Earth Girl

by Janet Edwards

  ‘The trick is moving as smoothly as possible,’ I explained. ‘Sudden movements can trigger the impact suit material and it locks up.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Do we have to wear these clumsy things?’ moaned Lolia loudly from the back of the group.

  ‘Maybe we should let her take it off. The wolves could use a good meal …’ I muttered to myself.

  Fian overheard me and laughed.

  Playdon obviously enjoyed the dramatic, because he gathered us up into a group again just before we reached the top of the hill, so everyone got to see New York at once. I’d seen it before, but never in winter. In summer, it’s a vast black expanse as far as the eye can see, with the odd patches of green trying to make an impression on the mess. At this time of year, the white of frost and a dusting of powdery snow added an extra bleakness to the mounds of rubble and the blackened skeletal remains of skyscrapers still soaring up into the sky.

  ‘Dear God!’ said Lolmack.

  ‘Respect!’ chorused a few others automatically. Ever since the physicists found evidence that the universe was created by an unknown entity or entities, there’s been a general feeling that it’s wise to avoid swear words involving deities.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It was a bit of a shock.’

  ‘I’d no idea,’ murmured Fian. ‘I’ve seen some ancient vids, but the sheer scale of this …’

  ‘Welcome to New York, once home to twelve million people,’ said Playdon. He let us absorb the scene for a few minutes longer. ‘Anyone know when in pre-history the last skyscraper was finished?’

  I laughed.

  ‘I see Jarra knows that’s a trick question,’ said Playdon. ‘The last skyscraper was built twenty-five years after the exodus started. By the time it was finished, the population of Earth was already plummeting. No one ever lived or worked in it.’

  ‘Why did they let it all get into this mess?’ asked Lolia.

  ‘After Exodus century, there weren’t enough people left to maintain the cities,’ said Playdon. ‘For every building in use, there were a hundred empty ones. It was a lot easier for the remaining people to gather together in selected small towns and villages, than to try and maintain a few buildings in the middle of a ruined city.’

  Fian knelt cautiously down and scraped his hand along the ground. The struggling grass became smeared with black. ‘There were fires here?’

  ‘There were many fires after it was abandoned,’ said Playdon. ‘There were inflammable materials left in a lot of the buildings, chemicals, even explosives. One massive fire continued burning for nearly two months. Always keep in mind that the ruins themselves are dangerous. It’s not just wild beasts, there are vicious pieces of glass and metal, decaying chemicals, and buildings that can collapse if you just breathe on them. Never trust the ground underfoot because it’s treacherous. They built downwards as well as up, and you can fall through into underground sewers, cellars, the transport network, even underground waterways. If you ever need to find your own way through the dig site, then look for the marked clearways, or failing that the deer trails. The herds have worked out their own safe routes.’

  ‘But why?’ asked Lolmack. ‘Why bother going in there?’

  ‘We’re looking for lost history, culture, and technology,’ said Playdon. ‘During Exodus, the new planets were focused on their own immediate problems. They thought humanity’s store of knowledge was safe on the home world. They thought Earth would provide all the technology, spare parts, and medicine whenever they needed them in the future, but so many people left so fast that the whole infrastructure of Earth fell apart. They learnt their mistake one night in 2409 when the Earth data net crashed. The few staff left did their best to patch it and get it running again, but there was a second catastrophic failure. Some fool tried to do the regular data backups and he couldn’t have done anything worse.’

  Playdon paused. ‘The Alpha worlds sent back their best experts, and they salvaged what they could from the corrupted backups, but we’d lost half of humanity’s data. After that, they took action. They tracked down all the major art and museum collections they could, and shipped them out to the Alpha worlds.’

  ‘Alpha sector is honoured to be the guardians of human culture,’ said Dalmora.

  Playdon ignored that remark. The other sectors are a bit jealous of all the ancient relics being kept by Alpha.

