same thing that Clown had shown me in pictures of Earth. It was a sullen, paltry kind of illumination. The star’s spectrum was acutely red, even though it still looked white to the naked eye. But none of this was surprising. Even before the Flotilla had left home, a century and a half earlier, they had known how much energy the world would receive in its orbit.
Deep in Santiago’s cargo hold, too light to have ever been worth sacrificing, was a thing of diaphanous beauty. Teams were preparing it even now. They had extracted it from the starship, anchored it to an orbital transfer tug and towed it beyond the planet’s gravitational field, out to the Lagrange point between Journey’s End and Swan. There, stationed by minute adjustments of ion-thust, the thing would float for centuries. That at least was the plan.
I looked away from the limb of the planet, towards interstellar space. The other two ships, the Brazilia and the Baghdad, were still out there. Current estimates placed their arrival three months in the future, but there was an inevitable margin of error.
No matter.
The first wave of shuttle flights had already made several return trips to and from the surface, and many transponder-equipped cargo packages had already been dropped, ready to be found in a few months’ time. A shuttle was descending now, its deltoid shape dark against a tongue of equatorial landmass which the geography section was calling the Peninsula. Doubtless, I thought, they would come up with something less literal given a few more weeks. Five more flights would be all it took to get all the remaining colonists down to the surface. Another five would suffice to transport all the crew and the heavy equipment which could not be dropped via cargo packages. The Santiago would remain in orbit, a skeletal hulk denuded of anything remotely useful.
The shuttle’s thrusters fired briefly, kicking it onto an atmospheric insertion course. I watched it dwindle until it was out of sight. A few minutes later, near the horizon, I thought I saw the glint of re-entry fire as it touched air. It would not be long before it was on the ground. A preliminary landing camp had already been established, near the southern tip of the Peninsula. Nueva Santiago, we were thinking of calling it — but again, it was early days.
And now Swan’s Pupil was opening.
It was too far away to see, of course, but the angstrom-thin plastic structure was being unfurled at the Lagrange point.
The placement was almost perfect.
A torch beam seemed to fall on the sombre world below, casting an ellipsoidal region of brightness. The beam moved, hunting — reshaping. When they had adjusted it properly, it would double the solar illumination falling on the Peninsula region.
There was life down there, I knew. I wondered how it would adjust to the change in ambient light, and found it hard to stir up much enthusiasm.
My communications bracelet chimed. I glanced down, wondering who amongst my crew would have the nerve to interrupt this moment of triumph. But the bracelet merely informed me that there was a recorded message waiting for me in my quarters. Annoyed — but nonetheless curious — I pushed myself out of the observation blister, through a gasket of locks and transfer wheels, until I reached the main, spinning part of our great ship. Now that I was in a gravitational zone, I walked freely, calmly, not allowing the faintest hint of doubt to show on my face. Now and then crew and senior officers passed me, saluting; sometimes even offering to shake my hand. The general mood was one of utter jubilation. We had crossed interstellar space and arrived safely at a new world, and I had brought us here before our rivals.
I stopped and talked with some of them — it was vital to cement alliances, for troubled times lay ahead — but all the while my mind was on the recorded message, wondering what it could mean.
I soon found out.
‘I assume by now you’ve killed me,’ Constanza said. ‘Or at the very least made me disappear for good. No; don’t say a word — this isn’t an interactive recording, and I won’t take very much of your precious time.’ I was looking at her face on the screen in my quarters: a face that looked fractionally younger than the last time I had seen her. She continued, ‘I recorded this some time ago, as you’ve probably gathered. I downloaded it into the Santiago’s data network and had to intervene once every six months to prevent it being delivered to you. I knew that I was an increasingly sharp thorn in your side, and thought the chances were good that you would find a way of getting rid of me before too long.’
I smiled despite myself, remembering how she had demanded to know how long I had held her prisoner.
‘Well done, Constanza.’
‘I’ve ensured that a copy will reach a number of senior officers and crew, Sky. Of course, I don’t really expect that I will be taken seriously. You’ll have certainly doctored the facts surrounding my disappearance. That doesn’t matter; it’s enough that I’ve sown a seed of doubt. You’ll still have your allies and admirers, Sky, but don’t be surprised if not everyone is prepared to follow your leadership with blind obedience.’
‘Is that all?’ I said.
‘There’s one final thing,’ she said, almost as if she had expected me to speak at that point. ‘Over the years, I’ve amassed a great deal of evidence against you, Sky. Much of it is circumstantial; much of it open to different shades of interpretation, but it’s a life’s work and I’d hate to see it go to waste. So — before I recorded this message — I took what I had and concealed it in a small, hard-to-find place.’ She paused.
‘Have we reached orbit around Journey’s End yet, Sky? If so, there’s little point trying to find the materials. By now they’re almost certainly on the surface.’
‘No.’
Constanza smiled. ‘You can hide, Sky, but I’ll always be there, haunting you. No matter how much you try and bury the past; no matter how effectively you remake yourself as a hero… that package will always be there, waiting to be found.’
Later, much later, I stumbled through the jungle. Running was difficult for me, but that had very little do with my age. The hard part was keeping my balance with only one arm, my body always forgetting that necessary asymmetry. I had lost the arm in the very earliest days of the settlement. It had been a dreadful accident, even though the pain of it was only an abstract memory now. My arm had been incinerated; burned to a crisp black stump when I held it in front of the wide muzzle of a fusion torch.
Of course, it hadn’t been an accident at all.
I had known for years that I might have to do it, but had kept delaying it until we were down on the planet. I had to lose the arm in such a way that no medical intervention could save it, which ruled out a neat, painless severing operation. Equally, I had to be able to survive the loss of it.
I had been hospitalised for three months after the accident, but I had pulled through. And then I had began to resume my duties, word escaping around the planet — and out to my enemies — of what had happened. Gradually it had settled into the mass consciousness that I only had one arm. Years had passed and the fact had become so obvious that it was barely mentioned any more. And no one had ever suspected that losing the arm was just a tiny detail in a greater plan; a precaution set in place years or decades before it might become useful. Well, now the time had come when I could be thankful for that forethought. I was a fugitive now, even as I approached my eightieth birthday.
Things had gone well enough in the early years of the colony. Constanza’s message from the grave had taken the shine off for a while, but before very long the people’s need for a hero had overridden any nagging doubts they might have had about my suitability for the role. I had lost some sympathisers, but gained the general goodwill of the mob, a trade-off I considered acceptable. Constanza’s hidden package had never come to light, and as time passed I began to suspect that it had never existed; that the whole thing had been a psychological weapon designed to unnerve me.
Those early days were heady times. The three months’ good grace which I had given the Santiago had been enough time for us to establish a network of small surface camps. We had three well-fortified main settlements by the time the other starships braked into orbit above them. Nueva Valparaiso, near the equator (it would make a fine site for a space elevator one day, I thought) was the latest. Others would follow. It had been a good start, and it had seemed unthinkable then that the people — with a few loyal exceptions — would turn so viciously against me.
