Nightborn, page 11
That said, if it is a natural force, woven into the fabric of this world, such forces have no emotions, no intentions, and no guiding intelligence. They are as likely to favor you as to harm you. We must keep reminding ourselves of that, as we seek to analyze the events of recent days. “The planet hates humans” is a tempting metaphor, but ultimately misleading.
Tonight I will tell the colony about the fae. It’s not right to keep the truth from them any longer. But I can’t share all the details. Telling people that an unseen force has been killing our people and attacking our equipment, and we have no clue how to defend ourselves, would be the equivalent of locking a man in a box and pumping in toxic gas. He can’t flee and he can’t fight, so what happens when his most primitive instincts demand he do one or the other? Our world may be larger than a box, but given the circumstances, such distinctions are moot. We are trapped as surely as that man is, unable to flee from this planet but lacking the knowledge we need to protect ourselves. Some may realize how bad the situation is once I tell them about the fae, but for most it will take a while, and I will not hasten the moment when two hundred people must be told how existentially fucked we are.
Angie Carmelo was working outside the mess tent when Ian found her. She had one of the battery units disassembled and was so focused on the tangle of wires in front of her that she didn’t even see him at first.
He waited a few seconds to see if she would notice him standing there—she didn’t—then said, “Hey.”
She looked up and smiled. “Hey, Ian. What’s up?”
“Nothing urgent. Can you spare a few minutes?”
“I’m almost done. Give me a bit.”
He nodded. As she turned back to the unit she explained, “Two of the batteries in the main array gave out this morning.” She was twisting the wires one by one back into their proper position. “Losing one would have been a bad enough piece of luck, but two at the same time . . . shitty coincidence, huh?”
Given the discussion in the pod, it was hard for Ian to view it as only that. Every coincidence seemed suspect to him now. But she didn’t share his knowledge and hence didn’t share his misgivings, so he kept a casual smile on his face and just said, “Good thing you can fix them.”
“One of them.” She picked up the cover of the unit and snapped it back into place. “The other one, I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with it.” She wiped her hands on the front of her jeans as she stood. “I have nightmares about our solar collectors failing, you know. Pretty much every night. No power, no tech—not a pretty picture.” She looked at him. “So what’s the question?”
He hesitated. She had nightmares about the collectors failing, then they started to fail. Just like with Rod. How often was this kind of thing happening in the camp? The destruction of a tractor was public and dramatic, but smaller, more trivial malfunctions might not even be reported. No one outside Leo’s inner circle was watching for them.
If he could find a way to change that pattern, to keep peoples’ own fears from jinxing them, he would go down in history as the man who had saved the colony. The savior who had led them out of darkness. The thought was a rush; it was all he could do to stay focused on the moment’s business.
“Ian?”
He forced himself back to the present. “You showed me a medallion you were wearing, back in Orientation. I was wondering if you still had it.”
She raised an eyebrow in curiosity, then reached inside her shirt and pulled out a small silver medallion on a black cord. “This?”
He nodded.
She took it off and handed it to him. It was the same as he remembered: a flat silver disk with geometric designs etched into each side. Circles and crosses and bits of ancient script were arranged inside and around those circles. The design had an ancient feel to it. “You said this was for protection?”
“I told you it was originally designed for that purpose, yes.” She smiled slightly. “It was a gift from someone back on Earth, who thought my work might stir up demons.”
“I doubt there are Terran demons in this place.”
She chuckled. “No, they all died in stasis.” She took the necklace from him and slipped it back over her head. “Seriously, Ian, what’s this about?”
He drew in a deep breath. “You said you wrote a paper once on the application of traditional symbology in neurological research.”
“In a previous life, yes. But I don’t imagine anyone on Erna will be worrying about neural interfaces for a while. Probably not in my lifetime.”
“You believe that primitive symbology can be used to control electromagnetic output from the brain?”
With a sigh she leaned back on the battery housing, balancing herself on its edge. “If you want to render twelve thousand words and several years of research into a single sentence, yeah, that’s pretty much the gist of it. Why?”
“I’m doing some experiments with local plant species,” he said. “Trying to see if human brainwaves can affect their growth.” Hopefully that would sound reasonable enough to avoid any probing questions.
