by Patty Jansen
It was a subject I didn’t want to discuss.
“Do you know how much those chairs cost?” Junco asked.
I glanced at him. It seemed a deeply personal question.
“A fair bit. I imagine the boy’s father had this chair designed for him. He is a top government official.” That was probably the best neutral description for the boy’s father. “I imagine that a chair like this would be hard to get. Why? Would you be interested?”
“Yeah. You see, my boy needs a wheelchair. My wife was pregnant during the war at the time the Dixie Republic fighters dropped chemical bombs on us. He was born with his legs all deformed. She has since died of the cancer that it caused.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged.
“How old is the boy?”
“Nine.”
“Well, I could make some inquiries. If you give me your contact details, I can let you know what I find out.”
“It might be best to contact me through Mariola. She’ll know how to talk to me without...”
He shrugged again and blew out a breath. Without what? Arousing suspicion from a government keen to control its people? It seemed he was keen to discuss politics.
“Mariola regularly gets you customers?”
“Yes. It’s a well-paying job. I’m talking to her all the time. She brings me a lot of business because she talks to tourists. Most of them don’t even know that you can still visit the canyon.”
“Yes, I can make some inquiries and let her know.”
I had no idea how one would go about getting the wheelchair and getting it fitted, because I was sure that it would require an elaborate fitting process, but we would deal with that later. He might be a useful contact in America Free State. I needed to nurture that opportunity. It had been hard enough to find someone who would talk to us, even about the most mundane of subjects.
“Can I ask a bit more information about your son so I can make more detailed enquiries? What exactly would he need?”
“He is like the other lad. His legs are all crooked, and he can’t walk. His arms are okay, but he has trouble with his shoulders so he can’t use crutches. He just sits in a chair all day being miserable. He used to have a chair with wheels, but they had rubber tyres with inner tubes that needed pressure and the pump broke and I couldn’t get hold of a new one. I tried using other materials, but it’s just too bumpy, because the roads are rough. Then other bits started breaking. I could fix it, if only the supplier in Atlantia would send me the materials. I get so angry at those suppliers. My son tells me it doesn’t matter because he doesn’t like it when I’m angry. But he’s lonely. He’s got some friends, but most of the kids think he’s weird and don’t want to play or want to be seen to be his friend. Every week I carry him into church, and I cannot stand the look of pity on those people’s faces. I come to church because I want to be a good man, but they’re making it hard for me not to yell at their sanctimonious faces. The folk act like we’re both contagious with a horrible disease. Do you go to church, Mr Wilson?”
“There are no churches where I live. I believe I can be a good person without having to visit a church.”
He nodded. “Fair enough.”
This was a question I always dreaded when I interacted with people on Earth. I had spent years preparing a variety of answers. If someone wanted, they could poke all sorts of holes in my inconsistent position on the subject of religion, mainly to justify that I wasn’t the type of person they wanted to interact with. But the fact remained that I was not from a religious family. My parents had been nominally religious, but gamra had serious questions about religion and how it could coexist with science, one of the primary points they found baffling and incredible about Earth society.
I was reluctant to talk about it in public, especially since the subject of Earth’s religions was such a hot topic in gamra and one that was used to ridicule Earth.
But one thing about that statement was absolutely true: I didn’t think anyone needed to visit a church or be religious in order to be a good person.
Junco wasn’t done with the subject. “Then what do you do on Sundays, over there?” he asked.
“There are no Sundays.”
“Ha ha. I guess that answers that question.”
“Where we live, there are five days in the week, and some other cultures don’t have any week days at all but go by the days of the month.”
“So you just got rid of weekends?”
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
“That sounds like a hard-working place to me.”
“I guess so.”
The concept of regulated days off was not something that we had in Barresh. I wasn’t sure if that made the culture hard-working, especially not if it involved the Barresh counsellors. You could argue that if there was no weekend, then every day was a weekend. That was definitely how they lived their lives.
But if it made him happy, that was great.
“So, where are you from, then?”
“We are from a city called Barresh, which is the headquarters of gamra, which I’m sure you’ve heard of.”
“Is that the thing that’s called the alien union?”
“Yes.” I cringed. I had not heard the word union for a long time, and definitely not preceded by the word alien.
“I was wondering where you were from before, because you’re speaking funny.”
“I grew up speaking Isla, and the version my parents spoke was more Asian than the version you know here. When I went to school, we spoke Cosla, the space settlement variety. They’re not interchangeable, but close enough.”
“Huh. We do none of that stuff here. We speak the good old language.”
“Isla has international recognition. With many countries in the world contributing to economic activity and culture, the language is part of the international landscape, too.”
