Earth and Fire

by Janet Edwards

  “Jarra, it’ll be mayhem here for days with all the people and equipment that need to be portalled back home. Rather than hang around fighting for a spot in the freight portal queue, Alice is going to fly Immy back home.”

  After days of hearing Air Control refer to pilots using the names of their dig sites, it had been strange to meet the real people and learn their actual names. Alice was the professional pilot at London Main, and Immy was Paris Coeur. Immy had thanked us for rescuing her, while I stood there like a nardle in awed silence. When I thought how she’d fallen into the heart of a fire, been rescued, and insisted on going straight back to fire fighting in a borrowed plane … Well, respect!

  “I thought I’d fly to Paris Coeur as well,” continued Gradin. “I can indulge my ego with a bit more gratitude from Immy, and then use Paris Coeur’s freight link to get my plane back to New York.”

  I frowned at him and he grinned back at me. “I warned you what I’m like, Jarra. You may have been embarrassed when Immy thanked us, but I adore that sort of thing. Everyone knows if I heroically save someone, they have to spend hours fulsomely thanking me and telling me how wonderful I am. The last person I rescued said he’d rather die than suffer it again.”

  I couldn’t help giggling.

  “I’ll take a bit of a detour on my way to Paris Coeur,” continued Gradin, “and drop you off at your Next Step, but only if you stop the giggling. Come on!”

  I chased after Gradin as he dodged his way out of the crowd. Over on the landing area, one fire plane was just taking off, while a row of others were parked neatly to one side. We went across to the New York plane and climbed in.

  “I think I’ll set up the course to your Next Step and you can do the flying as one of your mandatory cross-country training flights,” said Gradin. “I’ve done more than enough work lately.”

  I looked out at the water bucketing down from the sky. “What about the rain?”

  “What about it? Were you planning to only fly in dry weather?”

  Air Control channel had shut down, so I called the ordinary broadcast channel to get permission to launch. A man’s voice replied.

  “This is Dig Site Command. New York fire plane, please wait two more minutes before launching to allow London fire plane to clear Athens air space.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “They had ten planes up there fighting the fire, but now we can only have one at a time?”

  Gradin laughed. “The rules say they have to have an Air Control channel running if they have more than one plane in their air space, and they don’t want to make the effort for the sake of a couple of minutes. Once we’re clear of Athens, we’ll need to talk to Europe Air Control. I’ll do that, but you listen closely. Their protocols are nothing like those of a dig site.”

  We waited the two minutes and then took off, flying north-west towards my Next Step. The pouring rain made visibility bad, but it was no worse than flying through smoke. After about twenty minutes, the rain eased and then stopped entirely. I relaxed and enjoyed the novelty of flying over peaceful countryside.

  “I’m not sure the Principal of my Next Step will approve of me landing a plane in the grounds,” I said.

  “Chaos take your Principal,” said Gradin. “You can land a plane wherever you like. You’re one of the thousand now, Jarra.”

  “I always have been,” I said bitterly.

  “Pay attention,” said Gradin. “I didn’t say one in a thousand, but one of the thousand. I’m not talking about you being Handicapped, but about you being a pilot. Less than a thousand people on Earth can fly a plane. You’re one of them now. There’s still the technicality of you getting your licence, we’ll sort that out this summer, but you’ve already proved to me you’re a pilot.”

  Jubilation hit me, sweeping away the bitterness. I’d helped save Athens, and this summer I’d get my pilot’s licence.

  There was a glitter in the distance now, which had to be the flicker force fence around our destination settlement. I watched it drift closer, flew over it, and banked round above the rows of small homes and the shopping square, heading for the huge dome of my Next Step. It was early evening, and I could see a few figures sitting outside on the lawn.

  I circled, losing height, and a lot more people came running out of the main door and stood on the lawn staring upwards. I frowned and circled again, considering whether I should call Issette and ask her to move people off the lawn so I could land, but they must have worked out what was happening because they all suddenly backed off towards the dome wall.

