by Karen Lord
I heard about the petition for provincial status and how it affected Dllenahkh. It was all very thrilling, but I felt a twinge of guilt at my enjoyment when I looked at Grace Delarua and saw how she was torn between galactic and personal affairs. She stayed suspicious and talked trivia like a pro whenever I was around, but I could tell she was thinking hard, trying to measure my character.
On the day that I pushed my aerolight out onto the road and got ready to trundle it to a stretch with less forest and more open sky, she made a decision. She gave me a small bag.
‘What’s that?’ I asked her pleasantly.
‘Why, only lunch,’ she replied sweetly, and while she was holding my eyes with a not-quite-innocent smile, she put two fingers into her comm’s wristband, drew out a datachip, and dropped it deliberately into the lunch bag.
‘I don’t know if you can get to Punartam,’ she said, ‘and I don’t know if you can get Rafi to Punartam, but if you do, give that to him, and it will get him to where he needs to go.’
Lunch and a datachip. Many an apocalypse has been started by less, my friends. I took my leave, blessed the pilots for their favour in permitting me the freedom of their airspace and started to wing myself home. I was done with the Lyceum. I was ready to make some decisions. Ready to stand up to my padr. Ready to return to Punartam.
*
Stage One personnel always said that quarantine was like birth, a rite of passage best shrouded in amnesia. They also said it was easier to handle at a young age, and perhaps it was for the body, but for an unprepared mind it was a horrible shock, especially if you were one of that tiny percentage who did remember the initial regimen of blood-scrubbing, lung-flushing and skin-irradiation. Even for the majority, it felt like emerging from a long session of nightmarish drowning to float for a while, weak but peaceful, on the surface of life.
Everyone remembered the food: bland, mushy and designed to do terrible things to the digestion. The staff did show some remorse for that. Something about the nanotechnology no longer being readily available, requiring a return to earlier techniques of regulating alimentary flora. It became tradition to curse Zhinuvian transport price mark-up at mealtimes.
Rafi got through it because he knew it would come to an end, and he would only have to do it once.
Some architect, steeped in aesthetics but unburdened by a knowledge of human psychology, had designed the quarantine area so that the dining and recreation room looked onto a similar room for the seasoned travellers via a transparent wall. A few were heartless enough to wave cheerfully at the sick, glum faces of the first-timers. For a second trip taken within ten years you needed just a quick and painless booster procedure . . . but only if you had the nanotech. Rafi panicked at first when he heard that an essential part of the process was missing, but the medics reassured him that a brief session with the quarantine specialists at his destination would put him on the same level as the most widely travelled soldier in Galactic Patrol.
‘For a small fee, in galactic credit,’ they added in more muted tones as a disclaimer.
One of the medics teased him. ‘You weren’t so keen on getting the procedure when you first got here.’
‘What?’ Rafi asked. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You kept saying there was a mistake and you wanted to go back. Cold feet. It’s normal . . . nothing to be ashamed of.’
Rafi frowned hard and tried to think through the drug fog. Why would he want to go back?
‘But don’t worry. Your friend completed his booster a few days ago and he’s waiting for you on the other side so you can travel on to Punartam together.’
Rafi’s sense of self-preservation, honed by years living with his father and his shorter but still educational time at the Lyceum, told him to say nothing until he had a better idea of what was going on.
Once he got to the recovery stage when there were fewer drugs and less malaise, he began to discover the awe in the experience. The medical rooms and surgeries were cold-white and precisely arranged; the medics in their hooded overalls, masks and goggles looked like ghosts, or maybe alien angel midwives to some pristine afterlife. The quarantined travellers, the patients, wore loose, sterile shifts that were frequently changed and discarded as Cygnus Beta was peeled away from them, squeezed out of them, extracted and excreted.
