Old Man's War Boxed Set 1 (66 page)

“Why isn’t the colony at the shore?” someone asked.

“Because it doesn’t have to be,” Bell said. “This isn’t the sixteenth century. Our ships are crossing stars, not oceans. We can put colonies in places where it makes sense for them to be. This place”—Bell rewound to the original location—“is far enough inland to be insulated from the cyclones that hit at the mouth of the
Raleigh, and has other favorable geological and meteorological advantages as well. Also, the life on this planet has incompatible chemistry to ours. The colonists can’t eat anything from here. Fishing is out. It makes more sense to put the colony on an alluvial plain, where it has space to grow its own food, than it does on a coast.”

“Can we talk about who we took the planet from yet?” asked the first reporter.

“I’m not there yet,” Bell repeated.

“But we know all this stuff already,” said someone else. “It’s in our press packs. And our viewers are going to want to know who we took the planet from.”

“We didn’t take the planet from anyone,” Bell said, clearly annoyed at being knocked off her pace. “We were given the planet.”

“By whom?” asked the first reporter.

“By the Obin,” Bell said. This caused a stir. “And I’ll be happy to talk about that more, later. But first—” The image of the river delta vanished, replaced by some furry tree-like objects that weren’t quite plants, not quite animals, but were the dominant life form on Roanoke. Most of the reporters ignored her, whispering into their recorders about the Obin connection.

“The Obin called it Garsinhir,” General Rybicki had said to me and Jane a few days earlier, as we took his personal shuttle from our transport to Phoenix Station for our formal briefing, and to be introduced to some of the colonists who would act as our deputies. “It means
seventeenth planet
. It was the seventeenth planet they colonized. They’re not a very imaginative species.”

“It’s not like the Obin to give up a planet,” Jane said.

“They didn’t,” Rybicki said. “We traded. We gave them a small planet we took from the Gelta about a year back. They
didn’t have much use for Garsinhir anyway. It’s a class-six planet. The chemistry of the life there is similar enough to the Obin’s that the Obin were always dying off from native viruses. We humans, on the other hand, are incompatible with the local life chemistry. So we won’t be affected by the local viruses and bacteria and whatnot. The Gelta planet the Obin are taking isn’t as nice but they can tolerate it better. It’s a fair trade. Now, have you two had a chance to look at the colonist files?”

“We did,” I said.

“Any thoughts?” Rybicki said.

“Yes,” Jane said. “The selection process is insane.”

Rybicki smiled at Jane. “One day you’re going to be diplomatic and I’m not going to know what to do,” he said.

Jane reached for her PDA and pulled up the information on the selection process. “The colonists from Elysium were selected from a lottery,” she said.

“A lottery they could join after proving they were physically capable of the rigors of colonization,” Rybicki said.

“Kyoto’s colonists are all members of a religious order that avoids technology,” Jane said. “How are they even going to get on the colony ships?”

“They’re Colonial Mennonites,” Rybicki said. “They’re not whackjobs, and they’re not extremists. They just strive for simplicity. That’s not a bad thing to have on a new colony.”

“The colonists from Umbria were selected through a
game show
,” Jane said.

“The ones that didn’t win got the take-home game,” I said.

Rybicki ignored me. “Yes,” he said, to Jane. “A game show that required the contestants to compete in several tests of endurance and intelligence, both of which will also come in handy when you get to Roanoke. Sagan, every colony was given a list of physical and mental criteria that every potential Roanoke colonist had to
fulfill. Other than that we left the selection process up to the colony. Some of them, like Erie and Zhong Guo, did fairly standard selection processes. Some of them didn’t.”

“And this doesn’t cause you any concern,” Jane said.

“Not as long as the colonists passed our own set of requirements, no,” Rybicki said. “They presented their potential colonists; we checked them against our own standards.”

“They all passed?” I asked.

Rybicki snorted. “Hardly. The Albion colony leader chose colonists from her enemies list, and the colonist positions on Rus went to the highest bidder. We ended up supervising the selection process on both those colonies. But the end result is that you have what I think is an excellent class of colonists.” He turned to Jane. “They’re a damn sight better than colonists you’re going to get from Earth, I’ll tell you that much. We don’t screen
them
nearly as rigorously. Our philosophy there is that if you can walk onto a colony transport, you’re in. Our standards are a little higher for this colony. So relax. You’ve got good colonists.”

