can't run without it, it's too much a part of the machine. It'd be like taking out your brain and expecting your body to get along without it. I don't think anyone really wanted to face the fact of just how deep the trouble was.
In fact, only one thing was going to keep all of us alive: the two hundred and fifty Colonial Mennonites who were part of our colony. Their religion had kept them using outdated and antique technology; none of their equipment had computers, and only Hiram Yoder, their colony representative, had used a PDA at all (and only then, Dad explained to me, to stay in contact with other members of the Roanoke colonial council). Working without electronics wasn't a state of deprivation for them; it's how they lived. It made them the odd folks out on the Magellan, especially among us teens. But now it was going to save us.
This didn't reassure everyone. Magdy and a few of his less appealing friends pointed to the Colonial Mennonites as evidence that the Colonial Union had been planning to strand us all along and seemed to resent them for it, as if they had known it all along rather than being just as surprised as the rest of us. Thus we confirmed that Magdy's way of dealing with stress was to get angry and pick nonexistent fights; his near-brawl at the beginning of the trip was no fluke.
Magdy got angry when stressed. Enzo got withdrawn. Gretchen got snappish. I wasn't entirely sure how I got.
"You're mopey," Dad said to me. We were standing outside the tent that was our new temporary home.
"So that's how I get," I said. I watched Babar wander around the area, looking for places to mark his territory. What can I say. He's a dog.
"I'm not following you," Dad said. I explained how my friends were acting since we'd gotten lost. "Oh, okay," Dad said. "That makes sense. Well, if it's any comfort, if I have the time to do anything else but work, I think I would be mopey, too."
"I'm thrilled it runs in the family," I said.
"We can't even blame it on genetics," Dad said. He looked around. All around us were cargo containers, stacks of tents under tarps and surveyor's twine, blocking off where the streets of our new little town will be. Then he looked back to me. "What do you think of it?"
"I think this is what it looks like when God takes a dump," I said.
"Well, yes, now it does," Dad said. "But with a lot of work and a little love, we can work our way up to being a festering pit. And what a day that will be."
I laughed. "Don't make me laugh," I said. "I'm trying to work on this mopey thing."
"Sorry," Dad said. He wasn't actually sorry in the slightest. He pointed at the tent next to ours. "At the very least, you'll be close to your friend. This is Trujillo's tent. He and Gretchen will be living here."
"Good," I said. I had caught up with Dad with Gretchen and her dad; the two of them had gone off to look at the little river that ran near the edge of our soon-to-be settlement to find out the best place to put the waste collector and purifier. No indoor plumbing for the first few weeks at least, we were told; we'd be doing our business in buckets. I can't begin to tell you how excited I was to hear that. Gretchen had rolled her eyes a little bit at her dad as he dragged her off to look at likely locations; I think she was regretting taking the early trip. "How long until we start bringing down the other colonists?" I asked.
Dad pointed. "We want to get the perimeter set up first," he said. "We've been here a couple of days and nothing dangerous has popped out of those woods over there, but I think we want to be safer rather than sorrier. We're getting the last containers out of the cargo hold tonight. By tomorrow we should have the perimeter completely walled and the interior blocked out. So two days, I think. In three days everyone will be down. Why? Bored already?"
"Maybe," I said. Babar had come around to me and was grinning up at me, tongue lolling and paws caked with mud. I could tell he was trying to decide whether or not to leap up on two legs and get mud