High above, the stick moons wavered and shone, lights rippling along their sides while they did whatever the hell it was they did.
Drunk on her own despair, Cara didn’t make the connection between the moons and the dogs. Not until much later, when her brother, Xan, was already dead.
*
Laconia was only one of thirteen hundred and some new worlds. Her parents, like all the others in the first wave, had been intended as a survey force. Cara’s mother had come as a materials engineer, her father as a geologist. She’d come as a baby.
She’d seen pictures on her mother’s handheld of herself in the tight-seal diapers, floating in the family cabin of the Sagan. The ship was still in orbit—a pale, fast-moving dot when it caught the sun just right—but she didn’t remember it at all. Xan had been born a year after they’d all made landfall, and Cara didn’t remember that either. Her earliest memory was of sitting in a chair at home, drawing in an art program on her handheld while her mother sang in the next room.
Her second earliest memory was of the soldiers coming.
Her parents didn’t talk about that, so Cara had built the story from bits and pieces of overheard conversation. Something had happened on the other side of the gates. The Earth had blown up, maybe. Or Mars had. Maybe Venus, though she didn’t think anyone lived there. Whatever happened meant that the scientific expedition that had only been intended to stay for five years was now permanent. The soldiers had come to be the government. They had ships in orbit and the beginnings of cities already being constructed on the planet’s surface. They’d made the town. They’d made the rules for how the town worked. They had a plan.
“You’ve probably noticed,” Instructor Hannu, her teacher, said, “that the orbital platforms have been activated.”
The schoolroom was the old cafeteria from the first landing. Ten meters by eight, with a vaulted ceiling and reinforcements that let it double as a storm shelter, or would have if there were ever any storms bad enough to shelter from. The inner layer of environmental sealant had started to whiten and flake with age, but the early fears about quarantining themselves from Laconia’s ecosphere had gone by the wayside, so no one was in a hurry to repair it. There were no windows, the light entirely from ceramic fixtures set into the walls.
“We’ve been asked to keep an eye out for anything that changes down here,” he went on, “and report it back to the military.”
Which, Cara thought, was stupid. Everything changed on Laconia all the time. Telling the soldiers whenever a new plant showed up would be a full-time job. Was a full-time job. Was what all of their parents did, or were supposed to do, anyway. She wondered if the windowless room was like being on a spaceship. Months or years without ever once going outside or hearing the rain tapping into puddles or being able to get away from Xan and her parents. Never being alone. Never feeling the sunlight on her face. Nothing changing. Nothing new. It sounded awful.
And then circle meeting was over, and the kids scattered around the room to find their tasks for the morning work period. Cara helped Jason Lu with his phonetic-sounds lesson, because she was older and had already mastered it. Then she spent some time on complex multiplication. And then it was recess, and they all piled out to the meadow and the sunlight. Xan and two of the other younger boys ran across the road to skip rocks across the water-treatment reservoir even though they weren’t supposed to. Since his best friend, Santiago, went to school in the military’s program, Xan had to make do with first-wave children for playmates. So did Cara, but it wasn’t as much of a burden for her. She didn’t have any friends among the soldiers anyway.
That would change when they set up the lower university and everyone went to the same school, first wave and soldiers both. But that wouldn’t be for another two years. There was plenty of time for things to happen between now and then.
Mari Tennanbaum and Teresa Ekandjo came and sat with her, and before long, they’d arranged a zombie-tag game with the other older children. The call for second work period seemed to come too soon, but that was the way time worked. Too fast when you weren’t paying attention, and then slow as mud when you watched it. Xan wanted her to teach him phonetic sounds, more because she’d helped Jason with it than because he cared about the lesson, but she did it anyway. When she was done, she did some research of her own.
The classroom had access to the observational data that the survey team had collected since they’d arrived on Laconia. Sunbirds were a common enough species that there might be something there—what they ate, how they matured, when they stopped needing to be cared for—that would help her. Because as soon as school was over, Xan headed out to play with Santiago in the town’s center. She was free to get her bicycle, the one her father had printed for her at the beginning of summer, and start back to the pond and the babies.
The buildings in the town were of two different types. The old ones, the ones like her house, lumpy and round, built from the soil of Laconia and constrained by printed polymer sheaths, marked the original township. The other kind, solidly efficient metal and formed concrete, came later with the soldiers. The roads were new too, and still being built. She and all the other kids loved riding on the smooth, hard surface, feeling the bumps and uncertainty of the land vanish into a steady low hum that traveled up from the wheels through the handlebars and into her bones. They weren’t supposed to ride on the roads because the soldiers sometimes had transports and cars come through, but everyone did it anyway.
The sunlight pressed down, warm against her skin. The air had the soft, musty smell it got when rain was coming, the smell her mother called “moldy coffee grounds.” A swarm of smoke gnats rose up, swirling into the sky above her in their weird angular patterns, like writing in an alphabet that no one knew. She almost stopped to watch. The road ended at a barracks and construction yard, soldiers in their crisp blue uniforms watching her as she passed. When she waved, one of them waved back. And then she was on the rough trail again and had to keep both hands on the bars.