  “Please, Gradin, don’t let me crash this time,” I said. “I don’t want to look an idiot in front of my friends.”

  He laughed. “I won’t let you crash.”

  I came into land, frantically concentrating on the transition to hovers. Once the plane was safely on the grass, I double checked both thrusters and hovers were shut down, then let out a sigh of relief. I unsealed my hood, opened the cockpit, and saw my friends running towards me.

  “Hoo eee!” I yelled at them as I climbed out.

  “Jarra, Jarra, Jarra!” Issette grabbed me and hugged me, before recoiling and holding her nose. “You stink of smoke!”

  “What the chaos are you wearing?” asked Vina. “It looks dreadful.”

  “This is an impact suit, and it’s designed to keep you alive, not to look decorative.” I glanced round for Cathan, planning to tease him about impact suits, but couldn’t see him.

  Gradin stuck his head out of the cockpit. “Jarra, can you get that mob out of my way? This place is bringing back horrible memories of when I was imprisoned in Next Step as a kid, so I want to head on to Paris Coeur.”

  I turned to face the crowd. “Everyone move back near the dome please. The pilot wants to take off.”

  I moved out of the way with the rest of them, and saw the Principal was standing by the main door of Next Step, staring at the plane with a grazzed expression. I imagined what a conversation between her and Gradin would be like and grinned.

  Keon strolled up at a leisurely pace and shook his head at me. “I give up, Jarra. I can see the appeal, I really can, but I’m far too lazy and cowardly to give it a try.”

  I watched the plane take off. It soared upwards into the sky, banked to head in the direction of Paris Coeur, and grew smaller and smaller until it was a distant dot. I finally turned to look at Keon.

  “Sorry, what did you say just then? Were you thinking of learning to fly yourself?”

  “Me? Fly?” Keon laughed. “No, I was thinking of something very different, but it isn’t important now.”

  Issette reappeared, waving her lookup. “I’ve got a vid of the landing, and a vid of the take off, and a vid of the Principal’s face as well!”

  I instinctively turned to look at the Principal, and saw her give me her frostiest glare. “Jarra Reeath, I want a word with you. Everyone else, go inside now, it’s time for dinner.”

  “If she complains about you landing a plane here,” said Keon, “then ask her to point out the section in the rules and regulations for Hospital Earth residences that says you can’t land a plane on the lawn.”

  Issette and I giggled. It was a moment of pure triumph. I didn’t care how much the Principal lectured me. I was one of less than a thousand people on Earth who could fly a plane. I’d been part of the effort that saved Athens. I’d helped do something that truly mattered, not just to people alive today but to all the future generations of people who loved history.

  Then I saw the crowd heading inside Next Step were stopping and turning their heads. I automatically turned as well, and saw two people had arrived through the public portal at the edge of the lawn and were walking towards us. One of them was Cathan. The other was a total stranger, an elderly man in formal clothes, who looked chaos angry about something.

  My mood instantly sobered. I didn’t know what he’d done, but it looked as if Cathan was in deep trouble.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Principal recognized
the warning signs just as fast as the rest of us, and hurried down the steps to meet the new arrivals. “I’m the Principal of this Next Step. Can I help you with …?”

  She didn’t manage to finish the sentence before the elderly man started talking in an aggressive voice. “It’s completely outrageous. A prestigious interstellar medical conference disrupted by this … this throwback boy.”

  The Principal gave him her best professional smile. “It would help me if you introduced yourself.”

  The man sighed impatiently. “I’m Professor Reece of University Adonis. Head of the organizing committee of the Alpha Sector Congress on Regrowth Techniques.”

  “Thank you, Professor.” The Principal turned to Cathan. “What have you been doing, Cathan?”

  Cathan opened his mouth to speak, but Professor Reece was already answering the question for him. “He marched into our conference, interrupted a presentation by our guest of honour, and shouted insults at him!”

