The old woman poked the fire with a singed stick, letting her skirts skim dangerously close to the coals. She’d long since learned that the natural fibers wouldn’t catch easily, and the goats that wreaked havoc on the harvest still streaked across the plains in abundance.
If they’d been able to stay in contact with Old Earth as planned, they’d have had a thriving textile export trade. Alas, the journey had been wreaked with fear sufficient to terrify a young girl.
Even now, Alice thought. It had been sixty years since her parents had shoved her stumbling across grease-scented tarmac reflecting white-hot engine heat, promising to follow. Sixty years of daily prayers that her parents would follow. Sixty years of daily prayers that they wouldn’t follow a second ship, that the first ship, her ship, had escaped their surveillance.
Sixty years since she remembered her parents’ faces, if truth be told, which is why she would not admit the words aloud so as not to make it true. Though Alice supposed it wasn’t, because that’s not counting cryo time, because no one ever did.
Long enough to forget the need to stay wary. Long enough for tales to begin the slow fade into legend, for the colony’s elders to pass on.
Her grandchildren were old enough to know the truth, now, and to understand the need to fear the shining omens in the sky that beaconed an arriving starship. From the stars came invaders, coming to claim what she and so many others had fought valiantly to build.
She settled into the rocking chair her adopted uncle had carved for after the news of her firstborn, smoothing her skirts over her knees with long practice. Once, it had been unfamiliar, a far cry from the silky unnatural things that had sustained their journey here.
She cleared her throat and stared into expectant eyes. “We grew up in fear of robotic kind. To be fair, we came by it honestly. That was until the appearance of the biotech…and that’s when the robots saved us.”
