One Alive

The Tozuda reached Ithera with a scraped spine, a crate that wasn’t hers and a passenger who had never set foot on a planet in her life. Vedma was taking her to La Cicatriz because it was the only place in the system where nobody from either house could go in with a weapon. Not even a Commander with an order without a number.

“My ship,” Vedma said as they came out of the jump, and Ada handed back the stick without argument.

Ithera filled the whole canopy. It was blue at the edges and green in the middle, with clouds that moved if you watched them long enough. It had real seas, the kind she only knew from the drawings at the Aurora’s school, and continents with dark patches of forest. In front of the planet, very fast, a big grey moon was passing.

“Melvara,” said Tais. “Goes round Ithera every half hour.”

“That can’t be right,” said Ada. “A moon that size, at that distance…”

“Yeah,” said Chemo. “But it does. Moons round here do what they like. Ask the Faro. They’ve got a table.”

---

The Pioneers’ Puesto de Enlace was a circle of tamped earth, two huts made of fuselage sections and a few small vegetable plots round about, right on the edge of La Cicatriz. Vedma chose it because nobody there asked questions. She brought the Tozuda down in a slow spiral and, a hundred metres up, swore.

There were cows on the pad.

They weren’t cows. They were beasts the size of a cargo cart, their backs covered in brown plates like roof tiles, with short legs and a fleshy crest hanging from the nape of the neck. There were thirty or forty of them. They grazed on the pad with the calm of animals who pay rent.

“Barrelbacks,” said Chemo. “Rolvak, if you’re from El Faro Roto and like your names fancy. Eat all day, bother nobody, and if you kick one it remembers your face for ever.”

“Like Chemo,” said Tais.

“I remember faces out of politeness.”

Vedma switched on the landing lights and lowered the gear with as much noise as possible. The Rolvak raised their heads, looked at her with contempt, curled into armoured balls and rolled off across the grass, one after another, like barrels down a hill.

Ada laughed for the first time since they had woken her.

---

When she went down the ramp, the air hit her in the face.

It was air that moved by itself. Nobody was pushing it with fans or counting it on a wall. It smelt of wet grass, earth and something sweet that Tais told her was spores, that Ithera has spores in the air and you get used to them in two days. It was cool. It moved her hair.

And at the far end, where the grassland stopped, there was no wall. There was a line, miles away, where the green met the sky, and beyond that line there was nothing but more sky.

Ada sat down on the ramp.

“You all right?” asked Tais.

“I don’t know what that is.”

“What?”

“That. Over there. The line.”

Tais looked where she was looking.

“The horizon.”

“I know what it’s called.” Ada didn’t look away. “I didn’t know it was that far.”

---

Then she looked the other way, and saw La Cicatriz.

It was a furrow in the ground several kilometres long, as if someone had drawn a huge finger through the mud and left it to dry. Grass had grown back along the edges, but in the middle the earth was still black, and out of it came pieces of hull, the ribs of a ship, bulkheads standing on edge like headstones. All around, at different distances, buildings had gone up on big pieces of fuselage. And everywhere, in rings, there were people, kitchen smoke, cables, aerials, carts.

“That was my ship,” said Ada.

“That’s my neighbourhood,” said Vedma, beside her. “I was born there, in the outer ring. That’s where the escape modules came down. People turned them into houses. My mother walked out of the wreck at sixteen and never left again as long as she lived.”

Ada stood up and pointed, slowly, like someone recognising people in a photograph.

“That dome is the infirmary. The bioengineering section.”

“El Vivero. The Pioneers. They heal, grow and build.”

“The tower, the tall one. Navigation and sensors.”

“El Faro Roto. The Pathfinders. They make maps.”

“That thing over there, the one like a fin… it’s the dorsal fin. And underneath it was the containment bay. They kept Ithera animals there in cages, to study them.”

“El Aguijón. The Apex Syndicate, the hunters. The animals got out when the ship came down. The people from the bay hunted them back down.”

“To the south, the one giving off steam. The reactor and the hull workshops.”

“La Fragua Baja. The Forge. They melt down anything that’ll melt.”

“And that one, with the walls. The bridge.”

“El Bastión. The Vanguard. The only ones who carry weapons in La Cicatriz, and only because the treaty lets them.”

Ada went quiet.

“Five sections,” she said.

“Five guilds. Same thing.” Vedma shrugged. “When your ship crashed, the people upstairs were too busy fighting to come down for anybody. So the people down here gathered wherever their trade was any use. Doctors in the infirmary. Soldiers on the bridge. The ones who could weld, in the workshops. And nobody asked anybody which side they were on. There weren’t really sides yet. They were all Flota. They call it the Cuarenta Días de Fuego, the Forty Days of Fire.”

“Why?”

“Because it lasted forty days and everything was on fire. We’re not very poetic in La Cicatriz.”

