Remnant Population

By nightfall, Ofelia had surveyed the village and knew all the repairs she would have to make. She remembered that she had considered letting some of the buildings go, not worrying about them any more, but that had been pre-storm depression. She never had any energy before a big storm. Now it was over, and she could not imagine just letting things slide, no matter how tired she was. She opened the center to check the weather monitor. No storms approaching, though far to the east another whirl of clouds might become one. Two storms in one season were very rare; it had happened only twice in forty-odd years. Probably that storm would veer away and go somewhere else. She hoped so.

She unlocked the keyboards to enter a brief report on the past few days. How could she say this? Even though she knew no one would ever read it, she didn’t want it to be as crazy as it was. “In the middle of the storm, I went out and there was an alien in the street.” That sounded like an entertainment cube, something made up by the crazy people. She wasn’t crazy. They were real. How could she make them sound real?

Clicking in the hall. Of course they would have come in; she hadn’t closed the door. She looked around. One was watching her, its eyes bright and interested. Of course they were real. It held the gourd with the beaded strings wrapped around it; when she met its gaze, it shook the gourd. What was that? Invitation? Explanation? She didn’t know. She didn’t really want to think about it; she wanted to get this into the record in some way that made sense to her, that might make sense to another human, even though another human wouldn’t see it.

Her experience in writing about the colony’s past was not enough. She could tell about the loves and hates, the betrayals, the quarrels, because she understood them fully. She knew exactly how the wife felt when the husband was jealous for no cause — or with cause. She knew how the human feelings acted on each other, flavoring the simplest interaction with complicated swirls of hidden meaning. But these? It would be like writing about animals, and she had never written about animals. It would be like writing about animals that could think, and she had never known animals that could think. She waved dismissively at the creature; it withdrew. Was it understanding her gesture, or just not that interested in what she was doing?

“In the middle of the storm…” She read what she had written. “Alien” was the wrong word, really. These were native animals, like the treeclimbers. What was the word for that? She didn’t know, and she wasn’t going to ask the dictionary function now. Aliens would do for the moment, or native beings. Creatures. “I thought it was a pile of trash, and then it looked at me.” That sounded sufficiently crazy too. But that’s what she’d seen, a pile of trash with eyes. Let them laugh at her, the ones who might read this if anyone ever came to find out about those who had died.

Slowly, with many corrections, she tried to put it down. It was not, as she’d hoped, a short task. For it to make any sense at all, she had to put in her feelings, her inferences, her assumptions. She had to put in everything she had done, and everything they had done. She had to try to reproduce the sounds they made… no, she didn’t. The automatic recorders would have recorded some of it. She could insert that into her own record, if she could retrieve the right segment.

When she leaned over to the other control board, to enter the search criteria for the segments she wanted, her back cramped. She gasped with the pain, and a squawk from outside let her know that the creatures were still observing her, as much as she was observing them.

It was late. It was very, very late and she would sleep late in the morning and feel groggy and miserable half the day if she didn’t go home and go to sleep now. She shut the boards down, resetting the alarms, and got herself upright with many pops and creaks from her joints. Three of the creatures were sitting in the hall when she came out. She shut the door behind her, retied the latch she’d improvised, and said firmly “Let it alone. It’s not for you.” They said nothing, only watched her as she went down the hall. Would they follow? No. They wanted to be in the center without her, and she was not strong enough to get them out. At the moment she didn’t care. She wanted sleep, in her own bed, and if they destroyed all the machines that had helped her stay alive, then she would die. But she would not worry about it now.

CHAPTER TEN