Issette was my best friend, so I was most involved with what happened to her. When she accessed the records, it was obvious that Issette’s parents had done the standard thing. Dump the ape kid, blame the neanderthal genes on each other, and head in opposite directions. They’d been from Beowulf, in Gamma sector. Their divorce had been initiated the day after Issette was born. They’d both changed their names. Issette’s father was now on a frontier planet in Epsilon. Issette’s mother had moved too, but only as far as another planet in Gamma sector.
I thought that made things pretty clear. A throwback baby had shattered her parents’ comfortable norm lives, and they had done everything they could to turn their backs on it, but fluffy-headed, romantic Issette was sure that they would feel differently now. She tried to contact them. Her father replied with an impersonal written one line mail. It was polite but basically it could be summed up in two words. Nuke off! Her mother sent a long emotional mail, kept promising to visit then changing her mind, and finally shut the door completely.
Issette was a mess and took years to get over it. Her ProParents got her extra psychotherapy for a year, which Issette thinks helped her immensely, but I think made things worse. Issette is very different to me. She likes sharing everything with people, while I get really angry about a psychologist trying to poke around in my head and tell me which of my feelings get a pass grade and which fail and need correcting.
Seven of my friends took up their parental information option at 14. They went through a lot of pain and only Ross got anything out of it in the end. His real father calls him every few weeks, and even visits a couple of times a year. I met him myself once, when he came to our Next Step. For an exo, he wasn’t that bad. He didn’t wrinkle up his nose as if I smelled.
So, I knew from my friends’ experiences exactly how slim the chances were that I’d end up having a relationship with either of my real parents. My call to Registry was going to lead to catastrophe, but in the end it was like my attempt to portal off world. It was going to fail, it was going to hurt, but afterwards I could be proud that I’d tried, and if I could face the issue of my parents then facing my class should be simple.
That was the point when I made another decision. I’d keep up the lies until I’d dealt with the parent nightmare, but then I wouldn’t wait for the class to spot the flaws in my deception. I’d do what the Betans had done. I’d march up to the front of the hall, and tell everyone the truth.
16
I knew that surviving the next three days would be hard. I’m good at doing things, not sitting around and waiting for them to happen. There was an extra complication as well. At breakfast the next morning, Playdon called Fian and me away from the rest of the class for a quiet word.
‘I’m going to swap your two roles,’ he said, with his most evil smile. ‘Fian, you’re going to tag lead, and Jarra will act as your tag support.’
I felt an instinctive surge of anger, but caught myself. I’d made this mistake before, and wasn’t going to repeat it. Playdon knew what he was doing and I should trust him. It was Fian who objected.
‘I don’t want to be tag leader.’
Playdon laughed. ‘It’s only for a few days.’
Fian developed a stubborn look. ‘Then why bother? I want to get better at my own job.’
‘Because this will help you both to get better at your jobs.’ Playdon turned to me. ‘Jarra, for a Foundation course tag leader, you’re outstanding, but you can be better still. It’s my job to help you achieve that. It’s perfectly obvious you’ve worked as a heavy lift operator, but never on tag support.’
‘It is?’
He nodded. ‘I’ve talked to Earth 19 about your work during the rescue of Cassandra 2, and they said exactly what I was thinking. You’re a dream tag leader for a heavy lift operator; you don’t just tag any stable point on a rock, but go for somewhere convenient for the heavy lift beams.’
I flushed with pleasure, but of course he followed the compliment with a criticism.
‘You’re a dream for the heavy lift operators, but a nightmare for your tag support. A few days changing roles with Fian will fix that. You’ll learn about blind spots and awkward beam angles that can make it hard for your tag support to pull you out of trouble. You’ll learn to avoid putting yourself in those places, and that will make the second or two of difference which might save your life one day.’
I was going to hate doing this, but I trusted him so … ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Fian, this is your chance to see things through a tag leader’s eyes. What they need to do, how they need to do it, the decisions they need to make. It’ll help you anticipate Jarra’s movements on a dig site, so you see the dangers coming before they actually happen.’
Fian reluctantly nodded.
‘And when team 1 aren’t working, I’ll try and get both of you spending some time watching sensors with me,’ Playdon continued. ‘If either of you progress to be a research or teaching team leader one day, you must be experts on sensors. That may be five or ten years away, but learning sensors takes time.’
So for the next three days I spent my dig site time doing things I hated, and couldn’t even resent it because I soon realized Playdon was right. I hadn’t known just how difficult the tag support job was. I sat tensely watching Fian tagging rocks, waiting for him to get into trouble, hardly daring to blink in case that cost a vital second that was the difference between Fian being unscathed and Fian being strapped to a hover stretcher on his way to hospital. In its way, this was much harder than my own job of tagging rocks, and Fian had handled the strain so casually and so competently even as a total novice. Well … respect!
Watching the ever changing swirl of sensor readings was a different sort of strain. Playdon wanted much more from us than just a casual check of where a stasis box might be. Fian’s scientific background might have helped him, but I was definitely struggling.
