I slowed to a walk as I followed the track made by many small feet to where a brook scurried over smooth stones. This was our old playground. Issette had squealed at how cold the water was. Cathan had sulked when we pretended we were going to play hide and seek and then ran off without looking for him. Maeth and Ross had played house in the hollow of an old dead tree.
We’d been happy to share the brook with the rabbits, foxes and deer who came to drink, but we’d back away nervously, ready to run, when the wild boar came snuffling their way out of the trees. All the new kids were sternly warned to be especially careful if they had babies with them.
The other warning was never to stray into the trees beyond the brook. The year before I arrived from Nursery, one of the youngest boys had wandered into the woods and got lost. The kids from all three Homes searched desperately for hours, finding him only just before sunset. The lot of them arrived back after bedtime roll call and found all the Homes in uproar, with frantic ProParents searching the settlement.
After that, everyone kept within strict self-imposed boundaries. Everyone except me. I did what no one else seemed to have thought of doing, and looked up some maps so I wouldn’t get lost. They were ancient ones of course – maps weren’t important now every settlement was just one step away on the other side of a portal – but I could find some of the old landmarks. The brook still ran along the same route. The road had become a wide, flat, grassy path. A village was just heaps of crumbled stones.
I’d scavenged among those stones and found tarnished coins, a broken china cat, and a silver bracelet that I gave to Issette as a Year Day present. Those childish excavations had shown me the living past was all around us and started my love of history.
I crossed the brook on stepping-stones carefully placed by the massed efforts of children, and went on through the trees to the old road. That led me to another that was staggeringly wide, its route lined with jagged metal and concrete stumps. I walked along the colossal ancient highway for hours, skirting sections that had once been held up on pillars and now lay fallen and broken.
It was dusk by the time I reached a wide river. The gap in the centre of the bridge was bigger than the last time I’d walked this way, but I didn’t need to get across. I turned to my right instead, following the riverbank until I saw the glow of a settlement ahead, and the closer, brighter lights of a huddle of four very unusual houses. Ones built long before Exodus century, and painstakingly repaired by enthusiasts who’d relearned old skills of working with stone and wood.
I’d helped work on them myself, and was left wondering how people put roofs on houses in the days before lift beams and hover belts. I suppose experts did the job centuries ago, while we were a bunch of bumbling amateurs and needed all the modern help we could get.
These were real homes, not museum exhibits. The people living in them had picked houses close to a settlement, they had modern sanitation and heating, a portal, and a couple of hover sleds for emergencies.
There was a force fence surrounding the houses to keep the deer and rabbits out of the gardens. I walked up to the keypad controls and entered the security code. The date the Earth data net crashed.
The glitter of the section of fence in front of me abruptly died. I walked inside, restarted the fence behind me, and went to knock at the door of the nearest house. The metal knocker, shaped like a lion, was a genuine relic from the days of pre-history.
After a minute, the door opened, and I saw the familiar figure of a man in his forties. He was wearing reproduction nineteenth century clothes, so he must have just got back from helping out with some historical re-enactment event.
He looked totally grazzed to see me. ‘Jarra! What are you doing here?’
I smiled at the man who was far more than just a school history teacher. He’d given up endless weekends and holidays to take the school history club to work on the Fringe dig sites of ruined cities. He’d taught me how to wear an impact suit, run a heavy lift sled, and fire a tag gun. He’d helped make me who I was today. When I left school, I tried to tell him how much I appreciated everything he’d done, but I’m chaos bad at emotional stuff and probably didn’t make much sense.
‘I’m hoping to borrow some camping equipment, sir,’ I said.
16
The insistent chime of my lookup dragged me out of a dream where Colonel Leveque sat in a field of Osiris lilies, training a class of rabbits to calculate probabilities. I opened my eyes to a sight that was even weirder than the dream. I was in a vast cavern, its walls lined with glowplas that shone gently in response to a shaft of sunlight coming through a hole in the roof. The effect would have been incredibly lovely if it wasn’t for the carvings.