She considered for a moment, then nodded. “If brainwaves are strong enough to be detected outside the body, I suppose it might be possible that plants would sense them. Not sure how that would affect them. Never worked with plants myself. Certainly an interesting question. What do you need from me?”
“I’m trying to figure out how to fine-tune neural output so I can control what the plants are receiving.”
“Okay.” She nodded. “Well, I proposed that since spiritual symbols ultimately become embedded in human culture, we absorb their meaning unconsciously from our earliest days, and they can be used to influence neural responses. Triggers for emotion, if you will.”
“So your medallion . . .”
“The symbols on it are associated with protection. By wearing it, I stimulate pathways in my brain that make me feel safe, and perhaps will cause me to exercise more caution, thus making me safer in fact. That’s the theory, anyway.” She looked down at it. “Like I said, it was a gift.”
“And the neural interface part of your research?”
“Normally it takes time for a person to learn how to stimulate different parts of his brain, to control a computer, voice replicator, prosthetic, whatever. My goal was to shorten the learning curve. If we use culturally embedded symbols for stimuli, I reasoned, there are neural pathways already in place. Tapping into them can shorten the training period considerably.” She paused. “That was confirmed in a double-blind study, validating my work. But evidently that wasn’t enough for the scientific establishment to take me seriously. The traditional mind rebels at the thought that the Pentagram of Solomon might help control a technological device.” She shrugged. “I thought I would improve the world, but all I did was provide fodder for tabloids.”
“Is that why you left?”
She bit her lip for a moment. “One of the many reasons.” She waved a hand to dismiss the subject. “Anyway, what do you need? Training in applied symbology?”
“If you’ve got the time. Just for a few key emotions.” He smiled slightly. “I doubt plants care much about subtlety.”
“Shit. I’ve got all the time in the world.” With a grin she spread her arms wide. “Isn’t that what this place is all about?”
With a flutter of brightly colored wings the bird launches itself from its perch and takes to the sky, flying directly over Lise and Leo as it does so. Its scarlet feathers trail behind it like streamers of fire as it cuts across a field of clean blue, pristine and perfect. There is no choking smog here. No industrial fumes. No sense of a planet that is gasping for breath as it dies, or towering cities that are graveyards of hope. At this moment, in this place, the rest of the world called Earth does not exist.
Lying on the damp grass beside Leo, Lise shuts her eyes for a moment, drinking in the scents and sounds of her native planet, trying to fix it all in her memory. Once not so long ago, a day like this would not have seemed noteworthy. The skies had been clean back then, nature abundant. Thank God the Preserves were established before all that was gone, so that a few oases remained. And thank God the Colonial Orientation Project had been given a corner of the Amazon Preserve so they could teach the colonists how to deal with nature.
Soon we’ll have a whole planet like this, she tells herself. Endless expanses of clean air and sunshine. Less than a week now. Soon the great ship would load, its passengers would surrender to stasis, and Earth’s newest colony would head out in search of an unpolluted planet to claim. The thought of it sends a shiver of delight down her spine.
“We probably shouldn’t have skipped the meeting,” Leo murmurs.
She chuckles. “What are they going to do, strike us from the roster? You’re the colony commander now, remember? And I’m chief medical officer. We’d have to do far worse than sneak off for a picnic before they cancelled our tickets.” She reaches out and strokes his cheek gently; In the tropical sunshine her pale fingers glow like alabaster against the polished mahogany of his skin. Sharing affection with him is a symphony of contrast, as pleasing to the eye as to more primitive senses. The thought stirs hunger inside her, but also wariness.
She leans down and kisses him, gently at first, and when that is well received, more deeply. He draws her to him, wrapping his arms around her until her entire body is pressed against his. She can feel the heat of his body enveloping her, the pounding of his heart against her own chest. Then he reaches one hand up to slide his fingers through her long hair, and the other down to grasp her thigh, while she runs her fingers down the side of his chest, to where his heat is centered. Could it be that they will finally consummate this new relationship, out here in the open, surrendering to nature like wild animals do? The thought is intoxicating.
But the shadows are still strong in him, and after a moment she can sense them coming to the fore, as always. Her heart sinks as she senses his spirit drawing away from her, and she knows that nothing she might say or do will bring him back. Though he continues to embrace her, he is operating on automatic now; his mind is elsewhere. With a sigh she disentangles herself from his arms and lies down by his side again, laying her head on his chest.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“I understand,” she says softly.
