John Scalzi - Zoe`s Tale

"Your sympathy is overwhelming," he said. "I think you like watching me get abused. You could offer up some advice instead."

"Move faster," I said. "Try not to get hit so much."

"You're helpful," he said.

"There," I said, pressing the send button on the PDA. "It's in your queue now. So you can treasure it always."

"I hardly know what to say," he said.

"Did you get me anything?" I asked.

"As a matter of fact," Enzo said, and then pulled out his PDA, punched up something, and handed the PDA to me. On it was another poem. I read it.

"This is very sweet," I said. It was actually beautiful, but I didn't want to get mushy on him, not after just sharing video of him taking a hit to his nether regions.

"Yes, well," Enzo said, taking back the PDA. "I wrote it before I saw that video. Just remember that." He pressed his PDA screen. "There. In your queue now. So you can treasure it always."

"I will," I said, and would.

"Good," Enzo said. "Because I get a lot of abuse for those, you know."

"For the poems?" I said. Enzo nodded. "From whom?"

"From Magdy, of course," Enzo said. "He caught me writing that one to you and mocked the hell out of me for it."

"Magdy's idea of a poem is a dirty limerick," I said.

"He's not stupid," Enzo said.

"I didn't say he was stupid," I said. "Just vulgar."

"Well, he's my best friend," Enzo said. "What are you gonna do."

"I think it's sweet you stick up for him," I said. "But I have to tell you that if he mocks you out of writing poems for me, I'm going to have to kick his ass."

Enzo grinned. "You or your bodyguards?" he asked.

"Oh, I'd handle this one personally," I said. "Although I might get Gretchen to help."

"I think she would," Enzo said.

"There's no think involved here," I said.

"I guess I better keep writing you poems, then," Enzo said.

"Good," I said, and patted his cheek. "I'm glad we have these little conversations."

And Enzo was as good as his word; a couple of times a day I'd get a new poem. They were mostly sweet and funny, and only a little bit showing off, because he would send them in different poem formats: haiku and sonnets and sestinas and some forms I don't know what they're called but you could see that they were supposed to be something.

And naturally I would show them all to Gretchen, who tried very hard not to be impressed. "The scan's off on that one," she said, after she had read one I showed to her at one of the dodgeball games. Savitri had joined the two of us to watch. She was on her break. "I'd dump him for that."

"It's not off," I said. "And anyway he's not my boyfriend."

"A guy sends poems on the hour and you say he's not your boyfriend?" Gretchen asked.

"If he was her boyfriend, he wouldn't be sending poems anymore," Savitri said.

Gretchen smacked her forehead. "Of course," she said. "It all makes sense now."

"Give me that," I said, taking back my PDA. "Such cynicism."

"You're just saying that because you're getting sestinas," Savitri said.

"Which don't scan," Gretchen said.

"Quiet, both of you," I said, and turned the PDA around so it could record the game. Enzo's team was playing the Dragons in the quarter-final match for the league championship. "All your bitterness is distracting me from watching Enzo get slaughtered out there."

"Speaking of cynicism," Gretchen said.

There was a loud pock as the dodgeball smooshed Enzo's face into a not terribly appealing shape. He grabbed his face with both hands, cursed loudly, and dropped to his knees.

"There we go," I said.

"That poor boy," Savitri said.

"He'll live," Gretchen said, and then turned to me. "So you got that."

"It's going into the highlight reel for sure," I said.

"I've mentioned before that you don't deserve him," Gretchen said.

"Hey," I said. "He writes me poems, I document his physical ineptitude. That's how the relationship works."

"I thought you said he wasn't your boyfriend," Savitri said.

"He's not my boyfriend," I said, and saved the humiliating snippet into my "Enzo" file. "It doesn't mean we don't have a relationship." I put my PDA away and greeted Enzo as he came up, still holding his face.

"So you got that," he said to me. I turned and smiled at Gretchen and Savitri, as if to say, See. They both rolled their eyes.

In all, there was about a week between when the Magellan left Phoenix Station and when the Magellan was far enough away from any major gravity well that it could skip to Roanoke. Much of that time was spent watching dodgeball, listening to music, chatting with my new friends, and recording Enzo getting hit with balls. But in between all of that, I actually did spend a little bit of time learning about the world on which we would live the rest of our lives.

Some of it I already knew: Roanoke was a Class Six planet, which meant (and here I'm double-checking with the Colonial Union Department of Colonization Protocol Document, get it wherever PDAs have access to a network) that the planet was within fifteen percent of Earth standard gravity, atmosphere, temperature and rotation, but that the biosphere was not compatible with human biology—which is to say if you ate something there, it'd probably make you vomit your guts out if it didn't kill you outright.

(This made me mildly curious about how many classes of planet there were. Turns out there are eighteen, twelve of which are at least nominally humanly compatible. That said, if someone says you're on a colony ship headed to a Class Twelve planet, the best thing to do is to find an escape pod or volunteer to join the ship's crew, because you're not going to want to land on that world if you can avoid it. Unless you like weighing up to two and a half times your normal weight on a planet whose ammonia-choked atmosphere will hopefully smother you before you die of exposure. In which case, you know. Welcome home.)

What do you do on a Class Six planet, when you're a member of a seed colony? Well, Jane had it right when she said it on Huckleberry: You work. You only have so much food supply to go through before you have to add to it from what you've grown—but before you grow your food, you have to make over the soil so it can grow crops that can feed humans (and other species which started on Earth, like almost all our livestock) without choking to death on the incompatible nutrients in the ground. And you have to make sure that earlier-mentioned livestock (or pets, or toddlers, or inattentive adults who didn't pay attention during their training periods) don't graze or eat anything from the planet until you do a toxicology scan so see if it will kill them. The colonist materials we were given suggest this is more difficult than it sounds, because it's not like your livestock will listen to reason, and neither will a toddler or some adults.

So you've conditioned the soil and kept all your animals and dumb humans from gorging on the poisonous scenery: Now it's time to plant, plant, plant your crops like your life depended on it, because it does. To bring this point home, the colonist training material is filled with pictures of gaunt colonists who messed up their plantings and ended up a lot thinner (or worse) after their planet's winter. The Colonial Union won't bail you out—if you fail, you fail, sometimes at the cost of your own life.

You've planted and tilled and harvested, and then you do it again, and you keep doing it—and all the while you're also building infrastructure, because one of the major roles of a seed colony is to prepare the planet for the next, larger wave of colonists, who show up a couple of standard years later. I assume they land, look around at everything you've created, and say, "Well, colonizing doesn't look that hard." At which point you get to punch them.