Tarsi pulled me past our old adjoining vats and through the door. I stumbled along, my brain reeling with the idea that someone I had just come to know might be gone forever.
I ran alongside Tarsi and noticed many others hurrying in the same direction. Several groups of colonists were walking the opposite way, their hands over their mouths or tangled up in their hair. We, the running, had a shared look of doubting shock on our faces. The others—the walking—had a similar, horrified expression, but with all the disbelief removed.
I followed Tarsi around a large brown puddle of yesterday’s rain and across the packed earth. We crested a rise and came to a broad clearing, the spot they’d chosen for the rocket pad. Several tractors and dozers idled there, puffing smoke into the sky like huffs of anxious energy. Near one of the tractors, a small cluster of colonists stood around a tarp. A tarp that covered something.
I shuffled down the slope and stopped one of the female colonists who was wandering back up. “What happened?” I asked.
“One of the tractors lurched,” she said. “He fell off and got caught under the treads—”
Tarsi dragged me away from the girl and toward the scene.
“We’re supposed to get back to work—” the girl called after us.
I stopped at the edge of a small group that had formed near the tarp. Myra sat on the other side of the covered hump, sobbing into her hands, her shoulders shaking. I could see a hand sticking out of the tarp, half opened. The fingers curling up from the ground were perfectly still.
“How?” I asked. It didn’t make sense. Someone so alive, so in control, and all so recently, was no more. He would never again move of his own volition. Never speak to us with his calm voice. Never lead us to all the hopeful futures he seemed intent on taking us. I found myself passing through the denial stage, and completely aware of it.
“It wasn’t an accident,” someone in the group said.
Several other people arrived at a run, while others shuffled off in a state of shock. I was dead-still, undergoing the transformation.
“It was a fluke,” another person said. “He fell. I saw it happen.”
“Hickson was on the platform with him,” the first boy said. “No way was this an accident.”
I turned to tell the two guys to leave it alone, then saw Oliver. Our eyes met, and he came over to me; he wrapped both hands around my elbow, the weight of his thin arms pulling down on mine.
“The gods hath more need of him than we,” he said, the barest of smiles on his lips.
“Not now,” I told Oliver. I approached the two arguing colonists. They were both males—large, like members of the working class. “Which of you saw what happened?” I asked.
“We both did, I guess.”
“I was on the rise,” one of them said. “I was over there, diverting the water. I heard gears grinding and looked up. Stevens was in the air. Hickson was leaning out over the landing with his arms out. The tractor was moving forward and—”
“That was after,” the other boy said, shaking his head. “I saw the whole thing. Hickson was reaching out to grab him, to help him. The tractor just lurched. I swear, it was an accident.”
“No way was that an accident,” the first boy said. “You saw them this morning, and who’s gonna be in charge now?”
“You can’t go making those claims,” the other boy said, his voice rising. “Especially if you didn’t see—”
“Calm down,” I told them. “None of this is going to help. We don’t need to spread divisive rumors, okay?”
One of the boys nodded. The other shook his head, but it seemed to be more out of an unwillingness to accept the coincidence than anything else. He let the matter go and the two turned away from each other, going back to their duties, probably with a mind of seeding their individual version of events among the other colonists.
When I turned back, I saw Tarsi and Kelvin clinging to one another, both looking to the tarp. We had already begun burying the more than four hundred dead from the previous day, but this one would be different. This would be someone we knew, however briefly. More chilling was that with Stevens’s passing, we would be reducing our number by one.
And burying a bit of our hope along with him.
• 5 • Funeral
Oliver insisted his profession made him the expert on funerals, but none of what he said at the service made sense to me. He recited memorized passages with an odd syntax, his voice rising and falling theatrically. There was a lot of thanking and rejoicing and talk of Stevens living on in another place. It made for an uncomfortable scene, especially with most of us fidgeting in our new wardrobe.
The supply group had stitched together pants and tops from the headliners of the tractors and the sound-dampening fabric stapled to the engine compartments. While the material was more pliable than the tarps, it was also itchy and abrasive. I scratched my thigh while one of the dozers pushed dirt over the hole we had lowered Stevens into, a hole apart from the nearby pits of ash and bone. The machine roared noticeably louder than it had the day before, what with us wearing the fabric that once lined its hood. It was almost loud enough to drown out the sniffles from the crowd and Myra’s heart-wrenching sobs.
I watched Hickson as the hole gradually became a mound. He seemed distraught enough until I followed his gaze and realized his dour expression was aimed at Myra, and not the grave before her.
After the funeral, we ate the same thing we’d had for lunch: a paste made from the green fruits that fell from the canopy above, washed down with bowls of boiled water. It was hard to judge the taste of the fruit, having never really eaten anything else in my life, but the fact that I only looked forward to sating the grumbling in my stomach surely said something. We ate out of necessity rather than desire, which was not what I knew of hunger.