  “I didn’t shout insults,” said Cathan. “I called your guest of honour my father, because he is my father! I tried contacting my parents when I was 14, and they didn’t want to know me, but I’ve been following all the public information about them on the Earth data net. My father goes to lots of medical conferences. They’ve always been on Alpha sector worlds before, but this one was being held on Earth so it could include a demonstration of the new regrowth tank being developed here. I had to grab what could be my only chance to meet my father.”

  The Principal shook her head. “Cathan, your psychologist must have explained it’s better if you just accept a parental rejection.”

  “Just accepting it may be better for my parents,” said Cathan, “but I don’t see that it’s better for me, so I sneaked into the conference building. My father may have pretended I was lying about being his son, but at least I forced him to meet me face to face.”

  I blinked. Now I knew why Cathan had needed that door access code! I was quite impressed by what he’d done, but Professor Reece clearly didn’t share my opinion. First he glared at Cathan, and then at the Principal.

  “This boy is obviously totally delusional. An eminent medical researcher couldn’t possibly have a throwback child.”

  He took out his lookup. “I’m calling the police to register charges against this boy for trespass and slander. I’ll also make a complaint to Hospital Earth about the incompetent way you’re running this institution. You’re given ridiculously generous funding to care for these ape children, they’ve even got their own schools and University Earth to educate them as much as their limited capabilities allow. There’s absolutely no excuse for letting them run round out of control like this, annoying real people.”

  The Principal gave him her coldest stare. “You don’t seem to realize that I’m Handicapped myself.”

  He gave her a startled look, and then flushed red. “Well, that explains everything. If you’re Handicapped, you can’t be expected to run things properly.”

  The Principal spoke to him in a cuttingly polite voice. “Should you press charges against Cathan for trespass and slander, a Hospital Earth Child Advocate will have to present Cathan’s parental records as evidence in his defence. Your guest of honour will be furious about those being made public, and the resulting newzie reports will totally destroy the reputation of your conference, but if that’s what you want …”

  I saw the man’s expression change to uncertainty. He tried to say something, but the Principal hadn’t finished with him yet.

  “Should you register a complaint against me with Hospital Earth, I will naturally make a statement in my own defence. This will detail how you trespassed on the property of a private Hospital Earth residence and shouted offensive terms for the Handicapped at its Principal.”

  She glanced round at the rest of us. “I can see at least three of the young people in my care have been making vids of this incident. I shall include those as evidence. I warn you that may result in you facing abusive conduct charges. You now have thirty seconds to leave.”

  The man hesitated, then turned and stalked off back to the portal. We watched him dial a code and vanish, then everyone cheered wildly.

  “Totally zan!” screamed one of the Fifteens.

  I swear I saw a genuine smile on the Principal’s face.

  “I want to speak to all the Seventeens now,” she said. “Everyone else should go in to dinner.”

  The others reluctantly obeyed, leaving the nine of us nervously facing the Principal. She frowned at us for a moment before speaking.

  “I know the last year in Next Step can be a very frustrating time, and I understand you bending the rules a little, but you’re pushing things much too far and it has to stop right now.”

  She glanced at me. “Jarra’s fire fighting was, in my opinion, recklessly dangerous, but she had Hospital Earth approval for it and appears to have escaped uninjured. I’m far more worried about breaches of Hospital Earth rules, because they can lead to you being transferred to Correctional. I’ve been doing my best to protect all of you from that. I classified Cathan’s images as merely improper rather than blatantly indecent to avoid a Hospital Earth Inspector being involved, but there’s a limit to what I can cover up, and publicly confronting his father …”

  She sighed. “I deeply sympathize with your feelings, Cathan, but you mustn’t attempt to contact your parents again. I frightened that man with the threat of publicity, so I don’t think either he or your father will complain to Hospital Earth, but if they do you’ll be in severe trouble. The truth is the main board of Hospital Earth are all norms, appointed by the sectors, and they won’t want a scandal about one of their wards disrupting a high-status Alpha sector medical conference. They won’t appoint an advocate to defend you, just hush the whole thing up by sending you straight to Correctional.”

