View from Ararat

by Caswell, Brian

  He nods. ‘Of the worst kind. We’re looking at a bug which can survive on inanimate objects for months, maybe years or centuries at a time, in the air or in a vacuum – at temperatures approaching absolute zero at one end of the scale and who knows what at the other end – then cross over to an individual and start spreading like a bushfire through a whole population. How do you kill something like that?’

  Charlie brushes the hair away from her face. It is a trade-mark move. It usually means she has something to say that she is less than pleased to be saying.

  ‘Galen,’ she begins, and pauses. Another bad sign. ‘I don’t think you can. Kill it, I mean.’ She pauses again, then breathes in deeply. ‘Because . . . Well, I don’t think it’s actually alive in the first place.’

  CHARLIE’S STORY

  One of my tutors at the Academy was an old guy from Elton, by the name of Parmantier.

  He was born on Old Earth and came out on a C-ship as a kid. His parents were both miners, and he never lost the ‘down-to-earth’ approach to things. He was a breath of fresh air in the holy halls of the Acad, where everything was so serious and focused all the time.

  I learned a lot from Parmantier. I think I was twelve at the time, maybe younger. I’d just come to the mainland from the school on Carmody Island, and I was enrolled in pre-med. After the nurturing environment of the island, Edison was a pretty threatening place, but I liked Parm’s sessions.

  He had a way of making a point. One time he stood in front of us, took out a small box full of this gross-smelling brown, pasty sludge, and held it up for us all to see.

  ‘In Elton, where I grew up,’ he said, ‘there’s an old saying: “If it smells like shit and it looks like shit, don’t go spreading it on your sandwiches”.’

  He walked up to a couple of kids in the front row and held the box out to them. ‘Want some?’ he asked, and they shook their heads. We all laughed dutifully.

  Then he stuck his fingers into the middle of the stuff, scooped up a couple of digits’ worth and began eating it. When he’d licked his fingers clean, he walked across to me and held out the box. ‘Want some?’ he repeated, and winked at me.

  I dipped my finger in, scooped up a small amount, held my nose and put the sludge in my mouth. The taste was sweet and warm, and much better than most of the meals they served up at the Academy.

  He turned to the rest of the class. ‘Miss Jacklin here has just proved to herself that the only shit in this room is the old saying I just quoted. In Research, the most dangerous thing you can do is judge on appearances. Or accepted wisdom.’

  Parmantier was always doing things like that. Once, he even challenged us to prove that fire wasn’t actually a living thing. ‘It breathes air,’ he said. ‘It converts food to energy. It grows. It even reproduces. By what definition of life is a fire not alive?’

  ‘No cell structure,’ one brave soul suggested.

  ‘Neither has a virus,’ Parm countered, ‘but most would agree that it can be counted as a life form.’

  He looked at me, so I obliged.

  ‘Fire is just a complex chemical reaction. If it’s alive, so is rust.’

  He nodded. ‘Not bad, Miss Jacklin. Not bad. But not enough. If you think about it, we aren’t much more than a complicated series of biochemical reactions ourselves. But you are close.’

  ‘DNA.’

  The voice came from the back, from the kid in the wheelchair who hadn’t said a word since he’d arrived from New G three or four weeks earlier.

  There were all sorts of rumours about why he was paralysed, but that’s all they were. Rumours. No one knew a thing about him. Except maybe Mr P. And he wasn’t saying.

  ‘Mr Sibraa!’ He sounded delighted. ‘Good of you to join us. Would you like to expand?’

  ‘All life as we know it contains strands of DNA. It reproduces through replication of the genetic material. Not simply by burning raw materials.’

  I looked up, and I think that was the first time I really noticed Galen. I mean, I’d seen the wheelchair but I hadn’t actually seen the person sitting in it.

  After that, I made a point of seeing him. And trying to get to know him.

  Which is proving to be a lifetime job.

  I’d been thinking about Parmantier as I went over the GHO report while we were waiting for the results from the C-ship Pandora.

  In Research, the most dangerous thing you can do is judge on appearance . . .

  All the evidence in the report appeared to point to some kind of exotic disease. Even the unofficial name it had been christened with suggested it.

  Crystal Death . . . Like the Black Death, a plague with the potential to spread through a community without mercy. And all our judgments, all our strategies, were based on our centuries of knowledge of contagious infections.

  The clues were there, if we wanted to read them. Galen was halfway there along one track, and I was beginning to travel another.

  But of course by the time we realised what it all meant, it was too late.

  6

  The Wrong Side of the Fence

  NATASSIA’S STORY

  Crystal Death . . .

  It doesn’t have the same terrifying ring as ‘the Plague’, or ‘the Black Death’, or even ‘Scarlet Fever’.

  Crystal Death sounds . . . clean, almost.

  And I guess it was. Clean and inescapably fatal.

  I suppose it began like any other crisis. A word here or there about something someone heard someone else mentioning. A word that didn’t mean all that much at the time.