There was talk of venturing out in the coming days to search for meat, but Colony was being extremely secretive about what we might find. And with the vat module half-ruined and scavenged for supplies, it would be a very long time before we could raise what few Earth animal blastocysts had survived the fires.
“I don’t think Myra wants the job of leading us,” I heard Tarsi tell Kelvin between bites of paste. I pushed the rest of mine away and drank from one of the many gold bowls the construction crew had stamped out. We were arranged in several clusters, each group sitting around raised sheets of gold alloy that served as tables.
“I don’t think she should have to lead us,” Kelvin said. “Not if she doesn’t want to.”
“We should vote on it,” another at our table said.
“Colony is in charge,” someone reminded us. “Let it decide who’s next in line.”
Kelvin reached across and rapped his knuckles on the bright surface in front of me. When I looked up, he asked me, quietly: “What are our chances?”
“For what?” I asked.
He looked around. Our entire table had fallen silent. Everyone shifted their gazes back and forth between us. Amid all the noisy banter, a whisper had somehow caught everyone’s attention.
“For surviving,” Kelvin said. “For making it long-term. For not ending up like Stevens.”
We all end up like Stevens, I thought to myself. I looked around the table and considered taking another sip of my water, but knew how indecisive that would seem.
“It depends on us,” I said. “It depends mostly on how well we work together. We have enough of a mix of people—both for skills and producing offspring—that I can see us making it.”
I tried to say it like I really believed it, but the truth was: only Colony knew. The most damning evidence was the half-melted remains of so many of our modules, some of them still smoking slightly. The AI wouldn’t have made that decision lightly. Deep down, I couldn’t help but feel we were just playing a game, hoping to survive long enough to discover why this planet had been found unviable.
“It’s the minerals,” Mica said from the end of the table, almost as if reading my mind.
I looked down the length of the table, past all the somber faces, at her. She held my gaze as the chatter among the diners resumed, everyone drowning each other out. Her eyes fell down to her hands.
“What do you mean?” I asked her, raising my voice to be heard.
She glanced up at me, then peered down into her bowl, which she gently cradled in both hands. “This metal is too soft,” she said, holding the bowl up for emphasis. “You don’t build stuff out of this unless there’s nothing else.”
We stared at each other while those between us continued to argue over our chances of survival.
“Two weeks, max,” I heard someone say.
Mica and I continued to stare at one another. Her face was expressionless, none of the worry and crinkled brow everyone else wore. She looked very matter-of-fact.
I fought to remember what her profession was; she had mentioned it earlier that morning.
“I give the rocket even worse odds,” someone said.
I saw Mica frown. Then I remembered: hadn’t she introduced herself as a geologist?
• 6 • The Rocket
The rocket grew right on the landing pad, as if planted there by a seed. A giant cylinder of steel rose up amid a lattice of scaffolding. Tanks from the fuel depot had been converted into the body. They were split open, some of their plates had been removed, and then the rest was welded back into a tighter cylinder. Several of the other tanks had been converted to store the liquid oxygen and hydrogen that would propel the thing into orbit. These propellant tanks had been buried to help insulate them and were lined with refrigerant pipes.
Over the next week, I learned more engineering science over meals of green paste than I figured could be crammed into a month of training modules. Still, as I watched sparks fly from cutting torches, and the column grew ever higher, no part of me thought the thing would ever fly. How could it? It was being built by teenage refugees.
Besides, our enthusiasm for the project waned steadily after Stevens died. Hickson had taken over for enforcing the Colony’s will and did so in a manner that demanded more—and thus received less. Already, I could see people shirking duties to steal a nap or idle away their time. It was a psychological failing I knew well from my studies and was beginning to recognize in myself. One night, lying on the hood of the tractor that had become our official home, Kelvin, Tarsi, Oliver, and I talked about it.
“It’s the free rider problem,” I told Tarsi, who couldn’t understand how the efforts to survive could decline even as the need grew stronger.
“The what?” Oliver asked.
“Free rider,” I said, turning to him. “It’s a problem in game theory, one of the last things I was learning for my profession.”
Kelvin laughed. “For all we know, you would’ve found out a year from now that some other theory proved that one all wrong.”
Tarsi slapped him playfully in my defense, since she and Oliver were between us. I dropped the matter, assuming nobody cared, and tried to enjoy the warmth of the overworked engine as it soaked into my back.
“Aren’t you going to finish?” Tarsi asked.
I cleared my throat. “Well, the problem arises when people figure out they can take a little more than they’re putting in and nobody will notice. It makes sense, actually, for each individual to think this, but when everybody does it, you get problems.”
“How do you stop it?” Tarsi asked.
“Hypnotherapy,” Kelvin said.
All of us laughed except for Oliver, who had turned to the side, expecting a real answer from me.
“I have no idea,” I admitted. “I think one of the guys in my group has some economics training. He might know. All I know is resentment theory, which deals with people like us.”
“Those of us overworked and bitching?” Kelvin asked.
“Pretty much.”