He slept on a windowless ward where active privacy screens blurred each personal space, and it made him long for something distant to stretch his vision and colours to stimulate his brain. On the other side of the wall, where decontaminated travellers waited for their onward transport, greenery flourished in odd but beautiful configurations caused by the low gravity. It made him jealous. He asked the information manual in his ward if there was an observation gallery and was directed to the common room’s massive, full-wall monitor which tracked different views: the surface of Cygnus Beta, an oblique and carefully filtered glimpse sunwards and the cool black and bright glitter of space. It was beautiful, but . . .
‘Is that it?’ he asked in disappointment.
The common room manual responded automatically with a gentle but firm lecture on the cost of viewports and the hazards of agoraphobia and large-scale panic in hallucination-prone patients on medication. Rafi wandered away after about three minutes.
He returned to counting the days. There had been almost a week of semi-coma, a few days of slow recovery and then an intense three days of rebuild therapy. When he emerged from that, shaky but feeling human again, he was hit by an unexpected allergic reaction to something on the post-build menu which caused him to spend about a day and a half unable to keep anything down. The medics were a little worried about that one, worried enough that Rafi wondered if someone had made a mistake. They monitored him for a few more days before releasing him to the Other Side. He was assigned a tiny sleep compartment in a massive grid of infinite bunk-beds, and there too was his small allotment of luggage, newly decontaminated, in the attached foot locker. He went immediately for Nasiha’s comm – his comm now – and turned it on. A deluge of messages flashed across the screen and he smiled at the names with a mixture of fondness, guilt and worry. Aunt Grace was there of course, several times. Serendipity once or twice – strange, but pleasant. Nothing from Nasiha, which made him frown because she had been the one to fit the fresh chip into the comm for his use and set it to his ID. There was a message from his mother which made his heart beat with a sick heaviness. He promised himself he would open it last. Then, at the very top, there was the last name he expected to see. He opened it and listened.
‘My dear Moo, this is to wish you an early happy birthday. Meet me at the observation gallery as soon as you get out of quarantine. We’ll celebrate!’
‘What?’ Rafi went hunting through the earlier messages for enlightenment. The messages from Aunt Grace made little sense at first. They were cheerful. They were filled with advice and encouragement for his first space trip. Not once did she chastise him for dashing off without warning or order him to return to Cygnus Beta as soon as possible. A familiar and unwelcome feeling came over him. This was the language of their correspondence in the days when his father might overhear. It was the kind of message that belonged to unlocked datachips, public forums, megaphones and sky-high billboards. Someone was listening in.
He switched off the comm and lay for a while in a shivering cold sweat. After a few minutes, he calmed down, stripped off his patient shift and dressed himself in his own clothes. He put the comm on his wrist and his belongings back in the footlocker, and off he went to find the observation gallery.
He was glad to be seeing a familiar face and doubly glad it was Ntenman. In spite of the fact that he would be legally an adult in a few days, he was weary enough to let someone else take charge of his confusing, messy and dangerous life for at least a little while.
Part Two
Punartam
Chapter Seven
The nights of Punartam are unique and the days are intense. The seasons, regardless of latitude, are biza
rre, extreme and predictable only by highly specialised climatologists using complex models. As a result, the flora is simple, tenacious, short-lived and frighteningly fecund, and the fauna is cautious and canny, omnivorous and expert at hiding. Some people claim that if you spend enough time on Punartam, you will acquire the characteristics of one of those two groups in an attempt to cope with the most variable and stressful environment that ever tested a circadian rhythm.
The culture of Punartam is . . . complicated. At the level of greatest simplicity, it is no more than a colony of Ntshune born out of war and necessity. This bare, uncomplicated fact is a remnant of the untidy truth. Ntshune and Punartam have their own Dark Ages in which the causes and consequences of the Great Galactic War were buried by mutual will and shame as well as by circumstance.
Punartam’s younger generation is strongly influenced by Ntshune culture, which may seem counterintuitive unless you consider how many Ntshune choose Punartam for their last year of childhood. There is a tradition that challenge, sacrifice and symbolic death are required to attain to adult status, but that is not the only reason. Punartam still offers the best pool of raw Wallrunning talent in the galaxy, and many a matriarch sends her daughter-successor to Punartam in the hope of gaining fresh blood for her string of teams, or even the lesser ranks of her dynasty.
