With the planting done, she spent more time at the center, reading and revising the old logs again. She had almost forgotten Molly Suppert until she ran across the death notice: poor Molly, who had not been part of the original colony, but an assigned special technician. For five years, Molly had run the health clinic alone, as she trained her replacements from among the colonists. She was supposed to have been evacuated after five years, but when the ship came, Molly was dead.
Ofelia had never known what world Molly came from, but they had all known it was someplace strange, if its inhabitants had been anything like Molly, with her bone-white skin and yellow-green eyes, her orange frizzy hair. And her attitudes. It had been Molly who suggested that girls need not marry so young, that children need not be slapped into obedience. If she had stuck to giving immunizations and pregnancy tests, and teaching midwives how to use the diagnostic machines, she would not have been found with a knife in her neck out behind the center.
It had taken considerable work to make it appear that she had fallen on a scythe while chasing cattle down by the river, and Ofelia had wondered if the Company really believed that. She had rather liked Molly, although she had not been foolish enough to confide in her, like the younger girls. It was all very well to say those things Molly had said, but the world was the way it was, and had always been, slapped children and all.
In the log, she added what she remembered about Molly. She had never known for sure who killed her, and she wasn’t about to accuse without certainty. But the sun in her frizzy hair, that she put down, the way it glowed in a halo around her head as if she were a saint, but she wasn’t a saint because she cursed vividly in two languages. At least, Ofelia supposed that from the tone and vigor with which she spoke in her native tongue, whatever it was. She remembered none of the words; she had never really understood.
It had been so long that when she heard the voices she did not know what they were. They sounded alien as the shrieks and squawks that came from the distant forest. She stood still in the street, her heart pounding. What? Where?
Her ears led her to the center, to the control rooms, where one of the gray boxes emitted a gabble that her brain finally sorted into words. She stared at the box for some time before realizing that it was not speaking to her, and it was not the machines speaking to the human caretakers they expected.
“Correct your course, eighteen-six-forty one—” The speaker had an accent different enough that she had to strain to follow it, but it was the language she knew. A male voice. A voice she could tell was used to command.
“Done,” said another voice. “Shuttle One Sapphire, correcting. Get a six-oh-two and a thirty-twelve.” A hiss and crackle, then, “—Any sign of the other colony?”
“Sticks out on infrared like a blasted beacon,” said the first voice. “The boundary between terraformed and indigenous vegetation looks stable. Shuttle field. Some buildings. Why? We aren’t going near it.”
“Just wondered. They—”
A longish pause, then: “Well, we haven’t made that mistake,” from the first voice. “They were idiots to pick a tropical site anyway. I heard that they retrieved fewer colonists than they inserted.” A pause, as if someone had asked a question, though Ofelia couldn’t hear anything but the open, soft hissing. “No, not renegades—that many losses. Poor chills. Not like ours.”
Ofelia sat, hardly aware of the sudden cold sweat that ran down her ribs. Shuttle? Coming down? Chills? Colonists?
They would find her. They would find her and send her away, back to space, to some cryo tank . . . or, almost as bad, they would expect her to join them. They would expect her to fit her schedule to theirs, to do what she was told.
Her heart fluttered; she felt shaky and cold. She did not want that; she did not want to be caught, caged, ordered here and there. She tried to think what she could do. Move into the forest again? She might have the time to gather more things, but she could not live in the forest; she could not eat anything that grew there.
She went outside and looked up. Of course she could see nothing. The sky was a pale blue dome streaked with white clouds. If a ship hung up there in orbit, she could not see it. Could it see her? Unlikely, she thought, in daylight. But at night?
