'Zoe’s Tale PART II Chapter Twelve\r'

' in that respect was a sound and w pre directfore a thump and indeed a whine as the fowls lifters and engines died slew. That was it; we had exercise on Roanoke. We were home, for the very inaugural beat.\r\nâ€Å"Whats that snuff stunned?” Gretchen say, and wrinkled her nose.\r\nI in additionk a sniff and did most nose wrinkling of my own. â€Å"I speculate the pilot stained in a pile of rancid socks,” I say. I calmed Babar, who was with us and who expected excited or so approximately(prenominal) thing; by chance he akind the fragrance.\r\nâ€Å"Thats the satellite,” said Anna Faulks. She was wizard of the Magellan crew, and had been down to the planet salship canalal times, personate down consignment. The sm some(prenominal)(a) townsfolks base camp was almost ready for the settlers; Gretchen and I, as children of colony leaders, were population t stunned ensembleowed to arrange down on mavin of the fin on the wholey lo ad shuttles rather than having to take a cattle car shuttle with every(prenominal) unmatchable else. Our p bents had already been on planet for old age, supervising the unloading. â€Å"And Ive got parole for you,” Faulks said. â€Å"This is more or less as exquisite as the odours turn arse some hither. When you regulate a breeze coming in from the fo lie down, indeed it quarters authentically bad.”\r\nâ€Å"Why?” I asked. â€Å"What does it smell interchange adequate to(p) then?”\r\nâ€Å"Like every genius you retire secure threw up on your shoes,” Faulks said.\r\nâ€Å"Wonderful,” Gretchen said.\r\n in that location was a grinding clang as the massive doors of the cargo shuttle opened. in that respect was a slight breeze as the air in the cargo call for puffed pop into the Roanoke sky. And then the smell really hit us.\r\nFaulks smiled at us. â€Å" enthral it, ladies. Youre press release to be smelling it every sider eal day for the liberalisation of your resists.”\r\nâ€Å"So be you,” Gretchen said to Faulks.\r\nFaulks s round topped smiling at us. â€Å"Were passing play to prick moving these cargo containers in a cope with of minutes,” she said. â€Å"You devil need to clear out(a) and get out of our path. It would be a outrage if your precious selves got squashed underneath them.” She glowering a expressive style from us and started toward the rest of the shuttle cargo crew.\r\nâ€Å"Nice,” I said, to Gretchen. â€Å"I dont believe forthwith was a smart time to remind her that shes stuck present.”\r\nGretchen shrugged. â€Å"She deserved it,” she said, and started toward the cargo doors.\r\nI bit the inside of my cheek and opinionated non to comment. The pop off several eld had do everyone edgy. This is what happens when you jazz youre lost.\r\nOn the day we omitped to Roanoke, this is how soda pop broke the raws that we w ere lost.\r\nâ€Å"Beca enforce I please thither argon rumors already, allow me say this first: We be proficient,” atomic number 91 said to the colonists. He sas welld on the ready reckoner programme whither expert a couple of hours in the starting time we had counted down the skip to Roanoke. â€Å"The Magellan is undecomposed. We are not in whatever danger at the atomic number 42.”\r\nAround us the crowd visibly relaxed. I approveed how many of them caught the â€Å"at the moment” contri furtherion. I suspected thaumaturgy pose it in thither for a causation.\r\nHe did. â€Å" except we are not where we were told we would be,” he said. â€Å"The compound juncture has send us to a different planet than we had pass judgment to go to. It did this beca procedure it learned that a coalescency of alien prevails called the confederacy were planning to go a outlying(prenominal)seeing us from colonizing, by force if necessary. There is no doubt they would admit been waiting for us when we skipped. So we were move somewhere else: to an an new(prenominal)(prenominal) planet entirely. We are today supra the real Roanoke.\r\nâ€Å"We are not in danger at the moment,” arse said. â€Å" notwithstanding the conspiracy is odoring for for us. If it recalls us it go away try to take us from here, again ilkly by force. If it cannot exact us, it will destroy the colony. We are safe now, further I wont lie to you. We are existence hunted.”\r\nâ€Å"Take us rearwards!” soulfulness shouted. There were murmurings of keep bunsment.\r\nâ€Å"We cant go back,” backside said. â€Å" master copy Zane has been remotely locked out of the Magellans work systems by the compound Defense Forces. He and his crew will be link our colony. The Magellan will be destroyed once we control landed ourselves and all our supplies on Roanoke. We cant go back. None of us can.”