Later he discovered all the families who had disappeared had been living in savannah homesteads to the south-east of Schuster.
Aberdale was east of Schuster.
Could a retinal implant operating in the infrared spectrum spot a chameleon suit?
The options opening up were amazing.
A fortnight after the
Swithland
left Group Seven at their new home on the Quallheim, the voidhawk
Niobe
emerged above Lalonde. With the Edenists having a five per cent stake in the LDC a visit from Jovian Bank officials was a
regular occurrence. The visiting voidhawks also brought supplies and fresh personnel to the station in orbit around Murora,
the largest of the system’s five gas giants. They were there to supervise Aethra, a bitek habitat that had been germinated
in 2602 as part of the Edenist contribution to developing the Lalonde system.
Darcy requested the
Niobe
’s captain perform a detailed scan of Schuster County as soon as the voidhawk slipped into equatorial orbit.
Niobe
altered its orbital track to take it over Schuster at an altitude of two hundred kilometres. The verdant, undulating quilt
of jungle rolled past below the voidhawk’s sensor blisters, and it concentrated every spare neural cell on analysing the images.
Resolution was ten centimetres, enough to distinguish individual humans.
After five daylight passes
Niobe
reported that there were no unauthorized human buildings within a one-hundred-kilometre radius of Schuster town, and all
humans observed within that area were listed in the immigrant file Lori and Darcy had built up. Aboriginal-animal density
was within expected parameters, which suggested than even if a group had concealed themselves in caves or stealth-cloaked
structures, they weren’t hunting for food. It found no trace of the missing seventeen people.
After six months Aberdale was looking more like a village and less like a lumberyard with each passing day. Group Seven had
waded ashore that first day, armed with fission saws from their gear, and single-minded resolution. They had felled the mayope
trees nearest the water, trimmed the trunks to form sturdy pillars which they had driven deep into the shingly riverbed, then
sliced out thick planks from the boughs to make a solid walkway. Fission blades made easy work of the timber, ripping through
the compacted cellulose like a laser through ice. They sawed like mechanoids, and sweated the cuts into place, and hammered
away until an hour before the sun set. By then they had a jetty three metres wide that extended twenty-five metres out into
the river, with piles that could moor a half-dozen paddle-craft securely against the current.
The next day they had formed a human chain to unload their cargo-pods and cases as the paddle-boats docked one by one. Will-power
and camaraderie made light of the task. And when the paddle-boats had set off back down the river the next day, they stood
on the sloping bank and sang their hymn: “Onward, Christian Soldiers”. Loud, proud voices carrying a long way down the twisting
Quallheim.
The clearing which formed over the next fortnight was a broad semicircle, stretching a kilometre along the waterfront with
the jetty at its centre. But unlike Schuster, Aberdale trimmed each tree as it came down, carrying the trunks and usable boughs
to a neat stack, and flinging the smaller leftover branches into a firewood pile.
They built a community hall first, a smaller wooden version of the transients’ dormitory with a wooden slat roof and woven
palm walls a metre high. Everyone helped, and everyone learnt the more practical aspects of gussets and joists and tenons
and rabbet grooves that a didactic carpentry course could never impart. Food came from frequent hunting trips into the jungle
where lasers and electromagnetic rifles would bring down a variety of game. Then there were wild cherry-oak trees with their
edible nutty-tasting fruit and acillus vines with small clusters of apple-analogue fruit. The children would be sent on foraging
expeditions each day, scouring the fringes of the clearing for the succulent globes. And there was also the river with its
shoals of brownspines that tasted similar to trout, and bottom-clinging mousecrabs. It was a bland diet to start with, often
supplemented with chocolate and freeze-dried stocks taken from the cargo-pods, but they never fell anywhere near Schuster’s
iron regimen.
They had to learn how to cook for batches of a hundred on open fires, mastering the technique of building clay ovens which
didn’t collapse, and binding up carcasses of sayce and danderil (a gazelle-analogue) to be spit-roasted. How to boil water
in twenty-five-litre containers.
