“It’s all this tension,” the linguist was saying. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this—” Then don’t, Ofelia thought. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear it. “—but you’re wise, even if you don’t have an education.” The arrogance in that almost yanked a reply from her, but she managed to squeeze it back. Wise even if she had no education? What did wisdom have to do with education? Besides, she had an education; she had spent hours studying, nights and early mornings studying, long before this child was born. This . . . this chit of a girl who hadn’t known how to repair the pumps, who had blithely walked between a cow and her calf.
“The thing is,” the girl went on, in happy unawareness of Ofelia’s thoughts, “they don’t like each other and never have. So they’re using me as an excuse. One says I’m flirting, and the other one says I’m not flirting, and—”
“Are you flirting?” Ofelia asked. She thought so; why else wear that perfume? Why else swing her ripe young body back and forth like fruit on a vine, every motion declaring her readiness to be picked and eaten?
“Of course not.” A flounce, an outraged glance. Just like Linda, who had always denied with her mouth while proclaiming with her hips. But this was not Linda. “Well . . . maybe. But not seriously, you know. It’s not like your culture, you know.” Again that gentle condescension. “We don’t have the same rules—” As if human biology would shift aside for her convenience, as if men were not animals born to respond to smells and motions. “I do rather like one of them, and there’s no reason he shouldn’t know it. But that’s not really flirting.”
“Do you have sex with him?” Ofelia asked. The girl flushed and scowled.
“It’s none of your—” She stopped abruptly and her face changed, as if someone had wiped a thumb across clay. “Oh, hi Kira. How’s the tech survey going?”
Ofelia looked up at the other woman. Older, warier, than the young one, but still young to Ofelia. She was angry about something; Ofelia suspected it was the girl’s antics.
“There’s a staff meeting in twenty minutes, Bilong, and you’re supposed to have the preliminary analysis ready—”
“I can’t—it’s too soon—all I can do is discuss the raw data—”
“Then do that.” Kira stood there, as threatening as a sea-storm wall cloud until the younger woman got up and walked away, her shoulders stiff.
“You are angry?” Ofelia said. She leaned back against the sun-warmed wall and hoped she looked old and stupid.
“She is not supposed to waste her time talking to you,” Kira said. “She has work to do.” Ofelia waited. She had seen just this maneuver in older children who chased young ones away. What they really wanted was their own chance at the mother or grandmother.
Kira sighed, the kind of dramatic sigh that meant she too was going to confide. Ofelia let her eyelids sag almost shut. Maybe she would change her mind if Ofelia looked stupid enough.
“You’re not a chatterbox,” Kira said. Mistake. This woman had wanted a safe confidant, and for that purpose stupid and quiet would do well enough. Ofelia opened her eyes but it was too late to pretend alert garrulity. Kira’s mouth quirked. “And I don’t think you’re half so dim as you pretend, either. A stupid woman couldn’t have survived alone so long.” Good observation, if unflattering. Just once, Ofelia would have liked people to see her as she was, not as their ideas painted her.
She looked at Kira, the short hair so carefully shaped that it must be a style of some sort, the smooth young-woman skin just showing the first lines of age. Who was this person, really? “I don’t think I’m stupid,” she said.
Kira’s eyes widened, then narrowed.
“No. I can see that. What I can’t see is why you chose to stay behind.”
“No,” Ofelia said, mimicking Kira’s intonation. “I can see you don’t. But you are too young.”
“You didn’t want to die aboard the ship, in suspension?”
Ofelia shrugged, annoyed. They always came back to death, these young ones; they were obsessed with it. She tried again to explain. “It was not about death. It was about life. If I stayed, I would be alone—”
“But no one can survive isolation,” Kira said, interrupting Ofelia as she had done before, as they had all done. “You must have been terribly lonely. It’s lucky for you that the indigenes showed up when they did.”
It would do no good to argue that she had not been lonely. She had tried that, and they had looked at her with such pity, and such certainty.
“Perhaps I am crazy,” Ofelia said.
“Your psych profile didn’t show anything before,” Kira said. So they had snooped into her personnel file, something she had never done herself. Again the slow anger burned. What right had they? They were not her people: not family, not friends, not fellow colonists, not even someone she had gone to for help. “It’s not . . . normal,” Kira said. “Wanting to be the only human on the whole world—that’s not normal.”
“So I am not normal,” Ofelia said. Silence would not work with this one; she knew that already.
“But why?”
Ofelia shrugged. “You did not like my answers before; you told me I didn’t understand. Should I tell you the truth I know, or try to guess the untruth you want?”
Kira’s eyes widened. Surprise, the old lady has teeth. “You don’t have to be so—so vehement. I only wondered.” She sounded offended. Fine. Let her be offended.
“I wanted to be alone. I had not been alone for years. It didn’t bother me to be alone as a child, and it didn’t bother me this time either.”
Kira gave her perfect haircut a little shake, warding off that understanding. “Was it because your husband and children had died here? And you felt close to them?”
Ofelia sighed, and pushed herself away from the wall, standing slowly. These people felt almost as alien as the creatures, and they had less interest in understanding her. “If you don’t listen, you can’t hear,” she said, tugging her ear for emphasis. They would make up their own minds anyway, and nothing she said would change that.
She walked away, around the far end of her house, and out into the meadow. Kira followed her a few steps, bleating something incomprehensible. Then she fell behind. Ofelia did not turn to look, but she could feel Kira’s stare on her shoulderblades.
Out among the sheep, the blessedly silent sheep, who ignored her at this time of day, Ofelia hid in plain sight from the other humans. She used the basket she had brought to gather sheep droppings. She spread them along the outer margins of the meadow, supporting the terraforming grasses with their mix of bacteria and fungi, maintaining the meadow’s boundaries.
The newcomers hated the droppings, hated anything that smelled alive: “stank of organics,” is how they put it. They wanted nothing to do with her while she was doing work they considered dirty. After that first rapture over fresh tomatoes, they had recoiled from the discovery that she did not sterilize the sheep and cow manure, the kitchen garbage, that went into the compost trench and then into the soil. They accepted no more tomatoes, and refused the cooling fruit drink—although they would pick fruit themselves, and then scrub it in the kitchen sink in the center.
She was tired of the newcomers’ silliness about dirt, tired of their busyness, tired of the way they interrupted her without apology, talked as long as they wanted to, and then walked off, leaving her as casually as they would leave a building. She was behind in her garden work; she could not enjoy sewing or crocheting or making jewelry when at any moment someone might come interrupt her, with that expression which meant they thought she was especially silly to be making things now, when she would have to leave. They seemed to go out of their way to make her feel unimportant.