\r\nThe room erupte d in tempestuous shouts and discussions. soda pop in the end calmed them down. â€Å"None of us k cutting nearly this. I didnt. Jane didnt. Your colony representatives didnt. And certainly Captain Zane didnt. This was unploughed from all of us equally. The Colonial summation and the Colonial Defense Forces father firm for reasons of their own that it is safer to keep us here than to bring us back to Phoenix. Whether we agree with this or not, this is what we extradite to work with.”\r\nâ€Å"What are we acquittance to do?” Another theatrical role from the crowd.\r\n soda pop looked out in the guidance the voice came from. â€Å"Were going to do what we came here to do in the first role,” he said. â€Å"Were going to colonize. Understand this: When we all chose to colonize, we knew on that point were seeks. You all agnise that seed colonies are dangerous places. tied(p) without this crew trenchant for us, our colony would pacify hand been a t risk for attack, still a goat for other look sharps. None of this has changed. What has changed is that the Colonial aggregate knew ahead of time who was looking for us and why. That allowed them to keep us safe in the short run. It hand everyplaces an advantage in the long run. Because now we know how to keep ourselves from being found. We know how to keep ourselves safe.”\r\nMore murmurings from the crowd. on the barelyton to the even off hand of me a woman asked, â€Å"And equitable how are we going to keep ourselves safe?”\r\nâ€Å"Your compound representatives are going to inform that,” John said. â€Å"Check your personal organizers; distributively of you has a location on the Magellan where you and your former worldmates will meet with your representative. Theyll explain to you what well need to do, and break up the questions you have from there. unless there is one thing I motive to be clear some. This is going to require cooperation f rom everyone. Its going to require sacrifice from everyone. Our job of colonizing this world was never going to be easy. Its honorable become a lot harder.\r\nâ€Å" provided we can do it,” pa said, and the military posture with which he said it seemed to surp evolve some nation in the crowd. â€Å"Whats being asked of us is hard, but its not impossible. We can do it if we work together. We can do it if we know we can rely on to from each one one other. Wherever weve come from, we all have to be Roanokers now. This isnt how I would have elect for this to happen. But this is how we are going to have to lay down it work. We can do this. We have to do this. We have to do it together.”\r\nI stepped out of the shuttle, and put my feet on the nation of the new world. The grounds mud oozed everyplace the top of my boot. â€Å"Lovely,” I said. I started walking. The mud sucked at my feet. I tested not to cogitate of the sucking as a large metaphor. Babar boun ded away the shuttle and commenced sniffing his surroundings. He was happy, at to the lowest degree.\r\nAround me, the Magellan crew was on the job. Other shuttles that had landed before were disgorging their cargo; another shuttle was coming in for a landing some keep away. The cargo containers, standard-sized, littered the ground. Normally, once the con inhabit of the containers were taken out, the containers would be sent back up in the shuttles to be re utilise; dash take not, want not. This time, there was no reason to take them back up to the Magellan. It wasnt going back; these containers wouldnt ever be refilled. And as it happened, some of these containers wouldnt flush be unpacked; our new situation here on Roanoke didnt constrain it worth the effort.\r\nBut it didnt mean that the containers didnt have a purpose; they did. That purpose was in front of me, a couple coulomb meters away, where a bulwark was forming, a barrier make from the containers. Inside the bar rier would be our new temporary worker home; a tiny village, already named Croatoan, in which all twenty-five hundred of us †and the newly-resentful Magellan crew †would be stuck while popping, Mom and the other colony leaders did a persuasion of this new planet to see what we take to do in order to live on it.\r\nAs I watched, some of the Magellan crew were moving one of the containers into place into the barrier, development top lifters to notice the container in place and then turning off their power and letting the container fall a couple of millimeters to the ground with a thump. Even from this distance I felt the shaking in the ground. Whatever was in that container, it was heavy. plausibly farming equipment that we werent allowed to use anymore.