Tarsi stood up and stretched, groaning with exhaustion. She had her bottoms on, but had been using her top as a pillow. I watched her body elongate as she reached to the sky and arched her back. I noticed the way her ribs had become more and more visible. We were all losing weight, but some of us had started with less.
“I’m going to use the bathroom and turn in,” she said. “Anyone else need to go?”
Oliver stood without a word and the two of them moved off together. One of the strange things I had noticed about Oliver over the past few days was how severe his swings in mood were. One minute, the worst events were causing him to assuage us, telling us it was the will of the gods and part of a plan greater than we could know. Other times—when tragedy was in the back of most of our minds—he became sullen and almost what I would diagnose as clinically depressed. I kept meaning to make time to speak with him, to see how he was doing, but the leisure time for even snippets of conversation seemed hard to come by.
After the two of them left, Kelvin slid over next to me. He interlocked his hands behind his head, leaving his elbows pointing up toward the canopy.
“What’s the story between you and Tarsi?” he asked.
“The story?”
“The deal. Are you guys—is there anything there?”
I propped myself up on my side and pulled his elbow down, unhinging it at his shoulder. The light from the cab spilled through the glass behind us, illuminating his face with a dull glow. The flat planes of his skull and his strong brow were highlighted by harsh shadows and low-slanting rays.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “You’re the one that sleeps beside her every night.”
“I’m just asking because—well, I see how you guys are. I just wanted to know before anything happened and one of us had our feelings hurt. And look, I’m being practical as well. We’re a year out before our numbers start going up, you know what I mean?”
I flopped to my back, looking up through the canopy for a fleeting glimpse of a star. Somewhere, one of the local fruit whistled through the air and hit something metal with a loud crack. People had already begun calling them bombfruit for the sound they made as they plummeted from so great a height. As if any of us had ever heard a real bomb before.
“I don’t feel that way about her,” I finally said. And saying it, I realized I meant it. I didn’t feel that way about her. It felt like family, nothing more. Well, could anything be more than family? Maybe it felt like family, nothing less.
Now, Stevens . . . I think I had felt that way for him. I closed my eyes and tried to feel differently, certain some training module had been missed. Guys weren’t supposed to like other guys.
“Mica’s more your type, isn’t she?” Kelvin asked. He elbowed me in the ribs, chuckling.
“Yeah,” I lied. “She’s more my type.” I sat up, the heat from the engine compartment no longer soothing against my back. “I’ll see you in the morning,” I said, hurrying off to bed.
For some reason, my entire body burned as I went, my face feeling as if it were on fire.
• 7 • Colony
A few mornings later, I made my first major mistake, one that would alter the course of our little colony for the worse. Our foursome had stayed up late the night before, bemoaning the progress on the rocket, the mission package, and the infrastructure needed for long-term survival. We came to a conclusion: the moment Stevens had died, everything had changed. Tarsi told us how Hickson had the supply group scavenging more for parts than food. Kelvin pinpointed Stevens’s demise as the moment construction found themselves pulled off farming and moved solely to propellants.
Hickson had begun misallocating our energy—sapping what remained of it in the process. I had become lazier myself, concentrating more on how hard my neighbor worked or how much the person across from me consumed at dinner rather than looking to my own labors or my own plate. Maybe it was my training bias. I had been pulled out of—and was therefore permanently stuck in—the late twentieth Earth century. I knew from experiments there that we would all be dead before the rocket was complete if we continued down our current path.
So I decided to take action. Later that morning, I went to have a talk with Colony.
I found Myra at the door of the command module. She and a few others from that first night had taken up residence in the structure. Hickson had moved in after Stevens died; rumor even had it that his handful of belongings showed up before the funeral.
As I approached, I noticed how tired Myra looked. From what little I knew of her, I had a hard time imagining how she could cohabitate with the guy presently running our colony into the ground. She attempted a smile by way of greeting but couldn’t quite manage it.
“How’re you holding up?” I asked her.
“Fine,” she said, nodding her head. “Hickson’s not here, if that’s who you’re after.”
“Hickson? I’ve got nothing to say to him. Why would you think I came for him?”
“Oh. He told me this morning he really needed to speak with you.” She looked past me toward the cluster of modules and parked tractors. “Must’ve crossed paths.”
“I came to see how you were doing, see if you wanted to come spend a night with us. We have a little group that sleeps in a construction tractor.” I turned and pointed. In the distance I could see Tarsi and Kelvin still out on the hood. “We talk at night, and I just thought—”
“I know where you sleep,” Myra said. I turned back around and saw her shaking her head. “I can’t. It wouldn’t feel right—”
“What? No!” I laughed and shook my head. “No, not like that. I’m a psychologist. If you need to talk, well, forget my profession, if you just need any friends—”
“I have my group here,” she said. “I’m Hickson’s girl now.”
It isn’t often one experiences true speechlessness. Not wordlessness, the inability to come up with the right thing to say, but a moment of absolute muteness. Throat constricting, lungs inoperable, mouth dry, jaw unhinged. Truly unable to speak, even knowing what I wanted to say. Or shout.