  ‘Independent data archives were set up at every university, and we constantly run cross checks between them looking for flaws. The idea is we’ll never lose data again, but there are huge gaps in what we have. Some of it may still be out there.’ He nodded at the ruins.

  ‘It’s hard to believe anything can have survived in that,’ said Fian.

  ‘You get the odd freak survival by pure chance,’ said Playdon. ‘Last year they found an entire dry cellar packed with stuff. There were even two real books. More common are the stasis boxes. People were leaving Earth and you couldn’t casually portal between worlds then. They were going and never expected to come back. It was the fashion to leave a stasis box behind them, as a sort of memorial. They left them in their abandoned houses, preserving oddments, souvenirs, and records of who had once lived there. They’re still out there, we’re still finding them, and you never know what treasure trove may be inside the next one we open. In 2310, humanity’s science and technology was at its peak. We’ve now surpassed them in the areas of medicine and portal technology, but we’re still painfully regaining the rest.’

  ‘They were the magicians,’ I said. ‘Think of the glorious cities they built. New York, New Tokyo, London, Moscow, Paris Coeur, Berlin, Eden … Now it’s all in ruins, and we’re scavenging for scraps of their knowledge.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Playdon’s voice sounded startled, and I saw his head turn to look in my direction. ‘Most of this class will suffer their compulsory year on Earth’s dig sites, then leave and never come back, but a few of you may be caught by the joy of discovering the past, or even by its financial rewards, and make this your career.’

  His emotion was obvious in his voice, and now it was my turn to be startled. Playdon felt the same way that I did about these sprawling ruins of the past, and the people who had lived there, and the discoveries waiting for us. I’d never managed to make Issette or Candace understand, even most of the school history club didn’t share my feeling that the past was still alive, but Playdon did. It was strange to recognize my own passion for pre-history in an exo.

  We all stood there for a while after that, silently thinking. Finally, Playdon spoke again in a brisk voice. ‘Tomorrow, we’re working in Sector 22, and we’ll be heading out on to the site along the clearway that you can see over there.’ He pointed out the path, with its glowing markers, leading off into the ruins.

  Playdon had been carrying his lookup with him. Now he worked on it for a moment, and a miniature model of the New York Dig Site appeared in mid air ahead of us. He increased the projection to a huge size that would be quite a drain on the lookup’s power, and zoomed in. We could see the clearway now, with ruined buildings either side.

  ‘This is the way we’ll be going tomorrow. I’m getting this image from the data mosaic for New York Main. This is how the area looked at the last aerial survey about ten months ago. I can look at it in several ways. Plain image like this one, or hazard rated by grid square.’

  The image changed. Now it was coloured in patches of red, amber and green squares.

  ‘As always,’ said Playdon, ‘green is good, red is bad, and black is access forbidden, but bear in mind that the hazard ratings are only a best guess from the computer. I can add in the information on which grid squares have already been worked and they go blue.’

  Some squares changed to blue. Not surprisingly, the blue squares tended to cluster near the clearway.

  ‘Notice some areas are flashing blue.’ Playdon pointed at one. ‘Those mean they’ve been partially worked, but still contain something interesting. I can call up further information o
n those. Usually, people stopped work because they came across an unexpected hazard, but tomorrow we’re going to a grid square where they just ran out of time. The team dug out a stasis box from there, and believed there was a second one but didn’t have time to reach it. Normally they’d come back for it the next day, but this was just before Year End and their last day at New York Main. Tomorrow, we’ll be picking up where they left off, and we hope they were right about that second stasis box.’

  Zan, I thought joyfully. Tomorrow we would be digging, and with every chance of finding a stasis box!

  Playdon turned off his lookup, and led us all back to the base. ‘You’ve got an idea now of the conditions you’ll be facing. This afternoon, I want you all to practise suiting up. I’m sending details of styles and prices of skintights to your lookups. If anyone wants one, let me know this evening. We can get a discount on a group order, and they usually deliver within a day.’

  ‘That’s all for now,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow we start the real work.’