Jane settled back, not entirely convinced. I didn’t blame her; I wasn’t entirely convinced myself. The three of us fell silent as the shuttle negotiated the terms of docking at the gate.

“Where’s your daughter?” Rybicki said, as the shuttle settled in.

“She’s back at New Goa,” Jane said. “Supervising our packing.”

“And having a good-bye party with her friends that it’s best we not think too much about,” I said.

“Teenagers,” Rybicki said. He stood up. “Now, Perry, Sagan. Remember what I said about this colony process having become a media circus?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Then prepare to meet the clowns.” And then he led us off the shuttle to the gate, where apparently the entire news media of the Colonial Union had camped out to meet us.

“Holy God,” I said, stopping in the tunnel.

“It’s too late to panic, Perry,” Rybicki said, reaching back and taking my arm. “They already know everything about you. Might as well come out and get it over with.”

“So,” Jann Kranjic said, sidling up to me not more than five minutes after we had landed on Roanoke. “What’s it like to be one of the first humans to set foot on a new world?”

“I’ve done it before,” I said, toeing the turf under my boot. I didn’t look at him. Over the last few days I’d come to loathe his smooth vocal delivery and telegenic good looks.

“Sure,” Jann said. “But this time you don’t have anyone trying to shoot that foot off.”

Now I glanced over to him and saw that annoying smirk of his, which was somehow regarded as a winning smile on his home world of Umbria. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Beata Novik, his camerawoman, do her slow perambulation. She was letting that camera cap of hers record everything, the better to be edited down later.

“It’s still early in the day, Jann. There’s still time for someone to get shot,” I said. His smiled faltered slightly. “Now, why don’t you and Beata go bother someone else.”

Kranjic sighed and broke character. “Look, Perry,” he said. “You know that when I go in to edit with this there’s no way you’re not going to look like a jerk. You should just lighten the tone a little, hey? Give me something I can work with. We really want to work the war hero thing, but you’re not giving me much. Come on. You know how this goes. You did advertising back on Earth, for God’s sake.”

I waved him off, irritably. Kranjic looked over to my right at Jane, but didn’t try to get a comment out of her. At some point
when I wasn’t looking, he had crossed some sort of line with her and I suspect she ended up scaring the hell out of him. I wondered if there was any video of the moment. “Come on, Beata,” he said. “We need some more footage of Trujillo, anyway.” They wandered off in the direction of the landing craft, looking for one of the more quotable future colony leaders.

Kranjic made me grumpy. This whole trip was making me grumpy. This was ostensibly a research trip for me and Jane and selected colonists, to recon our colony site and to learn more about the planet. What it really was was a press junket with all of us as the stars. It was a waste of time to drag us all to this world just for a photo opportunity, and then drag us all back home. Kranjic was just the most annoying example of the sort of thinking that valued appearance over substance.

I turned to Jane. “I’m not going to miss him when we start this colony.”

“You didn’t read the colonist profiles close enough,” Jane said. “Both he and Beata are part of the Umbrian colonist contingent. He’s coming with us. He and Beata got married to do it because the Umbrians weren’t letting singles colonize.”

“Because married couples are more prepared for colonial life?” I ventured.

“More like couples competing made for better entertainment on that game show of theirs,” Jane said.

“He competed on the show?” I asked.

“He was the emcee,” Jane said. “But rules are rules. It’s entirely a marriage of convenience. Kranjic hasn’t ever had a relationship that’s lasted more than a year, and Beata is a lesbian in any event.”

“I’m terrified you know all this,” I said.

“I was an intelligence officer,” Jane said. “This is easy for me.”

“Anything else I need to know about him?” I asked.

“His plan is to document the first year of the Roanoke colony,”
Jane said. “He’s already signed for a weekly show. He’s also got a book deal.”

