John Scalzi - Zoe`s Tale

Two weeks after we landed on Roanoke, Magdy, Enzo, Gretchen and I went for a walk.

"Watch where you land," Magdy told us. "There are some big rocks down here."

"Great," Gretchen said. She shined her pocket light—acceptable technology, no computer equipment in it, just an old-fashioned LED—at the ground, looking for a place to land, and then hopped down from the edge of the container wall, aiming for her preferred spot. Enzo and I heard the oof as she landed, and then a bit of cursing.

"I told you to watch where you landed," Magdy said, shining his light on her.

"Shut it, Magdy," she said. "We shouldn't even be out here. You're going to get us all in trouble."

"Yeah, well," Magdy said. "Your words would have more moral authority if you weren't actually out here with me." He flicked his light up off of Gretchen and toward me and Enzo, still up on the container wall. "You two planning to join us?"

"Will you please stop with the light?" Enzo said. "The patrol is going to see it."

"The patrol is on the other side of the container wall," Magdy said. "Although if you don't hurry it up, that's not going to be the case for long. So move it." He flicked the light back and forth quickly in Enzo's face, making an annoying strobe effect. Enzo sighed and slid down off the container wall; I heard the muffled thump a second later. Which left me, feeling suddenly very exposed on the top of the containers that were the defensive perimeter around our little village—and also the frontier beyond which we were not allowed to go at night.

"Come on," Enzo whispered up to me. He, at least, remembered we weren't supposed to be out and modulated his voice accordingly. "Jump down. I'll catch you."

"Are you dumb?" I asked, also in a whispery voice. "You'll end up with my shoes in your eye sockets."

"It was a joke," Enzo said.

"Fine," I said. "Don't catch me."

"Jeez, Zoë," Magdy said, in a definite nonwhisper. "Will you jump already?"

I hopped off the container wall, down the three meters or so from the top, and tumbled a little when I landed. Enzo flicked his light on me, and offered me a hand up. I took it and squinted up at him as he pulled me up. Then I flicked my own light over to where Magdy was. "Jerk," I told him.

Magdy shrugged. "Come on," he said, and started along the perimeter of the wall toward our destination.

A few minutes later we were all flashing our lights into a hole.

"Wow," Gretchen said. "We've just broken curfew and risked being accidentally shot by the night guard for this. A hole in the ground. I'm picking our next field trip, Magdy."

Magdy snorted and knelt down into the hole. "If you actually paid attention to anything, you'd know that this hole has the council in a panic," Magdy said. "Something dug this out the other night while the patrol wasn't watching. Something was trying to get in to the colony from out here." He took his light and moved it up the nearest container until he spotted something. "Look. There are scratches on the container. Something tried to go over the top, and then when it couldn't it tried to go under."

"So what you're saying is that we're out here now with a bunch of predators," I said.

"It doesn't have to be a predator," Magdy said. "Maybe it's just something that likes to dig."

I flicked my light back up to the claw marks. "Yeah, that's a reasonable theory."

"We couldn't have seen this during the day?" Gretchen asked. "When we could see the things that can leap out and eat us?"

Magdy motioned his light over to me. "Her mom had her security people around it all day long. They weren't letting anybody else near it. Besides, whatever made this hole is long gone now."

"I'll remind you that you said that when something tears out your throat," Gretchen said.

"Relax," Magdy said. "I'm prepared. And anyway, this hole is just the opening act. My dad is friends with some of the security folks. One of them told him that just before they closed everything up for the night, they saw a herd of those fanties over in the woods. I say we go look."

"We should get back," Enzo said. "We shouldn't even be out here, Magdy. If they find us out there, we're all going to catch hell. We can see the fanties tomorrow. When the sun is up, and we can actually see them."

"Tomorrow they'll be awake and foraging," Magdy said. "And there's no way we're going to be able to do anything other than look at them through binoculars." Magdy pointed at me again. "Let me remind you that her parents have kept us cooped up for two weeks now, waiting to find out if anything might bruise us on this planet."

"Or kill us," I said. "Which would be a problem."

Magdy waved this away. "My point is that if we actually want to see these things—actually get close enough to them that we can get a good look at them—we have to do it now. They're asleep, no one knows we're gone, and we'll be back before anyone misses us."

"I still think we should go back," Enzo said.

"Enzo, I know this is taking away from valuable make-out time with your girlfriend," Magdy said, "but I thought you might want to explore something other than Zoë's tonsils for once."

Magdy was very lucky he wasn't in arm's reach when he made that comment. Either my arm or Enzo's.

"You're being an ass again, Magdy," Gretchen said.

"Fine," Magdy said. "You guys go back. I'll see you later. I'm going to see me some fanties." He started toward the woods, waving his pocket light in the grass (or grasslike ground cover) as he walked. I shined my light over to Gretchen. She rolled her eyes in exasperation and started walking after Magdy. After a minute Enzo and I followed.

Take an elephant. Make it just a little smaller. Lose the ears. Make its trunk shorter and tentaclly at the end. Stretch out its legs until it almost but not quite seems impossible that they could support the weight. Give it four eyes. And then do other assorted weird things to its body until it's not that it looks like an elephant, it's just that it looks more like an elephant than it looks like anything else you can think of.

That's a fantie.

In the two weeks we'd been trapped in the colony village, waiting for the "all clear" to actually begin colonization, the fanties had been spotted several times, either in the woods near the village or just barely in the clearing between the village and the woods. A fantie spotting would bring up a mad rush of children to the colony gate (a gap in the container wall, closed up at night) to look and gawk and wave to the creatures. It would also bring a somewhat more studiously casual wave of us teenagers, because we wanted to see them too, we just didn't want to seem too interested, since that would mess with our credibility with all our new friends.

Certainly Magdy never gave any indication of actually caring about the fanties at all. He'd allow himself to be dragged to the gate by Gretchen when a herd passed by, but then he spent most of his time talking to the other guys who were also happy to make it look like they had gotten dragged to the gate. Just goes to show, I suppose. Even the self-consciously cool had a streak of kid in them.

There was some argument as to whether the fanties we saw were a local group that lived in the area, or whether we'd seen a number of herds that were just migrating through. I had no idea which theory was right; we'd only been on planet for a couple of weeks. And from a distance, all the fanties looked pretty much the same.

And up close, as we quickly discovered, they smelled horrible.

"Does everything on this planet smell like crap?" Gretchen whispered to me as we glanced up at the fanties. They waved back and forth, ever so slightly, as they slept standing on their legs. As if to answer her question, one of the fanties closest to where we were hiding let rip a monumental fart. We gagged and giggled equally.