I’d no idea how the artist had managed it, but he’d carved figures actually within the glowplas rather than on the surface, their hands pressing forwards, giving the creepy impression that real people had been trapped inside and were struggling to escape. To make things worse, their faces had mouths stretched inhumanly wide in manic smiles.
I didn’t know whether the carvings were intended as adverts, or as warnings, to the customers who’d come here to get powered on blizz. I found them disturbing, but I had to put up with them because this was the perfect place to hide. Even when it was in use back in the twenty-third century, there’d have been no record of it on the Earth data net, because supplying blizz was illegal. Its customers would only have known its portal code, not its location.
Then came Exodus century, people streamed away from Earth, and the details of blizz were lost in the Earth data net crash. Nowadays, only historians like me knew the origin of the word blizz, and that you usually said pure blizz because impure blizz killed its users.
With the people and the blizz gone, this cavern had been left abandoned and forgotten for centuries, until the day I’d been walking by and literally stumbled across the hole in the cavern roof. I’d been somewhere I shouldn’t have been, on my way home after doing something I shouldn’t have done, so I’d never told anyone about my discovery.
I crawled out of my sleep sack, grabbed a carton of food from my hover bag, and walked past the broken remains of an archaic portal to where a rope ladder dangled from the hole in the roof. I climbed up it and took a cautious look above ground. The people searching for me would probably have guessed I was somewhere in Earth Europe. I didn’t think anyone would ask questions at Home E161/8822, they wouldn’t expect to learn anything from kids who’d arrived after I’d moved on to Next Step, but I’d talked my history teacher into taking his friends to visit some old students of his at Berlin Main Dig Site. I might be over-reacting, but I wasn’t risking anyone being hit with mind-bending drugs to make them betray me.
Things were just as peaceful outside as they’d been for days. The usual moa was there, pecking the grass by the edge of a tangle of bushes and brambles. I knew moa weren’t dangerous, they were one of the few genetically salvaged species allowed to pass freely through animal control barriers, but I was still wary of a bird that size. Fortunately, it seemed equally nervous of me.
I sat on the grass, took out the lookup Sadia had given me, and started checking newzie channels. The lookup was one of hundreds of thousands supplied to Hospital Earth, and would have done ten years’ service with multiple owners at some Next Step, before being replaced with a newer model and passed on to Home E161/8822. So long as I only used it to watch vid channels, there was no reason for anyone to link its identity code to me.
I had an alert set so the lookup chimed when major news stories broke in Beta sector. It had woken me twice during the night. Once because a famous vid star had died, and later with some political story about clan Marius withdrawing from the August alliance.
I skipped through the main newzie channels for sectors Alpha through Epsilon. Several were replaying the Tell clan vid statement. They seemed especially fond of the bit where I broke down in embarrassment while saying a cringingly romantic scripted line. If I heard one more vid presenter say I was
endearingly shy and vulnerable behind my Military facade, I would vomit.
The alert chimed and the lookup changed channel to Beta Sector Daily. The Betan alliances were still staying safely neutral on the issue of me joining my clan, but the newzie channels had started taking sides, and Beta Sector Daily was our strongest supporter. I saw a smiling Drago announce that the Interplanetary Crime Unit had found no evidence against Fian and would soon be releasing him.
‘Hoo eee!’ I yelled in delight, startling the poor moa so it ran away into the bushes.
Beta Sector Daily went back to their studio and a presenter started talking. ‘There are calls for an official enquiry into the conduct of …’
I changed channel to Beta Veritas, which was the leading voice of the opposition. ‘… failed to establish active involvement himself, but his undesirable ancestry is still …’
‘Bigots!’ I shouted.
I swapped channel again to Delta Sector Vision, who were interviewing a blonde girl. I was about to change channel yet again, when I heard her say she’d been boy and girling with Fian before he went away to university.
