Frontier

by Janet Edwards

  Koulsy picked up a bucket and headed into the field, and a gaggle of bar customers followed his lead. I was feeling more optimistic as I dragged another sack of Mirandan cabbage through the gate into the field, but then I saw one of the nearer moon monkeys topple over. It was a female, with a young baby clinging to its back.

  I ran over to kneel down next to the mother and baby. The baby dug its face into its mother’s fur, scared by me being so close to it, but it didn’t loosen its grip. I pictured the mother dying and the baby staying clinging stubbornly to her until it died itself.

  I bit my lip, told myself we weren’t going to let that happen, grabbed some cabbage leaves from my sack, and held them under the mother moon monkey’s nose. She didn’t respond at all. She seemed barely conscious.

  Koulsy arrived back with two buckets of water and clay. I tried rubbing the wet clay on a cabbage leaf and holding it to the moon monkey’s mouth, but she still wouldn’t take it. A couple of minutes later, there were buckets of wet clay and scattered cabbage leaves everywhere round me, but the drunken moon monkeys were ignoring them. More moon monkeys were lying on the ground now, and I didn’t have the faintest idea how to help them.

  Someone knelt down beside me. I turned and saw it was Teacher Lomas. The vet was with him, and a whole mob of young men and boys that must be Teacher Lomas’s evening class.

  “We’ve tracked down the source of the problem,” said Lomas. “Braden Nott’s apple orchard is just down the track from here. He hadn’t obeyed the rules about keeping the area round the orchard clear of Mirandan trees, and one blew down in the storm and smashed a hole through the protective fruit caging. We’ve got people repairing it now, but of course the moon monkeys had already eaten all the apples and leaves from the trees.”

  “Never mind the orchard,” I said. “How can we help these moon monkeys? They’re too drunk to know what they need to eat, and once they pass out it’s too late.”

  “You’ve already tried everything I know,” said Lomas.

  I dropped the useless cabbage leaf, stood up, and turned to the vet. “How can we help them?” I repeated.

  “I’ve only been on Miranda for three months,” said the vet. “My training covered all the standard Earth farm animals kept on colony worlds. I’ve learnt a bit about the Mirandan species kept as farm animals too, like the Mirandan ostrich, but I haven’t had time to learn about the wild species.”

  I looked down at where Lomas was still on his knees by the moon monkey mother and baby. “We need the Jains. We need them right now.”

  I was about to ask where the Mayor was, when her brusque voice came from behind me. “Nuking hell!”

  I sometimes said the nuke word in a crisis, but I’d never gone as far as saying nuking hell. I had to admit I felt this situation deserved it though. I swung round to look at the Mayor. “Where are the Jains?”

  “Bened’s on his way,” she said. “All the rest of the family are at the Founding Families Reception at Memorial.”

  I should have remembered that all the Jain family, except for Bened, would already be at the celebrations at Memorial. “Chaos! Can’t we get someone to drag Kellan Jain out of there?”

  “Not when he’s being interviewed live on Epsilon Sector News,” said the Mayor. “We don’t want Miranda getting a reputation for mishandling its ecology. Ah, here comes Bened now.”

  I saw Guiren was leading Bened Jain over to us. I’d no reason to like Bened, and he’d every reason to hate me, but I hoped he’d realize what was happening here was more important than our feelings.

  I pointed at the fallen mother moon monkey, and the pathetic scrap of brown fur that was the baby clinging to her back. “Bened, please tell us how to help them.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Bened made a helpless gesture with his hands. “You need my parents for this. I’m the lazy farmer who only grows medcorn and wastes his time on flowers.”

  “You must know what to do, Bened,” I said fiercely. “You’ve lived on Miranda since the second year of Colony Ten. You were here when people first discovered the effect apples had on moon monkeys. Given the passionate way your father talks about the Mirandan native species, you must know a huge amount about them.”

  “I did once,” said Bened. “It’s been a long time. I lost interest after ...”

  “You have to remember or they’re all going to die.” I waved at the other moon monkeys. Almost half of them were lying on the ground now.

