By Erie tenth, we had finished our first major crop harvests. I declared a national holiday and day of thanksgiving. The colonists celebrated by building the Mennonites a meeting house, for which they only occasionally needed to ask for advice from the Mennonites themselves. The second set of crops was into the ground less than a week later.
In Khartoum, Patrick Kazumi went with his friends to play by the stream behind Croatoan’s western wall. While running along the stream, he slipped, hit his head on a rock and drowned. He was eight years old. Most of the colony attended his funeral. On the last day of Khartoum, Anna Kazumi, Patrick’s mother, stole a heavy coat from a friend, placed rocks in her pockets and waded into the stream to follow her son. She succeeded.
In Kyoto, it rained heavily four days out of every five, spoiling crops and interfering with the colony’s second harvest of the year. Zo? and Enzo had a somewhat dramatic breakup, as often happens when first loves finally get on each other’s nerves. Hickory and Dickory, overstimulated from Zo?’s relationship angst, began openly discussing how to solve the Enzo problem. Zo? finally told the two to stop it; they were creeping her out.
In Elysium, the yotes, the coyote-like predators we’d discovered on our barrier, made their way back toward the colony, and attempted to work their way through the colony’s herd of sheep, a ready source of food. Colonists began working their way through the predators in return. Savitri relented after three months and went on a date with Beata. The next day Savitri described the evening as an “interesting failure” and refused to discuss it further.
With Roanoke autumn in full swing, the last of the temporary housing tents folded for good, replaced with simple, snug houses in Croatoan and on the homesteads outside its walls. Half of the colonists still lived in Croatoan, learning trades from the Mennonites; the other half carved out their homesteads and waited for the new year to plant their own fields and yield their own crops.
Savitri’s birthday—as measured on Huckleberry, translated to Roanoke dates—occurred on the twenty-third of Elysium; I gave her the gift of an indoor toilet for her tiny cottage, connected to a small and easily-drained septic tank. Savitri actually teared up.
On the thirteenth of Rus, Henri Arlien battered his wife Therese on the belief that she was having an affair with a former tentmate. Therese responded by battering her husband with a heavy pan, breaking his jaw and knocking out three of his teeth. Both Henri and Therese visited Dr. Tsao; Henri then visited the hastily assembled jail, formerly a livestock hold. Therese asked for a divorce and then moved in with the former tentmate. She hadn’t been having an affair before, she said, but now it sounded like a damn fine idea indeed.
The tentmate was a fellow by the name of Joseph Loong. On the twentieth of Phoenix, Loong went missing.
“First things first,” I said to Jane, after Therese Arlien came in to report Loong’s disappearance. “Where has Henri Arlien been recently?”
“He’s on work furlough during the day,” Jane said. “The only time he’s allowed to be by himself is when he has to pee. At night he’s back in his stall at the jail.”
“That stall’s not exactly escape-proof,” I said. In its former life it had held a horse.
“No,” Jane said. “But the livestock hold is. One door, one lock, and it’s on the outside. He doesn’t get anywhere overnight.”
“He could get a friend to visit Loong,” I said.
“I don’t think Arlien has friends,” Jane said. “Chad and Ari took statements from their neighbors. Pretty much all of them said Henri had got what he deserved when Therese hit him with that pan. I’ll have Chad check around, but I don’t think we’ll get much there.”
“What do you think, then?” I asked.
“Loong’s homestead borders the woods,” Jane said. “Therese said the two of them had gone for walks out there. The fanties are migrating through the area, and Loong wanted to get a closer look.” The fanties were the lumbering animals some of the folks saw at the edge of the woods not long after we landed; apparently they migrated, looking for food. We had caught the tail end of their stay when we arrived; now it was the early part. I thought they looked about as much like elephants as I did, but the name had stuck whether I liked it or not.
“So Loong goes out to look at the fanties and gets lost,” I said.
“Or gets trampled,” Jane said. “The fanties are large animals.”
“Well, then, let’s get a search party together,” I said. “If Loong just got lost, if he has any sense, he’ll stay put and wait for us to find him.”
“If he had any sense he wouldn’t be chasing after fanties in the first place,” Jane said.
“You’d be no fun on a safari,” I said.
“Experience teaches me not to go out of my way to chase alien creatures,” Jane said. “Because they often chase back. I’ll have a search party together in an hour. You should come along.”