“And then?”

“Then the people upstairs carried on fighting for eleven more years. The people down here made soup, maps and walls. When they finally signed the Armisticio, the people upstairs looked down and saw five guilds running everything. So they left them Ithera. No house rules here. The ones who work rule.”

Chemo came down the ramp with Mamparo’s crate in his arms.

“And that’s why nobody shoots at you here,” he said. “Which is what matters today, after yesterday.”

---

Ada didn’t reach El Vivero on foot. She arrived on a cargo cart, lying on sacks of seed, with Tais holding her head. A long thaw, CUSTODIA had told her, upsets the stomach for two or three days. It hadn’t told her it also switches you off like a light when you least expect it.

El Vivero was an enormous dome made of something that looked like glass and wasn’t, green inside, noisy, full of hanging plants and people. On the ground floor there was a seed market. Upstairs, the clinic. By the door, hand-engraved on a metal plate, was a sentence Ada read half asleep: EL VIVERO NEVER CLOSES ITS DOORS TO ANYONE WHO BLEEDS.

“I’m not bleeding,” she said.

“Nearly,” said an old woman’s voice.

SABLE OKOYE. “Madre Sable”. Administrator of El Vivero and head of The Pioneers. Seventy. In Year 1 she was a hydroponics technician and nurse aboard the Aurora, and she was the one who rationed the serum through the Forty Days so it wouldn’t run out on the first. What you need to know: she keeps a paper notebook with every favour the two houses owe her, and she collects at the worst possible moment.

She was a tall woman with very short white hair and a work coat covered in soil stains. She put two fingers on Ada’s neck, counted silently, then lifted one of her eyelids with her thumb to look at the eye.

And went still.

So did Ada. She looked up at her from the trolley. The nose. The way she pressed her lips together when counting. A small scar on the left eyebrow, shaped like a fish hook, that she had got from a seed tray the day that…

“Sable?” said Ada. “From hydroponics? Module four?”

Okoye didn’t let go of the eyelid.

“It can’t be.”

“I used to nick your tomatoes.”

“You used to nick my tomatoes,” said Okoye, very slowly. “The cherry ones. From the back tray, the good ones. And you’d leave a note saying ‘Hull account’.”

“Because I charged them to section seven.”

“The pilot. The one with the Tortugas.” Okoye sat down on the edge of the trolley without realising she was sitting. “Lys. Ada Lys. I watched you go to sleep. I put your line in myself. You were twenty-four.”

“I still am.”

Okoye looked at her for a long time, eyes very bright and face completely still, the way people do who haven’t allowed themselves to cry at work for many years.

“Well, I’m not,” she said. “I’m seventy. You owe me forty-six years of tomatoes.”

---

Then the green sphere appeared.

She came floating down from the clinic ceiling, slowly, silently, and stopped level with Ada’s face, a little to one side, the way someone does who doesn’t want to be in the way. She was the size of Mamparo, with a green ring round her lens and smooth, unmarked plates.

“Hello,” she said. Her voice was warm, unhurried. “What’s your name?”

“Nueve.”

“That’s a number.”

Ada took a while to answer. She hadn’t said it out loud for two days.

“Ada.”

“Ada.” The sphere tilted a little, as though nodding. “One alive.”

“That’s LUMBRE,” said Okoye. “Our compi. She was the core of a Flota infirmary. She counts the living in every room she’s in. Every day.”

“Even if there’s only one?”

“Even if there’s only one,” said LUMBRE. “I log it all the same.”

“How many did you count before? In the Flota.”

“Four thousand. Sleepers. One reading per person every forty minutes, for forty years. They all arrived. All of them.”

“And then?”

The green light dimmed a little.

“Then there was an hour,” said LUMBRE. “A hundred and twelve. Don’t ask me today.”

Ada didn’t. She stayed looking at the green ring, the colour the Flota used to mark rooms with people inside.

“I’ve seen the horizon,” she said, because she needed to tell someone who would understand. “Just now. Out there.”

“I saw it for the first time here too,” said LUMBRE. “There was no horizon on the ark. I didn’t know what was missing.”

---

Okoye put her on a drip, made her drink two glasses of water in small sips and told her about the Forty Days of Fire in the time it took the bag to empty.

She told it without trimmings, because she had been telling it for forty-six years and they had all fallen off.

The infirmary was the only section left with air and light after the impact, so within two hours it was full of wounded from both sides. Nobody knew yet who was what. An officer who would be Zenith the following year woke up bandaged by a botanist who would be Nadir the following year, and thanked her. The serum would last three days if everyone got it, and forty if you chose. Okoye chose. She has never told anyone who she didn’t give it to.

“Here we heal first,” she said, “and ask about sides afterwards. I said that on the second night, because some idiot with stripes wanted to know which side the lad was on whose leg I was stitching. Now it’s engraved on the door. I find it funny and embarrassing in equal measure.”