  The first time I heard anything about it, it wasn’t even mentioned by name. At that stage I don’t suppose more than a few people on the whole planet knew there was anything to give a name to.

  As a junior reporter for Internet, the biggest news-service on the planet, I got all the juicy ‘human interest’ assignments.

  If it wasn’t Eureka, the small mining community on the Fringes that had adopted a herd of Utiina, and planted hundreds of hectares of salt-resistant fodder to keep them fed during the long dry, it was the woman in Roma, whose family claimed to have cloned fifteen generations of the same family pet – a really ugly ginger cat called (what else?) Ginger.

  Aga Briggs her name was, and she explained how her great-grandparents, when they had discovered that no live pets could be brought from Earth on the C-ship, had arranged for frozen cells of the family fur-ball to be transported in one of the cryo-chambers, travelling the thirty-four light-years snuggled next to Mrs Briggs senior . . .

  Not exactly cutting-edge journalism. But at least it was a job. OK, they weren’t the world’s most inspiring assignments, but, like they say in the classics, you have to pay your dues. And I was aiming high.

  Even the legendary Amanda Kostas – whose investigative reports were credited with helping bring about the Revolution in 101 – began by doing the ‘kids and animals’ gig on a regional tube station. Or so my lecturer at the media training centre assured us.

  Kids and animals . . .

  On this occasion, it was kids.

  Two kids in particular.

  It was a story that the network was keen to run with, and that was a really good sign for me.

  Abbey Simeon, the head of special features – and my boss – had heard about the ‘Save the Children’ project on old Earth news reports that had been downloaded from the archive computers on one of the warp-shuttles a few years earlier. And he’d been sitting on the idea for all that time, like a mother hen.

  You could see why.

  They’d been ‘saving’ the children on Earth for centuries, of course. Three or four hundred years of charity and schemes to better the lot of the orphans or the children of ‘those less fortunate’. But this particular idea had a local twist that Abbey – and therefore the network – figured might give it ‘legs’ on the magaz
ine segments and the interactive weepies.

  In years gone by, charity meant handouts of food and clothing, or medical supplies for areas where the worst poverty existed, or scholarships and access to Research Funding for gifted kids who might otherwise be lost to the world of higher education. But it was all a bit like standing on the seashore and holding up a hand to stop the waves. For every kid saved, millions still suffered.

  The only real solution was to change the way the world economy worked. And no one was feeling quite that charitable.

  What ‘Save the Children’ did was to give a few astronomically lucky kids a chance at a real future. The money donated was used to pay the C-ship passages of orphans and the families willing to foster them, so that they could afford to come to Deuc and start a new life. The children were chosen by wealthy sponsors from among the poorest in the world, and the whole scheme had been really well marketed.

  It had caught the imagination of thousands of donors, and the first kids and their new families had been packed in ice and sent off on the C-ship Pandora in 2332ad Earth standard – forty years ago our time. Which meant they were due to arrive imminently.

  It was my job to choose a couple of likelies and build them up into a media event. It’s the oldest trick in the book: take the general and make it personal. Give the story a face. Especially a cute, eight-year-old face.

  That was why I chose Élita and Ramón. Eight and ten, sister and brother, and really cute – especially Élita. At least, if the ‘Save the Children’ file was to be believed.

  Julio Santos, their father, had been a worker in a Costa Rican ore-processing plant, and their mother, Maria, had cleaned houses for the plant manager and some of the top brass.

  Until the ‘accident’.

  The kids had a baby brother, too, Francisco. He was two, and a pretty sick little kid. Which wasn’t particularly unusual in Puerto Limon, where they lived.

  The report was a bit sketchy on exactly what happened, but the parents set off on the local flyer one day to take the kid for medical treatment, and they never came home.

  In that part of the world the machines they used on the economy hops were usually the ones that they’d retired from service in the wealthier parts of the world, where they placed a higher premium on the lives of their passengers. So mechanical failure was a distinct possibility. Or human error. You didn’t choose to pilot flyers on the Costa Rican charity circuit if you could snare a real flying job.

  Then, of course, it might not have been a crash. They were also pretty big on hijacks and random terrorism down there.

  Whatever . . .

  The end result was a perfect case for ‘Save the Children’ – two orphaned kids, and the plant manager’s wealthy wife as an interested sponsor – which translated into a big-break story for me.

  Except for a couple of small problems.

  One fact the file forgot to mention was that the particular foster family the program found for the pair weren’t just passengers on the Pandora, they were crew. Which meant that instead of sleeping away the whole trip in stasis, they’d spend eight Earth years running the ship, as part of the six-crew roster.

  It’s the only way they can get people to run the ship for what would be a lifetime for any one crew. Each crew does its eight years, then returns to freeze-sleep for the rest of the trip. For which they’re paid very well, and they arrive with enough to set themselves up in the new world. Not a bad deal really.

  Of course, even eight years is a long time, and the only way they could make it work was to crew the ship with entire families. Keep life as normal as possible.

  So my cute little eight-year-old was now sixteen – Earth standard – and her brother Ramón was eighteen, which was only two years younger than me, when you did the conversions.