“Lovely,” I said. “Well, at least now we know how he weaseled his way onto the shuttle.” The first shuttle down to Roanoke was meant to be only the dozen colonist representatives and a few Department of Colonization staffers; there was a near riot when the reporters on the
Serra
figured out that none of them was invited on the shuttle with the colonists. Kranjic broke the deadlock by offering to put the footage Beata shot into the pool. The rest of the reporters would come down in later shuttles, to do their establishing shots and then to cut to Kranjic’s material. For his sake it was just as well he was going to become a Roanoke colonist; after this some of his more resentful colleagues would be likely to walk him to an air lock.

“Don’t worry about it,” Jane said. “And besides, he was right. This
is
the first new planet you’ve been on where someone wasn’t trying to kill you. Enjoy it. Come on.” She started walking across the vast expanse of native grasses we had landed on, toward a line of what looked like—but weren’t exactly—trees. For that matter, the native grasses weren’t exactly grasses, either.

Whatever they were precisely, not-grasses and not-trees both, they were a lush and impossible green. The extra-rich atmosphere lay moist and heavy on us. It was late winter in this hemisphere, but where we were on the planet, latitude and prevailing wind patterns conspired to make the temperature pleasantly warm. I was worried what midsummer was going to be like; I expected I was going to be perspiring a lot.

I caught up with Jane, who had stopped to study a tree thing. It didn’t have leaves, it had fur. The fur seemed to be moving; I leaned in closer and saw a colony of tiny creatures bustling about in it.

“Tree fleas,” I said. “Nice.”

Jane smiled, which was rare enough to note. “I think it’s interesting,” she said, petting a bough of the tree. One of the tree fleas
jumped from the fur to her hand; she looked at it with interest before blowing it off her with a gust of breath.

“Think you could be happy here?” I asked.

“I think I could be
busy
here,” Jane said. “General Rybicki can say what he wants about the selection process for this colony. I’ve read the colonist files. I’m not convinced most of these colonists aren’t going to be a danger to themselves and others.” She nodded in the direction of the shuttle, where we last saw Kranjic. “Look at Kranjic. He doesn’t want to colonize. He wants to write about other people colonizing. He’s under the impression that once we get here he’s going to have all the time in the world to do his show and write his book. He’s going to get to the edge of starvation before he figures it out.”

“Maybe he’s an outlier,” I said.

“You’re an optimist,” Jane said, and looked back at the fur tree, and the crawly things in it. “I like that about you. But I don’t think we should operate from an optimistic point of view.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “But you have to admit you were wrong about the Mennonites.”

“I’m
provisionally
wrong about the Mennonites,” Jane said, looking back to me. “But, yes. They’re much stronger candidates than I expected.”

“You just never knew any Mennonites,” I said.

“I never knew any religious people at all before I got to Huckleberry,” Jane said. “And Hinduism didn’t do much for me. Although I can appreciate Shiva.”

“I’ll bet,” I said. “That’s a little different than being a Mennonite, though.”

Jane looked up over my shoulder. “Speak of the devil,” she said. I turned and saw a tall, pale figure coming toward us. Simple clothes and a wide hat. It was Hiram Yoder, who had been chosen by the Colonial Mennonites to accompany us on the trip.

I smiled at his form. Unlike Jane, I
did
know Mennonites—the part of Ohio I had lived in had a lot of them, as well as Amish, Brethren and other variations of Anabaptists. Like all sorts of folks, individual Mennonites had the usual range of personalities, but as a class they seemed to be good and honest people. When I needed work done on my house I’d always picked Mennonite contractors because they would do the job right the first time, and if something didn’t turn out right, they didn’t argue with you about it; they’d just fix it. That’s a philosophy worth getting behind.

Yoder raised his hand in welcome. “I thought I’d join you,” he said. “I figure if the leaders of the colony are looking so intently at something, I might want to know what it is.”

“It’s just a tree,” I said. “Or, well, whatever it is we end up calling this thing.”

Yoder looked up at it. “Appears to be a tree to me,” he said. “With fur. We might call it a fur tree.”

“Just my thinking,” I said. “Not to be confused with a
fir
tree, of course.”

“Of course,” Yoder said. “That would be silly.”

“What do you think of your new world?” I asked.