by Patty Jansen
I felt sick.
Houses like the one we had just visited lined the street. They were all in different bright colours. People sat on the verandas, and music spilled out. Children played in the yards.
These were proud people, business people, who relied on the tourists. They were brown people who didn’t speak Isla, or the old English. But they were tough people, with their own language, originated from Spanish.
We got many curious looks as we passed. The houses grew smaller as we came closer to the park entrance where a maintenance crew was at work cleaning the signs and sweeping sand off the road.
I guess we weren’t meant to see that, either.
“The dust blows in all the time,” Mariola said. “They employ a lot of people to keep it clean.”
“You mean, people sweeping up sand by hand? Can’t they use machines?”
“They make too much noise. And most machines use water, and we have severe water restrictions.”
“But what about the sprinklers that come on in the morning?”
“That’s all harvested and recycled here. Wait.”
She turned the vehicle onto a side road. After another turn, we came past sets of huge tanks with large pipes leading to them.
“All the water and garbage from the park is taken here and sorted, cleaned, reused and recycled.”
Deyu was giving me a blank look. Her translation module didn’t cope well with Mariola’s accent. Nicha explained it to her.
But to someone from Asto, recycling water was not a new concept. To be honest, even the small coastal community where my father lived in New Zealand did it.
We arrived in the park through a back entrance where Mariola opened the gate with an access pass. It was amazing how the scenery changed. Cheerful colours, neatly paved streets, green gardens.
It was busy on the main thoroughfare with tourists ambling past the restaurants and shops that stayed open until late. I hadn’t noticed this yesterday, but now saw that the tourists were kept in the main street through temporary barriers across the side streets, except where there were entrances to accommodation.
In the square in front of the hotel, scores of service people were sweeping and watering and pruning the plants, cleaning the benches and emptying the rubbish bins into trucks.
There was an entire army of these people, chatting and working hard. A bunch of kids on monocycles were playing with a ball, all of them racing around on their bikes. These were the kids we had seen earlier that day.
Our apartment was also a hive of activity.
We had not planned to stay here another day, regardless of whether we could arrange for the trip, and so we needed to pack everything up. As per our tradition, a pile of bags had appeared in the hall.
I went into Sheydu and Isharu’s room, intending to ask her if any messages had come in. I found most of the team in the middle of some sort of security briefing. Thayu, Deyu, Zyana and Reida sat on the bed, while Anyu had projected something on the wall.
“Oh, sorry. I can come back later,” I said. “I just wanted to ask if any messages had come in.”
Reida said, “No, but we were just discussing some messages we intercepted.”
“Anything important?”
“That’s what we were discussing.”
I went over to the bed and sat next to Thayu.
The projection showed a couple of lines of text in English. The translation function had produced some corresponding Coldi text, but I ignored it, because the translations from Isla to Coldi were bad enough. I had no faith in the device’s capability to translate from English to Coldi. I had to read it a few times before I understood.
Movement across the border has our troops on high alert. Patterson denies any activity. Braddock says military exercise in progress. Sukar confirms.
I checked the Coldi translation, which was garbage.
“Is it something important?” Reida asked.
“I doubt it has anything to do with us,” I said. “It seems one country is holding a military exercise and the others want to bicker over it.”
I had no idea what this out-of-context snippet meant. Maybe this type of bickering was normal. Who knew?
I explained to the others what I made of it.
“So they’re not about to go to war?” Isharu asked.
I checked the translation and noticed it mis-translated military as war. The Coldi word for military could be described as “going to war”, and it was a term of potential or threat, while “war” was a definitive term and meant that a war was already happening. Ah, I figured why this alarmed them.
“I don’t think there is anything to worry about. We are in a strange place. Our translation parameters will not work like they do at Nations of Earth. This message is talking about military exercises.”
“Ah,” Sheydu said.
They understood exercises.
The other members of the team came in. The room was not terribly big, and it grew very crowded, especially with Evi and Telaris in there.
I told the team that the trip was on, and we needed to do some planning.
We had to divide the team and decide who would come with me tomorrow afternoon and who would come back to the city with the children. I wanted that party to be the biggest, because we needed a small, powerful and nimble team to travel into the restricted zone.
We settled on Sheydu, Anyu, Veyada, Evi, Reida and Ynggi.
I packed a few things and then discussed the arrangements with Thayu.
To my surprise, she didn’t mind not coming with me.
“I don’t understand these people. I can hear what they’re saying behind our backs, and they don’t like us at all.”
That was true. We were going to have enough “aliens” problems, because I was definitely going to take Ynggi.
After crashing out earlier in the evening, Emi had woken up again, and I gave her some fruit purée mixed with the supplements she needed, and told her a story.
