‘It’s always you that sends me emergency calls, Jarra. Five minutes earlier and my lookup would have started chiming in Dr Garmin’s lecture and he’s horribly sarcastic. Someone better be dead!’
‘Someone is dead,’ I said.
‘Oh.’ Her expression instantly changed from reproachful to anxious. ‘Who? Not Fian!’
‘Joth.’
‘The one who went into the rainforest?’
‘Yes, I told you we’d found him and sent him to hospital. The nuking doctors have let him die. How the chaos did that happen? They can grow people new legs, new hearts, new lungs, a whole new body even! Everyone knows they can fix anything so long as there’s no brain damage. So what the hell went wrong?’
Issette didn’t complain at my swearing, just gave me a sorrowful look and spoke in a carefully patient voice. ‘I’m only a student, but … Growing new body parts doesn’t stop someone being sick. You have to cure the disease.’
‘So why didn’t they cure Joth?’ I blinked the betraying moisture out of my eyes. I didn’t really need to hide the fact I was crying from Issette, I’d known her all my life and she’d seen me in every sort of mess there was, but all the same …
‘We’re good at preventing diseases, Jarra, but not at treating them. People have their annual inoculations so they don’t get ill. When a serious new mutated disease shows up …’
‘Like malaria variation 2789 Beta.’ I shook my head. ‘How could Joth get malaria?’
‘From an insect bite. Malaria was supposed to be extinct for centuries, but it came back as the much deadlier …’ Issette shrugged. ‘That doesn’t matter now. Portals automatically route active disease carriers to Isolation and Disease Control for treatment so new diseases can’t spread before we have inoculations for them. The patients get the best treatment possible, but the first few cases …’
‘The first few cases may die.’ I let my head sag forward into my hands. ‘That stinks.’
‘It does,’ said Issette.
I ended the call and sat staring blankly at the wall for a few minutes until Fian came to join me. We silently changed into sleep suits, went to bed, and turned off the glows. I felt Fian’s arm go around me, shuffled closer to him, and turned to rest my head on his chest. I could hear the sound of his heart beating and feel the comforting warmth of him. Joth was dead, and that wasn’t just terrible, but terrifying. It was the first time a friend, someone my own age, had died. It gave me a whole new awareness of how fast a life could end.
I was fiercely, selfishly glad I wasn’t Petra. She’d lost Joth, but I still had Fian, for now at least. The next solar storm might arrive in as little as a few days time, and there was no way to know what the alien sphere would do when it arrived.
‘I love you,’ I said.
‘What?’ Fian’s voice sounded startled. ‘Are you powered, Jarra? You never say emotional things.’
‘I say them tonight.’ I lifted my head to kiss him.
17
The next five days were grimly miserable. Playdon gave us eight hours of lectures a day, but that still left mealtimes and evenings for the class to sit around in silent groups. When a conversation did start about something innocuous, like the taste of the reconstituted food from the food dispensers, it wouldn’t be long before someone broke off in mid-sentence and we all started thinking about Joth again.
Dalmora brought a new musical instrument into the hall in the evenings, one she’d got on her last trip home. It was another reproduction of a pre-history instrument, with far more strings than her guitar, a longer neck with a series of pegs down the side, and a curved bowl. Normally I would have asked her lots of questions about it, but I didn’t have the heart for it now. Whatever it was, she didn’t sing along to it, just played complex throbbing music.
I spent some sleepless nights pointlessly wondering what I could have done to change things. It was such a stupid waste of a life. Joth had had everything that I could only dream about. He’d grown up with a real family. He’d been able to casually portal between planets. He should have stayed on Asgard, where the Military had carefully cleansed the inhabited continent of all threats, instead of risking the dangers of my Earth.
On the sixth day, Playdon took everyone else to Asgard for Joth’s funeral, and I went to the portal room to wave them off. Asgard custom was to take flowers and candles to a funeral. Interstellar portal quarantine procedures stopped you portalling off world with fresh flowers, but everyone had a candle and Fian was taking an extra one for me.
