by Patty Jansen
“I’m sorry. They are just kids having fun,” I said.
“You might also tell them not to treat their toys like this. They might get damaged.”
I walked into the circle and clapped my hands. “Kids, this man here says you have to stop this.”
Nalya turned to me, and as his face took on a disappointed expression, one of the toys thrown by a dark-skinned unicyclist hit him on the side of the head and bounced over the ground. They might get damaged. What? Pieces of coloured plastic? Why did he care anyway?
“Can we come back here later?” Nalya asked.
“I don’t know.” I sighed. “I don’t think they like it when you perform their show.” And they didn’t like the fact that they played music in the wrong way and treated toys in the wrong way.
Or something. I was struggling to comprehend these people.
The young rascals on their unicycles jumped off their bikes.
The legitimate performers rushed into the square. They reset the music, pushed the toys aside and took up their positions to start dancing.
Chapter Two
Larrana collected his toys and put them in Ayshada’s basket.
Whenever he passed, people retreated as it dawned on their faces that this boy did not ride a tricycle for fun, but that it was part of him.
“You shouldn’t encourage those kids,” one tourist said to me. He was very tall and broad, but walked with a walking stick. He wore a hat with the New World Entertainment logo.
It was probably stupid, but I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. “I don’t think they were doing anything wrong.”
He snorted. “It looks like fun to be a performer, but these people get paid next to nothing and treated like dirt.” He nodded at the square where the chicken-and-dinosaur routine had made way for a song performed by young women in butterfly suits.
“Oh, do be quiet, Hank,” a woman said next to the tourist, presumably his wife. “They have paying work. They will be grateful for that.”
The man eyed me. “You’re not from here, mister. I can hear that by the way you speak.”
“Just visiting. Have a nice day.”
I was going to leave it at that. Besides the fact that Ayshada and Larrana had collected all the toys, and we needed to get going, I didn’t think there was anything to be gained by holding this conversation.
It could go in any of three or four directions, and neither the Tell me all about it, the How long are you there for? or I’m glad that those aliens don’t live here lines of discussion were particularly appealing to me.
I gathered the children, who were now watching the officially approved show where the performers danced in approved ways to approved music and juggled approved items.
So they got paid a pittance?
Typical. Everywhere we’d been so far, we’d met people who worked in expensive accommodation and still begged for money.
It annoyed me. I also felt sorry for them. Not sorry enough to succumb to this system.
“Let’s go. Our guide may already be at the apartment.”
“Why can’t we play?” Nalya asked.
He had very large dark eyes, and when he looked up at me like this, I could see so much of Thayu in him.
“I’m very sorry. This is not our world, and they don’t like it if we use their songs and their images for things they are not intended for.”
“But it’s just for fun,” Ayshada said.
But the Coldi word for fun also meant frivolous, and these people here did not think fun was frivolous. Fun was serious, fun was prescribed, fun was smiling even if there was nothing to smile about.
Fun was Have a nice day, the ultimate fob-off that killed any opportunity for a serious conversation.
Like all those little scrawny kids with their unicycles would have a nice day, or would even be employed, or their parents would be paid fairly.
Where had they come from?
They all stood in a group, some of them with their unicycles folded. One or two had already run. A young boy was standing out the front, his eyes wide. He was staring at a man on the other side of the square who wore the same uniform as the fellow who had attached himself to me and was still watching us.
Some of his colleagues moved through the gathered onlookers. Most people ignored them, or nodded polite greetings. Others slunk into the crowd and disappeared. Undesirable elements?
All this was happening while cheerful music blared over the square and the female dancers with butterfly wings were singing about flowers and sunshine.
It felt decidedly weird.
I met the eyes of the urchin at the front of the group. He was about the same age as our eldest youngsters, eleven or twelve, had dark skin and arms as thin as sticks.
“I hope we didn’t cause too much trouble,” I said.
He looked so terrified, and I had no idea where all these kids had come from. They couldn’t be employees of the resort, because they would never have been allowed into the precinct dressed as they were.
The kid just looked at me. I don’t think he understood me at all.
He eyed the uniformed man who stood behind me. Did he want anything?
When the uniformed man took a step forward, he tucked his unicycle under his arm, and the entire group ran out of the square.
“They won’t bother you anymore,” the uniformed man said.
Telling him that the kids weren’t bothering me would be a waste of breath, so I didn’t.
I led our group back to the hotel.
Our kids followed me, except the Pengali, who ran ahead, evoking squeals from tourists, and enjoying every bit of it. They’d be climbing over the balcony railings, raising alarm from fellow guests. I was tired of trying to stop them after two days of this. You couldn’t. They were Pengali.
“What were we doing wrong?” Nalya asked, walking next to me.
His voice was soft.
He was the oldest of all the kids, but you would never tell from his behaviour.
