Earth Star (21 page)

‘Not you,’ said Krath. ‘Me! He was my friend and …’

Amalie startled us by slapping the table with the palms of her hands. ‘Stop blaming yourselves for what happened! That sort of thing doesn’t do anyone any good. It isn’t anyone’s fault that Joth did something dangerous.’

‘But if he was so unhappy that …’ Dalmora let the words trail off.

‘He wasn’t,’ said Amalie. ‘This was just a stupid accident. If Joth had planned it deliberately, he’d have left a message with his lookup, and he didn’t.’

‘But why did he go out there then?’ asked Fian. ‘He’d seen the safety vids, so he knew how dangerous it was.’

‘You think a few safety warnings would stop him?’ Amalie shook her head. ‘We’re talking about Joth, remember! He’s the sort that you can tell a dozen times to be careful of a camp fire, and he still picks up a red hot branch and burns himself. Every batch of new colonists back home on Miranda included one like him. It was never a question of
whether
they’d have an accident, just
when
they’d have one, and exactly how bad it would be.’

She waved both hands in despair. ‘Joth could watch all the vids, hear Playdon saying over and over again that we mustn’t go outside the dome without a suit, and still think it wouldn’t matter for five minutes. He’d just had a fight with Petra. He probably only wanted to get out of the dome and away from things for a while, but once he was outside in the dark he was bound to get lost, and since he’d left his lookup in his room he couldn’t call for help.’

I stared down at my plate again while I pictured that; Joth fighting his way through the endless trees of the rainforest. Of course, being Joth, he was bound to keep heading in exactly the wrong direction and then …

There was the sound of a chair being shoved violently backwards, and I looked up in time to see Krath brush the back of one hand across his eyes and storm off through the hall door. I stood up to follow him, but Amalie shook her head at me.

‘It’s better if I talk to him. We’re … Well, if Krath ever develops some sense, then we might be something.’

I watched her go after Krath. He’d been one of Joth’s closest friends. This was going to be hard for him, for Petra, for the rest of team 4, for … for all of us.

Dalmora stood up as well. ‘I’m going to talk to Playdon. He’s looking very strained, and I’m sure he hasn’t had anything to eat.’

I glanced across at Playdon, and saw his expression and the way his shoulders sagged. This was hurting him as much, or more, than the rest of us. He felt responsible for his students and … I had two ways of dealing with emotional pain. One was to try to avoid thinking about the problem; the other was to turn the pain into anger, because anger was much easier to cope with. I couldn’t avoid thinking about this, and I couldn’t be angry with Joth, but I could be angry with …

‘And I’m going to call Issette. The real question isn’t why Joth went out there; it’s why the doctors let him die!’

I headed back to our room and called Issette, flagging the call as an emergency and routing it to the wall vid. It was a minute or two before the holo of her face appeared on the screen and gave a despairing groan.

‘It’s always you that sends me emergency calls, Jarra. Five minutes earlier and my lookup would have started chiming in Dr Garmin’s lecture and he’s horribly sarcastic. Someone better be dead!’

‘Someone
is
dead,’ I said.

‘Oh.’ Her expression instantly changed from reproachful to anxious. ‘Who? Not Fian!’

‘Joth.’

‘The one who went into the rainforest?’

‘Yes, I told you we’d found him and sent him to hospital. The nuking doctors have let him die. How the chaos did that happen? They can grow people new legs, new hearts, new lungs, a whole new body even! Everyone knows they can fix anything so long as there’s no brain damage. So what the hell went wrong?’

Issette didn’t complain at my swearing, just gave me a sorrowful look and spoke in a carefully patient voice. ‘I’m only a student, but … Growing new body parts doesn’t stop someone being sick. You have to cure the disease.’

‘So why didn’t they cure Joth?’ I blinked the betraying moisture out of my eyes. I didn’t really need to hide the fact I was crying from Issette, I’d known her all my life and she’d seen me in every sort of mess there was, but all the same …

‘We’re good at preventing diseases, Jarra, but not at treating them. People have their annual inoculations so they don’t get ill. When a serious new mutated disease shows up …’

‘Like malaria variation 2789 Beta.’ I shook my head. ‘How could Joth get malaria?’

‘From an insect bite. Malaria was supposed to be extinct for centuries, but it came back as the much deadlier …’ Issette shrugged. ‘That doesn’t matter now. Portals automatically route active disease carriers to Isolation and Disease Control for treatment so new diseases can’t spread before we have inoculations for them. The patients get the best treatment possible, but the first few cases …’

‘The first few cases may die.’ I let my head sag forward into my hands. ‘That stinks.’

‘It does,’ said Issette.

I ended the call and sat staring blankly at the wall for a few minutes until Fian came to join me. We silently changed into sleep suits, went to bed, and turned off the glows. I felt Fian’s arm go around me, shuffled closer to him, and turned to rest my head on his chest. I could hear the sound of his heart beating and feel the comforting warmth of him. Joth was dead, and that wasn’t just terrible, but terrifying. It was the first time a friend, someone my own age, had died. It gave me a whole new awareness of how fast a life could end.

I was fiercely, selfishly glad I wasn’t Petra. She’d lost Joth, but I still had Fian, for now at least. The next solar storm might arrive in as little as a few days time, and there was no way to know what the alien sphere would do when it arrived.

