Earth and Air

by Janet Edwards

  “That story Felipe told us was about a genuine accident though, wasn’t it?”

  Chaos, what was I supposed to say now? Crozier wanted me to calm Wren down, but I couldn’t lie to her. The truth was that the ruins of Earth’s ancient cities were hazardous places.

  I should have kept choking on my toasted wafer. That way I could have escaped this conversation by portalling to a Hospital Earth America casualty unit for medical treatment. Wren was still looking at me, waiting for an answer.

  I groaned. “You heard Felipe say that accident happened on Paris Coeur Main Dig Site. You have to be at least 18, and part of an accredited dig team or university class, before you’re allowed entry to the main dig sites. School history clubs like ours are only allowed on fringe dig sites, and those are much safer.”

  “They’re much safer,” said Wren, “but accidents do happen.”

  “Yes, they do, but mostly silly, trivial things.”

  “Mostly.” Wren pounced on the word, making it an accusation.

  I groaned again. “There’s sometimes what the fringe dig sites call a significant incident. It’s usually a tag leader getting in trouble, by being caught in something like a collapsing building. I’ve been involved in half a dozen or so of those, but remember I’ve been a tag leader since I was 13. Other jobs on the dig site, such as running a heavy lift sled, are far safer.”

  “I planned to be a tag leader like you one day but ...” Wren shook her head. “I’m nothing like you, Jarra. Everyone talks about how brilliant you are on a dig site, while I’m so useless that I can’t even walk properly in an impact suit, and yesterday terrified me.”

  Wren was comparing herself to me and feeling inadequate. I remembered feeling the same way about Felipe. Meiling had pointed out the obvious to me then, and now I needed to do the same for Wren.

  “You’ve only been on a dig site for a day or two, Wren. I’ve been on every school history club trip for the last six years. Stop and think about what that means. I’m bound to look brilliant compared to you. It’s hardly surprising that I look good compared to the other Seventeens as well, because I’ve twice as much experience as them.”

  I paused. “You shouldn’t be comparing yourself to me now, but to the way I was on my first trip to a dig site. Believe me, I was utterly useless back then, falling over my own feet in my impact suit, and so small that I had to sit on a cushion to reach the controls on a heavy lift sled.”

  “But you never wanted to give up and run away,” said Wren sadly.

  Her face had a blotchy look as if she was trying not to cry. Her shoulders were slumped in depression. I knew exactly how she was feeling, just how beaten and defeated, because I’d felt all those things myself six years ago. I was feeling them right now as well. Every time I thought about that summer, and especially one particular day, the emotions came flooding back as if it was happening to me all over again.

  Chaos, I had a horrible feeling that the best way for me to help Wren was to tell her about that day six years ago. I didn’t know if I could do that. Once I started talking, she’d ask questions, and I’d end up having to discuss all the embarrassing private details that I’d never shared with anyone before. Even Crozier only knew part of what had been going on in my head back then. I hesitated, gnawing on my bottom lip.

  Wren gave me a confused look. “Is something wrong?”

  No, I couldn’t share a lot of emotional stuff with a random 12-year-old girl who might laugh, sneer, and repeat the joke to the whole history club. The problem was that if I didn’t share these things now, then Wren was going to leave.

  I looked sadly at the remaining piece of toasted wafer in my hand, sighed, and dumped it on my plate. “When I was 11 years old, on my first trip with the history club, I did exactly the same thing as you.”

  “What do you mean?” Wren stared at me in bewilderment.

  “I told Crozier that I wanted to leave.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Wren stared at me in shock. “That can’t be true. You would never have told Crozier you wanted to leave.”

  “It is true.” I hesitated. “Anything you say to me about being scared of crashing planes or lasers is private, and I’ll never repeat it to anyone. This story is private too. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right. Well.” I gulped down a mouthful of Fizzup. “The school history club was here at New York Fringe that summer too. I was only 11, everyone else was at least three years older than me, and they didn’t want me on the trip because of the state of the history club finances.”