The portal activated, and people started heading through to Earth Africa Off-world. The last one in line stopped and turned to face me. Steen, the tag leader for team 4.
‘There won’t be any more trouble, Jarra. Playdon offered to transfer Petra to another Pre-history Foundation course with a vacancy, but she said no because it would mean her repeating some theory work and missing others.’
He shrugged. ‘The rest of us can’t make her go, but if she stays then some things are going to be different. We aren’t calling you names to please her any longer, and we aren’t letting her call you names either.’
Steen walked through the portal before I could work out what to say, and it shut down behind him. There was normally a faint background hum of conversations and music in the dome, but now it felt weirdly quiet. I’d planned to stay here but …
I pressed my hand on the check-out plate to show I was portalling out of the dome, looked up the portal code for Zoo Africa, and then changed my mind. The tropical bird dome in Zoo Africa was even more impressive than the one in Zoo Europe, but its safely sanitized jungle plants would remind me too much of Eden’s rainforest. I’d go over to the Pyramid Zone instead.
As an afterthought, I sent a quick message to tell Playdon and Fian what I was doing. I didn’t want anyone worrying if they came back and found me missing. Then I dialled the portal, and stepped through to the Pyramid Zone reception area. They were obviously having a busy day, because there were queues waiting at all four internal portals for the next pyramid tours.
I wasn’t here to join a crowd of chattering tourists and hear the tour guide recite the information I’d heard a dozen times before. I headed away from the portals to the exit that led into the desert. The man on the door handed me a hat and one of the tracker armbands they insist on you wearing to stop you getting lost. He started telling me the safety instructions, but I shook my head.
‘I’m from Eden Dig Site, and I’ve walked the desert path several times already. I know all the refreshment and portal points, and how to call for help.’
He accepted that and waved me through. I glanced at his display screen as I went past, and saw two clusters of dots that were probably school parties, but they were both on the short route. The longer desert path looked nice and peaceful.
Once outside, I followed the paved path with its information points displaying holo images of what this area had looked like in the twenty-third century, before Tuan created his genetically modified creeper to reclaim the desert. I ignored them, preferring to see it as it was now. Deceptively delicate greyish-green leaves mixed with turquoise flowers carpeted the ground, the colours merging together in the distance to look like a blue ocean.
The path divided, and I took the left turn for the desert trail. I remembered seeing the distinctive turquoise of a Tuan creeper high up in the Eden rainforest when we were searching for Joth, and stopped at the first refreshment point to collect a bottle of water and use my lookup to send a question to Pyramid Zone Information.
Their reply came a few minutes later. Apparently, I could have been right about it being a Tuan creeper. Genetically modified plants didn’t always do exactly what their creators intended, and in some very rare cases Tuan creepers had been found living an arboreal existence in the rainforest, clinging to a tree trunk and managing to survive on nutrients absorbed from the humid air.
That sounded a bit like me. One of the Handicapped was as rare and out of place in a norm class a
s a Tuan creeper in the rainforest, but I’d managed so far and things should be a lot easier now. Steen had said there wouldn’t be any more trouble.
I pulled a face of angry self-mockery as I walked on along the path. At the start of this year, I’d declared war against a class of norms. I’d defeated them now, but what sort of victory was this? My enemies hadn’t learned to like me. They just blamed Petra for Joth’s death, and being nice to me was a way of punishing her.
The victory wouldn’t last for long anyway. Next year, Playdon was going to be running a pre-history degree course for University Asgard. It would be heavily practical, and based on Earth, so Fian and I planned to join it. Some others from our class would be joining it too, but there’d also be a lot of new people. There was bound to be someone prejudiced against the Handicapped, so I’d have to fight the battle all over again.
This battle would always be part of my life. There would always be people who didn’t think I was really human. I’d been bitterly angry about that for years, and a lot of that anger was aimed at myself. When people keep telling you something, it has an effect on you. I’d had the perfect example of that with the Alien Contact programme. Everything I’d been taught, every mention of meeting aliens, had assumed humanity would meet them during Planet First explorations of a new sector. Even knowing that Alien Contact had called me in, I hadn’t been able to step back from that ingrained idea and work out that the aliens must have come to Earth.