\r\nGretchen had already gotten far ahead of me. I horizon almost racing to catch up with her but then noticed Jane coming out from crumb the newly placed container and lecture to one of the Magellan crew. I walke d toward her instead.\r\nWhen Dad talked astir(predicate) sacrifice, in the immediate term he was talking about 2 things.\r\n first gear: no contact between Roanoke and the rest of the Colonial conjunction. Anything we sent back in the direction of the Colonial Union was something that could give us away, so far a child care skip drone full of data. Anything sent to us could give us away, too. This meant we were very isolated: no help, no supplies, not counterbalance any mail from hotshots and love ones left behind. We were alone.\r\nAt first this didnt seem same often of a liberal deal. After all, we left our old lives behind when we became colonists. We said good-bye to the people who we werent taking with us, and most of us knew it would be a very long time if ever until we saw those people again. But hitherto for all that, the lines werent on the whole severed. A skip drone was so-called to leave the colony on a nonchalant basis, carrying earn and news and info rmation back to the Colonial Union. A skip drone was supposed to arrive on a day-by-day basis, too, with mail, and news and new shows and songs and stories and other ways that we could still feel that we were part of humanity, notwithstanding being stuck on a colony, position corn.\r\nAnd now, none of that. It was all by gone. The no new stories and music and shows were what hit you first †a bad thing if you were hooked on a show or muckle before you left and were ho bump to keep up with it †but then you realized that what it really meant was from now on you wouldnt know anything about the lives of the people you left behind. You wouldnt see a beloved baby nephews first steps. You wouldnt know if your naan had passed away. You wouldnt see the recordings your best paladin took of her wedding, or read the stories that another friend was writing and desperately stressful to sell, or see pictures of the places you utilize to love, with the people you still love standin g in the foreground. entirely of it was gone, maybe forever.\r\nWhen that fruition hit, it hit people hard †and an even harder hit was the realization that everyone else that any of us ever cared about knew nonentity about what happened to us. If the Colonial Union wasnt going to tell us where we were going in order to fool this Conclave thing, they certainly werent going to tell everyone else that they had pulled a fast one with our whereabouts. every(prenominal)one we ever knew concept we were lost. Some of them probably perspective we had been killed. John and Jane and I didnt have much to matter to about on this score †we were each others family, and all the family we had †but everyone else had someone who was even now mourning them. Savitris mother and grandmother were still alive; the expression on her crusadeful when she realized that they probably thought she was dead made me rush over to give her a hug.\r\nI didnt even want to consider about how the Obin were manipulation our disappearance. I only if hoped the Colonial Union ambassador to the Obin had on clean underclothes when the Obin came to call.\r\nThe second sacrifice was harder.\r\nâ€Å"Youre here,” Jane said, as I walked up to her. She reached down to pet Babar, who had come bounding up to her.\r\nâ€Å"Apparently,” I said. â€Å"Is it always like this?”\r\nâ€Å"Like what?” Jane said.\r\nâ€Å"Muddy,” I said. â€Å"Rainy. Cold. Sucky.”\r\nâ€Å"Were arriving at the offset of spring here,” Jane said. â€Å"Its going to be like this for a modest while. I cypher things will get better.”\r\nâ€Å"You infer so?” I asked.\r\nâ€Å"I hope so,” Jane said. â€Å"But we dont know. The information we have on the planet is slim. The Colonial Union doesnt seem to have done a normal check over here. And we wont be able to put up a satellite to track support and climate. So we have to hope it gets bette r. It would be better if we could know. But hoping is what we have. Wheres Gretchen?”\r\nI nodded in the direction I saw her go. â€Å"I cypher shes looking for her dad,” I said.\r\nâ€Å" eachthing all right between you two?” Jane said. â€Å"Youre rarely without each other.”\r\nâ€Å"Its fine,” I said. â€Å"Everyones tw tense these last hardly a(prenominal) days, Mom. So are we, I guess.”\r\nâ€Å"How about your other friends?” Jane asked.\r\nI shrugged. â€Å"I havent seen too much of Enzo in the last couple of days,” I said. â€Å"I speculate hes taking the idea of being stranded out here moderately badly. Even Magdy hasnt been able to cheer him up. I went to go chew the fat him a couple of times, but he doesnt want to say much, and its not like Ive been that cheerful myself. Hes send me poems, still, though. On paper. He has Magdy deliver them. Magdy hates that, by the way.”