  Wren looked puzzled. “What club finances?”

  “Crozier doesn’t worry the junior history club with details of the club finances,” I said, “but they’re vitally important. When we come to a dig site like this, the Dig Site Federation charges the history club a lot of credits for the use of their accommodation dome, plus an extra payment per person to cover things like food and use of equipment.”

  “I thought Hospital Earth paid for those things.”

  “Hospital Earth only pays the history club expenses for two weeks on a dig site each year,” I said. “If the history club is going to spend the whole long summer break on a dig site, and make extra trips in the spring and autumn as well, then we have to find enough valuable artefacts to cover the rest of the costs.”

  Wren’s puzzled look had changed to a frown now, so I hurriedly reassured her. “There’s no need for you to be concerned about the club finances, because right now they’re in a very healthy state. Six years ago, things were very different. The history club hadn’t found any good artefacts for quite a while. No valuable artefacts meant no bounty payments coming in, and the spring break trip to London Fringe Dig Site turned into an utter disaster when some nardle knocked a whole glass of Fizzup over the controls of a hideously expensive sensor sled.”

  “Oh chaos,” said Wren. “I knocked a glass of Fizzup over my lookup last year. It never worked again.”

  “Fizzup is just as lethal for banks of delicate sensor equipment as for lookups. The Dig Site Federation covers the cost of equipment damaged in dig site accidents, but given the rules forbidding taking food or drink on a sensor sled ...”

  Wren finished the sentence for me. “The Dig Site Federation made the history club pay for the repairs?”

  “Yes. It was a terrifyingly large bill, so the club was barely left with enough credits to cover the summer trip to New York Fringe. We all knew that if we didn’t find some good artefacts that summer, then the history club could be stuck with the minimum two weeks on dig sites for years to come.”

  I sighed. “Everyone was worried about what that would mean for our history careers. We’d still be able to get places to study pre-history at University Earth, but we’d be in classes with students who’d had far more experience working on dig sites. However hard we tried to catch up, it would harm our chances of ending up as professional archaeologists when we graduated.”

  Wren nodded.

  “The others felt that bringing me on the trip was a waste of precious credits. Crozier insisted on them training me like any other newcomer, but they made it clear they thought I was just a useless burden.”

  I broke off to have another gulp of Fizzup. These things had happened six years ago. It shouldn’t hurt to talk about them now, but somehow it did. I had to force myself to keep going.

  “I told myself that I’d show the rest of the club how good I was, and worked as hard as I could in training, but the other first-timers were all 14-year-olds so I was at a huge disadvantage. You’ve already discovered how heavy impact suits are, and how awkward it is walking in them, let alone trying to run.”

  “Yes,” said Wren eagerly. “Alund and Landon are bigger and stronger than me, so they don’t find it as hard.”

  “I had just the same problem. I was always the slowest in the impact suit training exercises. When we started learning how to use a heavy lift sled, things got even worse. The others kept laughing at me, ca
lling me names, and making jokes about me sitting on a cushion to reach the controls.”

  “This is why you take the club captain’s job of stopping bullying so seriously, isn’t it?” asked Wren. “You know how horrible it can be.”

  “Yes. I reached the point where I couldn’t take any more, and I went to talk to Crozier.”

  I paused. I wasn’t going to repeat any of my despairing, emotional outpourings to Crozier. It wouldn’t make much sense if I did. I’d no idea how much Crozier had learned from my jumbled sentences back then. Possibly nothing more than the obvious fact I was deeply upset.

  I summed up my whole outburst in one simple sentence. “I told Crozier that I was wasting his time and the history club’s credits, and wanted to leave. He said that he didn’t let anyone leave until they’d thought their decision over for at least twenty-four hours.”

  “That’s exactly what he said to me,” murmured Wren.

  I managed a fleeting smile. “Crozier is always repeating himself. He says that some of us may have heard his lectures multiple times already, but new club members need to hear them as well.”

