She could not turn on the lights. Although she had chosen to do without them many a summer evening, now she felt confined by the dark. She had things to do, if she was going to escape, and she needed the light. She sat in the dark that night, peering up at the stars. Could they see her even without light? Infrared . . . that was heat, she remembered; the colonists had once had goggles for seeing animals in the dark, but over the years these had failed. So the spaceship up there might see her anyway, would certainly see the heat plume of the waste recycler. Would they believe it had been working by itself since the other colony left? That someone had merely forgotten to turn off the automatics?
After the months alone, it was hard to fit her thoughts to the shape someone else’s mind might make. If it were Barto up there, what would he be thinking? How long until the shift is over . . . when is it my turn . . . is supper ready?
Dawn woke her; she had fallen asleep sitting against the wall, and her neck hurt. Her eyes felt gummy. She stretched slowly, painfully, and finally levered herself up beside the wall. Inside the center, it was just light enough to find her way from room to room. She went into the offices, and stared at the gray box, from which no voices came. Just as she began to wonder if she’d dreamed it, it crackled again and the voices resumed.
“Local sunrise,” said another male voice. Ofelia wondered where they were; the sun would not rise here for another hour. East of her? Only the sea lay to the east, unless you traveled far to the north. She flicked on the weather screen, which generated a map of the continent, showing the dawnline. Somewhere along that line was the place they’d landed. It had to be over a thousand kilometers away.
Perhaps they would never find her. They would be too busy. In all the forty years of this colony, none of them had ventured more than a few kilometers from the base. They had planned to go farther, but things happened. She might be safe yet.
“Eight-eight will drop the heavies in two.”
“On it.”
Ofelia spent that day hunched over the receiver, following the invasion—she could not help thinking of it like that—in the half-understood comments. She remembered enough of her own landing to know the necessary sequence. The first shuttles could land without prepared ground; they carried the mechbots that scraped out a shuttle field. Then the main cargo shuttles could land, with the construction crews that quickly set up the temporary structures for storage and surfaced the strip. Finally, the passenger shuttles, with the newly-wakened colonists, in order of specialty. She imagined another woman like her young self, waking from the cryo tank, trying to comfort her children as they were revived, trying to keep them calm as they were herded into a shuttle . . . they had landed in the rain, she remembered, and Barto had screamed and butted his hard round head into her breast.
But that would be later. Today, somewhere east and north, the hard shuttles were unloading mechbots, and the big construction machines were gouging the native plants—she wondered if it was forest or brush up there—to make a longer landing strip.
That night, she went back to her house to sleep, trusting that she would hear any shuttle landing at the nearby field. She didn’t turn any lights on—that would be stupid, as long as she knew a ship hung up there, watching. But it would leave, eventually, and the colonists would have hard work to do in their own place. Then she could turn the lights on. She began to be sure that they would not find her. She had heard them say that the tropical site had been a stupid choice; that should mean they wouldn’t want to explore that way. And by the time they did—in ten or twenty years, in thirty years or forty—she would be safely dead.
They might read the colony logs—her additions to them, as well. It made her grin, lying there in the darkness, to think of them reading the truth, the stories of real people, instead of the official version, all dates and names.
“Pass six. On course.” Just like all the others, Ofelia thought. Five passenger shuttles had already landed; she had listened less tensely than before. Clearly no one was paying any attention to the site of an abandoned colony they had no use for. She had even left the center to tend the gardens, to cook and eat her meals, to sleep in her own comfortable bed. Although she had started to assemble a survival pack to take into the forest, she had not finished it. Now she relaxed in a chair in the sewing room, with the volume up high on the radio as she strung the beads she’d painted.
