the Mennonites a meeting house, for which they only occasionally needed to ask for advice from the Mennonites themselves. The second set of crops was into the ground less than a week later.

In Khartoum, Patrick Kazumi went with his friends to play by the stream behind Croatoan's western wall. While running along the stream, he slipped, hit his head on a rock and drowned. He was eight years old. Most of the colony attended his funeral. On the last day of Khartoum, Anna Kazumi, Patrick's mother, stole a heavy coat from a friend, placed rocks in her pockets and waded into the stream to follow her son. She succeeded.

In Kyoto, it rained heavily four days out of every five, spoiling crops and interfering with the colony's second harvest of the year. Zoe and Enzo had a somewhat dramatic breakup, as often happens when first loves finally get on each other's nerves. Hickory and d.i.c.kory, overstimulated from Zoe's relationship angst, began openly discussing how to solve the Enzo problem. Zoe finally told the two to stop it; they were creeping her out.

In Elysium, the yotes, the coyote-like predators we'd discovered on our barrier, made their way back toward the colony, and attempted to work their way through the colony's herd of sheep, a ready source of food. Colonists began working their way through the predators in return. Savitri relented after three months and went on a date with Beata. The next day Savitri described the evening as an "interesting failure" and refused to discuss it further.

With Roanoke autumn in full swing, the last of the temporary housing tents folded for good, replaced with simple, snug houses in Croatoan and on the homesteads outside its walls. Half of the colonists still lived in Croatoan, learning trades from the Mennonites; the other half carved out their homesteads and waited for the new year to plant their own fields and yield their own crops.

Savitri's birthday-as measured on Huckleberry, translated to Roanoke dates-occurred on the twenty-third of Elysium; I gave her the gift of an indoor toilet for her tiny cottage, connected to a small and easily-drained septic tank. Savitri actually teared up.

On the thirteenth of Rus, Henri Arlien battered his wife Therese on the belief that she was having an affair with a former tentmate. Therese responded by battering her husband with a heavy pan, breaking his jaw and knocking out three of his teeth. Both Henri and Therese visited Dr. Tsao; Henri then visited the hastily a.s.sembled jail, formerly a livestock hold. Therese asked for a divorce and then moved in with the former tentmate. She hadn't been having an affair before, she said, but now it sounded like a d.a.m.n fine idea indeed.

The tentmate was a fellow by the name of Joseph Loong. On the twentieth of Phoenix, Loong went missing.

"First things first," I said to Jane, after Therese Arlien came in to report Loong's disappearance. "Where has Henri Arlien been recently?"

"He's on work furlough during the day," Jane said. "The only time he's allowed to be by himself is when he has to pee. At night he's back in his stall at the jail."

"That stall's not exactly escape-proof," I said. In its former life it had held a horse.

"No," Jane said. "But the livestock hold is. One door, one lock, and it's on the outside. He doesn't get anywhere overnight."

"He could get a friend to visit Loong," I said.

"I don't think Arlien has friends," Jane said. "Chad and Ari took statements from their neighbors. Pretty much all of them said Henri had got what he deserved when Therese hit him with that pan. I'll have Chad check around, but I don't think we'll get much there."

"What do you think, then?" I asked.

"Loong's homestead borders the woods," Jane said. "Therese said the two of them had gone for walks out there. The fanties are migrating through the area, and Loong wanted to get a closer look." The fanties were the lumbering animals some of the folks saw at the edge of the woods not long after we landed; apparently they migrated, looking for food. We had caught the tail end of their stay when we arrived; now it was the early part. I thought they looked about as much like elephants as I did, but the name had stuck whether I liked it or not.

"So Loong goes out to look at the fanties and gets lost," I said.

"Or gets trampled," Jane said. "The fanties are large animals "

"Well, then, let's get a search party together," I said. "If Loong just got lost, if he has any sense, he'll stay put and wait for us to find him."

"If he had any sense he wouldn't be chasing after fanties in the first place," Jane said.

"You'd be no fun on a safari," I said.

"Experience teaches me not to go out of my way to chase alien creatures," Jane said. "Because they often chase back. I'll have a search party together in an hour. You should come along."