  Bened knelt down and gently touched the baby moon monkey with his forefinger. “It was Year Five. We’d worked out the clay thing by then. Apparently, some Earth species of monkeys and birds used clay to soothe their stomachs after eating poisonous fruit and leaves.”

  I wanted to tell him to hurry up and get to the point, but he was obviously talking to himself to try to retrieve half-forgotten memories.

  “For the moon monkeys, the clay worked best combined with cabbage leaves,” he said, “but there was an incident. We didn’t find the moon monkeys until they were unconscious and ...”

  He broke off and almost shouted a single word. “Soup!”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “It was Father’s idea. Equal parts of Mirandan cabbage soup and wet clay. We scooped it up in cups and poured it down their throats.”

  “The carts of extra Mirandan cabbage have arrived,” said Guiren. “I’ll start making soup using the fast method. That doesn’t taste as good, but it should still work for this.”

  He ran off towards the bar, shouting at people to come and chop cabbage for him. I stood watching Bened stroke the baby moon monkey’s head, and was surprised when the bar runners, Delun and Jonas, appeared only a couple of minutes later. Delun was carrying a huge china jug, and Jonas had a tray of empty tankards.

  “Guiren says this is some soup left from yesterday,” said Delun. “He’ll have fresh soup soon.”

  Delun handed the jug to Bened, Jonas put his tray of tankards on the ground, then they both hurried back to the bar. I watched Bened pour the cabbage soup into a bucket and mix it with clay and water. He dipped a tankard into the mixture, then lifted the mother moon monkey’s head and coaxed her mouth open.

  “Don’t pour it in their mouths too fast or they’ll choke,” he said. “Just a little, wait for them to swallow, then give them a little more. Half a tankard each should be enough to start with.”

  I watched him slowly feed the greenish brown glop to the moon monkey, nodded, picked up a tankard myself, and scooped up some of the mixture. There were plenty of moon monkeys lying nearby, so I picked another female with a baby because that meant there were two lives to save rather than one. Giving her the mixture was oddly like feeding my baby brother.

  The vet and Lomas started feeding the clay and soup to monkeys as well. By the time I was working on my third moon monkey, more jugs of soup were arriving. Bened was mixing them with clay and water, and the vet and Teacher Lomas were giving lessons to the bar customers and the evening class on how to feed medicine to moon monkeys. If things hadn’t been so serious, I’d have laughed at the sight of Hammer cradling an elderly male moon monkey on his lap.

  “Look,” said the Mayor, “that one’s getting up.”

  I turned to see where she was pointing. The first moon monkey we’d treated was back on her feet, staggering because she was unsteady rather than drunk, and drinking more medicine from a bucket herself.

  “It’s working!” I said.

  “There must be more monkeys who didn’t make it here,” said the Mayor. “I’ll contact all the farms, and tell them to send out search parties looking for fallen moon monkeys.”

  An hour later, we had a system in place. All the original moon monkeys had had half a tankard of medicine. That was enough to get the adults on their feet and helping themselves to cabbage leaves and wet clay. The juveniles usually needed an extra dose of medicine. The totally limp moon monkeys being brought in by search parties needed two or three doses of medicine each, and a
few still didn’t make it.

  I was helping Bened prise a baby moon monkey loose from its dead mother, carefully freeing one tiny finger at a time, when I heard shouting from the direction of the portal. Palmer Nott had just arrived. He was holding an unconscious juvenile female moon monkey in his arms, and facing a group of a dozen angry boys from the evening class.

  “How dare you come here, Palmer Nott?” yelled one of them. “Your father did this!”

  “I hate this too.” Palmer Nott held out the moon monkey. “You can hit me all you want, but for chaos sake someone help this poor little thing.”

  I stood up and shouted across to him. “Palmer, bring the moon monkey to me!”

  Palmer stumbled across to me, with the other boys following him. Once he’d handed me the moon monkey, Palmer turned to face the mob. I could see this wasn’t going to be a fight, but a massacre.

