On the side of the house local children had painted a red, green, and yellow mural of birds and trees. Some of it was still visible under black swathes of graffiti.
I dodged a heavy man who came out of the shop counting a handful of betting slips, waved a greeting at Mr. Deshindar who ran the shop, and fumbled inside my shirt for the keys, kept on a string around my neck. The lock on the barred iron door caught, then clicked open. I dragged it aside enough to slide in, then locked it behind me. Paranoid, yes. There isn’t much of value here, except our old computer, and the solar panels and recycled car batteries that we used during electricity cuts. And my telescope.
I went up the dim stairs and into the top of the building. I still felt queasy and my legs ached from the long walk, but at least I’d made it here. Daylight was fading and I wanted to put the money into our strongbox before I went back to my tent. I’d kept my own cash at the Assembly ever since the tent was ransacked and money taken from it, soon after Grace moved out.
The office was a single room, illuminated only by a dirty skylight and windows that let in the afternoon sun if we forgot to lower the blinds. Papers covered most of the threadbare green carpet and three rickety tables that served as desks. The drawers of two huge filing cabinets stuck half open, contents bulging. Nelson Mandela smiled from a faded poster on one wall at an infonet portrait of Marlena Alvarez on the other. Talk to your enemies, said the text below Mandela, but Alvarez didn’t smile back. Perhaps she didn’t like being an internationally recognized symbol, shared between human rights, women’s rights, and social justice movements. Like the Assembly of the Poor, which tried to service all of these as best it could.
We helped our member groups apply for funding, and the director, Abdul Haidar, lobbied local government. The Assembly itself was always in need of money. I was the “technical staff.” Florence Woo, the other staff member, wrote submissions for funds, that is, begging letters.
When I came for the job at the Assembly, I’d said that I was involved in the EarthSouth movement in Vaupés and named the largest town near Las Mujeres, sure it existed in this time.
I’d been using stories of my great-grandmother’s life to explain my presence in the out-town, masquerading as someone who knew Marlena Alvarez, the founder of the EarthSouth movement, the best known of the popular social justice movements in the early twenty-first century. At least, a century later it was the best known.
Alvarez was the mayor of the village of Las Mujeres from 2011 to 2017. My great-grandmother, Demora Haase, had been her chief of police. I grew up in that village hearing stories of Marlena. Her life, her sayings, her death by an assassin’s bullet in 2017. It was easy to put myself in supporting roles in the events my great-grandmother used to talk about, events that to these people happened only a few years ago.
I poured myself a drink of water from the jug on Florence’s table. Her papers were in neat piles.
Drinking water was the biggest expense for everybody in the out-town and in the surrounding suburbs. Since I arrived there’d been perhaps four days of rain, and none in the past three months. The tent cities had no piped water, and the water that came through the old pipes to these houses was often undrinkable. Water trucks came around regularly, but they charged just enough to make it difficult for a person on a subsistence wage to pay. Which meant most of the out-town struggled. We could boil piped water most of the time and get by. The last alternative was river water—nobody, seeing the rubbish and waste that ran through the drains, would willingly drink that.
One of the things the Assembly worked toward was getting water supplied free to everyone. Eventually we hoped to arrange sewerage as well as regular garbage collection. The enclosed environmental system of the space station recycled everything except a portion of heat waste, and I found it hard to believe this society still condoned the use of fossil fuel-burning engines and allowed production of nondegradable plastics. Still harder to believe was that some sections of the same city were left at below subsistence level, while others enjoyed the luxury of space and safety.
I knew how hard it was to persuade those with privileges to share with the less fortunate. On Jocasta we had enough space in the uppermost of its three rings to comfortably house most of the refugees and unregistered residents who stayed in the lower ring. But the upper ring residential area was owned and controlled by members of the Four—our “upper classes,” and do you think they’d give up their extra space? No more than the power-holders of this city would let the out-town residents into the harbor area or downtown.
I felt too tired to work on the damn telescope, sweaty from the walk and the hot room... suddenly the claustrophobic heat became more than I could bear, and I pulled up the dusty blind and opened one of the windows. A hot, dry breeze entered, but at least the air was moving now.
I needed to explore other options to contact the Invidi. What if I can’t get a laser? Arrival is only three weeks away.
I groaned inwardly and switched on the small globe suspended from the roof girder in the middle of the room. Then, after first putting my cash in the strongbox and sliding it back behind one of the filing cabinets, I took out the telescope from its box under my desk and sat on the floor beside it.
My knees creaked as I sat, and it worried me that something else was going wrong. I thought I knew this, my body. I’d lived with it for thirty-seven years. Now it was behaving like an unreliable machine and the things that happened to it here were frightening. I couldn’t control the incursions of viruses and bacteria, and what they did to me. My body was alien, a flimsy thing that didn’t work as I expected it to.
I found myself heeding Grace’s warnings about dangerous places, dangerous times of day, aware that physical damage here could be permanent; conscious of the frailty of my own flesh and bones, conscious that the medical treatments I used to take for granted would not be made until decades after the Invidi come. In this decade, a broken bone could take months to heal. Bruises remained for weeks.