  We headed into the dome and there was a race to get out of our suits and be first into the bathroom. I won!

  6

  The next day we headed out for our first dig. It was another slow start, with people still struggling with impact suits. We finally got outside and Playdon opened up the big doors of the huge sled storage dome that sat next to the accommodation dome like a big brother. He turned on the glows, which slowly beat back the shadows and illuminated the huge space. There must have been nearly twenty hover sleds, in varying sizes, and I couldn’t even see some of the ones at the back.

  ‘We have several types of small specialist sleds, as well as the big transport sleds.’ Playdon looked round at us. ‘Who’s had experience driving a hover sled?’

  I put my hand up. In an Earth class, just about every hand would have gone up. Here only about half the hands did. I suppose exos don’t have as many hover sleds around as we do on Earth. We get more solar storms, so have more portal outages to worry about, and every settlement has its emergency hover sleds.

  ‘Good.’ Playdon made notes against names on his lookup. ‘If you can’t, then it’s really simple to learn, but for our first trip we’ll stick to giving people jobs they know as far as possible. Now, who can drive a big transport sled?’

  I put my hand up again. There were a lot fewer hands going up this time, but even on Earth not many people can drive the big sleds. It would be quite an achievement to get into trouble driving an ordinary hover sled, given the small size, simple controls, and anti collision protection. Large transport sleds are different though, because of their weight and momentum. You have to pass a test to drive one on Earth, so few bother. We have an age restriction too, so I couldn’t do my test until I was 16. I hate age restrictions.

  ‘Krath, when have you driven a transport sled?’ asked Playdon.

  ‘I’ve driven my father’s transport sleds. He runs a refuse collection and recycling business.’

  There were a few giggles from the class.

  ‘Dalmora?’

  ‘I’ve gone along with my father when he’s been making vids,’ the daughter of the great Ventrak Rostha told us lesser mortals. ‘Some of them need a lot of equipment, props, costumes, so we use the transport sleds.’

  ‘Amalie?’

  ‘Construction work,’ said the quiet girl, Amalie. ‘I’m from Epsilon, so I’ve driven them for years.’

  Playdon nodded. Everyone knew that planets in Epsilon sector were in the frantic building phase. The standard joke was that if you wanted to go shopping on an Epsilon planet, then first you had to help build the shop.

  ‘Jarra?’

  Was it my imagination, or was Playdon’s voice suddenly frosty? I didn’t like it, but I kept my reply to him calm and Military. ‘Training trips, sir. Transporting people and equipment.’

  A couple of the Gamman boys had experience driving big transport sleds too. Playdon made more notes on his lookup. ‘We’ll be taking out four specialist sleds, and two big transports today. I like to have enough sleds that we can cope if one breaks down. It happens very rarely, and there are emergency evac portals, but walking to one in an impact suit can be hard work.’

  He looked round and picked the two Gamman boys to drive the transports, then pointed out four of the specialist sleds and allocated drivers to them. We were taking a sensor sled, a tag support sled, and two heavy lifts. Playdon was only planning to run one dig team then. I didn’t blame him for that, since it would be hard enough running one team with this bunch of clueless exos. I could blame him for still not picking me as a driver though. Didn’t he trust an ape to drive any of his precious sleds, even the little ones?

  The drivers carefully manoeuvred the selected sleds out of the storage dome, and the rest of us piled on board the transport sleds. They were the basic ones, with no luxury frills like roofs to keep off the rain, or comfy chairs. At the front, were the controls and driver’s seat, behind that was just a huge bare hover platform with rows of bench seats and some clear space for equipment.

  Playdon rode on the lead transport sled, the second transport followed, and then four small specialist sleds. We headed off to the edge of the rubble and started moving along the clearway.

  Playdon’s voice came over the team circuit. Those of us on the same sled could hear him talking without the comms, but he needed to use the team circuit so those on the other sleds could hear.