The search party began its search just before noon. It was a hundred and fifty volunteers strong; Henri Arlien may not have been popular but both Therese and Loong had a number of friends. Therese came to join the party but I sent her home with two of her friends. I didn't want to run the risk of her coming across Joe's body. Jane blocked off search areas for small groups and required each group to stay in voice contact with one another. Savitri and Beata, who had become friends despite their interesting failure of a date, searched with me, Savitri keeping a tight grip on an old-style compa.s.s she had traded for with a Mennonite sometime before. Jane, some measure down the woods, was accompanied by Zoe and Hickory and d.i.c.kory. I wasn't entirely thrilled with Zoe being part of the search squad, but between Jane and the Obin she was probably safer in the woods than back home in Croatoan.

Three hours into the search, Hickory bounded up, shadowy in his nanomesh suit. "Lieutenant Sagan wishes to see you," it said.

"All right," I said, and motioned for Savitri and Beata to come along.

"No," Hickory said. "You only."

"What is it?" I asked.

"I cannot say," Hickory said. "Please, Major. You must come now."

"We're stuck in the creepy woods, then," Savitri said, to me.

"You can head in if you want," I said. "But tell the parties on either side so they can tighten up." And with that I jogged after Hickory, who kept an aggressive pace.

Several minutes later we arrived where Jane was. She was standing with Marta Piro and two other colonists, all three of whom had blank, numb expressions on their faces. Behind them was the ma.s.sive carca.s.s of a fantie, wild with tiny flying bugs, and a rather smaller carca.s.s farther beyond that. Jane spied me and said something to Piro and the other two; they glanced over to me, nodded at whatever it was Jane was saying and then headed back toward the colony.

"Where's Zoe?" I asked.

"I had d.i.c.kory take her back," Jane said. "I didn't want her to see this. Marta and her team found something."

I motioned to the smaller carca.s.s. "Joseph Loong, it looks like," I said.

"Not just that," Jane said. "Come here."

We walked over to Loong's corpse. It was a b.l.o.o.d.y mess. "Tell me what you see," Jane said.

I leaned down and got a good look, willing myself into a neutral frame of mind. "He's been eaten at," I said.

"That's what I told Marta and the others," Jane said. "And that's what I want them to believe for right now. You You need to look closer." need to look closer."

I frowned and looked at the corpse again, trying to see what it was I was clearly missing. Suddenly it snapped into place.

I went cold. "Holy G.o.d," I said, and backed away from Loong.

Jane looked at me intently. "You see it, too," she said. "He wasn't eaten. He was butchered butchered."

The Council crowded uncomfortably into the medical bay, along with Dr. Tsao. "This isn't going to be pleasant," I warned them, and pulled the sheet back on what was left of Joe Loong. Only Lee Chen and Marta Piro looked like they were likely to vomit, which was a better percentage than I expected.

"Christ. Something ate him," Paulo Gutierrez said.

"No," Hiram Yoder said. He moved closer to Loong. "Look," he said, pointing. "The tissues are cut, not torn. Here, here and here." He glanced over at Jane. "This is why you needed to show us this," he said. Jane nodded.

"Why?" Guiterrez said. "I don't understand. What are you showing us?"

"This man's been butchered," Yoder said. "Whoever did this to him used some sort of cutting tool to take off his flesh. A knife or an ax, possibly."

"How can you tell this?" Gutierrez said to Yoder.

"I've butchered enough animals to know what it looks like," Yoder said, and glanced up at Jane and I. "And I believe our administrators have seen enough of the violence of war to know what sort of violence this was."

"But you can't be sure," Marie Black said.

Jane glanced over to Dr. Tsao and nodded. "There are striations on the bone that are consistent with a cutting implement," Dr. Tsao said. "They're precisely positioned. They don't look like what you'd see if a bone was gnawed on by an animal. Someone did this, not something something."

"So you're saying there's a murderer in the colony," Manfred Trujillo said.

"Murderer?" Gutierrez said. "The h.e.l.l with that. We've got a G.o.dd.a.m.n cannibal cannibal walking around." walking around."

"No," Jane said.

"Excuse me?" Gutierrez said. "You said it yourself, this man's been sliced up like he was livestock. One of us had to have done it."