There were stinging insects to recognize, and thorny plants, and poisonous berries, nearly all of which somehow managed to
look different from their didactic memory images. There were ways of lashing wood together; and firing clay so that it didn’t
crack. Some fronds were good for weaving and some shredded immediately; vines could be dried and used for string and nets.
How to dig latrines that nobody fell into (the Ivets were given that task). A long, long list of practicalities which had
to be grasped, the essential and the merely convenient. And, by and large, they managed.
After the hall came the houses, springing up in a crescent just inside the perimeter of the clearing. Two-room shacks with
overhanging veranda roofs, standing half a metre off the ground thanks to astute management of the tree stumps. They were
designed to be added to, a room at a time extending out of the gable walls.
Out of the two hundred and eighteen family groups, forty-two elected to live away from the village, out on the savannah which
began south of the river where the jungle eventually faded away to scrub then finally grassland, a sea of rippling green stalks
stretching away to the foothills of the distant mountain range, its uniformity broken only by occasional lonely trees and
the far-off silver glimmer of narrow watercourses. They were the families who had brought calves and lambs and goat kids and
foals, geneered to withstand months of hibernation; pumped full of drugs, and transported in marsupium shells. All the animals
were female, so that they could be inseminated from the stock of frozen sperm that had accompanied them across three hundred
light-years from Earth.
The Skibbows and the Kavas were among the families who had visions of filling the vast, empty savannah with huge herds of
meat-laden beasts. They slept in a tent on the edge of the jungle for five weeks while Gerald and Frank assembled their new
home, a four-room log cabin with a stone fireplace, and solar panels nailed on the roof to power lights and a fridge. Outside,
they built a small lean-to barn and a stockade; then dammed the little nearby stream with grey stones to form a pool they
could wash and bathe in.
Four months and three days after the
Swithland
departed, they split open their seventeen marsupium shells (three had been stolen at the spaceport). The animals were curled
up in a form-fitting sponge, almost as though they were in wombs, with tubes and cables inserted in every orifice. Fifteen
made it through the revival process: three shire-horse foals, three calves, one bison, three goats, four lambs, and an Alsatian
pup. It was a healthy percentage, but Gerald found himself wishing he could have afforded zero-tau pods for them.
All five family members spent the day helping the groggy animals stand and walk, feeding them a special vitamin-rich milk
to speed recovery. Marie, who had never even patted a living animal before let alone nursed one, was bitten, peed on, butted,
and had the yellowy milk spewed up over her dungarees. At nightfall she rolled into bed and cried herself to sleep; it was
her eighteenth birthday, and no one had remembered.
Rai Molvi made his way across the clearing towards the jetty where the tramp trader boat was waiting, exchanging greetings
with several adults. He felt a surge of pride at what he saw, the sturdy buildings, neat stacks of timber, fish smoking over
open fires, danderil hides pegged out on frames to dry in the sun. A well-ordered community chasing a common goal. The LDC
could use Aberdale in its promotional campaign without any falsehood, it was exemplary.
A second wave of tree felling had been underway for a month now, cutting rectangular gashes deep into the jungle around the
perimeter of the clearing. From the air the village resembled a gear cog with exceptionally long teeth. The colonists were
starting to cultivate the new fields, digging out the tree stumps, ploughing the soil with rotovators that charged from solar
cells, planting their vegetable plots and fruit groves. Lines of small green shoots were already visible, pushing up through
the rich black soil, and the farmers had to organize a bird patrol to scare off the hungry flocks perched waiting in the surrounding
trees.
Not all of the Earth seeds had germinated successfully, which was surprising because they were geneered for Lalonde’s environment.
But Rai had every confidence the village would triumph. Today’s fields would become tomorrow’s estates. In six months they
had accomplished more than Schuster had in eighteen. It was down to effective organization, he felt. His council was acknowledged
as a stroke of salutary foresight, organizing them into an effective interactive work unit even back in the transients’ dormitory.
