They Dreamed of Poppies (a novelette) Read Online Free

assumption. But let’s say you’re right. Why not just stay here and do it? It’s just as good a place as any. Better even. And more importantly, why leave the rest of us to wonder all these years?”
    “Maybe because they felt like we betrayed them.”
    “But we didn’t.”
    He leans into the monitor until I can see how bloodshot his eyes are. “Didn’t we? There’s also the possibility that they cut off communication on purpose. Maybe they didn’t want us to come.”
    “Again, why? You’re suggesting they’d willingly sentence us to death on that hunk of metal we’ve been living on for the past forty years?”
    “If you had all this to yourself, would you want the rest of Humanity coming along and ruining it? Digging into her, extracting all the life out—”
    “Mars was dead before we came. We brought life.”
    “Did we?”
    I shake my head. The guilt must be weighing especially heavily on him right now. “Four hundred people won’t ruin anything,” I say. “Not when there’s a whole planet to spread out on.”
    “You know how it goes, Joe. Four hundred soon becomes four thousand. Then four million. Four billion. Too many people taking everything for granted, trashing everything. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
    I purse my lips. It bothers me that he might be right. But I also hate the idea that any of us would think so selfishly, much less act that way.
    “Don’t take it personally,” he advises, before reaching over and flipping off the com.
    But I can’t help it. I do take it personally.
    * * *
    In order to clean the animal cages, they opt to move the small herd of eight head of cattle from the ship’s hold into a small pen they build outside in a patch of clover. At first the animals seem uncertain, lowing mournfully and blinking against the natural light, as if the generations of eating processed grain extract from an aluminum trough have erased their instinct to forage. They end up trampling the plants into the dirt instead, forcing the crew to move the pen to a new site.
    Bryson returns from the GenAtmos outpost and reports that it’s empty. “Equipment’s in a terrible state. Generators are completely inoperable,” he adds, glancing resentfully in Hallem’s direction. “Damn plants have grown right up into the intake manifolds. The good news is that gas levels appear to be stable.”
    He shows me the recordings from the post’s still-functioning monitors. They give us a history of the planet’s atmosphere stretching back nearly twenty years, since before we began to change it. I’ll want to study them later.
    I’m not sure what else there is to do in regards to the missing colonists. I have twenty people who need to begin establishing some sort of permanent, self-sustaining settlement before their food stores are used up. I order the first two families to move out of the pod and into the barracks. Their first job is to reclaim the old buildings.
    Shoveling out the piles of dirt is exhausting work in the thin air, so Hallem modifies a motorized handcart to help remove it all. It’s a smaller version of the device they use to clear the ground outside. All the dirt is piled into a massive mound just beyond the camp’s perimeter.
    In the course of clearing the brush away from the buildings, they uncover the old paddock and chicken coop. They find more teeth there, but they’re clearly the molars of ruminants. Without bones, we can’t tell if the cows were slaughtered or died by some other means.
    After they’ve scraped the area down to the bedrock, they move the animals in.
    Siobhan tells me that the teeth they found the first day belong to a dog, a young one. “And also some very small bits and pieces of bone.”
    “Any of them human?”
    She shakes her head. “All puppy. I’m working on a chunk I think is part of a vertebra. None of it’s big enough to tell what the poor thing died of. I’d like to see if I can find the rest of the skeleton. It’s probably buried