And all the time, sitting on the tag support sled, watching the sensors, listening to lectures or chatting to my classmates, part of my mind was always on that call to Registry. The reply would come exactly three days later. I knew the time down to the hour, the minute, and practically the second. I’d studied the instructions until I could recite them by heart. I just had to wait, and wait and wait.
Finally, the three days had crawled past, and I sat in my room with my lookup in my hand, its display already linked in to the wall vid. ‘Come on. Come on.’ I told it. ‘It’s got to be time …’
I broke off my complaint as I heard the soft chime of arriving mail. I tapped the look up, my fingers clumsy with haste, saw the code number I needed and entered it. It took me two attempts to get it right, and then I took a deep breath and looked nervously at the wall vid screen. I’d planned how to do this. I could ask for as much or as little information as I wanted. The first step was to query my parents’ birth sector. If it was Beta, I might have to think for a bit, but anywhere else …
And the answer flashed up on the wall in front of me. It was the same for both parents. ‘Not Applicable.’
What?
I sat there for a full minute. What the chaos? No sector? They must have been born on Earth, but in that case why dump me?
Well, all right, I obviously hadn’t thought of this, but I couldn’t leave it with ‘Not Applicable’. I queried my parents’ birth planets.
Instantly the answer flashed up. Again it was the same for both parents. ‘Not Applicable.’
‘Oh nuke that!’ I told my lookup. This was just total rubbish. What was going on? Did fate hate me that much? Had I wound myself up to face this, only to find Hospital Earth had lost my parental records? Had the maternity ward where I was born just thrown the nean baby through the portal and not bothered to send any medical records after her?
I glared at the lookup. ‘All right …’ I queried my parents’ exact place of birth.
The answers flashed up. Two different answers this time. Two Military bases. ‘Oh nuke … Oh zan …’
/> I sat there in shock. I didn’t know where these Military bases had been. They probably weren’t there any longer, it must have been more than 40 years since my parents were born and Military bases relocated sometimes. It didn’t matter anyway. My parents were born Military. I’d made up a lie; I’d been living a lie, and guess what?
So, they were born Military. The odds were that they were Military themselves. If they were, then I could see things in a whole new light. Most people, if they really tried, could move to Earth and still follow their career in some way. The Military couldn’t. I’d made JMK so real, I’d even been dreaming I was her, and I could picture how much it would hurt to give up everything to care for a Handicapped baby on Earth.
I asked myself a couple of questions. If I was a norm would I want to be combat Military? Yes, I would. If I was combat Military, could I give up the life I loved to move to Earth? It might be the right thing to do, but I couldn’t honestly be sure I would do it.
So, I tried another query. My parents’ exact location was restricted to Military access only, but they were currently on active duty with Planet First, Kappa sector.
I was still staring at that, absorbing that, when there was another musical chime from my lookup to tell me I had mail. I mechanically checked who it was from. The sender was Military Support.
The Military are incredibly efficient. Hospital Earth discovered in the early days that norm parents could really mess their ape kids about. They’d dump us, and then they’d change their minds and move to Earth and want us back. Then they’d decide they couldn’t cope and dump us again. Parents coming and going, having contact one minute and ignoring them the next, drove the kids crazy. Hospital Earth brought in strict rules to protect us. No half measures. Either you were a parent and on Earth regularly, or your ape kid was made a ward of Hospital Earth and no contact was allowed unless the kid requested it after they reached the age of 14.
So, I had to admire Military Support. I’d just requested information that told me my parents had been Military. That meant Military Support were now free to contact me, my record on their system had been flagged, and bing I had mail!
It was formal written mail, not a vid. The document was version two. I’m betting version one of it had been sitting on the Military Support system waiting to be sent since I was 14. When I was 18 it was changed and became version two.
I read it. The first part said that since I had at least one Military parent I was entitled to a Military education scholarship for the duration of my studies. As I was a ward of Hospital Earth, the fee element was not relevant as my education fees would be automatically paid by Hospital Earth. I was, however, entitled to the maintenance element in addition to any provision by Hospital Earth, and that would be regularly credited to my account including any arrears due.
It wasn’t the most important thing at that moment, but my income had suddenly doubled.
The second section of the mail drove everything else out of my head. I was the Honour Child for my grandmother, Jarra Tell Morrath. As I was now 18, the Honour Ceremony would be carried out if I was ready to take part. Military Support would be happy to supply any information, assistance, or advice I required on these or any other issues.
I was grazzed. I was a Military Honour Child, and named Jarra after my grandmother. How the chaos did that happen? The system just didn’t work that way. Hospital Earth chose the names of its wards to prevent us getting ones that labelled us as cast offs from one sector or another. That was for obvious reasons. Just imagine what a kid with a Betan name would suffer at school.
Hospital Earth shouldn’t have let me keep my original first name, but they’d broken the rules in my case. They were up against a Military family tradition that even civilians respect. When one of a Military family dies on active service, the next child born in the family is given their name to honour them. Sometimes, they deliberately have an extra child to carry the name. I’d been the Honour Child for my grandmother. I was a girl, so I was Jarra. A boy would have been Jarrack.