He watched, listened, barely said anything and rarely questioned anything.
His family was extremely strict, and he was used to getting lectured when he had done something wrong. It showed. I’d been apprehensive about having him along—being from a rival family and all that—but the only thing I’d had to worry about was that he was too quiet.
“I think only approved people can do performances out here.”
To be honest, I suspected what was at the heart of this slap-down. It was about licensing and intellectual property. The park owned everything: the characters, the music, the dance moves, the costumes and didn’t allow anyone—not even a bunch of kids—to use it in an unauthorised fashion.
This was such an alien place.
Now that the staff had cleared the disturbance, the square returned to normal. Sweetly, sickly normal. With people in their costumes smiling with not a speck on their shirts or hair out of place, with not a wrong word or heaven forbid a wrong image, with spectators in the audience where they belonged.
I felt alien. We might as well have landed on another planet.
“I’m not sure I like this place,” Nalya said. “Everyone is supposed to be happy, but a lot of the people here are not happy. They just pretend to be happy.”
In Earth years, he would be about twelve or thirteen, and him spending time with us was part of his mentoring agreed to by his family.
It amazed me that a young boy from another world could see those things. Many of the holidaymakers appeared to be oblivious to the fact. Or maybe they liked pretending to be happy.
They were families on trips of nostalgia. Many were rich people, because it wasn’t cheap to stay here.
I promised the kids a snack, and we went back into the apartment.
“How did you meet those other kids?” I asked when we were walking across the hotel foyer.
“They work here,�
�� Nalya said.
I was pretty sure that was impossible. The rules for children working were very strict, even here.
“Where?”
“At the back of our accommodation.”
“What were they doing?”
“Riding and playing.”
But I gathered he didn’t know where the kids had come from and what they were doing here any more than I did.
I surmised that when Larrana, Nalya and Ayshada had gone to the foyer to look at the souvenir shop, the kids with their unicycles had been there. Kids being kids, they were attracted to each other, even if they didn’t speak each other’s language or, for that matter, they came from the same world.
Back in our apartment, Ynggi was happy to see everyone returned in one piece. He doled out my promised snack in the kitchenette—bananas. The kids loved bananas, and they all collected as many as they could and proceeded to peel them—reminded by Jaki to please put the skins in the bin. Not that Pengali were familiar with the concept of rubbish bins.
Calm returned while the kids ate, and it lasted a blissful few minutes until an argument broke out between Ynggi and the Pengali kids about wearing clothes. I made my exit to the hall.
My security team had packed up all the equipment and were getting ready for the day. We would spend it in the park, having fun with the kids. The long-promised trip was part of my attempt to placate the Azimi family, Ayshada’s clan, and that of his demanding, unreasonable mother, who was also Larrana’s aunt.
Larrana had already forgotten the incident and his disappointment, because I had promised him that there would be a lot more of his favourite cartoons and he would be able to purchase a lot more figurines for his collection.
He had transferred a whole damn catalogue of the things onto his reader and had shown me which ones he still lacked. The prices for the things were ridiculous.
So he was soon again bouncing off the walls practicing dance moves, Nalya and Ayshada were egging him on, Ileyu was squealing at the top of her voice, and Emi, being Emi, sat in the middle of it, legs spread, on the floor taking it all in.
The security staff had gathered in the hall. They were ready.
I didn’t miss the concerned look on Sheydu’s face.
“No luck restoring connectivity?” I asked her.
“Their systems are rubbish,” she said. “I’m sure someone is following us. Someone is blocking our equipment and blocking our communication. I don’t understand. If your president had any sense, he would be glad to talk to you. He wouldn’t ignore you, only because of what you are.”
But of course what I was might be part of the problem. Dekker and Nations of Earth would not acknowledge that I had become a major representative, and that I worked closely with Ezhya. Dekker and his people distrusted Asto and anything to do with gamra. His predecessor had presided over Earth’s decision to join gamra, in a different time that seemed years ago. And all the time that he had been in power, Dekker had done nothing about furthering the cooperation. He had put the joining process on the slowest burner possible.
He now refused to speak with me. I didn’t think that his lack of communication had anything to do with the equipment. Although I granted that there were probably issues with the equipment as well. If the antiquated power point on the wall was anything to go by, the level of communication in this place was probably just as bad as Sheydu said.
“Any other news?” I asked.
“Nothing shocking. We crosschecked a few of the references we found yesterday.”
We had visited a location we had really come here to visit, a building and warehouse in San Diego. According to my research, the location used to be an office of the Southern California Aerospace Corps, but the building itself had changed hands a few times since their alleged ownership and no one knew anything about the Corps or why there was a half-buried space ship of theirs in the rainforest in Barresh.