She doesn’t know all the details of what happened with his son, but she does know that he blames himself for the boy’s death, and that guilt has erected barriers around his soul. Deep inside, he doesn’t believe he is worthy of love. That will change when he leaves Earth, the psyche evaluator assured them. It’s a pattern so common that it even has a name: Colonial Mnemonic Syndrome. Many people leave Earth to escape painful memories, and heading out to a distant planet seems to achieve that better than travelling within the home system. Maybe it is a side effect of prolonged stasis, altering the pathways of memory. Or maybe it is the knowledge that no one from the Colonies ever comes home—that one’s life is being severed cleanly in two, the Terran part being left behind forever. Whatever the cause, the psych team seems confident that this trip will give Leo a fresh start. And when the shadows of grief and guilt finally loosen their death-grip on his soul, maybe he will be able to let another person into his heart.
It may take a while. But some men are worth waiting for.
By the time Leo returned to his office, the workday had nearly ended. The afternoon shift had been long but productive, and even with their largest tractor gone the colonists had managed to get a good stretch of palisade erected. At the eastern end of the wall a metal shelter now served as part of the barrier, made from three cargo pods attached end-to-end. Vents and doorways had been cut into the steel shells, turning the pods into one long facility, and some of the precious synthetic material from Earth had been used to create double-decker platforms running down the length of one wall, that could be used for seating during the day and sleeping at night. It would take a lot more work to make the space truly livable, especially when summer’s heat warmed the giant box like an oven, but at least this was a start.
The resulting longhouse was narrow and stark, but strangely comforting. Most of the colonists had grown up in similar spaces, cargo units stacked high to create featureless apartment buildings, each one identical to the next. Less than two weeks ago in subjective time, these people had wanted nothing more than to escape that kind of surrounding forever; now they longed for the kind of safety—and sanity—they had once taken for granted. A dozen people had already marked out their bunk spaces on the upper platform, and Leo expected that more would soon follow, especially if there were any more surprise attacks or explosions.
But thus far today no one had died, and nothing had blown up. That shouldn’t be the kind of thing one was grateful for, but this was Erna, where nothing could be taken for granted, and the fact that night was falling with no catastrophe to record was somewhat comforting. But he’d been hearing reports of small technological failures throughout the camp, so minor they hardly seemed significant on their own, but chilling in aggregate. Power tools glitched, solar batteries failed to charge, diagnostic tools gave inconsistent results: he understood now how all those events might be connected, and dreaded each new report. If it turned out that some unseen entity was indeed sabotaging their technology—not to mention killing people—it could stress the colony in ways they couldn’t address.
We don’t know for a fact that’s what’s happening, he told himself. But as each new incident was reported to him, it became harder and harder to deny the connection. And he was the one who must decide when and how that connection would be explained to the population at large.
On the seventh day God rested, he thought. Was it right to be jealous of a deity? He ached for a good night’s sleep.
Tonight he was going to decide who would be his second-in-command, ready to take over his job should he be incapacitated or killed. It was a disturbing task, but one he couldn’t avoid. That he had to choose one of his inner circle went without saying, but those people already had duties of their own, and asking them to do this as well meant they would be distracted from their work. So on whose head should he place the thorned wreath of authority in this terrible place?
Lise was going to meet with him later to go over everyone’s personnel files and help him decide. She was one person he clearly couldn’t choose for the job, because her service as head of the medical team was too vital to compromise. But he trusted her more than any other to give him sound advice.
“Leo!”
He turned and saw Dani jogging toward him. “What’s up? Everything okay?”
She nodded to reassure him as she joined him. “I’d like permission to set up a chapel. A space that wouldn’t be used for anything else.”
He glanced at the half-finished palisade. “Dani, it’s going to be a while before we can think about new building projects.” She of all people should understand that.
But she waved off the objection. “It doesn’t have to be a building. A meeting tent is fine. But something earmarked specifically for religious services.” She smiled slightly. “Not that holding a prayer meeting next to someone cooking breakfast isn’t a deeply meaningful experience.”
