In all, there was about a week between when the Magellan left Phoenix Station and when the Magellan was far enough away from any major gravity well that it could skip to Roanoke. Much of that time was spent watching dodgeball, listening to music, chatting with my new friends, and recording Enzo getting hit with balls. But in between all of that, I actually did spend a little bit of time learning about the world on which we would live the rest of our lives.
Some of it I already knew: Roanoke was a Class Six planet, which meant (and here I’m double-checking with the Colonial Union Department of Colonization Protocol Document, get it wherever PDAs have access to a network) that the planet was within fifteen percent of Earth standard gravity, atmosphere, temperature and rotation, but that the biosphere was not compatible with human biology—which is to say if you ate something there, it’d probably make you vomit your guts out if it didn’t kill you outright.
(This made me mildly curious about how many classes of planet there were. Turns out there are eighteen, twelve of which are at least nominally humanly compatible. That said, if someone says you’re on a colony ship headed to a Class Twelve planet, the best thing to do is to find an escape pod or volunteer to join the ship’s crew, because you’re not going to want to land on that world if you can avoid it. Unless you like weighing up to two and a half times your normal weight on a planet whose ammonia-choked atmosphere will hopefully smother you before you die of exposure. In which case, you know. Welcome home.)
What do you do on a Class Six planet, when you’re a member of a seed colony? Well, Jane had it right when she said it on Huckleberry: You work. You only have so much food supply to go through before you have to add to it from what you’ve grown—but before you grow your food, you have to make over the soil so it can grow crops that can feed humans (and other species which started on Earth, like almost all our livestock) without choking to death on the incompatible nutrients in the ground. And you have to make sure that earlier-mentioned livestock (or pets, or toddlers, or inattentive adults who didn’t pay attention during their training periods) don’t graze or eat anything from the planet until you do a toxicology scan so see if it will kill them. The colonist materials we were given suggest this is more difficult than it sounds, because it’s not like your livestock will listen to reason, and neither will a toddler or some adults.
So you’ve conditioned the soil and kept all your animals and dumb humans from gorging on the poisonous scenery: Now it’s time to plant, plant, plant your crops like your life depended on it, because it does. To bring this point home, the colonist training material is filled with pictures of gaunt colonists who messed up their plantings and ended up a lot thinner (or worse) after their planet’s winter. The Colonial Union won’t bail you out—if you fail, you fail, sometimes at the cost of your own life.
You’ve planted and tilled and harvested, and then you do it again, and you keep doing it—and all the while you’re also building infrastructure, because one of the major roles of a seed colony is to prepare the planet for the next, larger wave of colonists, who show up a couple of standard years later. I assume they land, look around at everything you’ve created, and say, “Well, colonizing doesn’t look that hard.” At which point you get to punch them.
And through this all, and in the back of your mind, is this little fact: Colonies are at their most vulnerable to attack when they’re new. There’s a reason humans colonize Class Six planets, where the biosystem might kill them, and even Class Twelve planets, where just about everything else will kill them too. It’s because there are a lot of other intelligent races out there who have the same habitation needs as we have, and we all want as many planets as we can grab. And if someone else is already there, well. That’s just something to work around.
I knew this very well. And so did John and Jane.
But it was something I wonder if other people—either my age or older—really understood; understood that Class Six planet or not, conditioned soil or not, planted crops or not, everything they’ve done and worked for doesn’t matter much when a spacecraft shows up in your sky, and it’s filled with creatures who’ve decided they want your planet, and you’re in the way. Maybe it’s not something you can understand until it happens.
Or maybe when it comes down to it people just don’t think about it because there’s nothing to do about it. We’re not soldiers, we’re colonists. Being a colonist means accepting the risk. And once you’ve accepted the risk, you might as well not think about it until you have to.