Authors: Eric Brown
Coda
He was awoken early by a gorgeous orange sunrise in the west. He slipped out of bed, dressed and left the dome.
He stood in the warm morning light, stretching and inhaling the heavy scent of the flowering shrubs that grew in the garden surrounding the dome.
Down in the valley, another day was beginning: domes were being constructed, roads laid, fields tilled.
A year since landfall, the colonisation of Arcadia was progressing according to schedule. The society would have been better equipped, and balanced, if the four thousand sleepers had not perished aboard the
Dauntless
, but the one thousand and three surviving colonists would provide a sufficiently varied gene pool in order for a viable colony to prosper.
And Arcadia had proved a welcoming world, with few vicious predators — animal or viral — to worry the colonists. They had settled a clement equatorial region, with hot summers and mild winters, and set up farms, a few outlying villages and this, Latimer's hometown, Landfall City, home to some six hundred souls, and rising.
Latimer worked as an engineer in Landfall, supervising the slow expansion. At nights, he sat at his com-screen and slowly wrote out the story of what had happened aboard the
Dauntless
.
Sometimes, when daunted by the prospect of accurately setting down what had happened, when the emotions brought about by the memories become too much, he would leave the dome and stroll up the hillside, sit on the blue-green grass and stare up at the star-packed sky.
Sol was a tiny speck of light high in the northern sky, but it was hard to associate the star with the cradle of humankind. The first children were being born on Arcadia, and soon they would learn all about the troubled history of planet Earth.
That had been something Latimer had worried over during the long months of establishing the colony: how to shape a society that would not fall into the traps that had brought life on Earth to its knees.
It was a conundrum beyond his limited knowledge: the future, he knew, was unknowable; he could but trust in the goodness of the individuals around him to perpetuate a fair and equable society, based on equality and tolerance.
He spent long hours wondering if what he had done with Renfrew, in the core of the
Dauntless
, had been the right thing. At the time, of course, fighting for his life, there had been no other course of action. But every time he beheld the diminutive figure of Jenny Li, every time he interacted with the obviously caring and compassionate human being she had become, he questioned his actions... and wondered at a future that would have contained Caroline.
Now he sat on the bench before his dome and watched three small figures leave the ground-effect vehicle on the road far below, and begin the long climb towards him. They were Renfrew, Li, and a biologist called Freya Sinclair, whose friendship for the past month had diverted his thoughts from what might have been.
Together, he and these three constituted the steering committee of the Landfall Anniversary Celebrations, to be held next week.
Smiling, aware of his good fortune, Latimer stood and strolled down the hillside to greet his friends.
About the author
Eric Brown
has won the British Science Fiction Award twice for his short fiction and has published forty books and over a hundred stories. His latest books include the novel
The Kings of Eternity
and the children's book
A Monster Ate My Marmite
. His work has been translated into sixteen languages and he writes a monthly science fiction review column for the
Guardian
. He lives near Cambridge, England, with his wife and daughter. His website can be found at:
www.ericbrownsf.co.uk
About the cover artist
Dominic Harman
is thirty-six and one of the finest cover artists in the business, with his art work gracing the fronts of books from all the major publishers in Britain, Europe and the States. He lives is East Sussex and his website is at: