John Scalzi - The Last Colony

"I remember the last time I was here," Zoe said. The small bouquet of flowers she brought lay propped up on the gravestone. "It was the day Jane asked me if I wanted to come live with you and her."

"Yes," I said. "You found out you were going to live with me before I found out I was going to live with either of you."

"I thought you and Jane were in love," Zoe said. "That you planned to live together."

"We were," I said. "We did. But it was complicated."

"Everything about our little family is complicated," Zoe said. "You're eighty-eight years old. Jane is a year older than I am. I'm the daughter of a traitor."

"You're also the only girl in the universe with her own Obin escort," I said.

"Speaking of complicated," Zoe said. "By day, typical kid. By night, adored by an entire alien race."

"There are worse setups," I said.

"I suppose," Zoe said. "You'd think being the object of worship for a whole alien race would get me out of homework now and then. Don't think I haven't noticed that it doesn't."

"We didn't want it to go to your head," I said.

"Thanks," she said. She pointed to the gravestone. "Even this is complicated. I'm alive, and it's my father's clone who is buried here, not my father. The only real person here is my mother. My real mother. It's all very complicated."

"I'm sorry," I said.

Zoe shrugged. "I'm used to it by now. Most of the time it's not a bad thing. And it gives you perspective, doesn't it? I'd be at school, listening to Anjali or Chadna complain about how complicated their lives were, and I'd be thinking to myself, girl, you have no idea what complicated is."

"Good to hear you've handled it well," I said.

"I try," Zoe said. "I have to admit it wasn't a very good day when the two of you told me the truth about Dad."

"It wasn't much of a fun day for us, either," I said. "But we thought you deserved to know the truth."

"I know," Zoe said, and stood up. "But you know. I woke up one morning thinking my real dad was just a scientist and went to bed knowing he could have wiped out the entire human race. It messes with you."

"Your father was a good man to you," I said. "Whatever else he was and whatever else he did, he got that thing right."

Zoe walked over to me and gave me a hug. "Thank you for bringing me here. You're a nice man, ninety-year-old dad," she said.

"You're a great kid, teenage daughter," I said. "You ready to go?"

"In a second," she said, and walked back over to the gravestone, knelt quickly and kissed it. Then she stood up and suddenly looked like an embarrassed teen. "I did that the last lime I was here," she said. "I wanted to see if it made me feel the same."

"Did it?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said, still embarrassed. "Come on. Let's go." We walked toward the gates of the cemetery; I took out my PDA and signaled for a taxi to come pick us up.

"How do you like the Magellan?" I asked, as we walked.

"It's interesting," Zoe' said. "It's been a long time since I've been on a spaceship. I forgot what it was like. And this one's so big"

"It has to fit twenty-five hundred colonists and all of their stuff," I said.

"I get that," Zoe said. "I'm just saying it's large. It's starting to fill up, though. The colonists are there now. I've met some of them. The ones my age, I mean."

"Meet any you like?" I asked.

"A couple," Zoe said. "There's one girl who seems to want to get to know me. Gretchen Trujillo."

"Trujillo, you say," I said.

Zoe nodded. "Why? You know her?"

"I think I may know her father," I said.

"It's a small world," Zoe said.

"And it's about to get a lot smaller," I said.

"Good point," Zoe said, and looked around. "I wonder if I'll ever make it back here."

"You're going to a new colony," I said. "Not the afterlife."

Zoe smiled at this. "You weren't paying attention to the gravestone," she said. "I've been to the afterlife. Coming back from that's not a problem. It's life you don't get over."

"Jane's taking a nap," Savitri said, as Zoe and I returned to our stateroom. "She said she wasn't feeling well."

I raised my eyebrows at this; Jane was the healthiest person I knew, even after she had been transferred into a standard human body. "Yes, I know," Savitri said, catching the eyebrow. "I thought it was odd, too. She said she'd be fine, but not to disturb her for at least a few hours."

"All right," I said. "Thanks. Zoe and I were going to go to the rec deck anyway. You want to come along?"

"Jane asked me to work on some things before I got her up," Savitri said. "Some other time."

"You work harder for Jane than you ever did for me," I said.

"It's the power of inspiring leadership," Savitri said.

"Nice," I said.

Savitri made shooing motions. "I'll ping your PDA when Jane is up," Savitri said. "Now, go. You're distracting me."

The Magellan's recreation deck was arrayed like a small park, and was packed with colonists and their families, sampling the diversions the Magellan would offer them on our week-long journey to skip distance, thence to Roanoke. As we arrived, Zoe spied a trio of teenage girls and waved; one waved back and beckoned her over. I wondered if it was Gretchen Trujillo. Zoe left me with a quick backward glance good-bye. I wandered around the deck, watching my fellow colonists. Soon enough most of them would recognize me as the colony leader. For now, however, I was safely and happily anonymous.

At first glance the colonists seemed to be moving freely among each other, but after a minute or two I noticed some clumping, with groups of colonists standing apart. English was the common language of all the colonies, but each world also had its secondary languages, largely based on the stock of its original colonists.

I heard snatches of these languages as I walked: Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, German.

"You hear them, too," someone said behind me. I turned and saw Trujillo. "All the different languages," he said, and smiled. "Residue from our old worlds, I guess you would say. I doubt people will stop speaking them when we get to Roanoke."

"This your subtle way of suggesting that the colonists won't be in a rush to trade in their own nationalities to become newly minted Roanokers," I said.

"It's just an observation. And I'm sure in time we all will become… Roanokers," Trujillo said, pronouncing that last word as if it were something spiky that he'd been required to swallow. "It will just take some time. Possibly more time than you now suspect. We are doing something different here, after all. Not just creating a new colony from the old-line colony worlds, but mixing ten different cultures into one colony. To be entirely honest about it, I have my reservations I think the Department of Colonization should have taken my original suggestion and let just one of the colonies field settlers."

"That's bureaucracy for you," I said. "Always messing up perfect plans."

"Yes, well," Trujillo said, and waved his hand slightly, to encompass the polyglot settlers, and possibly me. "We both know this is as much about my feud with Secretary Bell as anything else. She was against Roanoke from the start, but there was too much momentum from the colonies for her stop this from happening. But there was nothing stopping her from making it as impractical as possible to manage. Including offering the colony leadership to a pair of well-meaning neophytes who have no idea where the landmines are in this situation, and who will make convenient scapegoats if the colony fails."

"You're saying we're patsies," I said.

"I'm saying that you and your wife are intelligent, competent and politically expendable," Trujillo said. "When the colony fails, the blame will fall on you, not on Bell."

"Even though she chose us," I said.