“Is there more than that?” I asked.
“We have said what we can,” Hickory said. “Except for this. We are at your service, Major. Yours, Lieutenant Sagan’s and especially and always Zo?’s. Her father gave us the gift of ourselves. He asked a high price, which we willingly would have paid.” I shuddered slightly at this, remembering what the price had been. “He died before that price, that debt could be repaid. We owe that debt now to his daughter, and the new debt accrued in her sharing her life with us. We owe it to her. And we owe it to her family.”
“Thank you, Hickory,” I said. “I know we are grateful that you and Dickory have served us so well.”
Hickory’s smile returned. “I regret to say you misunderstand me again, Major. Certainly I and Dickory are at your service and always shall be. But when I say we are at your service, I mean the Obin.”
“The Obin,” I said. “As in, all of you.”
“Yes,” said Hickory. “All of us. Until the last of us, if necessary.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry, Hickory. I’m not quite sure what to say to that.”
“Say that you’ll remember it,” Hickory said. “When the time comes.”
“I will,” I said.
“We would ask you to keep this conversation in confidence,” Hickory said. “For now.”
“All right,” I said.
“Thank you, Major,” Hickory said. It looked back at Dickory and then back at me. “I fear we have made ourselves overly emotional. We will turn off our implants now, with your permission.”
“Please,” I said. The two Obin reached up to their necks to switch off their personalities. I watched as the animation slid from their faces, replaced with blank intelligence.
“We rest now,” Hickory said, and it and its partner left, leaving me in an empty room.
THREE
Here’s one way to colonize: You take two hundred or three hundred people, allow them to pack what supplies they see fit, drop them off on the planet of their choice, say “see you,” and then come back a year later—after they’ve all died of malnutrition brought on by ignorance and lack of supplies, or have been wiped out by another species who wants the place for themselves—to pick up the bones.
This isn’t a very successful way to colonize. In our all-too-short ramp-up period, both Jane and I read enough reports on the demise of wildcat colonies that were designed in just this fashion to be convinced of this salient fact.
On the other hand you don’t want to drop a hundred thousand people onto a new colony world either, complete with all the comforts of civilization. The Colonial Union has the means to do something like this, if it wanted to. But it doesn’t want to. No matter how close a planet’s gravitational field, circumference, land mass, atmosphere or life chemistry is to Earth’s, or to any other planets humans have as yet colonized, it isn’t Earth, and there’s no practical way of knowing what sort of nasty surprise a planet has in store for humans there. Earth itself has a funny way of devising new diseases and ailments to kill off unwary humans, and there we’re a native species. We’re foreign bodies when we land on new worlds, and we know what any life system does to a foreign body in its midst: it tries to kill it as quickly as possible.
Here’s an interesting bit of trivia I learned about failed colonies: Not counting wildcat colonies, the number one cause of abandoned human colonies is not territorial disputes with other species; it’s native bugs killing off the settlers. Other intelligent species we can fight off; that’s a battle we understand. Battling an entire ecosystem that’s trying to kill you is an altogether trickier proposition.
Landing a hundred thousand colonists on a planet just to watch them all die of a fast-moving native infection you can’t cure in time is just a waste of perfectly good colonists.
Which is not to underestimate territorial disputes. A human colony is exponentially more likely to be attacked in the first two or three years of its lifespan than it is at any other point in time. The colony is focused on creating itself and is vulnerable to attack. The Colonial Defense Forces’ presence at a new colony, while not insignificant, is still a fraction of what it will be once a space station is built above the colony a decade or two later. And the simple fact that someone has colonized a planet makes it rather more attractive to everyone else, because those colonists have done all the hard work of colonization for you. Now all you have to do is scrape them off the planet and take it for your own.