“This isn’t a very religious group,” he reminded her. The fact that colonists had been chosen from so many different backgrounds for the sake of genetic diversity meant there were almost as many varieties of faith on Erna as there were people, so Colony Control had sought candidates who could handle that kind of situation. Most of the people here had little or no interest in religion.
“Men turn to faith when their world is most uncertain,” she told him. “And given what may be on the horizon for us, I think we may need such a space. Not only for formal services, but to serve as spiritual refuge. Somewhere that people can retreat to for a sense of safety. And we should have it in place before we need it, so that it is ready and waiting.”
He considered the suggestion. “Where would you put it?”
“North end of the camp. That’s really the only option, given the new palisade. The southern field gets too much traffic.”
“Between the memorial garden and the quarantine pod.”
“It was traditional on Earth to build churches next to cemeteries. It sanctified the ground there and comforted mourners.”
He nodded. “All right. See what we have left in stock and take what you need. But you’ll have to recruit volunteers to set it up; I can’t spare anyone from the regular construction teams right now.”
“Understood. Thank you.”
She could run the colony, he thought as she walked away. People trust her. They seek her guidance. Weren’t those the qualities Colony Control saw in me, that made them think I was right for this job?
He sighed heavily. Damn that day!
When he got to his office he turned on his tablet and called up the profiles of the other seven counselors. Ian, Ted, and Pravida weren’t options, because their expertise in analyzing alien life-forms was crucial right now, and they needed to stay focused on that. There were a few notes in Ian’s file that concerned him, regarding the botanist’s desire for public acclaim. A colony commander must focus on the welfare of the whole community, and not worry about who got credit for what. Johnny’s astronomical studies were no longer a full time project, but he was a bit of a hothead. That left three possibilities. Leo scrolled through their files, looking for any detail that might cause him to favor one or the other.
“Daddy . . .”
The sound was a whisper, barely audible, but it sent a chill down his spine. The voice of a ghost—a memory. He twisted around and saw the figure of a young boy standing in the shadows at the far end of the pod.
His son.
The boy looked just like he had when Leo had dropped him off at the Center that ill-fated day, his dark skin neither lacerated nor burned yet, but gleaming with ebony health. He was even wearing the same clothing he’d had on that day. For one dizzying moment it was as if past and present merged: Leo was back on Earth preparing to go to work, and he was inside a drop pod on a distant planet, and both worlds were equally real. It was a terrifying sensation.
Tonight I will tell the colony about the fae. It’s not right to keep the truth from them any longer. But I can’t share all the details. Telling people that an unseen force has been killing our people and attacking our equipment, and we have no clue how to defend ourselves, would be the equivalent of locking a man in a box and pumping in toxic gas. He can’t flee and he can’t fight, so what happens when his most primitive instincts demand he do one or the other? Our world may be larger than a box, but given the circumstances, such distinctions are moot. We are trapped as surely as that man is, unable to flee from this planet but lacking the knowledge we need to protect ourselves. Some may realize how bad the situation is once I tell them about the fae, but for most it will take a while, and I will not hasten the moment when two hundred people must be told how existentially fucked we are.
Angie Carmelo was working outside the mess tent when Ian found her. She had one of the battery units disassembled and was so focused on the tangle of wires in front of her that she didn’t even see him at first.
He waited a few seconds to see if she would notice him standing there—she didn’t—then said, “Hey.”
She looked up and smiled. “Hey, Ian. What’s up?”
“Nothing urgent. Can you spare a few minutes?”
“I’m almost done. Give me a bit.”
He nodded. As she turned back to the unit she explained, “Two of the batteries in the main array gave out this morning.” She was twisting the wires one by one back into their proper position. “Losing one would have been a bad enough piece of luck, but two at the same time . . . shitty coincidence, huh?”
Given the discussion in the pod, it was hard for Ian to view it as only that. Every coincidence seemed suspect to him now. But she didn’t share his knowledge and hence didn’t share his misgivings, so he kept a casual smile on his face and just said, “Good thing you can fix them.”
“One of them.” She picked up the cover of the unit and snapped it back into place. “The other one, I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with it.” She wiped her hands on the front of her jeans as she stood. “I have nightmares about our solar collectors failing, you know. Pretty much every night. No power, no tech—not a pretty picture.” She looked at him. “So what’s the question?”