  “So what made you change your mind and stay?”

  This was precisely what I’d expected to happen. Wren wouldn’t be satisfied until she’d heard every detail of this story.

  “I went out on the dig site as usual the next morning, and sat on a transport sled watching the club team 1 excavating the remains of a residential building. It seemed a perfectly simple excavation. Most of the walls had collapsed, so there was a heap of rubble inside the building. Sensors showed a potentially hazardous storage tank to the left of the building, which only had a thin layer of rubble on top of it, but there was no need to go near that area.”

  I sighed. “Walden was team 1 tag leader back then. He spent a couple of hours tagging rubble and getting the heavy lift sleds to shift it out of the building, and then he found a strange, glittering ornamental globe. It was when he picked it up that everything went dreadfully wrong.”

  “The globe was something dangerous?” asked Wren.

  “No, but Walden was in a hurry to get a good look at it in the sunlight, so he moved backwards out of the shadow of the walls. He’d forgotten about the storage tank, and put his foot on a small metal hatch that was rotten with rust and age. That broke under his weight, and he dropped straight down into the tank.”

  “But surely Walden would have had a lifeline beam locked on to his suit? Why didn’t that stop him falling?”

  “I never found out whether the boy in charge of the lifeline beam wasn’t paying attention or did the wrong thing in panic,” I said, “but Crozier moved him to a different job after that.”

  I waved a dismissive hand. “Anyway, Walden fell into the tank, and all chaos broke out. Crozier and the rest of the history club came running over to help. New York Fringe Dig Site Command was getting Mayday signals from Walden’s impact suit, so they started talking to us too. Walden had blacked out for a few seconds, but then he woke up and started screaming about his leg hurting and how dark it was in there.”

  Wren made a faint distressed sound. Perhaps I’d made a mistake telling her this story, but I couldn’t stop now.

  “Crozier leant over the hole to run tests with a hand sensor. That showed Walden had fallen into an old fuel storage tank. The fuel had mostly evaporated or leaked away over the centuries, but the tank was full of fumes. Walden’s impact suit had detected the fumes, and automatically switched to recycling its air, so we thought we had plenty of time to get him out of there.”

  I grimaced. “We were wrong. Dig Site Command had just decided to send a specialist rescue team to help us, when Walden started coughing. Impact suits are incredibly good at protecting you from most hazards, but something sharp and pointed can get through them. The broken metal hatch had some needle-like fragments around the edge that had punctured the leg of Walden’s suit.”

  Wren was leaning towards me now, her hands gripping the edge of the table. “The air recycling wouldn’t work with a punctured suit. Walden would be losing the internal oxygen reserves and getting poisonous fumes in exchange.”

  “Exactly. There’s always the possibility of finding somewhere with bad air on a dig site, so standard excavation equipment includes packs of oxygen booster cells. Crozier lowered a pack down to Walden, but he’d already passed out. We needed to get help to him quickly, but cutting a way into the storage tank with a laser would have made the fuel fumes explode.”

  I paused. “The only option was to knock away the dangerous shards of metal from the edge of the existing hole, and lower someone else into the storage tank to fit an oxygen booster cell to Walden’s suit. There was one big problem though. The hole was very narrow. Walden was a tall, thin boy like Radley, so he’d managed to fall down there, but our other tag leaders were too broad-shouldered to follow him.”

  I shrugged. “I was the smallest person there, so I volunteered to go into the storage tank. Crozier wasn’t happy about letting me do it, but he didn’t have any choice in the circumstances. Once I was in there, I just had to fit an oxygen booster cell to Walden’s suit, spray sealant on the damaged suit area, and set his suit controls to flush the toxins from his air system. The rescue team arrived soon after that, and used air pumps to clear the fumes from the tank before cutting a way in.”

  “Ah.” Wren made a satisfied noise and settled back into her seat again. “So you saved Walden’s life.”