This was Fian’s ex-girlfriend! I studied her critically. She would have been pretty if it wasn’t for the big nose.
Well, maybe the nose wasn’t really that big, but she was obviously doing the same as Cathan, exaggerating things to get on the newzies. The interviewer seemed to realize that too. I indulged myself by watching him poke fun at her for a little longer, then washed in a nearby stream and reluctantly opened my carton of food.
My history teacher stored some of the history club equipment at his home. He’d been able to lend me one of the club’s few precious hover belts, as well as an impact suit, skintight, and other oddments, but food was a problem. He’d only had two crates of cartons of Osiris mash, which the club were given free after New York Main supplies department accidentally ordered a hundred times more than they actually wanted.
After living on Osiris mash for days, I’d grown to hate it, but my only other option was to try fishing in the stream. People really did catch and eat fish back in the days of pre-history, but I was a twenty-eighth century girl, used to meat and fish tissue grown in vats. Even if I could make myself kill an innocent fish that was happily swimming around in front of me, how would I cook it? I’d cooked potatoes and saus on a camp fire, but genuine fish had bones and heads and …
I was glumly munching my way through my carton of Osiris mash, when my lookup chimed for another alert. A male presenter was talking.
‘… reactions to Major Fian Eklund being attacked on Hercules in Delta sector.’
‘Nuke it!’ The lookup was showing Beta Sector Daily. I checked their text news feed, but it hadn’t updated yet. Their idiot presenter was babbling about Betan clan alliances now. I didn’t care about nuking alliances, or joining Betan clans! I should never have let Fian get involved in this. I’d been stupid, stupid, stupid!
I madly changed channels. Surely one of them would tell me … I recognized the angry woman talking on Delta Sector Vision. Fian’s mother!
‘… beaten up for having a Handicapped girlfriend. These people should …’
Beaten up implied Fian wasn’t dead or seriously injured, didn’t it? I checked Delta Sector Vision’s text news feed and finally found the details I needed. Minor injuries. Thought to be receiving medical treatment at a Military base in Delta sector.
I suddenly felt giddy, so I dropped the lookup into my lap and rested my head on my hands for a moment. Fian wasn’t badly hurt then, but why had he done something as totally nardle as going home to Hercules instead of coming straight back to Earth, and why had the Military let this happen? Raven and Drago were supposed to be protecting Fian. When I saw them, I would …
I would do what? Try and pin the blame on them? Fian had been beaten up for having an ape girlfriend who dared to challenge the traditions of Beta sector. This was all my fault. I’d started this whole crazy chain of events by applying to University Asgard instead of University Earth.
My instinct was to head straight back to Military Base 79 Zulu, but that would be criminally stupid. Fian was still in Delta sector so I mustn’t give our enemies the chance to attack me as well. I had to keep my head, follow our plan, wait until Fian was back on Earth before leaving my hiding place and portalling to join him.
I went back down into the cavern to shovel my belongings into my hover bag, then dragged the bag up the rope ladder to the surface and sat on the grass, impatiently watching Earth Rolling News until I finally saw General Torrek appear. He said the words I needed to hear. Fian was back on Earth!
It was going to take me several hours to travel to the nearest portal. I wanted to save time by calling Zulu base and asking for an aircraft to pick me up, but it was too big a risk. The spy at Zulu base might eavesdrop on that call and learn my location. If I was right about enemies searching for me in Earth Europe, they might reach me before the Military aircraft.
I sighed, put on my hover belt, clicked the key fob to make my bag start chasing me, and hovered off along the valley. When I reached a river, I skimmed along above it at the maximum speed of my hover belt. Heading downstream, the flowing water added to my speed, so I was moving perhaps three times as fast as someone on foot.