Older Punarthai of the ruling class fall into one of two categories. There is an anti-Ntshune, pro-Zhinuvian faction which runs a rogue InterPlanetary Wallrunning League in defiance of the standard Ntshune-based Galactic League. The leagues’ teams never compete, except for a few optimistically labelled ‘friendlies’ on special occasions, but the battle for sponsorship, audience share, media attention and pure, raw, ugly celebrity is brutal, bloody and unceasing.
The other pole of power is centred on the Academes. Ecumenical in outreach, they represent the intelligentsia of every planet, who comport themselves as if they are above the petty pride and crass commercialism of the Wallrunning leagues (though it does no harm to enjoy a match or two, purely as entertainment, of course). Their focus is knowledge, their currency is communication and the Sadiri pilots and their mindships do very well as the swiftest conduits of weightless, intangible, priceless information. Each Academe has its own spire to the Equatorial Ring, stretching their topless towers beyond the very atmosphere. Each also connects to a system of linked underground reservoirs. These are less visible but equally essential and large enough to accommodate a brace of mindships coming in and going out. Matter and mind, material and memory, up the spaceline to scant air and naked vacuum, or down to drown in the hidden waters of cool, damp caves.
*
Rafi ripped the audioplug from his ear and tossed it onto the table; it went further than he expected and almost landed in a nearby cactus. ‘This idiot’s going off again.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Ntenman vaguely, distracted by his own morning’s media, a curious little lens that rode his eyebrow like a half-monocle and projected images directly to his retina.
‘This Punartam guide. It’s always wandering from the point.’
‘If you don’t like it, choose a guide from another Academe. There are plenty.’
Rafi grimaced and admitted, ‘This one’s the easiest. There aren’t many in Standard Cygnian.’
‘Um,’ Ntenman muttered, an utterance of sympathy as profound as it was lengthy.
They were in a bubble, quite literally, shielded from the full Punartam experience within the transition biodome for visitors from Cygnus Beta. The structure was a temporary extension within the recreational Terran biodome in the heart of the metropolitan range. The location was unusual – most quarantine areas were orbital or rural, carefully distant from high urban density – but it had become a necessary measure after Cygnian quarantine standards dipped below galactic requirements. So claimed, and declaimed, the Punartam guide.
It was a scenic prison. Beyond the spare, clean dormitories, which resembled a rack of morgue shelves even more than the facilities on Stage One, there was room to wander and enjoy an eclectic mix of Terran habitats. The semi-arid desert habitat had been purposely expanded as the closest match to the climate of the surrounding boroughs of the Metropolis, and the view from the open-air lounge showed palms, succulents and prickly things with tiny, vivid blossoms.
Ntenman didn’t have to be there, but he was and Rafi was grateful for it because he was incredibly bored. The most interesting new thing was the reduced gravity. He found himself walking with a bounce. Ntenman gave him a look that begged him to remember dignity, but he didn’t care. The lightness even took the slight slouch out of Ntenman’s back so he looked less like a floppy joker and more like an elegant, heroic moko jumbie. Rafi felt so buoyed by the change that he immediately asked if there were any places nearby where they could do a couple of Wallruns, just for practice, but Ntenman shut that down brutally by telling him he had no right running anything until he learned to walk properly again.
It was as if the old Tinman had been replaced with an elder version, more sober, more critical and much less inclined to tolerate nonsense, far less instigate it. Now, in the light of the biodome’s artificial morning, he looked tired and preoccupied. Rafi examined his features and noted the small crease of worry between his eyebrows.
‘Why are you so miserable?’ Rafi complained.
Ntenman looked at him, glared at him in fact, and said nothing for a while, but eventually he snapped, ‘What are you going to do while you’re here? How long do you plan to stay on Punartam?’