  ‘We’re now entering New York Main Dig Site,’ Playdon said. ‘I’ve notified New York Main Dig Site Command of our entry. Dig Site Command monitor all teams on the site. I’m using a comms channel you can’t hear when I talk to them. At the moment, the only channels you should be hearing are the team circuit, your private channel if I want to talk to you without the rest of the team hearing, and the broadcast channel that Dig Site Command uses when they want to broadcast information to all teams.’

  It was thrilling to be entering New York Main. I’d worked on New York Fringe Dig Site on summer trips with the school history club. My first trip into Fringe was when I was 11, the next two years we went to other dig sites, but I was back at the Fringe at 13, and again at 17. The Fringe is a nice flat area, with none of the old skyscrapers left standing, so it’s relatively safe. That’s where the Earth school parties, and the people who work the sites as a weekend hobby, do their digging.

  You don’t see any exo schools there. It’s too dangerous, and they don’t want to come to the ape planet. Exo schools stay at home and do sweet little excavations of settlements that are only a few hundred years old. You do get the occasional party from Military schools though, or even the Military Academy. It’s a good place for them to practise wearing impact suits and using equipment, while doing something useful at the same time.

  I’d decided it was safe to mention my experience on New York Fringe to the class, since it was quite believable that a Military kid had been there. I’d have to keep quiet about some of the details though, especially getting my pilot’s licence there last summer, because being a pilot was too unusual. There might be a survey plane tucked at the back of all those hover sleds in the storage dome, but I couldn’t fly it while pretending to be Jarra the Military kid.

  I sulked briefly about the flying, but entering New York Main was too exciting to waste time in a bad mood. Fringe was just a children’s playground compared to this. I’d scanned all the information, and heard all the stories about New York Main. It’s a lot more interesting than Fringe, with far more stasis boxes around, but it’s also much more dangerous. They don’t let you in until you’re 18, however much you try, and believe me I tried as hard as I could. It’s not for kids, and it’s not for amateurs. New York Main is for the professionals. I’d been waiting for this for years, and I was going in!

  ‘We’re following the clearway,’ said Playdon. ‘The clearways are literally clear routes through the dig site. They were made by the first excavation teams a hundred and fifty years ago. The rubble on them has been crushed and sometimes
fused together. The ground beneath them is stable and has been checked for hazards. You’ll see glowing markers at each side of the clearway guiding you. Remember in emergency that the green arrows always point you to the shortest route off the dig site. They’re especially useful if there is sudden snow or fog and visibility is low.’

  Everyone looked round at the ruins. We were passing blackened sections of walls, some only head height, others still many storeys high. Broken remnants of floors jutted out. Huge blocks of concrete lay around, as if some giant child had tossed aside his toy building blocks in a tantrum. One huge girder, orange with the rust of the ages, leant against a blackened wall.

  ‘We’re stopping here.’ Playdon spoke over the team circuit as we reached a flatter area. ‘Park the sleds this side of the clearway in case other teams need to drive by.’

  I looked round at our work site. The team that had worked it before us had obviously taken down any dangerous buildings. Shame. Blowing up walls was fun. I thought I could guess where they’d found the stasis box. There was a nice cleared area with a central depression, just the way a good tag leader would have dug out a box.

  ‘Now,’ said Playdon, ‘on a dig team, there are five roles. The team leader is in overall charge, and that’s obviously me. The others are tag leader, tag support, sensor, and lift. Tag leader is the dangerous job, because they’re the only person who enters the excavation area. They direct operations on the ground, decide how to clear the rubble, tag rocks, and guide the people working the lifting gear.’

  I knew all about tag leaders, because I’ve always been a tag leader for my school history club. Well, not back when I was 11, because my history teacher flatly refused to have an 11-year-old tag leading, and put me on the heavy lifting gear. That was better than nothing of course, but I still hated having to wait around for a couple of years for the job I really wanted. It was so frustrating watching other people tag leading, and having to follow their instructions even when they were wrong. Still, I got to be tag leader when I was 13, and I’ve done it ever since.