Chapter 2

Chapter 2

In the first few weeks following our landing it was clear that that our new lives on Perda would not be easy. While the atmosphere, gravity and climate were survivable for humans, the slightly heavier gravity made physical labor even harder, and the air had slightly less oxygen than earth, making our attempts to build a settlement and establish a fresh food supply via agriculture and hunting difficult. In time I hoped our bodies would adapt to the new conditions, as our original plan of terraforming the planet to suit us was lost with the colony ships, the complex geo-manipulating systems and equipment destroyed, too complex to rebuild with our resources. Despite this we did manage to build a solid settlement, cutting down the tree’s to build houses and buildings- I think we all realized pretty quickly that we had to make do with what we had. After all, the prefabricated buildings and supplies had been destroyed during our arrival. We had no contact with any other survivors, our coms system was either too damaged to pick up distant transmissions, or the other pods also lost their coms devices. None of us really wanted to face the possibility of us being the only survivors on the planet.

After the initial rush of injuries from the crash had been dealt with I found myself in a new role, assisting our agricultural scientist in inspecting local flora as potential food supplies- it was out of my area of expertise, but our food supplies from the pod had ran out, and our genetically engineered seeds from the pod were struggling to grow as effectually as we had hoped, resulting in careful rationing. We needed to find a new source of food and fast. After giving me a quick crash course in key traits or combinations to spot in plant genetic code, Aridail, our Agricultural Scientist and I set off, wandering the hills around our crash site.  The work was slow,  our trekking for new specimens was time consuming, and waiting for our basic lab equipment to finish analysis held us back. In time, we did make a fair amount of progress, finding a number of plants, fruits and vegetables suitable for widespread farming and consumption, though this process took a number of weeks.  So we made the most of opportunity, using the down time to talk and reminisce about our pasts, and get to know each other.  At least, the few good parts of our pasts, neither of us initially wanted to bring up what life really was like back on Earth, the real reason we became colonists. We tried to avoid the topic, bantering, bickering and joking, trying to ignore the fact we had escaped from hell only to end up in purgatory. In time, we grew closer, and one evening we sat down in her cabin, and I took the nervous first step of sharing my past with her.

I had been a moderately successful doctor in a small town in Austria before I signed up for the colony program.  At the time Europe was embroiled in a turf war, the overpopulation meaning the smaller countries were desperate for more land, and had eye the fresh and bountiful lands of their rivals, hungry for conquest and glory. Even the massive advancements of technology by the 22^nd century could not change the lust for war in man’s heart. As the years progressed, I grew tired of the constant clashes between the countries around us, constantly patching up the young men of my country so they could go and die another time fighting for a mere scrap of land. It broke my heart to see these passionate young men and women brought before me, their bodies ravaged by bullets and wounds, dying for a war that they did not understand, for a war that was not theirs.  I confessed, I could take it no more, I wanted to be free of warfare and the sick politics of Earth, to find a new way to protect and save my fellow man.   So I signed up for the colony program,  as a respected and experienced doctor in his mid thirties, in good physical condition I easily qualified, and signed up for the voyage in stasis, on the condition I unthaw in the last year of the journey to assist in preparations for deceleration and arrival.

After I told my story, she was silent for a long time. I thought for a while I had somehow offended her, but just as I was about to speak she began to speak. She was a young woman of Indian heritage, an orphen from the civil war. She had grown up in poverty; her family was one of a lower caste, struggling to survive.  There was no way she was even supposed to have basic education, but he father had taken time to teach her as a child, an incredible oddity considering that even as a man, his lower caste meant he had no chance of an education.  One day while out on an errand for her mother, she returned to find her village in flames, a victim of one of the many radical revolutionary groups desperate to gain power through fear and oppression.  She grew silent and trembled telling me this, her whole body wracked with silent sobs. I reached over and held her hand, until she began to speak again.  She was taken in but a foreign aid worker who was witness to the massacre and brought to Australia and adopted her as his own. She spoke of a burning desire to help her people, to save them from poverty and the desperation to turn to war and violence simply to survive. She studied hard, and moved back to India, determined to take a role in helping her people, by introducing new ways of farming and new crops to plant, to help her people rise out of povety.  But her people would not listen. They saw her lower class status, and refused her right to speak, to work denying her the one thing that had kept her strong growing up, the desire to save her country. She was cast out of village’s when she tried to speak, men insulted her, the police beat her. She gave up, she said. I ran away, I could not stand living on earth any more, being reminded of my failure and my people’s suffering every day. So I signed up for the colony program,  lying to the recruiter, all to escape her past. At this point she broke down once more and kept sobbing. I drew her close into an embrace as she cried herself to sleep. I longed to find the perfect words to comfort her, but everything I came up with seemed inadequate. I simply whispered  “I’m so sorry” as she fell asleep in my arms, curled up on mat next to me.  I felt so powerless, all my medical knowledge, all my experience and I could not help one women with a broken heart.

We woke up the next morning,  I tried to speak to her about last night, but all simply whispered “I don’t want to talk about it, can we get on with our work?”  We got on with our duties, but it seemed like there was a distance between us from then on. I had no idea what to do, I had no close friends to consult for advice or support,  so I simply tried to put my feelings aside and work professionally. It almost worked, until that day where everything changed…