“And the animals from the bay?”

“They got out on the third night. The cages opened in the crash. The xenological security people spent the night putting them back with whatever they had. By dawn there was only one left. A kid of twenty with a rifle, who came in here, sat on the floor and said seven names. Today she runs El Aguijón.” Okoye closed the valve on the drip. “They call that the Primera Cacería, the First Hunt. It’s become a legend. To me it seemed like a very long night.”

Ada was quiet for a moment.

“Sable. Do you remember my brother?”

“The boy.” Okoye smiled without meaning to. “He used to nick my strawberries while you nicked my tomatoes. You thought I didn’t know.”

“He’s in the Custodia’s register as dead. Day 236.”

“So are a lot of people.” Okoye put her hand on Ada’s arm, over the dressing. “I was down here, Ada. In the infirmary. The boy was upstairs, on the bridge, with the captain. Not many came off the bridge. I don’t know who.”

“Right.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Right.”

Okoye took a little cloth-covered notebook from her coat pocket, found a blank page and wrote something with a very short pencil. Then she showed it to her.

Ada Lys. Owes: one day in bed, two serums and forty-six years of tomatoes.

“I don’t charge interest in this notebook,” she said. “It’s the only good thing about it.”

---

By the time Ada came out of El Vivero it was night, and Ithera’s night was something else she didn’t know.

Ithera’s rotations last five hours, Tais explained, so in one Flota day there are nearly five nights. People in La Cicatriz don’t sleep when it gets dark: they sleep when they’re sleepy, and they measure short spans of time in melvaras, which is how long it takes Melvara to rise again. A melvara is thirty-odd minutes.

“Two melvaras till dinner,” said Tais. “That’s how you say it here.”

“Where does it rise?”

“Over there.”

Tais pointed west. Ada looked west and, after a while, the big grey moon showed over the horizon, climbed quickly up the sky and began to cross to the other side.

“In the west,” said Ada.

“Yeah.”

“Moons don’t rise in the west. A moon that goes round slower than its planet turns…”

“This one goes round faster. Chemo told you. Moons here do what they like.” Tais shrugged. “At El Faro Roto they’ve got a table of what each one does. They don’t know why they do it. They just write it down.”

Ada stayed looking at the moon. On the Aurora she had been taught orbital mechanics with numbers on a wall. The numbers on the wall said this couldn’t be happening. It was happening right over her head, fast and silent, as if nobody had ever explained the rules to it.

To the west, past the huts, in a low, waterlogged patch of ground, small lights came on at ground level, cyan, very slowly, and went out again.

“What’s that?”

“Lumbro. Glowlice.” Tais smiled. “Armoured things the size of a dog that roll up into a ball if you touch them. They eat algae in the pools and glow at night. Don’t eat one.”

“Why would I eat one?”

“Because Chemo ate one in his first year and saw his mother for two days.”

“She looked very well,” said Chemo, from the ramp.

And above the centre of La Cicatriz, over the cordoned zone of the core where the Aurora’s bow had come down, a blue light went round in a circle, slowly, always at the same height.

“And that?”

“A sentinel,” said Chemo. “Round here we call sentinels orphans. That one’s the oldest in the system, they say, so the kids call it the Abuelo. Grandad. Been going round up there since the crash. They throw stones at it.”

“Do they hit it?”

“Never.”

Ada had put Mamparo’s crate down beside her with the lid open. The amber lens was on, very faint, looking at the blue light turning in the sky.

“It goes round because nobody told it to stop,” said Ada.

“Perimeter,” said Mamparo. “Bow. Doesn’t answer.”

“Did you know it?”

“No. It was bow. I was hull.”

“Someday someone will go and get it.”

Mamparo said nothing for a moment.

“Logged,” he said.

---

Corporal Yannick Osk arrived at the next melvara, in a two-seat Vanguard hover, lights on and a folded piece of paper in his hand.

He got out, looked at Vedma, at Chemo, at Tais, at the open crate on the ground and, last of all, at Ada. He recognised her within a second, though he had never seen her face awake.

“You were the green dot,” he said.

“What green dot?”

“On the pod. I opened your door.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” Osk unfolded the paper. “Colonel Ostrach wants to see the core. Tonight. And you.”

“The core’s my cargo,” said Vedma, without moving.

“I found the core.” Osk raised the paper. “I’ve got the signed report.” He put his hand in his other pocket and took out another, smaller piece of paper, crumpled. “And I’ve got a receipt. You haven’t got either.”

Vedma looked at El Notario’s receipt in the corporal’s hand. Then at Ada. Then at the crate.

“We’ll go to El Bastión,” she said.

She said it too quickly. Ada noticed and didn’t know what it meant. She found out the next day.