Don’t think of that. Think of getting back to your own time, where you won’t have to worry—at least, not as much. Think about the telescope.
A fat tube with ungainly legs, it sat waiting for its computer connections to come alive. The lens was in place, and a hell of a job I’d had finding a workshop that would let me grind it. I was still accumulating pieces of hardware in order to motorize the tracking. For the time being, the scope had to sit static on its mount. I opened the toolbox, selected a screwdriver. The mount needed to be more stable.
I stood up again with a grunt, found the page I’d scribbled notes on, sat back down again. Most obliging of amateur astronomy groups to post telescope construction manuals on the infonet. After Grace had laughingly instructed me in basic computer usage, I found there were manuals for everything on the net, from bombs to kitchen renovations. Including the hacking manuals that allowed me to develop my computer skill further.
The floor shuddered slightly as someone rattled the door downstairs. The sound of male voices floated up through the open window.
I stood up, heart beating much faster than it had a few seconds ago. Maybe they want the betting shop, not the Assembly.
The door rattled again.
Maybe if I ignore them, they’ll go away.
“Hey, Maria,” called a familiar voice.
Two
It was Grace’s older son, Vince. Some of the tension in my shoulders relaxed.
He’d probably either be trying to borrow money or looking for a place to hide something illegal. That’s what he used to do when Grace lived with me. At least, I assumed the neatly wrapped packages he used to leave in Grace’s tent were illegal. No reason to hide them otherwise. I lifted one once and it was heavy, the heaviness of metal. I asked Grace if Vince’s group was connected with one of the larger gangs. “I don’t want to know,” was all she would say.
I turned on the weak yellow bulb on the stairs as I went down and looked through the bars. “Hello, Vince.”
He stared at me with his usual sulky expression and jiggled his hands in his pockets as he spoke. In spite of the heat he wore a short blue jacket with the collar turned up, jeans, and a black T-shirt. It infuriated Grace that he always had cash to buy clothes.
“You seen Will?” he said. Will was Grace’s younger son, ten years old. “No, he hasn’t come here. Is he out alone?” I heard my voice sharpen like Grace’s. “Just checking. So you can tell her I asked.” He jerked his head back. “These blokes want to see you.” Four men stood behind Vince. I squinted into the gloom—the local butcher and the bus driver I knew. His bus ran between the Clyde yards south of the motorway and the streets closest to the tent city. The other two men were strangers.
“You said she’d show us the tellyscope,” said the driver. He poked his narrow nose up to the bars and stared up the stairs. The brim of his cap bumped the bar.
“Now?” I said. “And why? It’s just a homemade telescope.”
“That’s what you say.” One of the unknowns grunted from behind the butcher.
“Yeah. We don’t like spies here,” said the other.
I snorted. “Vince, have you been putting this stuff in their heads?”
“Not me.” Vince shot me a look that said it was exactly what he’d done. He kicked the barred door. “I’m off then. If you see the kid, send him home. I’m sick of mucking around looking for him.”
Left alone with the four men, I tried reason.
“Who would I spy for?”
“Migrant Affairs,” the grunter said immediately.
“What would I tell them?”
“Names.” He glanced at the others in triumph.
I felt both exasperated and concerned. “How would I contact them?” The butcher nodded up at the office. “I seen all your radio stuff.” “That’s not a signaling device,” I said. At least, not to anyone on Earth. “Wait a minute.”
I went upstairs, heaved the telescope into my arms. It kept slipping to one side, but I descended crablike down the stairs, placed it on the floor while I unlocked the barred door, picked it up again with a grunt, and shoved past them. Wish I’d gotten around to making wheels for the mount.
Outside the house, I crouched and eased the scope down on the uneven concrete, hoping the dust-proofing on the casing and the screws would hold.
“Look through here,” I panted.
The sky was quite dark now in the east, except for the glow of the city low down. Often I’d get better viewing in the south.
The butcher took first turn to squint through the eyepiece at what looked from here like a stretch of dull black sky.
“Well?” said the driver, leaning so close that I was afraid he’d push the scope over.
The butcher withdrew, rubbing his eye socket. “You wouldn’t think you could see anything, would you?”
“Gimme a look.” The driver pushed him out of the way to see for himself. “Huh, nothing special.” But he sounded almost awed.
“Give me a go, then,” said the grunter.
“Wait yer turn.”
Most of them wouldn’t have seen the stars properly for years. The skies of Sydney were as polluted as any other big city in 2023, and in my five months there, I’d never seen more than Venus just before sunrise or isolated dots that might have been constellations directly overhead, with the naked eye. Many of the out-town residents wouldn’t even have seen the stars on their journey here, especially if they’d been jammed in the holds of boats sneaking past Customs patrols or drugged senseless in luggage compartments of aircraft.
On the rare moments I could see the stars, I loved the twinkling effect. I hadn’t seen it since I was a child, having spent the past twenty-five years mostly in space habitats without surrounding atmosphere.