He passed the community hall and stood to one side to let a group of children march by, carrying braces of fat polot birds
they had caught in their traps. Their skin was scratched from thorns, and their legs were coated in mud, but they were smiling
and laughing. Yes, Rai Molvi felt very good indeed.
He reached the jetty and walked its length. A couple of Ivets were in the river, Irley and Scott, hauling up their creels
full of mousecrabs. The creels were adaptations of lobster-pots, one of Quinn’s ideas.
Rai waved at the two lads, receiving a grinning thumbs-up. The Ivets were undoubtedly his greatest success. A month after
they had arrived, Quinn Dexter had asked to talk to him. “Anything we say to Powel Manani just gets automatically ignored,
but we know you’ll give us a fair hearing, Mr Molvi.”
Which was so true. It was his job to arbitrate, and like it or not, the Ivets were part of Aberdale. He must appear strictly
impartial.
“We want to organize ourselves,” Quinn had said earnestly. “Right now you have all eighteen of us working for you each day,
but you have to feed us and let us live in the hall. It’s not the best arrangement, because we just sweat our arses off for
you and don’t get anything out of it for ourselves, so we don’t give a hundred per cent, that’s only human nature. None of
us asked to come to Aberdale, but we’re here now, and we want to make the most of it. We thought that if we had a rota so
that thirteen of us are available as a general work team each day, then the remaining five could use the time to build something
for ourselves, something to give us a bit of pride. We want to have our own cabin; and we could trap and grow our own food.
That way you don’t have to support us, and you get a far more enthusiastic work team to help put up your cabins and fell the
trees.”
“I don’t know,” Rai had said, although he could see the logic behind the idea. It was just Quinn he was unsettled over; he
had encountered waster kids back in the arcology often enough, and Quinn’s sinewy frame and assertive mannerisms brought the
memories back. But he didn’t want to appear prejudicial, and the lad was making an honest appeal which might well be beneficial
to the whole community.
“We could try it for three weeks,” Quinn suggested. “What have you got to lose? It’s only Powel Manani who could say no to
you.”
“Mr Manani is here to help us,” Rai answered stiffly. “If this arrangement is what the town council wants, then he must see
that it is implemented.”
Powel Manani had indeed objected, which Rai thought was a challenge to his authority and that of the council. In a session
to which Powel Manani was not invited, the council decided that they would give the Ivets a trial period to see if they could
become self-sufficient.
Now the Ivets had built themselves a long (and very well constructed, Rai grudgingly conceded) A-frame building on the eastern
side of the clearing where they all lived. They caught a huge number of mousecrabs in their creels, which they traded for
other types of food among the other villagers. They had their own chicken run and vegetable allotments (villagers had chipped
in with three chicks and a few seeds from their own stocks). They joined the hunting parties, even being trusted to carry
power weapons, although those did have to be handed back at the end of the day. And the daily work team were enthusiastic
in the tasks they were given. There was also some kind of still producing a rough drink, which Rai didn’t strictly approve
of, but could hardly object to now.
It all added up to a lot of credit in Rai Molvi’s favour for pushing the idea so hard. And it wouldn’t be long before the
time was right for Aberdale to think about formally electing a mayor. After that, there was the county itself to consider.
Schuster town was hardly flourishing; several of its inhabitants had already asked if they could move to Aberdale. Who knew
what a positive, forthright man could aspire to out here where this world’s history was being carved?
Rai Molvi came to the end of the jetty flushed with a strong sense of contentment. Which was why he was only slightly put
out by a close-up view of the
Coogan
. The boat was twenty metres long, a bizarre combination of raft and catamaran. Flotation came from a pair of big hollowed-out
trunks of some fibrous red wood, and a deck of badly planed planks had been laid out above them, supporting a palm-thatched
cabin which ran virtually the whole length. The aft section was an engine house, with a small ancient thermal-exchange furnace,
and a couple of time-expired electric motors used by the McBoeings in their flap actuators which the captain had salvaged
from the spaceport. Forward of that was a raised wheel-house, with a roof made entirely of solar panels, then came the galley
and bunk cabin. The rest of the cabin was given over to cargo.