Of course I’d been affected by the off-worlders’ views of the Handicapped as well. Every day of my life, I’d been reminded of them in one way or another. Growing up a ward of Hospital Earth because my own parents had rejected me. Hearing the jokes on the off-world vids, about how people like me were ugly and stupid. Knowing I’d never have the right to vote, or …
Part of me had absorbed those ideas, and felt I wasn’t really human. I’d tried to fight my insecurity by being the best at everything, dumping the subjects like science, where I could only manage to be average. That was why joining this class had been more about proving things to myself than to the hated exos.
I didn’t feel that way any longer. It had taken a combination of the acceptance of my friends and Fian, the Military awarding me the Artemis medal, and a truly alien race sending a probe to Earth to convince me, but it had finally happened. The words Candace and my psychologist had said to me a thousand times really were true. I was as normal and human and valuable as any off-worlder, I just had a faulty immune system.
That realization wouldn’t magically give me a family, mean I could travel to the stars, or stop some people from calling me names, but it still helped. My Handicap would always cause me problems, but I had a lot of good things in my life as well. Fian, my friends, and my joy in history. I was even an officer in the Military now. If it wasn’t for the threat of that alien sphere up in Earth orbit …
I was lifting my head to give the usual instinctive look at the sky, when my lookup chimed. I accepted the live link from Asgard, and forgot about aliens while I listened to the funeral of a friend. It was happening on a distant planet in Gamma sector, while I was standing among a sea of turquoise flowers on one of the deserts of Earth. When it was my turn to speak, people had to wait a few seconds before they heard my voice because of the comms portal lag as my words were relayed through Alpha and Gamma sector to Asgard, and Fian had to light my candle for me. None of that mattered. I could still take part in the funeral as we said goodbye to Joth.
18
It took a while for things to get back to normal after the funeral. The Dig Site Federation Accident Specialist insisted on us suffering an entire day of boredom while Playdon repeated all the special Eden safety lectures. The following day, Eden Dig Site closed entirely while a doctor went around every dome giving people special inoculation shots. The class did get outside the next morning, but we didn’t go further than the edge of the ruins, and spent the whole time practising specialist sensor sled alarm drills.
Repeating lectures had just been tedious, but the drills were four solid hours of screeching sirens and hard physical work. Most of the time, the sensor sled just screams its standard alarm that means pull the tag leader out of the danger area, but some alarms warn of a serious threat to the whole team. Unstable ground, you get to the clearway as fast as possible. Tower falling, you get away as fast as possible and just keep going. Magnetic, you cut all lift beams, abandon sleds, and run like chaos before things start exploding or your own suit kills you. Radiation, you head for the nearest evac portal and get Dig Site Command to warn Hospital Earth Casualty to prepare for a hot team arrival. Chemical is like radiation, except you pause on the way to the evac portal to spray yourselves with decontaminant.
Four hours of that added up to an awful lot of running, which is no fun at all when you’re wearing restrictive impact suits. We all hated it, but even Krath had enough sense not to utter a word of complaint. Playdon had had to portal to Asgard at two that morning to be interrogated by his department head back at University Asgard, and had barely got back in time for breakfast. He was even more exhausted than we were.
That evening, I watched Petra’s old friends pointedly ignoring her, and felt sorry enough for her to try approaching her myself. She answered my attempt at sympathy in a savage voice. ‘Don’t you realize I’d rather not have any friends than be friends with you. Nuke off!’
I got the message and left her to sit alone for the rest of the evening. I suppose it was stupidly insensitive of me to have even tried talking to her, but …
The day after that, the Dig Site Federation grudgingly gave us clearance to work on the dig site again. Since we were well ahead with theory lectures now, we spent two long days excavating the Eden ruins, only stopping when forced to by the inevitable rain.