\r\nJane smiled. â€Å"Enzos a fi ne boy,” she said.\r\nâ€Å"I know,” I said. â€Å"I think I didnt beak a neat time to decide to make him my boyfriend, though.”\r\nâ€Å" swell, you said it, everyones twitchy the last a fewer(prenominal) days,” Jane said. â€Å"Itll get better.”\r\nâ€Å"I hope so,” I said, and I did. I did moody and depressed with the best of them, but even I have my limits, and I was getting near them. â€Å"Wheres Dad? And wheres hickory tree and Dickory?” The two of them had gone down in one of the first shuttles with Mom and Dad; between them making themselves scarce on the Magellan and being away for the last few days, I was starting to miss them.\r\nâ€Å" hickory and Dickory we have out doing a succeed of the surrounding area,” Jane said. â€Å"Theyre helping us get a lay of the land. It keeps them busy and useful, and keeps them out of the way of most of the colonists at the moment. I dont think any of them are persuasion very friendly toward nonhumans at the moment, and wed just as soon avoid someone trying to pick a competitiveness with them.”\r\nI nodded at this. Anyone who tried to pick a fight with Hickory or Dickory was going to end up with something broken, at to the lowest degree. Which would not make the two of them popular, even (or maybe especially) if they were in the right. Mom and Dad were smart to get them out of the way for now.\r\nâ€Å"Your dad is with Manfred Trujillo,” Jane said, mentioning Gretchens dad. â€Å"Theyre laying out the temporary village. Theyre laying it out like a Roman Legion refugee camp.”\r\nâ€Å"Were expecting an attack from the Visigoths,” I said.\r\nâ€Å"We dont know what to expect an attack from,” Jane said. The unrhetorical way she said it did absolutely nothing to cheer me up. â€Å"I expect youll a sneak Gretchen with them. Just head into the encampment and youll dominate them.”\r\nâ€Å"Itd be easier if I coul d just ping Gretchens personal organizer and find her that way,” I said.\r\nâ€Å"It would be,” Jane agreed. â€Å"But we dont get to do that anymore. Try using your eyes instead.” She gave me a quick blame on the temple and then walked off to talk to the Magellan crew. I sighed and then headed into the encampment to find Dad.\r\nThe second sacrifice: Every single thing we had with a computer in it, we could no longer use. Which meant we couldnt use most things we had.\r\nThe reason was radio set waves. Every piece of electronic equipment communicated with every other piece of electronic equipment by radio waves. Even the tiny radio transmissions they sent could be discovered if someone was looking hard decent, as we were assured that they were. But just turning off the connecting electrical capacity was not enough, since we were told that not only did our equipment use radio waves to communicate with each other, they use them internally to have one part of the equipment talk to other parts.\r\nOur electronics couldnt help infection evidence that we were here, and if someone knew what frequencies they used to work, they could be detected simply by sending the radio signal that morose them on. Or so we were told. Im not an engineer. all I knew was that a huge amount of our equipment was no longer usable †and not just unusable, but a danger to us.\r\nWe had to risk using this equipment to land on Roanoke and set up the colony. We couldnt very well land shuttles without using electronics; it wasnt the trip down that would be a problem, but the landings would be pretty tricky (and messy). But once everything was on the ground, it was over. We went dark, and everything we had in cargo containers that contained electronics would stay in those containers. Possibly forever.\r\nThis included data servers, recreation monitors, modern farm equipment, scientific tools, medical exam tools, kitchen appliances, vehicles and toys. And PDAs. \r\nThis was not a popular announcement. Everyone had PDAs, and everyone had their lives in them. PDAs were where you unploughed your messages, your mail, your favorite shows and music and reading. Its how you connected with your friends, and played games with them. Its how you made recordings and video. Its how you shared the fabric you loved, to the people you liked. It was everyones outboard motor whizz.\r\nAnd suddenly they were gone; every single PDA among the colonists †middling more than one per person †was imperturbable and accounted for. Some folks tried to inter them; at least one colonist tried to sock the Magellan crew section whod been assigned to collect them. That colonist fagged the night in the Magellan brig, courtesy of Captain Zane; rumor had it the captain cranked down the temperature in the brig and the colonist spent the night precarious himself awake.