He hesitated. She had nightmares about the collectors failing, then they started to fail. Just like with Rod. How often was this kind of thing happening in the camp? The destruction of a tractor was public and dramatic, but smaller, more trivial malfunctions might not even be reported. No one outside Leo’s inner circle was watching for them.
If he could find a way to change that pattern, to keep peoples’ own fears from jinxing them, he would go down in history as the man who had saved the colony. The savior who had led them out of darkness. The thought was a rush; it was all he could do to stay focused on the moment’s business.
“Ian?”
He forced himself back to the present. “You showed me a medallion you were wearing, back in Orientation. I was wondering if you still had it.”
She raised an eyebrow in curiosity, then reached inside her shirt and pulled out a small silver medallion on a black cord. “This?”
He nodded.
She took it off and handed it to him. It was the same as he remembered: a flat silver disk with geometric designs etched into each side. Circles and crosses and bits of ancient script were arranged inside and around those circles. The design had an ancient feel to it. “You said this was for protection?”
“I told you it was originally designed for that purpose, yes.” She smiled slightly. “It was a gift from someone back on Earth, who thought my work might stir up demons.”
“I doubt there are Terran demons in this place.”
She chuckled. “No, they all died in stasis.” She took the necklace from him and slipped it back over her head. “Seriously, Ian, what’s this about?”
He drew in a deep breath. “You said you wrote a paper once on the application of traditional symbology in neurological research.”
“In a previous life, yes. But I don’t imagine anyone on Erna will be worrying about neural interfaces for a while. Probably not in my lifetime.”
“You believe that primitive symbology can be used to control electromagnetic output from the brain?”
With a sigh she leaned back on the battery housing, balancing herself on its edge. “If you want to render twelve thousand words and several years of research into a single sentence, yeah, that’s pretty much the gist of it. Why?”
“I’m doing some experiments with local plant species,” he said. “Trying to see if human brainwaves can affect their growth.” Hopefully that would sound reasonable enough to avoid any probing questions.
She considered for a moment, then nodded. “If brainwaves are strong enough to be detected outside the body, I suppose it might be possible that plants would sense them. Not sure how that would affect them. Never worked with plants myself. Certainly an interesting question. What do you need from me?”
“I’m trying to figure out how to fine-tune neural output so I can control what the plants are receiving.”
“Okay.” She nodded. “Well, I proposed that since spiritual symbols ultimately become embedded in human culture, we absorb their meaning unconsciously from our earliest days, and they can be used to influence neural responses. Triggers for emotion, if you will.”
“So your medallion . . .”
“The symbols on it are associated with protection. By wearing it, I stimulate pathways in my brain that make me feel safe, and perhaps will cause me to exercise more caution, thus making me safer in fact. That’s the theory, anyway.” She looked down at it. “Like I said, it was a gift.”
“And the neural interface part of your research?”
“Normally it takes time for a person to learn how to stimulate different parts of his brain, to control a computer, voice replicator, prosthetic, whatever. My goal was to shorten the learning curve. If we use culturally embedded symbols for stimuli, I reasoned, there are neural pathways already in place. Tapping into them can shorten the training period considerably.” She paused. “That was confirmed in a double-blind study, validating my work. But evidently that wasn’t enough for the scientific establishment to take me seriously. The traditional mind rebels at the thought that the Pentagram of Solomon might help control a technological device.” She shrugged. “I thought I would improve the world, but all I did was provide fodder for tabloids.”
“Is that why you left?”
She bit her lip for a moment. “One of the many reasons.” She waved a hand to dismiss the subject. “Anyway, what do you need? Training in applied symbology?”
“If you’ve got the time. Just for a few key emotions.” He smiled slightly. “I doubt plants care much about subtlety.”
“Shit. I’ve got all the time in the world.” With a grin she spread her arms wide. “Isn’t that what this place is all about?”
With a flutter of brightly colored wings the bird launches itself from its perch and takes to the sky, flying directly over Lise and Leo as it does so. Its scarlet feathers trail behind it like streamers of fire as it cuts across a field of clean blue, pristine and perfect. There is no choking smog here. No industrial fumes. No sense of a planet that is gasping for breath as it dies, or towering cities that are graveyards of hope. At this moment, in this place, the rest of the world called Earth does not exist.
