At first view, the abandoned colony looked exactly like an abandoned colony. They had landed at local dawn, and a hazy pink light glowed from the walls of the shabby little one-story houses. Nothing moved. Parked in a ragged row beside the shuttle strip were the colony vehicles, streaked with rust, tires deflated. Tough grass, and even a few shrubs, had encroached on the runway itself. A moist warm breeze stirred the grass and carried the strange alien smell of a different world.
The shuttle skin popped and hissed; Kira could hear nothing more at first, until her own ears popped. Far off, something groaned horribly; she jumped. Ori said “That must be the cows” and she could have kicked herself for not recognizing the sound. She was the xenobiologist, after all; she was supposed to know animals. Vasil started down the ramp, but one of the advisors stopped him. “We aren’t sure yet,” the advisor said. Sure of what, Kira wondered. They were sure the indigenes were here, and at least one human. They had speculated endlessly about that human, seen only on the weathersat visual scans: who was it, how had he or she found this place, and why? Some drunken crewman left behind after the colony was evacuated? Some exploring entrepreneur come to salvage the leftover equipment? Someone who wanted to claim the planet for himself? “Somebody—” said another of the advisors. Despite Vasil’s arguments, they had brought weapons along. He might be the team leader, the future ambassador, but they had traveled on a military ship, landed on a military shuttle; he had not been able to change the captain’s orders. “To defend the shuttle” the captain had said to Vasil; Kira, standing behind him, had seen his ears redden. He had told the others he would take care of it, meaning get rid of the weapons, but his bluster had gotten him nowhere. Now the advisors had their weapons out. Kira was not surprised.
“Don’t do anything,” Vasil pleaded. They ignored him. Kira, sweating in her protective suit, ignored him too.
“One individual,” the advisor said. He was speaking into a mic more than to them. “Appears to be human, female…” Then in a tone of surprise, “Old. An old woman, alone.”
Kira couldn’t see what they were seeing; the advisors and Vasil, all in bulky suits, blocked her view up the village lane. They could have moved enough to let those behind see, but they were all standing foursquare, as if intending to be as obtrusive as possible. She looked sideways instead, back down the runway with its ragged rows of grass, to the river — a surface gleaming in the early light — then the other direction, where a distant green wall was the forest. Kira could not tell this second-growth forest from the uncut primary forest a little to the west, even though it had shown up clearly on the scans from space. “She’s…” A long pause, almost a gulp, then the advisor found the right official phrase for it.
“Inappropriately attired. Wearing… uh… just some sort of cape-like garment and some beads. Barefoot.
Uh… this individual may be disturbed…”
Kira couldn’t stand it. She was the assistant leader of this expedition, and they were ignoring her. She pushed forward, not too carefully, and Vasil staggered into the advisor, who almost went over the edge of the ramp. She didn’t care; she wanted to see. And there, walking slowly toward the shuttle, came a scrawny little woman with an untidy bush of white hair. Barefoot, yes, and wearing an embroidered cape over her tanned skin… some kind of garment slung around her hips. And beads. She didn’t look disturbed, not like the senile clinic patients shown in newscubes to remind people to take their anti-senility pills. She looked annoyed, like someone who has had unexpected company drop by on a day when she had planned to do something else. It was this very assurance, the way she planted her gnarled old feet carefully on the ground, one after another, that silenced them all, Kira thought. The old woman was not embarrassed by her odd attire; she was not impressed with them. They stood, sweating in their protective suits, as the old woman walked slowly up to the foot of the ramp. Kira tried to make out the design embroidered on the cape, and suddenly realized it was faces — faces and eyes. Too many eyes. The old woman tipped back her head and glared at them with her bright black eyes. “This was not a good time,” she said. “You’ve upset them.”
Vasil shook himself into action first. “By the authority vested in me—” he began. The old woman interrupted.
“I said it wasn’t a good time,” she said. “You could have listened when I tried to talk to you.”
“Talk to us?” Kira asked, cutting off Vasil’s angry sputter.
“Yes.” The woman’s head bobbed, then came up again. “But you folk have done something to the weathersat, so I can’t get it to listen.”
“You took those pictures?” Ori asked. “You made it do the visual scanning of this location?” “Of course,” the old woman said. “They wanted to see what it looked like, not just the weather. It helped them understand.” They. Kira shivered as she realized what the old woman must mean by they. Perhaps she was crazy, if she had been showing them the technology. Surely even an uneducated old woman knew better.
“By what right — !” began Vasil, just as the senior advisor said, “Under whose authority — ?” The two men glared at each other.
“Who are you?” asked Kira, into the moment of silence.
“Who are you?” the old woman asked, without answering the question. If she was senile, perhaps she had forgotten her own name.
“We won’t hurt you,” Kira said, trying to sound gentle and patient. “We want to help you—” That sounded stupid, even to her, and she was not surprised when the old woman made a scornful noise. “I don’t need help,” the old woman said. “If you’re one of that other lot, you’re in the wrong place.”
“That other lot?” Vasil got that out, silencing the advisor with another glare.
“Come awhile back, tried to land — you must know about them.”
“Yes,” the advisor said, this time beating out Vasil. “What do you know about them?” “Heard it on the com,” the old woman said. “Heard them coming down, heard them calling for help.” She clamped her mouth together, then said “Heard them die.” She looked down. “Didn’t you try to help?” Vasil asked. Kira was cheered to find that someone could say something stupider than she had. Did Vasil really think that this frail old woman could have stopped a massacre that had happened thousands of kilometers away? The old woman said nothing, just kept looking up at them. Vasil turned red, and cleared his throat. The advisor, Kira noted, looked amused. “Have you been here all along?” Kira asked, since no one else broke the silence.
“Of course,” the old woman said. “Forty years and more, by now.”
“But Sims Bancorp said—”
The old woman grinned, “Company wasn’t going to waste time hunting down one old woman they didn’t want anyway. Already charged my family extra for me being overage, figured I’d die in cryo.” Kira shivered. She had not imagined that kind of crassness, even from Sims Bancorp. Surely it was against the law — but who would enforce such a law, out here in the frontiers? “So I stayed,” the old woman said. She was still grinning; it looked grotesque.
“On purpose?” Vasil asked, as if he still couldn’t believe it. The old woman scowled now. “Yes,” she said shortly. Kira wondered how — how had she survived all alone? Or had someone else stayed behind? But she could not ask that angry face.