Founded or Imposed

Bixbus marked the first anniversary of its founding with a day of public celebration organised by Lisa Smith, held a year to the day after Luke Smith first stepped through the portal into Clivilius. It was the settlement's first civic holiday. Several hundred people attended, far more than the hundred or so for whom Lisa had planned.

The day had official sanction. Paul Smith, who had given the settlement its name and convened the Clivilius Lead Council on the hill across the river eleven months earlier, had pressed the Council some weeks before to endorse the anniversary, and it had done so without dissent. Support in stores, equipment, and labour was assigned to the Secretaries of Community Engagement and Cultural Affairs. Both departments were then being divided in preparation for a new council that would take over the settlement's local affairs, and the allocation fell between the officials who were giving the work up and the people who had not yet taken it on. Much of what had been promised never reached the main road.

The Clivilius Lead Council held its regular weekly sitting on the hill that same morning, and the business before it was the constitution of the Bixbus Lead Council. While the settlement laid out tables below, most of the officials whose departments were meant to be supplying the celebration were across the river, transferring those departments to the new body. Paul attended the sitting and came down into the settlement in the early afternoon.

Lisa worked without a budget or a committee. She had a list of volunteers and the goodwill of a few people who controlled stores and equipment, and two of the volunteers withdrew on the morning itself. Sergio Aveskamp, a stores worker who had arrived in Bixbus a few months earlier, carried tables, found chairs, and spent most of the day at Lisa's side filling whatever gap had opened next. It was the first time the two had worked together.

Leena Heikki ran the communal meal, laid out on trestles along the main road. Half the ingredients she had been promised had failed to appear, and she had rebuilt the menu twice in the preceding day. She cooked for several hundred people from kitchens built to feed a fraction of that number. Aldo Heikki, off a night shift on The Arlington, carried pots from the stoves to the table through the afternoon. The meal was the part of the day the settlement talked about for weeks afterwards.

Music came from whoever had brought an instrument through the portal, and children who had been born on Earth and would grow up in Clivilius ran between the tables until dark. For many of those present it was the first time since their arrival that the whole settlement had stopped working at once.

Luke Smith did not attend. Paul had advised him to stay away, judging that a part of the crowd held Luke personally responsible for their being in Clivilius, and that his appearance on the anniversary of his own arrival would turn a celebration into a reckoning. Luke spent the day on Earth.

At dusk the settlement gathered at the Bixbus Bonfire, where Lisa had invited anyone who wished to speak about the year that had passed. The first speakers talked about what had been built and who had been lost. Paul spoke briefly about the hill, the sapling, and the name he had given the place. A settler who had been brought through the portal without his consent then asked him, in front of the crowd, whether Bixbus had been founded or simply imposed. Others took up the question. A few defended Paul. More did not.

Paul did not defend himself. He acknowledged that the question was a fair one and that he had no answer that would satisfy the man who had asked it, and he sat down. No one else spoke after him.

The bonfire was lit with the settlement's words, Light the fire. Share the light., and left to burn well into the night. Lisa stayed until it had burned down, clearing tables and counting what had been borrowed. Most of those who had celebrated on the main road did not learn until the following days that their settlement had been given a council of its own that morning.