He eyed me suspiciously. Then he dropped the subject. America Free State did not believe in an international economy.
“But where did you come from, or your parents?”
“I was born and lived until I was eight years old in New Zealand.”
“Oh.”
That answer seemed to satisfy him. I wasn’t sure why, maybe because New Zealand was a country he approved of, as he didn’t seem to approve of Isla, or influences by other cultures. It was a very quaint mindset, and one I hadn’t encountered for a while. And he still wanted to talk to me.
“Why did you leave New Zealand?”
“Remember that I was only eight. I had no choice. My father got a job in Midway Space Station.”
Now his face lit up. “That was a significant step up.”
Obviously, Midway was also on the approved list. It was an Earth station and had nothing to do with gamra. In fact, the station management made a point of having nothing to do with gamra. I remembered how badly they had treated Erith there. I remembered the strange group of people who had tried to take over the station and assassinate a visiting delegation from gamra, which included the Chief Delegate Akhtari.
Back then, there had been a semi-militant movement of purist people on Earth to set up a space program that was separate from gamra and didn’t use the Exchange.
What if… crap.
A cold feeling washed over me.
Had those people, many of whom were deeply religious, come from America Free State? Were they in any way related to the Southern California Aerospace Corps?
To think of it, that seemed likely.
Of course, Junco had grown up with those people painted to him as heroes. Those were the people who would further the cause of his country in space. Some were willing to sacrifice lives for that aim.
Damn, I hardly remembered any of them. There had been a man called Sullivan, and another man called Rocky, who wasn’t part of the group. I didn’t remember their full names. What did they even
want and why were they there?
Those people had scared and tried to bully me, but I’d warned then-president of Nations of Earth Pedro Gonzales about them. I’d even spoken to him.
Knowing all the things I knew now, my youth experience looked like what I feared: these people were not friends of Nations of Earth and they weren’t friends of gamra either. I didn’t remember ever hearing from them again. After the attempt to steal a ship at Midway, they’d sort of… disappeared. Like these people we were looking for now.
Well, that was an interesting revelation. I’d have to investigate what had become of that group. I couldn’t even remember what they called themselves. I’d been ten.
“So how long did you stay at Midway?” Junco asked.
“Just a couple of years, two or three, I don’t remember. I was a young kid and went to primary school there. After that, my father got a job at New Taurus, and we moved to Arcadia.”
“Huh, that would have been fun.”
Did he mean that sarcastically?
“What do you mean?”
“With all the trouble after the crash at Taurus, and then all the bickering that led to the settlement being abandoned.”
“That was after my time, but I don’t remember it as being a very happy time for my father.”
I’d been a teenager and obsessed with girls and bikes, and oblivious to the politics.
But damn it, there had been a rogue group of people who would rather die than work with gamra and it was entirely plausible that they had infiltrated and taken over aspects of the international space settlement effort, especially over fifty years ago, which would have been a very turbulent time that predated Nations of Earth.
As far as I knew, the human space program was still going, with vibrant settlements on the Moon and Mars. As far as I knew, Taurus and New Taurus had been mostly abandoned. The people who were doing the work were also the same, the international group allied with Nations of Earth. They were scientists and international politicians, people who were sensible and diplomatic, if also boring and bureaucratic. The gung ho militants and military types had… vanished.
Well, damn.
But maybe I’d been looking in the wrong direction, maybe in that time of despair had those people made it to Barresh. The people who were trying to take over Midway Space Station had insinuated that they had a secret place where they were going to take the human space settlement effort, because they viewed Nations of Earth as pandering to the “aliens” too much.
Junco continued his questions. “So what about you? When did you decide to leave your own people?”
“I don’t see it that way. We are all people. One of the little girls in the other group is my daughter. One of the guards here is her mother.”
“You’re kidding?”
“No, I’m not.”
“I thought that was impossible.”
“It’s difficult, but it is possible. Have you heard of the Human Tree project?”
He hadn’t, so I told him of the hundred-year-old project in Barresh to piece together the genetic relationships between all different kinds of humans, how the Aghyrians were at the base, how Earth humans had a place in it, and even the Pengali.
I said, “We’re all people, and we’re all related.”
He looked me up and down, as if seeing me through a new lens.
“Well, that’s interesting. Thank you for telling me that.”
His appreciation seemed genuine.
He pulled out a map and started explaining about where we were going. There was a town close to the site of the old factory, and there was another viewing platform where you could see over the canyon. He would take us there tomorrow morning.
I told him that I’d noticed there was accommodation for hire in the town. “Is the lookout that popular?”
“Not really, but people come for boat rides on the lake,” he said.