Lying on the damp grass beside Leo, Lise shuts her eyes for a moment, drinking in the scents and sounds of her native planet, trying to fix it all in her memory. Once not so long ago, a day like this would not have seemed noteworthy. The skies had been clean back then, nature abundant. Thank God the Preserves were established before all that was gone, so that a few oases remained. And thank God the Colonial Orientation Project had been given a corner of the Amazon Preserve so they could teach the colonists how to deal with nature.
Soon we’ll have a whole planet like this, she tells herself. Endless expanses of clean air and sunshine. Less than a week now. Soon the great ship would load, its passengers would surrender to stasis, and Earth’s newest colony would head out in search of an unpolluted planet to claim. The thought of it sends a shiver of delight down her spine.
“We probably shouldn’t have skipped the meeting,” Leo murmurs.
She chuckles. “What are they going to do, strike us from the roster? You’re the colony commander now, remember? And I’m chief medical officer. We’d have to do far worse than sneak off for a picnic before they cancelled our tickets.” She reaches out and strokes his cheek gently; In the tropical sunshine her pale fingers glow like alabaster against the polished mahogany of his skin. Sharing affection with him is a symphony of contrast, as pleasing to the eye as to more primitive senses. The thought stirs hunger inside her, but also wariness.
She leans down and kisses him, gently at first, and when that is well received, more deeply. He draws her to him, wrapping his arms around her until her entire body is pressed against his. She can feel the heat of his body enveloping her, the pounding of his heart against her own chest. Then he reaches one hand up to slide his fingers through her long hair, and the other down to grasp her thigh, while she runs her fingers down the side of his chest, to where his heat is centered. Could it be that they will finally consummate this new relationship, out here in the open, surrendering to nature like wild animals do? The thought is intoxicating.
But the shadows are still strong in him, and after a moment she can sense them coming to the fore, as always. Her heart sinks as she senses his spirit drawing away from her, and she knows that nothing she might say or do will bring him back. Though he continues to embrace her, he is operating on automatic now; his mind is elsewhere. With a sigh she disentangles herself from his arms and lies down by his side again, laying her head on his chest.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“I understand,” she says softly.
She doesn’t know all the details of what happened with his son, but she does know that he blames himself for the boy’s death, and that guilt has erected barriers around his soul. Deep inside, he doesn’t believe he is worthy of love. That will change when he leaves Earth, the psyche evaluator assured them. It’s a pattern so common that it even has a name: Colonial Mnemonic Syndrome. Many people leave Earth to escape painful memories, and heading out to a distant planet seems to achieve that better than travelling within the home system. Maybe it is a side effect of prolonged stasis, altering the pathways of memory. Or maybe it is the knowledge that no one from the Colonies ever comes home—that one’s life is being severed cleanly in two, the Terran part being left behind forever. Whatever the cause, the psych team seems confident that this trip will give Leo a fresh start. And when the shadows of grief and guilt finally loosen their death-grip on his soul, maybe he will be able to let another person into his heart.
It may take a while. But some men are worth waiting for.
By the time Leo returned to his office, the workday had nearly ended. The afternoon shift had been long but productive, and even with their largest tractor gone the colonists had managed to get a good stretch of palisade erected. At the eastern end of the wall a metal shelter now served as part of the barrier, made from three cargo pods attached end-to-end. Vents and doorways had been cut into the steel shells, turning the pods into one long facility, and some of the precious synthetic material from Earth had been used to create double-decker platforms running down the length of one wall, that could be used for seating during the day and sleeping at night. It would take a lot more work to make the space truly livable, especially when summer’s heat warmed the giant box like an oven, but at least this was a start.
The resulting longhouse was narrow and stark, but strangely comforting. Most of the colonists had grown up in similar spaces, cargo units stacked high to create featureless apartment buildings, each one identical to the next. Less than two weeks ago in subjective time, these people had wanted nothing more than to escape that kind of surrounding forever; now they longed for the kind of safety—and sanity—they had once taken for granted. A dozen people had already marked out their bunk spaces on the upper platform, and Leo expected that more would soon follow, especially if there were any more surprise attacks or explosions.