When I turned out to be Handicapped … Well, I suppose my parents must have discussed it. I could imagine the frantic debates. I was the next-born child, so tradition insisted I bore the name. I was Handicapped, so I could never be Military, but of course not every Honour Child becomes Military themselves. They probably did a lot of thinking, but they’d gone ahead with it in the end rather than have a replacement Honour Child later.
I used my lookup to request more information. Military families usually have two or three kids, very close together in age, because that works best for active assignments. I had a brother and sister who were only a year apart in age, but then there was a gap of twelve years before my birth. I checked my grandmother’s details. Yes, she’d died in 2769. I was a deliberately planned Honour Child.
I sat there for a bit. I’d expected to have to make one decision, but now there were two. Did I try to contact my parents? Did I agree to take part in the Honour Ceremony? The second one was much easier, because it only concerned myself and my grandmother. I had no grudge against a Military hero who’d died before I was born, and being Handicapped didn’t change the fact I had a duty to perform. My grandmother wouldn’t be left with just the mandatory plaque on the Military Academy wall. She would have her Honour Ceremony.
I mailed Military Support saying it would be a privilege to take part in the ceremony, and then I went to bed and had the dream where I was JMK again, but it was even more confusing this time. I was on a Military base that looked just like the one in Defenders. My parents were with me, and Fian was there too. We were all sitting round a table drinking frujit, and Fian kept talking about aliens.
17
The next morning, Playdon swapped Fian and I back to our regular roles, and took the class to a new area of the dig site where we found a stasis box. When we got back to the dome, there was the usual suspense as we waited to see what we’d found. Playdon opened it as we stood around. This time it was a child’s toy. A lover of fluffy toys from hundreds of years ago, a twenty-fourth century Issette, had left a green furry object in a stasis box. That wasn’t all they’d left though. There was a recording of a nervous and excited family about to head off to a new world, and there was a real treasure trove. They’d left us an ancient newzie! Not one from the day they left. This was far older, from before Language was adopted as a common tongue. It wasn’t recorded but actually printed on paper.
Playdon used his lookup, while we waited in suspense. ‘This is totally new. It’s from one of the lost years.’
We cheered wildly. We’d found history!
We all watched while Playdon scanned the precious paper pages with slow and painstaking care and put the results through data translation. The scanned images and data were sent off to researchers and all the University data archives for safe keeping. After that was done, the toy, the family recording, and the newzie itself were packed and sent off. With them secure, we could all scan the data on our lookups.
While we ate lunch, we gloated over fragments from the past. Some of it was trivial, a story about one of their vid stars for example, but it was all part of the patchwork quilt of lost information that humanity was rebuilding.
‘What was Formula One?’ asked Dalmora.
‘It’s a report about a land vehicle race,’ Playdon explained.
‘But they went so fast … These speeds can’t be right.’ Krath was doing calculations on his look up. ‘There must have been an error during the translation into Language.’
‘Their vehicles could travel much faster than ours can,’ said Playdon. ‘Speed isn’t a priority for us, because we can portal long distances instantly. They had to travel everywhere on foot or in vehicles, like we do when we go places on the hover sleds. Huge amounts of their resources had to be invested in transport systems, vehicles, tracks, roads, ships, aircraft. It was crippling.’ Playdon gave us his evil look. ‘As it happens, this afternoon we study twentieth century economics.’
I g
roaned. When they refer to the twentieth century as war, war and bore, its economics is definitely part of the bore.
We were in the middle of the 1930s recession, when Playdon’s lookup bleeped. He frowned and checked it. Stared. Checked it again, looked grazzed, then panicky. ‘Jarra, I have a mail from the Military. Their team will arrive in one hour.’
I was a bit startled too. I’d only given the Military the go ahead last night. Presumably they’d already done the ceremonies for the other Honour Children who had turned 18 on Year Day, and could tidy up unusual cases like mine very quickly.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
‘You know how to do this?’ Playdon looked frantically round the all purpose dining room and classroom. ‘We need to clear this place up. I’m sorry we don’t have a more appropriate venue.’
‘Sir, with respect, this is a Military issue training dome. There could be no more appropriate venue for the ceremony. Most of them are held in places like this.’
I realized the rest of the class were listening avidly with fascinated but confused faces. Whatever was going on was a welcome respite from 1930s economics, but they didn’t understand it.
Playdon turned to them, and let them in on the secret. ‘Jarra is a Military Honour Child. She’s 18 and that was the call for the Honour Ceremony.’
The end of his sentence got drowned out by collective class excitement.
‘Amaz!’ said Dalmora. ‘The ceremony comes to the name! We actually get to see …’
‘If only they’d shown up on the dig site this morning,’ wailed Krath. ‘An Honour Ceremony with everyone in impact suits. The flag flying in the middle of ruined New York. We’d have made all the newzies!’
‘They’d surely have sent us back to the dome to do it,’ objected Lolmack.
‘You know the rules,’ Krath argued. ‘The ceremony has to come to the name, wherever they are, whatever they’re doing. Remember that boy who was in prison, and they held the Honour Ceremony in his cell. They’ve held ceremonies in impact suits before too. I remember there was one on a solar power array.’