  I winced. “Crozier tells this story to the history club on the last evening of every summer break. He starts with a lecture on how much we’ve learnt during the summer and says he considers us all experienced members of the history club now. Then he says he expects us to welcome future new members and pass on the knowledge we’ve learned. He finishes up by telling the story of that accident, and saying something deeply meaningful about how the new member you help today could be the person who saves your life tomorrow.”

  I shuddered. “I find it horribly embarrassing. Crozier insists on telling people about the accident, because it’s the ideal example to underline his point, but I’ve got special permission to go and hide in my room while he does it.”

  “Why do you find it so embarrassing?” asked Wren. “Most people would be proud of saving someone’s life.”

  That reminded me of Gradin boasting about the people he’d rescued. I had a wistful moment, thinking that I’d never have to tell him he was the best pilot in humanity again. Inevitably, that wistfulness turned to anger at what his recklessness had cost me. I’d only been a couple of weeks away from completing all the required elements for my pilot’s licence, and now it would be years before I managed it, if I ever managed it at all.

  I wouldn’t get a ride in an aircraft again this year. The history club would be spending the autumn break at Barcelona Fringe Dig Site, which didn’t have a professional pilot at the moment. Next year, I’d be too fully occupied with my Pre-history Foundation course to do more than beg an occasional flying lesson from Dig Site Federation pilots. The following three years of my main degree course would be even more pressured.

  The brutal truth was that it would probably be at least five years before I had another chance to get my licence. I had to accept that, forget all about Gradin and flying, and focus on helping the new members of the history club. Right now, that specifically meant helping Wren. She’d asked why I found the story of the tank rescue so embarrassing. That was difficult to explain, but I did my best.

  “It’s embarrassing because Crozier makes it sound as if I was terrified, but I nobly overcame my fear to go into that tank and save a fellow club member. It wasn’t like that at all. The truth is that I wasn’t being noble or feeling scared when I went to help Walden. I was screaming furious at the way people had called me a useless infant, and grabbing my chance to show everyone they’d been wrong to laugh at me.”

  “Oh.” Wren paused to think about that. “I can understand you feeling so angry that it drowned out your fear.”
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br />   “I did have one panicky moment when I was first lowered into the tank,” I confessed. “That was really ridiculous. I had an oxygen booster cell fitted to my suit, and it was set to recycle air, so I knew I’d have no trouble breathing. I had lights strapped to my head and my wrists, so the darkness wasn’t a problem. It was just that I saw what looked like a lot of other people down there, and had a nardle moment when I thought the tank was haunted, but it turned out to just be my own reflection in the metal sides of the tank.”

  “It sounds as creepy as one of Dezi’s paintings,” said Wren.

  “Not quite that creepy. Anyway, the rescue changed everything, so I stayed with the history club. Not because I’d proved my worth to the other members, but because I’d proved my worth to me.”

  Wren didn’t say anything, but her expression seemed to show that made sense to her.

  “Oh and the experts decided that Walden’s globe was an interesting example of ancient glass techniques, so there was a bounty payment that solved the history club’s financial problems.”

  I looked at Wren anxiously. “You mustn’t repeat this story to the others. Everyone knows about the rescue, but not about people calling me names, or me telling Crozier I wanted to leave. I told you those things to show you that six years ago I was exactly the same as you are now.”

  “I understand,” she said.

  “I’ve learned a huge amount since my first trip with the history club. If you keep coming on trips, then you’ll learn a huge amount too.”

  “I understand,” Wren repeated. There was a long pause before she spoke again in a brisker voice. “Are you going to be training me this morning?”

  I grinned. “Yes. You’d better go and put your impact suit on now.”

  Wren stood up and headed out of the hall. I’d won. She was going to give excavation work another try.

  I slumped across the table in relief for a minute, then pulled up my hood and sealed my suit. I’d left my suit comms on, so I heard Milo talking on the team circuit.