The landscape underneath us had flattened out and looked old and dusty and incredibly ancient.
I could still see the canyon of the river out a left-hand window. Reida was following the contours of the land on his map.
He turned to me. “What is this here?” He pointed at a dark area.
“It’s a lake,” I said.
He frowned. “In the open? It’s very hot and dry here.”
“Yes, the water comes from somewhere else. There are mountains a bit further to the east. It’s like the creek at Athyl. The water comes from somewhere else.”
“But why the lake?”
“It’s a dam,” I said. “See how there is a wall here across the canyon?”
“Oh, yes. Why do people do that? The water goes all green and smelly if it doesn’t flow. That’s why the reservoirs at Athyl are underground. They’d just disappear in no time and the lake would become a smelly puddle, like the one we saw this morning.”
Junco had been looking at us while we spoke.
I explained to him. “He comes from an area with a lot of desert, not unlike this area. He wondered why the lake was there.”
“Well, there wouldn’t be a lake if it wasn’t for the dam.”
“That’s what I said to him.”
“They don’t have dams where he comes from?”
“They do, except they don’t have a lot of water to fill dams. He wonders why the lake is in the open when the water is going to evaporate and algae is going to turn it green.”
“Oh. I get that. The lake has been much higher in past years. We have to keep letting out some water to keep the river flowing, but there’s folk who are afraid that it’s going to empty sooner rather than later. But what can we do? Build a roof over the top?”
“Where he lives, the water reservoirs are all underground.”
“Huh. That right, huh? I guess they have lots of money to build stuff, too.”
“They have lots of people to build stuff.”
Junco shrugged. “Well, the big guy up there hasn’t been very kind to us. We’ve kinda earned it, I guess. We don’t have lots of people. We don’t have lots of money. We have all the oil in the ground no one wants to buy anymore and all the people who knew how to do it are gone. We have a government that prefers to keep us distracted with silly fights. It’s all the design of the guy up there, isn’t it? We screwed up, and he’s punishing us.”
I had to think about that for a while and then realised that he meant divine influence.
That was one way to think about it, even if not a viewpoint I subscribed to.
Meanwhile, in the valley of Asto, a huge irrigation program had sprung up and people were again growing plants in fields, and attempting to further soften the climate and bring greenery back to the landscape.
Once that was completed, the planet could support a lot more people.
But I wasn’t here to discuss the problems of the world, and his government’s failure to look after its people.
We were going down. I could already see the outline of the old buildings.
Chapter Ten
We flew over the town.
It was getting later in the afternoon. The sun was turning yellow, spreading a golden glow over the dilapidated houses, the ruins, the cracked and dust-covered roads and the desolate landscape. Not a tree grew along the streets or in the yards, and the surrounding landscape was similarly barren.
I thought that it was a ghost town but then I spotted someone on a motorbike. A few people stood in the front yard of a house. Some shops in the centre of town also seemed to be operating. A man on a quad bike turned into a driveway.
What were these people doing in this barren place?
The lake lay to the left of us. The water was bright green, and well below the level etched into the rock over decades of use. A winding road ran along the far shore and ended at a couple of buildings where a walkway led to the water. There was a jetty with a few boats.
The lake and
then the town slid from view. We continued following another road.
Once we came over a hill, the landscape became a bit more varied.
I could also make out a clump of buildings scattered against the hillside, overlooking a barren and dusty plain. The structures still stood upright, but only just. Part of the roof of a shed had fallen in. A pile of burnt rubble lay in the dirt outside another building.
“Is that it?” I asked.
“Sure is,” Junco said.
At least we’d have something to look at. I’d feared that a combination of looting and the passage of time would have dismantled the entire site. We’d had trouble securing recent images.
Some worry fell off my shoulders. I hadn’t come all this way for nothing. We’d do the work, write up the report, and I’d present it to Ezhya. We might even talk to some locals.
I’d had some ideas about the Southern California Aerospace Corps that I wanted to explore. I was now less certain than I’d been before that they’d been aligned with the Aghyrians. The people I’d known at Midway Space Station would never associate with “aliens”. They’d vanished because they had re-absorbed back into the regular space programs. The militant groups amongst them had not stood the test of time, as such extreme groups were wont to do.
Yes, we’d do our jobs here, finish up and then concentrate on all the many important things waiting for me—after seeing my father and Erith with Emi.
The craft landed in a dusty field between the buildings. Several trees stood around the perimeter of the complex. About half of them were dead.
Patches of shrubbery dotted the landscape, but it was hard to tell if the shrubs were still alive. Their leaves were grey and dusty, but a few of them had green shoots, so those were obviously not dead.