  “Nobody hits Palmer,” I said. “What happened was his father’s fault, not his.”

  “It was my fault too.” Palmer seemed to be deep in a potentially suicidal fit of remorse. “I told him we should take down that tree, but he ignored me the way he always does. I should have made him listen, or cut it down myself.”

  The other boys advanced a pace on their prey, but Teacher Lomas appeared and stepped in front of them. “If anyone is going to hit Palmer, it’s me. The rest of you get back to work.”

  They reluctantly moved away. Lomas took the moon monkey from me, and started showing Palmer Nott how to feed it medicine. I went back to helping Bened with the baby moon monkey.

  By sunset, a horde of filthy, clay covered humans were outside the bar, sitting on upturned buckets, and watching a field full of moon monkeys. Some of the monkeys were still nibbling cabbage leaves and wet clay, but they were mostly just sitting down and resting.

  The Mayor got up with a moan of pain. “After all that crawling round helping moon monkeys, I could use an extra rejuvenation treatment.”

  “Think how I feel,” said Guiren. “The Medical Subcommittee has announced that people over 60 will move to a full rejuvenation schedule next year. If that doesn’t happen as promised, I’m going back to Gamma sector.”

  “Earlier this evening, you told me that you faced five years in prison if you went back to Gamma sector,” said Lisbet.

  “Prison would be better than having my bones ache like this until I reach my hundredth and die,” said Guiren.

  “I’m sure you’ll get your rejuvenation treatments as promised,” said the Mayor. “There are only a tiny number of people that old on Miranda anyway.”

  “Now I feel really ancient,” said Guiren.

  I had the cynical thought that Guiren would definitely get his rejuvenation treatments, because Kellan and Inessa Jain had just passed the age of 60.

  The Mayor turned to Teacher Lomas. “On your feet, Zachary. We have to start drafting a major ecological incident report. Worse than that, this will be the tenth major ecological incident report involving apples on Miranda, and you know what that means.”

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  Lomas stood up. “Miranda will get a mandatory full ecological inspection by Colony Ten Command, and the inspectors will order us to stop growing apples. Chaos knows this was bound to happen one day. Colony Ten would never normally clear an Earth animal or plant for introduction to a world when it had such potential to harm the native species. Apples are one of the golden triad though. Every world of humanity has apples, potatoes, and chickens, so we were allowed to grow apples under strictly controlled conditions.”

  He sighed. “Every school has been hammering home the importance of following the rules on apple growing, but we’ve still had ten major incidents and a host of minor ones. Now this apple harvest is going to be the last one on Miranda. Afterwards, the trees will be cut down and burnt, and apples will become an imported luxury food that most people can only afford for a special occasion.”

  I frowned down at my grubby hands. I didn’t care about apples myself, but my parents would hate destroying their much loved apple trees.

  “We wanted Miranda to be famous,” said the Mayor, in a grim voice, “but not for being the only world in humanity without apples.”

  Koulsy was sitting a short distance from the rest of us. He hadn’t said a word in the last hour, so I was startled to hear his voice.

  “Apple trees are a non migrant species.”

  Everyone turned to stare at him. “What do you mean?” asked the Mayor.

  “Global extermination of some dangerous migrant species may be unavoidable. Non migrant dangerous species should be limited to sufficiently distant land masses.” Koulsy repeated the same words he’d said earlier in the evening. “Any use of the other continents of Miranda would be both illegal and lethally dangerous, but if you have any neighbouring islands then they’re counted as part of this continent.”

  The Mayor clapped her hands together. “You mean that we could use one of the islands off the Northern Reach coastline to grow apple trees. Captain Mobele, if I didn’t have two husbands already, I’d offer to marry you! Zachary, we have to draft both a major ecological incident report, and a proposal for moving young apple trees to a contained area on an offshore island.”

  The Mayor and Teacher Lomas went to sit on a fallen tree trunk. Lomas started tapping away on his lookup, with the Mayor peering over his shoulder and offering what she probably felt were helpful suggestions. I wasn’t sure how Lomas would describe them.