The pictures I showed fascinated her, very proper pictures from Asto, and once again, she did not embody any of Sheydu’s fears that we would corrupt our children with another culture of which she disapproved.
I thought it was important that the children learned about culture. Any culture. Sheydu also had a problem with Pengali culture when we first involved them in our team, but she seemed to have warmed to their presence in my household.
The two Pengali youngsters had also woken up, and came to listen to my story, both of them curled up with tails around them in my lap.
Then Thayu and I retreated to our corner of the room, and I read through my notes on this old factory we intended to visit.
I’d found out about this complex in my tedious and often frustrating research on the Southern California Aerospace Corps.
The international efforts to salvage NASA’s work was the side of Earth’s space program I knew: the settlements on Mars and the Moon, the long-distance ships to travel to the natural jump point in the outer reaches of the solar system, Midway Space Station, Arkadia and New Taurus.
But apparently some of NASA’s technology and hardware had been sold locally, or, if some reports were to be believed, had been stolen.
The Southern California Aerospace Corps had originated out of San Diego. We had already visited the building that used to be their headquarters and had found little of use.
News reports of the time spoke of them as being a group of enthusiasts who, with the help of rich donors, had tried to keep the pride of the original program alive.
There were some problems: after the Second Civil War, California became part of Mexico, and Mexico was keen to add the space program to their industries. But Mexico was a prominent member of Nations of Earth, and a significant number of the organisation’s members saw Nations of Earth as their enemy.
What exactly had happened when the first launch of their new space veh
icle had gone wrong was unclear. Official reports said that the vehicle had come down on the other side of the border and had crashed, killing all on board.
However, others said that the crew had taken off with their technology and set up a new base in America Free State where they employed thousands and produced space ships. Whether the locality of the ship-building plant and the accident were related was a matter for debate. But the fact that the plant had existed was undisputed. This was where we were going.
The official records maintained that the organisation had never left Earth and had fizzled out after a number of years, having neither the workforce nor the resources required, but yet, there was that spaceship in the forest near Barresh. Also, the aforementioned official records meant Nations of Earth records, and they weren’t particularly accurate for North America.
Ezhya had asked me to investigate the origin of the ship because while it wasn’t unusual for unknown items of technology to turn up in unusual places, it was unusual for them not to be traceable to a known source.
Historians in Barresh had confirmed my estimate that the ship was about fifty years old. Where had it come from, and what was it doing there? Worse, why had the occupants passed technology to a Pengali tribe that made them think they could take on their rivals?
Ezhya had given me a very poignant explanation why he wanted this investigated:
“If a family lives isolated from other people, they will spend most of their time gathering or growing food. If a group of people live in a small community and have no contact with other people, they will develop small tools for building and harvesting and working the land. There will be no time or resources for detailed teaching or major technology, because if one member of the community is smart and can figure this out, this member will still need to explain the concepts to the community in a way that they’re on board with it. Most communities will just tell this member not to be silly. The smaller the community, the less chance that the ideas will take root. A small town may develop crude vehicles for transport. They may have factories to mass-produce things so that their people’s time can be freed up from doing menial tasks like harvesting. A city in isolation will have people who specialise in things and become really good at those things. But because there is no market for the specialist stuff, it will be scarce and expensive. Space travel needs a lot of really specialist knowledge, and people who spend their time doing just that, so it needs lots of people who grow the food, harvest the food and prepare the food so that these very specialist people can worry about how to get vehicles into space. It needs a society that understands and agrees about the importance of sending people into space. Space travel needs a huge population base. So if we find a vehicle, and we cannot trace it back to known technology, this means that somewhere in the galaxy there is a huge population that we don’t know about that can do this kind of stuff.”
This was not a fun archaeological trip. It was finding that link, probably tracing it back to the Aghyrian ship, or the Tamer Collective, which was also related to the Aghyrians, just so that we could rule out the existence of some sort of shadow society that we didn’t know about.
But for now, it was time to go to bed. We were all tired, and tomorrow would be a very long day.
Chapter Seven
The next morning we all got up very early, because there was a lot to do that my team hadn’t been able to do the previous night.
As well as getting the kids ready with the right outfits, because Swallow had warned us it might be cold, we had to get ready for our investigating trip.
Sheydu and her people had already collected a bunch of gear in the hall, hidden in innocent-looking bags that looked like simple travel luggage.
That illusion only held until you tried to pick one of the bags up. This gear was all extremely heavy.
Outfits included having to wear armour and wearing clothes over the top that accommodated for it.