But thus far today no one had died, and nothing had blown up. That shouldn’t be the kind of thing one was grateful for, but this was Erna, where nothing could be taken for granted, and the fact that night was falling with no catastrophe to record was somewhat comforting. But he’d been hearing reports of small technological failures throughout the camp, so minor they hardly seemed significant on their own, but chilling in aggregate. Power tools glitched, solar batteries failed to charge, diagnostic tools gave inconsistent results: he understood now how all those events might be connected, and dreaded each new report. If it turned out that some unseen entity was indeed sabotaging their technology—not to mention killing people—it could stress the colony in ways they couldn’t address.
We don’t know for a fact that’s what’s happening, he told himself. But as each new incident was reported to him, it became harder and harder to deny the connection. And he was the one who must decide when and how that connection would be explained to the population at large.
On the seventh day God rested, he thought. Was it right to be jealous of a deity? He ached for a good night’s sleep.
Tonight he was going to decide who would be his second-in-command, ready to take over his job should he be incapacitated or killed. It was a disturbing task, but one he couldn’t avoid. That he had to choose one of his inner circle went without saying, but those people already had duties of their own, and asking them to do this as well meant they would be distracted from their work. So on whose head should he place the thorned wreath of authority in this terrible place?
Lise was going to meet with him later to go over everyone’s personnel files and help him decide. She was one person he clearly couldn’t choose for the job, because her service as head of the medical team was too vital to compromise. But he trusted her more than any other to give him sound advice.
“Leo!”
He turned and saw Dani jogging toward him. “What’s up? Everything okay?”
She nodded to reassure him as she joined him. “I’d like permission to set up a chapel. A space that wouldn’t be used for anything else.”
He glanced at the half-finished palisade. “Dani, it’s going to be a while before we can think about new building projects.” She of all people should understand that.
But she waved off the objection. “It doesn’t have to be a building. A meeting tent is fine. But something earmarked specifically for religious services.” She smiled slightly. “Not that holding a prayer meeting next to someone cooking breakfast isn’t a deeply meaningful experience.”
“This isn’t a very religious group,” he reminded her. The fact that colonists had been chosen from so many different backgrounds for the sake of genetic diversity meant there were almost as many varieties of faith on Erna as there were people, so Colony Control had sought candidates who could handle that kind of situation. Most of the people here had little or no interest in religion.
“Men turn to faith when their world is most uncertain,” she told him. “And given what may be on the horizon for us, I think we may need such a space. Not only for formal services, but to serve as spiritual refuge. Somewhere that people can retreat to for a sense of safety. And we should have it in place before we need it, so that it is ready and waiting.”
He considered the suggestion. “Where would you put it?”
“North end of the camp. That’s really the only option, given the new palisade. The southern field gets too much traffic.”
“Between the memorial garden and the quarantine pod.”
“It was traditional on Earth to build churches next to cemeteries. It sanctified the ground there and comforted mourners.”
He nodded. “All right. See what we have left in stock and take what you need. But you’ll have to recruit volunteers to set it up; I can’t spare anyone from the regular construction teams right now.”
“Understood. Thank you.”
She could run the colony, he thought as she walked away. People trust her. They seek her guidance. Weren’t those the qualities Colony Control saw in me, that made them think I was right for this job?
He sighed heavily. Damn that day!
When he got to his office he turned on his tablet and called up the profiles of the other seven counselors. Ian, Ted, and Pravida weren’t options, because their expertise in analyzing alien life-forms was crucial right now, and they needed to stay focused on that. There were a few notes in Ian’s file that concerned him, regarding the botanist’s desire for public acclaim. A colony commander must focus on the welfare of the whole community, and not worry about who got credit for what. Johnny’s astronomical studies were no longer a full time project, but he was a bit of a hothead. That left three possibilities. Leo scrolled through their files, looking for any detail that might cause him to favor one or the other.
“Daddy . . .”
The sound was a whisper, barely audible, but it sent a chill down his spine. The voice of a ghost—a memory. He twisted around and saw the figure of a young boy standing in the shadows at the far end of the pod.
His son.
The boy looked just like he had when Leo had dropped him off at the Center that ill-fated day, his dark skin neither lacerated nor burned yet, but gleaming with ebony health. He was even wearing the same clothing he’d had on that day. For one dizzying moment it was as if past and present merged: Leo was back on Earth preparing to go to work, and he was inside a drop pod on a distant planet, and both worlds were equally real. It was a terrifying sensation.