  Next year they could both be voting for the President, so they weren’t exactly a couple of small and helpless innocents, saved from the cruel grip of poverty.

  I could see my story crashing down in flames.

  But I’d done all the background, and Abbey was behind it a hundred per cent. And Abbey didn’t like to be disappointed.

  It was too late to back out. So I looked for a new spin to put on the story – which was when I realised the one huge positive in the whole mess.

  You can ask a teenager the sort of questions that a little kid couldn’t possibly answer. About what it’s really like being poor on Earth, and what it meant to be given a second chance at life, through other people’s kindness.

  Suddenly this story didn’t seem such a disaster after all. We could still use the old footage from the ‘Save the Children’ file, to provide the ‘cuteness’ factor, but now we had the ‘before and after’, and a couple of (hopefully) intelligent talking heads for people to relate to.

  It might just work . . .

  Except for the second problem.

  For over two hundred years, since the arrival of the first C-ship, the new arrivals had always been shuttled down to the landing field just outside New Geneva.

  Always.

  Until this time.

  There was no explanation, just a terse announcement from a minor immigration official that the passengers would be in quarantine at the old Wieta Reservation, west of Edison, for a little over a month, and that there would be no interviews – in fact, no contact of any kind – until the end of that period.

  No reasons were given and none of the questions from the assembled newshounds were answered in anything but double- talk, but the rumour doing the rounds was that there was some kind of epidemic on the mother-planet at the time of the C-ship’s launch, and that this was a precaution.

  I checked the files later, and I couldn’t find any reference to something so dangerous that it would cause the Council to act with such speed and heavy-handedness. It worried me a bit, but there wasn’t much anyone was going to be able to do, so I filed what I had with the subeditor, with an instruction to keep it on ‘hold’ – a standard procedure when you were waiting for confirmation of a source or clearance from above for the release of sensitive information.

  Then I phoned Abbey for a new assignment.

  I managed to talk him into running the story in a couple of months, when the subjects could meet with me. It wasn’t hard to sell him on the idea – considering we’d then also have an exclusive on how the new settlers responded to being locked away like prisoners, after travelling for a lifetime to get here.

  I was already writing my opening comments in my mind, as I headed off to interview a man who claimed he’d discovered evidence that he’d been accidentally swapped at birth with President Müller – whose real name, he claimed, was Renos Kohl.

  You might say that my mind wasn’t on the job at hand.

  I had an instinct about the story of the two kids who’d been lifted from grinding poverty to a world where freedom and the future were open to them, only to have that freedom snatched from them before they even touched the soil of their new home. It was powerful stuff.

  President Müller wasn’t about to let anyone on his staff talk to a junior Internet reporter about his being swapped, sixty years ago, with someone called Kohl in a maternity-unit mix-up.

  The enforced detention of innocent people, on the other hand, was a story with ‘legs’. Someone would have to respond on behalf of the government. And that meant prime-time coverage.

  I was going to make my two orphans into national identities, and they were going to move me beyond kids, animals and delusional flakes into serious reporting.

  Of course, I had no idea just how big the story really was. How could I? No one knew. At least, no one who was telling.

  And certainly no one on the wrong side of the fence they erected almost overnight around a small section of the old Elokoi Reserve, in the flatlands, about 30 clicks west of Edison.

  RAMÓN’S STORY

  If you c
ome from Callas, there are two things that you never forget. The permanent hunger like knives in your stomach, and the smell from the separation plants.

  Always the smell.

  My sister Élita, who knows a little bit about everything, says it was the sulphur mixing with gases that they had banned for more than a century in most other parts of the world. But Callas wasn’t ‘most other parts of the world’. In our small corner of the planet few of the normal rules applied.

  So after Callas anything was mejo . . . an improvement – even the crowded holding-camp we found ourselves in, when they finally let us off the C-ship.

  Thirty thousand people were living in what was really a small town of portable buildings, which the government had erected for us on the coastal flatland 30 or so kilometres outside of Edison. The rumours said that it had taken them only a couple of weeks to turn a barren plain into the scene that met us as we stepped off the shuttle and into the unknown.

  From the beginning there was a sense of confusion in the camp. Nothing had been mentioned about quarantine before we left Earth. The authorities assured us it was just ‘precautionary’, that once the forty days were up, we would be transported to New G, ready to begin our new life. But there was still the uncertainty.

  ‘Precautionary’ against what? Nobody was talking, and we didn’t have the power or the organisation to force them to answer our questions.

  Then, of course, there was the boredom.

  It’s not that there was nothing to do. They’d set up any number of activities to keep the inmates occupied. It’s just that it was too hot to think about doing anything. If they had to choose somewhere to hide us away from the rest of the citizens, they picked a great place.

  The flatlands are as near to desert as I ever want to get. During the day, temperatures can reach above forty, baking the earth, and driving winds sear in across the mountains from the desert to the west.

  The huts were air-conditioned and well insulated, but the moment you stepped outside . . .

  Well, if you were smart, you didn’t.