Most of the clothes I had bought to look like a local were too tight, so I had to resort to wearing a grey outfit that I brought from Barresh, but that might be bland enough to pass for local tough wear.
The children were all blurry eyed, having been woken up so early.
Ayshada seemed to be quite keen to go. He had his little backpack packed and sat next to the stack of luggage in the hall. He had always been fascinated by these stacks of bags from the moment he could crawl. “Packing up” and “getting all the bombs ready” were games he would play in Barresh where he’d drag all his possessions into the hall and collect the table coasters Eirani would use to protect the table underneath hot dishes, because they were round and flat like Sheydu’s bombs.
He also loved bossing the younger kids around and now reminded the two Pengali kids that they had to pack their soap and bubble machine or they would have to leave it here—exactly in the way Eirani spoke to him.
The thought of the kids bringing the bubble-making contraption into the cabin on the flight horrified me. I reminded myself to double-check that the little backpack that the Pengali kids brought—a yellow thing—would be stowed in the passenger compartment where they couldn’t reach it.
Nalya was quiet. He helped Thayu carry all of our bags into the hall and then waited while leaning against the wall. Then he asked me in a quiet voice if Mariola was going to come. I told him that I thought she probably had other tourists to guide today, and that answer seemed to satisfy him. For what reason, I had no idea.
Larrana was still talking about his collection. He had the catalogue open on his reader and was talking about how he could sell some of his loot for a profit and buy other rare items, but no one listened to him. Ayshada was playing a giggling game with the Pengali kids. Nalya held Emi. Ileyu was eating an energy bar, spilling sticky crumbs all over the floor, and Emi was trying to take it off her. Did I dare to hope that some of the kids had had enough of the plastic figurines and the fake cheerfulness of the resort? Or maybe that was just my wishful thinking.
Well, after this trip we would be on our way, returning to Athens, possibly via Rotterdam, if I managed to get onto Dekker. To be honest, his hide-and-seek routine was starting to get ridiculous.
I made sure I checked our messages before we left, but the only thing that had come in were a couple of messages from the Exchange that could wait, including one from Amarru with my travel details back to Barresh.
I would deal with all those when we came back here.
Someone had gone downstairs to the breakfast bar and returned with a tray of food. We had a quick breakfast while standing up. For one, I was looking forward to Eirani’s cooking, fresh fruit and freshly baked bread. I was not impressed with the artificially sweetened and starchy offerings here. Many of the visitors looked like they’d had too much of this food, and the service staff looked like they could do with some.
I guess it was this way in many parts of the world, but at my father’s community in New Zealand, and even in Auckland, I hadn’t seen this level of segregation between rich and poor.
Then we were all ready, and the reception called to say that people were waiting for us downstairs.
We trooped out of the building.
Some went down the stairs and some of us caught the lift with all the equipment.
I thought we’d meet our guides in the foyer, but the two young men who waited turned out to be nothing more than pick up drivers.
The receptionist called a cheerful have a good day while we were leaving the foyer.
Have a good day indeed. Have a good day while the countries fought, while many lived in poverty and everyone was pretending there wasn’t a war going on. They’d have a good day all the way to the end of the world.
Outside stood two people carriers.
Once we had deposited the bags in between the seats, there was barely enough space for all of us.
The drivers did not appear to understand us at all. They were there just to take us to the airport
.
We were all in, and the convoy set in motion.
The vehicles took us through the busy boulevard that went past the park entrance, but we did not turn into it to join the small line of people already waiting there.
Instead, we went straight ahead and the sides of the street became a lot less glamorous, since the need to make everything appear pretty for the tourists evaporated.
There was a gate across the road, which was opened at our approach. These people knew that we were coming.
Outside the gate we returned to the dust bowl of a landscape that we had also seen on our way here and that darkness had hidden from us last night.
And it was dry and desolate. The sand was pale brown; the grass was all dry and dead. A mountain range rose from the plain in a blue-grey haze. The sky was pale blue.
A dry wind blew up eddies of sand. There was not a tree in sight.
Mariola had said that the trees were still dying back, and that you could tell how well off a community was by whether they had removed dead trees or made efforts to replace them. Keeping trees alive was a community effort. It meant giving up precious water and taking the time to look after them.
A short drive along the road with worn and cracked paving brought us to the airport.
Several aircraft waited on the other side. We were told to wait in a shelter. Dust had blown in through the open sides, covering the seats, even though I could see a woman using a broom to sweep it away in one of the adjacent similar shelters.
There seemed to be a separate shelter for each flight, so that the travelling parties didn’t have to mix with the other plebs, or something along those lines.
The aircraft that stood closest to us was a gyrocopter.
Evi squinted at it.