The current owner had allowed us to look around. My team had pulled up some old electronics, and the owner had let us photograph old items that had been inside the office when he moved into the warehouse, and my team had pulled some pieces of equipment apart and had sent snatches of code to the Exchange for analysis. Those results had now come in.
“Anything useful?” I asked.
“Nothing beyond what we already knew. They owned the building for a few years and manufactured small electronic parts.”
“Not any that happened to contain Coldi routines?”
She flicked her eyebrows up. I wasn’t supposed to know this, officially. “You have a very high opinion of Asto’s omnipotence.”
“I would be right for most of this world.”
“Most of this world. Not this part.”
Well, that was disappointing. Was she insinuating that this group, this semi-private militia about whom we knew little, had been smart enough to realise the spying potential of imported electronics? Or that this was just a sign of their general paranoia?
We needed to put all the information we had found on the table about how these people had ended up in Barresh, why no one had noticed except a remote Pengali tribe, and what had happened to this space force or private militia, or whatever they were.
“Anything else?”
“We’ve had a short message from Amarru that came to us not via the regular channels.”
“Does that mean anything?”
“She just said she’d be in contact. I’m not sure if that meant anything.”
“No, I meant the fact that the message didn’t reach you through regular channels.”
“It means that communication here is rubbish. Normally we can use the local network, even if they don’t want us to, but that doesn’t even seem to be a functional local network.”
Yes, yes, I had heard it all before. This was not a particularly modern part of the world, and we had several pressing problems bearing down on us, and it would be helpful if Dekker pulled his head out of his arse and started talking to us, so we could, for example, discuss our joint responses to the unidentified space vehicle that was approaching Earth from the outer solar system, that we knew nothing about, and that both Nations of Earth and gamra played tag with.
“Have you heard anything about our other activities?” Being deliberately vague here.
“Nothing.” She sounded disappointed. “The people we tried to contact just vanished.”
When I was in Barresh, a few people from this area had been willing to talk to me, but with the prospect of a visit from us, most of them had stopped responding. I’d even found some of their contact addresses disabled.
Since I’d started investigating the Southern California Aerospace Corps, I had found that, despite the name, the organisation had never spent a long time in southern California. Their main locality was in a small inland town across the border in America Free State. I wanted to visit it.
I didn’t know if many people from the organisation were still here, but at the very least, I hoped to speak with local historians about why and how a ship of theirs had crashed in the rainforest near Barresh about fifty years ago.
But America Free State was one of the hardest countries in the world to get a permit to enter.
We weren’t getting anywhere with our usual contacts.
I knew Sheydu wanted to be out of here. She didn’t like this place any more than I did, but we promised, and we were here for the kids, so we packed up all our things and got ready for a day of being tourists.
Tourists with listening equipment. Tourists wearing armour under their regular clothes. Tourists with hidden guns and explosives.
Someone knocked on the door. Reida went to open it, and came back a moment later, announcing that our guide had arrived. When we booked the accommodation, I’d been informed that groups over a certain size qualified for a guide courtesy of the hotel, and I’d accepted their offer.
The woman was in her thirties.
She had olive skin and a mass of black curly hair. Her eyes were black and clear and reminded me of Thayu’s eyes. She had broad hips underneath the regular service uniform, blue trousers and a black-and-white striped shirt, which all people working in the precinct wore. I had noticed that they used different coloured lapels on the shirts and presumed the different colours denoted difference in position.
She smiled at me. Her smile was genuine.
“Are you Mr Wilson?”
“Yes, I am.”
Although I rarely used the name any more. I’d changed all my official documentation except my Earth ID to Aveya Domiri.
“I am Mariola, your guide for today.” She spoke decent Isla. That was a relief because I wasn’t looking forward to attempting conversation with someone in the archaic forms of the local English dialect.
“These are all the kids? The message I received said there were seven, so I took seven satchels of gifts for them.”
“There are seven.”
I hadn’t spotted the Pengali kids since the banana-eating extravaganza, but as I said that, the door opened to Ynggi and Jaki’s room and two very grumpy youngsters came out, both dressed in identical bright purple jumpsuits, their tails dragging over the carpet.
I had to make an effort not to laugh.
I’d chosen the colour so that we could easily spot them when they escaped our attention, but they looked rather comical in those suits.
And they’d be grumpy because they didn’t like wearing clothes.
Visiting a theme park was not high on the Pengali list of priorities either.
To her credit, Mariola did not freak out at the sight of them.
She introduced herself to the kids, who gave her a bewildered look. I had to translate for her.
I could see Nalya think about whether she was seriously friendly, or only pretending to be friendly. Now I wished I hadn’t acknowledged that to him. He was a deep thinker and he would think about this and talk about this and bring it up at inopportune moments, for the next few days, and possibly the entire trip.
Mariola handed out her gift satchels, which were received with wide eyes by the older kids and suspicion by the Pengali kids.