At first Rafi began to laugh because those were the two questions he had heard on Stage One as Ntenman organised their passage on a mindship. He heard them again when the ship docked with the Equatorial Ring and they were awakened with the rest of the human cargo to face a thorough examination by the Punartam Planetary Guard. Down the spaceline and into a second quarantine, and again the staff asked the same two questions – politely, almost conversationally, but they asked. He thought Ntenman was making sport, but no – he was dead serious. Rafi felt his scalp prickle and his hands go cold.
‘I don’t know.’
He truly did not, and it frightened him to acknowledge how much he had been ignoring reality. Unopened messages still sat in his comm’s memory, messages that he could not answer until he breached the Cygnian atmosphere once more. He had a datacharm (still locked) and a datachip (not yet accessed) and an audioplug provided by the biodome staff which had all but drowned him in information, much of it not immediately useful. So much stuff – he had no idea where to start. It had been easier to let Ntenman do the steering and tell him what to do, where to go, what to expect.
‘Good. As long as you realise that. As long as you realise you don’t have room to be . . . frivolous about all this.’
Rafi gaped for a moment then burst out laughing as Ntenman’s anxiety suddenly made sense. ‘That’s not me you’re talking about. You’re scared. You’re scared. Why?’
Ntenman slid the media lens carefully from his brow and rested it gently on the table. Suspicious of such studied calmness, Rafi eased out of range, but he received nothing more than another sharp glare. ‘We need to build some credit,’ Ntenman stated. ‘Too long at too low a level and they’ll ship you back to Cygnus Beta.’
‘You know where we can find work?’
‘Work?’ Ntenman said, bemused and scornful. ‘We want credit, not pay.’
‘Well, how will we eat if we don’t have pay?’ Rafi asked, irritated.
‘Moo, do us both a favour and put back in the audioplug. Learn to love the voice of the Academes because I will not be explaining everything to you at every step. Pay is for survival; credit is for living. I’m here, and I want to live.’
‘You’ve been here before?’ Rafi said, curiosity and accusation making it a question.
‘Yes.’ His reply sounded hesitant. ‘Yes,’ he said again, more firmly. ‘I’ve survived here. I even gained some credit. It was almost a year before my padr got them to send me back.�
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Rafi noticed a slight difference in the timbre of his voice that suggested Ntenman was not referring to the usual authorities. ‘Them?’
‘My other parentals . . . or they would be if they acknowledged me. “Mother” and “stepfathers” are not quite correct, but they’re titles you’ll understand until you can recite that Punartam guide in your sleep.’
Rafi’s heart skipped painfully. Many of the Lyceum’s students were half-orphaned or abandoned outright, but Ntenman spoke so often of his padr and was so obviously spoiled by the same that it had never crossed Rafi’s mind to ask about a mother. ‘Your mother . . . doesn’t call you her son?’
‘She tried,’ Ntenman said, his face pinched with discomfort. ‘Now is not the time, Moo. Listen to the wise voices from our towers of knowledge. After that you may be ready to hear my sordid family history.’
‘Well, at least tell me what your plan is so I know what topics to look up,’ Rafi said.
Ntenman picked up his media lens and smiled enigmatically, but Rafi knew he was being baited and merely sat patiently. ‘So, you want to go Wallrunning?’ Ntenman said casually. ‘There’s a lot of that where I’m planning to take you.’
*
My first attempt at a Punartam Year went foolishly wrong. I was young, so young! I was the kind of fourteen that Rafi’s never been. I got as far as Stage One on bluff and bribery before they shipped me back.
My second attempt came soon after and it brought a kind of success. I made a deal with one of my padr’s competitors to travel with his next batch of cargo. I didn’t even get off the homestead before my padr found out. He was proud at the cargo idea but vexed that I had embarrassed him by going to an outsider, so he compromised by giving me reward and punishment bundled together. He let me go to Punartam on a ‘family visit’. Getting there was indeed a gift; meeting my relatives was the punishment. It was supposed to be for three weeks, but I disappeared after two and it took my so-called family months before they deigned to involve themselves in a proper search-and-seize. In that time I learned many things, such things that the Academes would never teach an off-worlder. But it wasn’t a Year.
