“—Come in — Carver, answer!”
“—Too late, you bastards — they got the shuttle and the strip!” That from one of the other local sources.
Ofelia felt a pressure in her chest. The creatures had blown up a shuttle? “Get us out of here!”
“Three hours until another shuttle can make it.” A new voice from the ship, older, with more authority. “That will be after local sunset… they’ll need lights for landing. We’ve put every trained person aboard—” “In three hours, we won’t be here to save!” the voice said. “Lights — how can we — Dammit, do something now! These things are coming in — we can’t—” Ofelia felt wetness on her face and tasted it. Tears. She was crying for them, for the hopeless, helpless colonists, waked from cryo to be killed on a planet they had not even met. It was far worse than her own fate, far worse than working forty years for nothing. She knew, as they would learn, that Company ships hanging safe in space never risked themselves down in the dirty atmosphere for mere colonists. Cheaper to lose a few colonists than a deep-space carrier.
“We don’t have any space-to-surface weapons,” the ship’s voice said. “Recommend you lay out a defensive perimeter—” “With what?” The bitterness in that made Ofelia wince. “I’ll leave this on transmit, and you can get your precious record — tell whoever surveyed this place they were blind, deaf, and crazy—” Ofelia hardly breathed as the distant sounds made clear what happened. The creatures overran the landing site; Ofelia could hear screaming, most of it incoherent, and sounds she supposed were made by the creatures themselves. The last sound transmitted was the thud, then crunch, of something knocking over and squashing the transmitter. Ofelia went outside; it was dusk, dusk of the same day. She heard a distant roar, then a crashing boom: a shuttle coming down fast, not on the course of the others. She went back inside to listen. The shuttle crew was reporting to the orbiting ship. “Visible light, yes. Thermal profile suggests burning debris, not any civilized source of light. Lots of infrared — thousands, tens of thousands of whatever-they-are. Recording in all frequencies. Its — Gods, look at that! Get us UP, Shin!”
And, over a gabble of returning questions from the ship, “—No doubt at all they’re intelligent. Tool-users, absolutely. No way we can set down there in the dark. In the morning—” “—Make a full report to the Ministry,” the calm voice from the ship said. “A daylight survey, high altitude. No use risking more lives. The Company can get a refund, I’m sure, on grounds of misrepresentation by the former franchise holder, and let the pols decide if they want to send a diplomatic expedition. Not our problem.”
“—consider old colony landing site?”
“No. If there’s an indigenous intelligent species, the rules have changed. We won’t touch it; we’ll report. If your data are good enough, we won’t even bother with the daylight survey. We’ve got the direct transmissions from the landing site, anyway.”
“I’d like to know how they missed this — these whatevers.”
“Not our problem.”
Ofelia had heard that tone before. Whoever it was up there in the safe, air-conditioned space ship, never considered it his problem when people were dying somewhere else. Her lip curled. She would like to tell him what she thought. The transmission switch suddenly caught her eye; she had not even considered it before. Now, though: if she could hear them, they could hear her. If she spoke. It would do no good. It would only get her in trouble.
For a day or so, she could believe nothing had changed. The threat was gone; the new colony didn’t exist. If the creatures had not found her in over forty years, why would they now? She could go on as before, living peacefully in the deserted village, stringing beads, playing with paints, gardening the small amount necessary to grow her own food.
Resolutely, she walked out among the animals, strolled the margin of the grassy pastures. In the sun, in the haze of pollen blown from the flowering grass, she could pretend nothing had happened. The sun warmed her shoulders; the sheep smelled like sheep, and the cattle… the cattle wagged their ears at her, snuffed with wet black noses, and edged away. The bull huffed, swinging his head back and forth. Not at her. At something across the river.
They were no more nervous than usual. She told herself that even as her breath came short and the back of her neck itched. She went back to the sheep, telling herself they were more restful, and then all of them jerked their heads up at once, staring at one point in the forest where she saw and heard nothing at all. Sheep were stupid. Cattle were flighty. Ofelia glared at the forest, and went back to her garden. It was only accident that she kept ending up in the corner nearest the kitchen, hoeing the same bit of ground, staring across the tangle of dayvines on the fence she had never quite mended at the pasture and the brush beyond it.
Perhaps she had dreamed the whole thing. She had heard, in school, that no one could live long alone without going crazy, without thinking they heard and saw other people. She had never believed it, but she had been told. So if she had gone crazy, without noticing it, she could have imagined the whole thing. The other ship had never really come, and nothing had happened to it. Why she had imagined such a gruesome fate for its colonists she did not know; it must be some evil streak in her, probably the same one that made her decide to stay here alone.
That idea, once rooted, bore tempting fruit: it would be easy to find out the truth. The machines would have recorded the transmissions, if there had been transmissions. All she had to do was play them back. Or play back nothing, and know she had made it all up.
She knew what she knew; she didn’t need any machine to tell her the truth. Day after day, she went into the center to check the gauges, the weather, to record the necessary items in the log. Day after day, she eyed the machine records and did not play them back.
It was, in the end, an accident. She had meant to check the date she’d planted carrots the year before.
Something interrupted; her finger slipped off the control that reversed the calendar search.
“—With what?” asked a frightened, angry voice that was not her own. It was real. It had happened. The machines did not lie, could not lie, and that meant the voice on the tape had been a real person, real in fright and pain.
And now was dead. She began to shake without realizing it; her hands and then her arms, her feet and then her legs, her whole body, shaking with the same fear, with the same shock. They had been human — people she could have known, could have talked to — and now they were all dead. With shaking hands, she fumbled over the controls until she turned the recording off. Silence rushed in on her, the silence she had grown used to, that she had thought of as peace. No voices. No voices anymore. Slowly, slowly, her breath steadied. She felt tired; she wanted to go to sleep. When she looked at her hands, with their red, swollen knuckles and knotted veins and age spots, they looked more fragile than flowers. Her gaze slid downwards, caught on the fringed drape she had made for herself. It seemed more indecent than her body; she yanked it off as she stood, balled it in her hands and threw it on the floor. “They’re dead!” she said aloud, in a voice she hardly remembered using. Her mind divided like water running down a slope: she wondered why she was outraged, she wondered why she was afraid, why she was not more afraid. She would not have killed them, those strangers, though she had not wanted them here.
She went outside again, into another day that insisted on being like any other. Again it was hot, humid, the sky clotted with clouds moving slowly before a steady wind. Why did it matter if they were all dead? They had come; they had gone; she was alone again, and she had wanted to be alone.