“My go,” the grunter insisted. He squatted, looked, and became suddenly still. They wouldn’t see half the stars I saw from Earth as a child, because in my time the Invidi had helped clear the pollution from the atmosphere, but even this view was more impressive through the telescope.
“I told you, it’s just a hobby.” I didn’t try to keep the annoyance out of my voice and they all nodded and sidled back, except for the butcher.
“Yeah, well we had to check it out, y’know?” He looked hungrily at the eyepiece and wiped his hands on his apron, which smelled faintly of offal. “Reckon I could have another look sometime?”
“I don’t mind,” I said. “But not tonight, eh? I’m really tired.”
“Right.” He followed the others as they trailed away.
We needed the residents’ goodwill because it wouldn’t be hard to break into this old house. The people who lived in the tents and shacks along the riverbank knew the Assembly worked for them. They kept an eye on the office and we had to trust them, as we couldn’t afford to pay for professional security.
I carried the telescope back inside and up the stairs. It felt a lot heavier now the adrenaline rush had worn off, and my knees wouldn’t stop trembling as I made sure the computer was unplugged and checked the window catches were closed. Put the scope back—now I’m really too tired to do anything. I could push two of the chairs together and sleep on them. Or lie down on the hard green carpet— although the cockroaches made that an unsavory option. I could dump papers on the floor and use the table as a bed— it wouldn’t be the first time. Or I could walk the three hundred meters back down the street and into the maze of paths to my tent.
Vince’s words nagged at me. Had Will run off again? If he had, he’d be more likely to go first to my place. I sighed and locked the door behind me. Tent it is, then.
I’d shared the tent with Grace until recently. She picked me up off the street when I first arrived in the out-town, lost and disoriented. She found me occasional mechanical jobs around the out-town and then the job at the Assembly. And she nursed me through virus-induced illnesses and bacterial infections, and negotiated with the local clinic to supply me with asthma medication on her health card. I owed my survival in this century to her.
When she lost her job packing pallets at a wholesale food distributor a month ago, she moved into her lover Levin’s house, which was across the motorway near Parramatta Road. I chose to stay in the tent, despite Grace’s invitation that I move with her; “Levin’s got an extra room upstairs,” she’d said. Levin’s house backed onto his business and stood in an area with steady electricity and water supply, but Levin and I didn’t get on at all. Grace said she moved in “for Will’s sake.” Levin resented my presence and the fact that I’d known Grace longer than he had. Will and I both resented Grace having anything to do with him at all.
I couldn’t work out what his business involved—the shop front was a neat office, with a sofa for people to wait and a stack of magazines. I’d never seen anyone in there on the few occasions I went past in the bus or visited Grace. Grace said simply that he was a “local entrepreneur.” She made it clear, in her blunt way, that she wasn’t interested in talking about it. I wondered if he was connected with the gangs. Vince called him “Mr. Levin,” and didn’t talk much in his presence; that in itself was enough to make me wary of him. Levin occasionally hinted at some kind of paramilitary past, too, usually by mocking another person’s less-than-expert opinion on firearms or military protocol.
Outside, the street was unlit except for irregular strips of light from windows and doorways. I tripped and stubbed my toe on raised pieces of concrete and potholes. As I left the paved area and moved between the out-town shacks, flickering lamps mostly replaced the electric lights. I could hear voices and see vague moving outlines in the darkness. Somewhere children giggled.
At the second corner down from Creek Road I passed through a yellow rectangle of light from the snack stall there. The woman inside waved her spatula.
“Nothing tonight, love?”
“No thanks,” I said. My stomach at the moment couldn’t tolerate a cup of tea, let alone slabs of potato fried in well-used grease.
“Night, then.” She wiped t
he sweat off her mustache with a red and white checked cloth.
“Good night.”
Her accent was unlike the accents of the majority of out-town residents—they used English as their lingua franca and to gain practice before paying off their fake ID cards and moving into suburban society, but it was not the mother tongue of most of them. Her accent was broad and local, and reminded me of Bill Murdoch.
Bill Murdoch was the chief of Security on Jocasta. He grew up on Earth in this very city, although at the end of this century, and his Earth Standard was as flat and idiosyncratic as the English in this time. Some days I could think about him and the station calmly—when the Invidi come I’ll talk them into sending me back there and then Murdoch and I will pick up where we left off and everything will be fine. More than fine, perhaps, since he made it clear he was interested in more than friendship. He kissed me, after all. We hadn’t done much about that more-than-friendship when I left; meals together when our schedules didn’t clash and occasional off-duty walks in the station’s gardens. Murdoch had been with me on the station for nearly five years, and when I didn’t think about it too much, I could assume he’d be there when I got back.
It was when I did think about it, or in unguarded moments when I listened to local voices, that I was overwhelmed by longing to hear his voice. And consumed by longing to be on the station again. What if Murdoch’s not there when I get back? He might have moved on, decided five months was long enough to wait. Why the hell didn’t I tell him…
I spent many long out-town nights considering what I should have told Murdoch. Plenty of time to consider many things, while the sirens howled down the motorway and rats scrabbled along the roof and the couple next door screamed their nightly abuse at each other before rocking the line of tents with noisy sex.
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