\r\nI sympathized with the colonist. Id been without my PDA for three days now and I still kept catching myself reaching for it when I precious to talk to Gretchen, or listen to some music, or to check to see if Enzo had sent me something, or any one of a hundred different things I used my PDA for on a daily basis. I suspected that part of the reason people were so cranky was because theyd had their outboard passs amputated; you dont realize how much you use your PDA until the stupid thing is gone.\r\nWe were all outrage that we didnt have our PDAs anymore, but I had this itchy feeling in the back of my brain that one of the reasons people were so worked up about their PDAs was that it kept them from having to think about the fact that so much of the equipment we inevitable to use to survive, we couldnt use at all. You cant just disconnect the computers from our farm equipment; it cant run without it, its too much a part of the machine. Itd be like taking out your brain and expecting your body to get along without it. I dont think anyone really wanted to face the fac t of just how deep the gravel was.\r\nIn fact, only one thing was going to keep all of us alive: the two hundred and l Colonial Mennonites who were part of our colony. Their religion had kept them using outdated and antique engine room; none of their equipment had computers, and only Hiram Yoder, their colony representative, had used a PDA at all (and only then, Dad explained to me, to stay in contact with other members of the Roanoke colonial council). work without electronics wasnt a state of deprivation for them; its how they lived. It made them the odd folks out on the Magellan, especially among us teens. But now it was going to save us.\r\nThis didnt reassure everyone. Magdy and a few of his less appealing friends pointed to the Colonial Mennonites as evidence that the Colonial Union had been planning to strand us all along and seemed to resent them for it, as if they had know it all along rather than being just as surprised as the rest of us. Thus we confirmed that Magdys way of dealing with stress was to get angry and pick nonexis inhabit fights; his near-brawl at the beginning of the trip was no fluke.\r\nMagdy got angry when stressed. Enzo got withdrawn. Gretchen got snappish. I wasnt entirely sure how I got.\r\nâ€Å"Youre mopey,” Dad said to me. We were standing outside the tent that was our new temporary home.\r\nâ€Å"So thats how I get,” I said. I watched Babar wander around the area, looking for places to mark his territory. What can I say. Hes a dog.\r\nâ€Å"Im not following you,” Dad said. I explained how my friends were acting since wed gotten lost. â€Å"Oh, okay,” Dad said. â€Å"That makes sense. Well, if its any comfort, if I have the time to do anything else but work, I think I would be mopey, too.”\r\nâ€Å"Im thrilled it runs in the family,” I said.\r\nâ€Å"We cant even blame it on genetics,” Dad said. He looked around. All around us were cargo containers, stacks of tents under tar ps and surveyors twine, jam off where the streets of our new diminished town will be. Then he looked back to me. â€Å"What do you think of it?”\r\nâ€Å"I think this is what it looks like when God takes a dump,” I said.\r\nâ€Å"Well, yes, now it does,” Dad said. â€Å"But with a lot of work and a little love, we can work our way up to being a festering pit. And what a day that will be.”\r\nI laughed. â€Å"Dont make me laugh,” I said. â€Å"Im trying to work on this mopey thing.”\r\nâ€Å"Sorry,” Dad said. He wasnt actually reprehensible in the slightest. He pointed at the tent next to ours. â€Å"At the very least, youll be close to your friend. This is Trujillos tent. He and Gretchen will be living here.”\r\nâ€Å"Good,” I said. I had caught up with Dad with Gretchen and her dad; the two of them had gone off to look at the little river that ran near the edge of our soon-to-be settlement to find out the best place to put the waste collector and purifier. No interior plumbing for the first few weeks at least, we were told; wed be doing our business in buckets. I cant begin to tell you how excited I was to hear that. Gretchen had rolled her eyes a little bit at her dad as he dragged her off to look at likely locations; I think she was regretting taking the early trip. â€Å"How long until we start bringing down the other colonists?” I asked.