Jane glanced over at me. "Okay," I said. "I'm going to have to do this formally. As the Colonial Union administrator of the colony of Roanoke, I hereby declare that everyone in this room is bound by the State Secrecy Act."

"I concur," Jane said.

"This means that nothing said or done here now can be shared outside this room to anyone, under penalty of treason," I said.

"The h.e.l.l you say," Trujillo said.

"The h.e.l.l I do say," I said. "No joke. You talk about any of this before Jane and I are ready for you to talk about it, and you'll be in deep s.h.i.t."

"Define deep s.h.i.t deep s.h.i.t," Gutierrez said.

"I shoot you," Jane said. Gutierrez smiled uncertainly, waiting for Jane to indicate she was kidding. He kept waiting.

"All right," Trujillo said. "We understand. No talking."

"Thank you," I said. "We brought you over here for two reasons. The first was to show you him"-I pointed to Loong, whom Dr. Tsao had hidden again under the sheet-"and the second was to show you this." I reached over to the lab table, pulled an object from underneath a towel and handed it to Trujillo.

He examined it. "It looks like the head of a spear," he said.

"That's what it is," I said. "We found it by the fantie carca.s.s near where we found Loong. We suspect it was thrown at the fantie and it managed to pull it out and break it, or perhaps broke it and then pulled it out."

Trujillo, who was in the act of handing the spearhead over to Lee Chen, stopped and took another look at it. "You're not seriously suggesting what I think you're suggesting," he said "It wasn't just Loong who was butchered," Jane said. "The fantie was butchered, too. There were footprints around Loong, because of Marta and her search party and me and John. There were tracks around the fantie as well. They weren't ours."

"The fantie was brought down by some votes," Marie Black said. "The yotes move in packs. It could happen."

"You're not listening," Jane said. "The fantie was butchered butchered. Whoever butchered the fantie almost certainly butchered Loong. And whoever butchered the fantie wasn't human."

"You're saying there's some sort of aboriginal intelligent species here on Roanoke," Trujillo said.

"Yes," I said.

"How intelligent?" Trujillo asked.

"Intelligent enough to make that," I said, noting the spear. "It's a simple spear, but it's still a spear And they're intelligent enough to make knives for butchering."

"We've been here almost a Roanoke year," Lee Chen said. "If these things exist, why haven't we seen them before?"

"I think we have," Jane said. "I think whatever these things are, were the ones who tried to get into Croatoan not long after we arrived. When they couldn't climb their way over the barrier they tried digging under." think whatever these things are, were the ones who tried to get into Croatoan not long after we arrived. When they couldn't climb their way over the barrier they tried digging under."

"I thought the yotes did that," Chen said.

"We killed a yote in one of the holes," Jane said. "It doesn't mean the yote dug the hole."

"The holes happened right around the time we first saw the fanties," I said. "Now the fanties are back. Maybe these things follow the herd. No fanties, no Roanoke cavemen." I pointed to Loong. "I think these things were hunting a fantie. They killed it and were butchering it up when Loong wandered onto what they were doing. Maybe they killed him out of fear, and butchered him afterward."

"They saw him as prey," Gutierrez said.

"We don't know that," I said.

"Come on," Gutierrez said, waving toward Loong. "The sons of b.i.t.c.hes turned him into f.u.c.king steaks steaks."

"Yes," I said. "But we don't know if he was hunted hunted. I'd rather we don't jump to any conclusions. And I'd rather we we didn't start panicking about what these things are or what their intentions are toward us. As far as we know they have no intentions. This could have been a random encounter." didn't start panicking about what these things are or what their intentions are toward us. As far as we know they have no intentions. This could have been a random encounter."

"You're not suggesting we pretend that Joe wasn't wasn't killed and eaten," said Marta Piro. "That's already impossible. Jun and Evan know, because they were with me when we found him. Jane's told us to keep quiet, and we have so far. But this isn't something you can keep quiet forever." killed and eaten," said Marta Piro. "That's already impossible. Jun and Evan know, because they were with me when we found him. Jane's told us to keep quiet, and we have so far. But this isn't something you can keep quiet forever."