I knew it was time to leave the river when the current suddenly increased. My map showed a waterfall somewhere ahead, and I didn’t want to go over it. I aimed for the bank, steadied myself on an overhanging tree branch, and snagged my hover bag before the current could steal it from me. There was a brief struggle to pull myself up on to the bank, and then I was safe on dry land.
Progress was much slower now because I was going uphill. When I reached the high point, I got a clear view of the surrounding countryside. Far away to my left was another hill with two stylized human figures on top of it. One male and one female, their hands holding a planet above their heads. The unmistakable Spirit of Man monument.
I wrinkled my nose in disgust. Off-worlders had built this vast monument, to mark the site of Earth’s first true interstellar portal, and commemorate the historic moment when the first colonists portalled from Earth to Adonis. It had always felt like a deliberate insult to me. Two of those colonists died within minutes of setting foot on the new world. That was when they discovered some people were Handicapped. That was the moment humanity was divided into the norms who had the ticket to the universe, and the people like me, the apes and the throwbacks, who could look up at the stars but never reach them.
I turned away from the monument, and looked in the direction I was going. There was the distinctive glittering line of an animal control barrier running through the valley ahead, and a huge forest covering the slopes of the low hills beyond.
I sat down for a moment to study my map. The forest hadn’t been here when this map was made, but somewhere among those trees was an old road that would lead me straight to where an archaeological research team was excavating an ancient underground storage facility. I could use their portal to get to Zulu base.
A herd of deer appeared from the forest. I watched the barrier flash brightly, its sensors checking the deer as they walked through it. During the chaos after Exodus century, many of the new colony worlds had problems with dangerous species reaching their inhabited continent. Now they all had barriers like this, selective force fences that allowed through all but restricted species, dividing the inhabited continent into about a dozen sections. Their barriers were just a safety precaution, but Earth’s barriers were constantly working to defend the safe zones from dangerous creatures.
The restricted species list varied from planet to planet of course, but one creature was on all of them. The nightmare of Thetis ended with the extinction of the chimera over a quarter of a millennium ago, but the Military still followed the standing orders of the legendary Tellon Blaze. Every Military ship and sled had chimera detectors. Every animal control barrier checked for them. It was strange to think the glittering force field ahead of me was still
blindly following the orders of my long dead ancestor, checking for a dreadful threat that no longer existed.
I didn’t want any problems with the wolves on the other side of the barrier, so I changed into my borrowed skintight and impact suit before heading on into the valley. I held my breath as I went through the barrier, feeling my skin tingling and my hair standing on end as the force field flared brightly around me.
I’d just reached the outskirts of the forest when I saw a dark speck in the sky. That was an aircraft, and it was coming straight towards me! I told myself not to panic. Aircraft were rare, very rare, but people did use them sometimes. This one looked too small to be delivering a portal to a new location, and a dig site survey plane wouldn’t normally fly across country, but there were emergency rescue flights sometimes. The plane could be flying to the coast to help a pleasure boat in trouble.
I shouldn’t panic, but I shouldn’t take chances either. I pulled up my impact suit hood and sealed it, then hovered at top speed into the forest with my hover bag chasing after me. As I dodged my way between tree trunks, I could hear the aircraft getting closer. The massed leaves overhead meant the pilot wouldn’t be able to see me, but almost all aircraft carried some sort of sensor equipment.
I heard the aircraft getting closer and then circling overhead. It was definitely hunting me then, but how had my enemies found me? How could …?
The animal control barrier! The barriers must send reports on what crossed them, and my enemies had been watching that data. Nuke it!
I headed on through the trees as fast as I could. The aircraft definitely had sensors; the big question was if it had weapons as well. In theory, the Military controlled all the weapons of humanity, because every legally constructed gun included a device to let it be remotely disabled if it fell into the wrong hands. In reality, no system was perfect, and the people hunting me might have illegal weapons.
I heard a strange hissing sound, and glanced behind me in time to see trees explode into balls of flame. ‘Oh nuke, nuke, nuke!’