  “They can’t do that,” said Cathan. “I have legal rights.”

  The Principal shook her head. “Hospital Earth can do anything they like. You’re their ward and they have absolute authority over you. Even when you’re adult, the situation won’t be much better, because the main board of Hospital Earth run this planet and make its laws. That’s totally unjust, but it’s the way things have been for hundreds of years and we have to accept it.”

  She paused to look round at us. “All of you have been acting extremely foolishly. I couldn’t totally ignore Maeth and Ross’s behaviour because of the repeated damage to the room sensors and wall vid in Commons, but so far I’ve managed to keep the crucial issue of inappropriate intimacy off their records. Jarra and Issette went to Europe Off-world, which …”

  I gasped. “How did you find out about that? The guard didn’t catch us.”

  “He didn’t need to catch you,” said the Principal. “He just needed to get close enough to scan your genetic code. He reported the pair of you as being unauthorized intruders, but fortunately the Europe Off-world security staff supervisor who dealt with that report was Handicapped. She chose to call me informally about your trespassing rather than put details on your official records.”

  I remembered the way the security guard had suddenly stopped chasing us. At the time, I’d thought he was too tired to keep running after us, but he’d actually scanned us and got all the information he needed.

  “Vina has been harassing her ex-boyfriend’s family,” continued the Principal, “and Ayden and Selia have been experimenting with forbidden substances.”

  They had? How did the Principal know that, when I didn’t? Had she found something when she was checking their rooms?

  The Principal turned to look at Keon. “I’ve no definite proof that Keon’s done anything wrong, but I’m fully aware that he’s bright enough to have done a dozen illegal things without being caught. Eventually, though, he’ll make a mistake.”

  She shook her head. “All of you must stop taking these silly risks. It may only be six months until next Year Day, but that can feel like an eternity when you’re locked up in Correctional. The ther
apy sessions aren’t so bad, but there’s the authorized punishment regime, not to mention what goes on that isn’t authorized. I know exactly how bad it is, because I went through Nursery, Home and Next Step just like you, finishing with a nightmare seven months in a girls’ Correctional. That was nearly twenty years ago, but Correctionals aren’t any better now, so think about what I’ve told you and be more sensible in future.”

  She turned away and went indoors, leaving us to exchange silent grazzed glances. We’d thought the Principal was our enemy, but she wasn’t. She was Handicapped like us, she’d been locked up in a Correctional herself once, and she’d been trying to protect us from suffering the same thing.

  Finally, we got over the shock enough to follow her indoors. The others went into Commons for dinner, but I went to my room, stripped off the heavy impact suit, and went into the shower to wash away the sweat and smell of smoke.

  As the warm water poured over me, I was thinking about the way a bunch of off-worlders ran our planet and decided our laws. Thinking about the society that dismissed us as less than second-class citizens. Thinking of how Professor Reece had stood in front of us, on the lawn of our own Next Step, talking about apes and their limited capabilities as if we weren’t really human.

  Things had been this way for hundreds of years, and the Principal said we had to accept it, but I didn’t agree. I hadn’t just accepted a forest fire destroying Athens, I’d joined the others fighting to stop it, and I wanted to fight this too.

  One day, I’d do that. One day, I’d find a way to tell Reece, and all the norms like him, what it was like to be born one of the Handicapped and live with injustice and anger. One day, I’d prove I wasn’t just as good as the norms, I was better!

  Thank you for reading Earth and Fire. Jarra is the main character in the Earth Girl trilogy – Earth Girl, Earth Star, and Earth Flight. I also have plans for further novellas featuring her. You can make sure you don’t miss these and other future books by signing up to get new release updates.