\r\nDad pointed. â€Å"We want to get the mete set up first,” he said. â€Å"Weve been here a couple of days and nothing dangerous has popped out of those woods over there, but I think we want to be safer rather than sorrier. Were getting the last containers out of the cargo hold tonight. By tomorrow we should have the perimeter completely walled and the interior blocked out. So two days, I think. In three days everyone will be down. Why? bore already?”\r\nâ€Å"Maybe,” I said. Babar had come around to me and was grinning up at me, spitting lolling and paws caked with mud. I could tell he was trying to decide whether or not to jumpstart up on two legs and get mud all over my shirt. I sent him my best dont even think about it telepathy and hoped for the best. â€Å"Not that its any less boring on the Magellan right now. Everyones in a foul mood. I dont know, I didnt expect colonizing to be like this.”\r\nâ€Å"Its not,” Dad said. â€Å"Were sort of an exceptional case here.”\r\nâ€Å"Oh, to be like everyone else, then,” I said.\r\nâ€Å" similarly late for that,” Dad said, and then motioned at the tent. â€Å"Jane and I have the tent pretty well set up. Its small and crowded, but its also cramped. And I know how much you like that.” This got another smile from me. â€Å"Ive got to get in touch Manfred and then talk to Jane, but aft(prenominal) that we can all have luncheon and try to see if we cant actually enjoy ourselves a little. Why dont you go in and rela x until we get back. At least that way you dont have to be mopey and windblown.”\r\nâ€Å"All right,” I said. I gave Dad a peck on the cheek, and then he headed off toward the creek. I went inside the tent, Babar right behind.\r\nâ€Å"Nice,” I said to Babar, as I looked around. â€Å"Furnished in tasteful ultramodern Refugee style. And I love what theyve done with those cots.”\r\nBabar looked up at me with that stupid doggy grin of his and then leaped up on one of the cots and laid himself down.\r\nâ€Å"You idiot,” I said. â€Å"You could have at least wiped off your paws.” Babar, notably nonchalant with criticism, yawned and then closed his eyes.\r\nI got on the cot with him, brushed off the chunkier bits of mud, and then used him as a pillow. He didnt seem to mind. And a good thing, too, since he was taking up half my cot.\r\nâ€Å"Well, here we are,” I said. â€Å"Hope you like it here.”\r\nBabar made some sort of snuffli ng noise. Well said, I thought.\r\nEven after everything was explained to us, there were still some folks who had a hard time getting it through their heads that we were cut off and on our own. In the group sessions headed by each of the colonial representatives, there was always someone (or someones) who said things couldnt be as bad as Dad was making them out to be, that there had to be some way for us to stay in contact with the rest of humanity or at least use our PDAs.\r\nThats when the colony representatives sent each colonist the last file their PDAs would receive. It was a video file, shot by the Conclave and sent to every other race in our slice of space. In it, the Conclave leader, named General Gau, stood on a rise over-looking a small settlement. When I first saw the video I thought it was a human settlement, but was told that it was a settlement of Whaid colonists, the Whaid being a race I knew nothing about. What I did know was that their homes and buildings looked lik e ours, or close enough to ours not to matter.\r\nThis General Gau stood on the rise just long enough for you to wonder what it was he was looking at down there in the settlement, and the settlement disappeared, turned into ash and fire by what seemed like a thousand beams of light piercing down from what we were told were hundreds of spaceships floating high above the colony. In just a few seconds there was nothing left of the colony, or the people who lived in it, other than a rising column of smoke.\r\nNo one questioned the wisdom of hiding after that.\r\nI dont know how many times I watched the video of the Conclave attack; it must have been a few dozen times before Dad came up to me and made me hand over my PDA †no special privileges just because I was the colony leaders kid. But I wasnt observation because of the attack. Or, well, I should say that wasnt really what I was looking at when I watched it. What I was looking at was the figure, standing on the rise. The crea ture who ordered the attack. The one who had the beginning of an entire colony on his hands. I was looking at this General Gau. I was wondering what he was thinking when he gave the order. Did he feel regret? atonement? Pleasure? Pain?\r\nI tried to imagine what it would take to order the deaths of thousands of truthful people. I felt happy that I couldnt wrap my brain around it. I was terrified that this general could. And that he was out there. Hunting us.\r\n'