  I turned to Koulsy and smiled. “Thank you for suggesting that solution. It will make things a lot easier for people like my parents.”

  Bened stood up. He had two baby moon monkeys clinging to him, one on each shoulder. I had one myself. It was hanging on to my hair, tugging it painfully hard, but I didn’t have the heart to make it let go. I’d already had to force the poor thing to let go of its dead mother.

  “I think it’s time to find our orphans new mothers,” said Bened.

  I stood up too. I’d been wondering how I’d cope with a baby moon monkey clinging to me day and night for months. “How do we find them new mothers?”

  “On rare occasions a moon monkey has twin babies,” said Bened. “When that happens, the mother will only care for one baby, while one of the wise aunties in the troop takes on the other. One of the aunties would also adopt a baby if the mother is killed in an accident. Feeding the baby isn’t a problem. The wise aunties help feed the babies in a troop anyway.”

  He walked slowly out into the field. “We need a wise aunty who looks as if she’s recovering, but is still too ill to run from us.”

  He went down on his hands and knees, and crawled up to an older female. It was a struggle to prise one of the moon monkey babies loose from his shoulder, but then it happily grabbed hold of its new mother. She sniffed at it cautiously for a couple of minutes, then coaxed it into moving round on to her back.

  Bened and I found new mothers for the other two orphan baby moon monkeys. As we moved back towards Mojay’s bar, there was a harsh, staccato yelp from somewhere in the field, quickly echoed by a second, and then a dozen more competing cries.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “The older males are trying to call their groups together.” Bened shouted across to Mojay. “Get your sign turned off. We don’t want those blazing lights distracting them now.”

  A moment later, the bar sign went off. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dimmer light of the setting sun, but then I saw the older male moon monkeys were clustering into small groups. Females with babies were moving to join them. Older females were bounding round the fields, making chattering scolding noises at juveniles, and herding them back to join their groups.

  After about twenty minutes, the moon monkeys had gathered into troops, and were busily grooming dried clay and oddments of leaves from their fur. A few confused juveniles were still scattered round the fields. One of them started making high-pitched wailing cries of distress, and within a few seconds the oth
er lost juveniles had joined in. It was such a penetrating sound that I put my hands over my ears to block it.

  The troops of moon monkeys seemed to find the noise annoying too. They broke off their grooming, and groups of wise aunties bounded over to chatter at the nearest distressed juveniles. I watched, fascinated, as juveniles cowered, were groomed ruthlessly hard by the wise aunties, and then herded into the troop for more grooming in what seemed to be an acceptance ritual.

  “Juveniles often change troop,” said Bened, “though it usually happens later in the Mirandan year.”

  Once the last of the lost juveniles had been adopted into a moon monkey troop, things went quiet again. One after another, the troops began heading for the conservation zones, until finally the fields were back to normal. The beleaguered horses moved out of their corner and began grazing again, and Mojay shouted at the top of his voice.

  “Normal service is now resuming in the bar. If you want food, you’ve got a choice of Mirandan cabbage soup or omelette.”

  “Omelette!” shouted Hammer. “I never want to smell cabbage soup ever again.”

  “No one under the age of 16 is allowed in the bar!” yelled the Mayor.

  I saw Mojay glare at her. I cringed, expecting an argument, but Lomas swiftly cut in, speaking in a voice of exaggerated innocence. “Does that include moon monkeys?”

  There was laughter, and people started moving into the bar or heading for the portal. Koulsy came over to me. “I’ll be walking back to my camp site. Which track should I follow?”

  I opened my mouth to say that I’d take him there, but saw the strain on his face. The man had been in a crowd of people for the last couple of hours, and needed to be alone now.

  “You go along that track.” I pointed the way. “Follow the signs for Lone Tree.”

  He nodded and walked off, leaving Bened and me alone outside the bar. I expected Bened would start insulting me again now, but I didn’t care. Whatever the man said to me in future, I’d still be grateful for the way he’d helped us save the moon monkeys.