On the first day, we found nothing, but on the second day we found a stasis box. Playdon let me help him run the Stasis Q safety checks, and we opened it to find the usual data chip with a farewell vid from a family leaving Earth in Exodus century, as well as something completely different to anything I’d ever found before. A set of diaries, actual physical books, handwritten by some eccentric back in the first half of the twenty-fourth century.
I’d have liked to spend the evening reading them, but Fian and I had arranged to portal over to Earth Europe and meet my friends from Next Step. We all went to Stigga’s MeetUp as usual, because Maeth had talked Stigga into letting us back in. It should have been really zan, but I felt uncomfortable about laughing and joking so soon after Joth’s death. Issette and the others kept talking about the Ark evacuation as well, reminding me of all the things I was hiding from them. I was relieved that Earth Africa was on Green Time plus two hours, so Fian and I had a good excuse for leaving early.
The following morning, the class headed out while the early morning rain was still falling, so we could go further than usual into the Eden ruins. Our little convoy of sleds drove nearly halfway to the Eden Ring, before we turned left on to a small side clearway that suddenly ended in the middle of an anonymous area of rubble.
The sleds pulled up in a neat line at the end of the clearway and I looked across at the nearest intact buildings. They glowed white with the occasional hint of blue or gold, looking deceptively fragile with their frivolous towers, archways, and balconies. It was hard to believe they’d been abandoned for over three hundred and fifty years. A casual glance could miss the fallen walkways and encroaching rainforest plants, and expect to see people looking out from those empty windows.
I pictured these buildings in the height of their beauty, and compared them to the functional domes that were the basis of half Earth’s current architecture. The depressing natural grey of the flexiplas was usually coloured to be more cheerful, but even so …
‘I wish we could make glowplas,’ I said on the team circuit.
Playdon was right next to me, so I could hear his voice echoing as he replied, the original voice a little quieter than the one speaking over the team circuit
.
‘We know it’s a form of plas, like the flexiplas we use in a thousand applications today. Tougher and far more durable than concraz, with a natural white glow. The details of the manufacturing process were lost, along with so much other technology and knowledge, in the Earth data net crash at the end of Exodus century. For a couple of hundred years, humanity was too busy struggling to survive after the collapse of Earth to worry about making glowplas. Since then, there’s been a lot of research into it, but no one has managed to come up with a form of plas that’s anything like it.’
‘We’ll probably never find the secret,’ I said. ‘We’ll never build anything as beautiful as Eden again.’
‘Don’t give up hope, Jarra,’ said Playdon. ‘Perhaps one day, scientists will rediscover the process, or some dig team will find a stasis box containing the answer.’
‘Just imagine the bounty payment they’d get for that,’ said Krath.
Everyone laughed. While we were working on New York Dig Site, our class had found a stasis box holding ancient paintings, and been rewarded with one of the bounty payments you got for especially valuable finds. Ever since then, Krath had been constantly discussing our chances of getting another reward.
‘Team 1 will be excavating the remains of a fallen building in this grid square, and will be using the team circuit for their communications,’ said Playdon. ‘We’ll let them start work, and then I’ll get team 5 doing a little practice firing tags at glowplas.’
There were some exaggerated groans from the members of team 5, who preferred to sit and watch the rest of us do the work.
‘I know, I know,’ said Playdon. ‘You lot want to be theoretical historians, and you hate the dig site work. I understand, but you must do enough of it to pass the practical side of this course because it’s a prerequisite for starting your full history degree.’
Fian went to the tag support sled, Krath and Amalie to the heavy lifts, and Dalmora to the sensor sled. They began moving them into position at the extreme edge of the clearway. I waited until the tag support sled was stationary, and then went across to collect my hover belt and tag gun. Fian attached his lifeline beam to the tag point on the back of my suit, and there was a familiar itching feeling between my shoulder blades, which vanished even before Fian had finished double-checking the beam was properly locked on to me and closed it down to minimal power. The itch was pure self-conscious nerves at being at the mercy of the lifeline beam operator, most tag leaders got it, but I had total confidence in Fian so mine faded very fast.