‘I love you,’ I said.

‘What?’ Fian’s voice sounded startled. ‘Are you powered, Jarra? You never say emotional things.’

‘I say them tonight.’ I lifted my head to kiss him.

The next five days were grimly miserable. Playdon gave us eight hours of lectures a day, but that still left mealtimes and evenings for the class to sit around in silent groups. When a conversation did start about something innocuous, like the taste of the reconstituted food from the food dispensers, it wouldn’t be long before someone broke off in mid-sentence and we all started thinking about Joth again.

Dalmora brought a new musical instrument into the hall in the evenings, one she’d got on her last trip home. It was another reproduction of a pre-history instrument, with far more strings than her guitar, a longer neck with a series of pegs down the side, and a curved bowl. Normally I would have asked her lots of questions about it, but I didn’t have the heart for it now. Whatever it was, she didn’t sing along to it, just played complex throbbing music.

I spent some sleepless nights pointlessly wondering what I could have done to change things. It was such a stupid waste of a life. Joth had had everything that I could only dream about. He’d grown up with a real family. He’d been able to casually portal between planets. He should have stayed on Asgard, where the Military had carefully cleansed the inhabited continent of all threats, instead of risking the dangers of my Earth.

On the sixth day, Playdon took everyone else to Asgard for Joth’s funeral, and I went to the portal room to wave them off. Asgard custom was to take flowers and candles to a funeral. Interstellar portal quarantine procedures stopped you portalling off world with fresh flowers, but everyone had a candle and Fian was taking an extra one for me.

The portal activated, and people started heading through to Earth Africa Off-world. The last one in line stopped and turned to face me. Steen, the tag leader for team 4.

‘There won’t be any more trouble, Jarra. Playdon offered to transfer Petra to another Pre-history Foundation course with a vacancy, but she said no because it would mean her repeating some theory work and missing others.’

He shrugged. ‘The rest of us can’t make her go, but if she stays then some things are going to be different. We aren’t calling you names to please her any longer, and we aren’t letting her call you names either.’

Steen walked through the portal before I could work out what to say, and it shut down behind him. There was normally a faint background hum of conversations and music in the dome, but now it felt weirdly quiet. I’d planned to stay here but …

I pressed my hand on the check-out plate to show I was portalling out of the dome, looked up the portal code for Zoo Africa, and then changed my mind. The tropical bird dome in Zoo Africa was even more impressive than the one in Zoo Europe, but its safely sanitized jungle plants would remind me too much of Eden’s rainforest. I’d go over to the Pyramid Zone instead.

As an afterthought, I sent a quick message to tell Playdon and Fian what I was doing. I didn’t want anyone worrying if they came back and found me missing. Then I dialled the portal, and stepped through to the Pyramid Zone reception area. They were obviously having a busy day, because there were queues waiting at all four internal portals for the next pyramid tours.

I wasn’t here to join a crowd of chattering tourists and hear the tour guide recite the information I’d heard a dozen times before. I headed away from the portals to the exit that led into the desert. The man on the door handed me a hat and one of the tracker armbands they insist on you wearing to stop you getting lost. He started telling me the safety instructions, but I shook my head.

‘I’m from Eden Dig Site, and I’ve walked the desert path several times already. I know all the refreshment and portal points, and how to call for help.’

He accepted that and waved me through. I glanced at his display screen as I went past, and saw two clusters of dots that were probably school parties, but they were both on the short route. The longer desert path looked nice and peaceful.

Once outside, I followed the paved path with its information points displaying holo images of what this area had looked like in the twenty-third century, before Tuan created his genetically modified creeper to reclaim the desert. I ignored them, preferring to see it as it was now. Deceptively delicate greyish-green leaves mixed with turquoise flowers carpeted the ground, the colours merging together in the distance to look like a blue ocean.

The path divided, and I took the left turn for the desert trail. I remembered seeing the distinctive turquoise of a Tuan creeper high up in the Eden rainforest when we were searching for Joth, and stopped at the first refreshment point to collect a bottle of water and use my lookup to send a question to Pyramid Zone Information.

Their reply came a few minutes later. Apparently, I could have been right about it being a Tuan creeper. Genetically modified plants didn’t always do exactly what their creators intended, and in some very rare cases Tuan creepers had been found living an arboreal existence in the rainforest, clinging to a tree trunk and managing to survive on nutrients absorbed from the humid air.

That sounded a bit like me. One of the Handicapped was as rare and out of place in a norm class as a Tuan creeper in the rainforest, but I’d managed so far and things should be a lot easier now. Steen had said there wouldn’t be any more trouble.

I pulled a face of angry self-mockery as I walked on along the path. At the start of this year, I’d declared war against a class of norms. I’d defeated them now, but what sort of victory was this? My enemies hadn’t learned to like me. They just blamed Petra for Joth’s death, and being nice to me was a way of punishing her.

The victory wouldn’t last for long anyway. Next year, Playdon was going to be running a pre-history degree course for University Asgard. It would be heavily practical, and based on Earth, so Fian and I planned to join it. Some others from our class would be joining it too, but there’d also be a lot of new people. There was bound to be someone prejudiced against the Handicapped, so I’d have to fight the battle all over again.

This battle would always be part of my life. There would always be people who didn’t think I was really human. I’d been bitterly angry about that for years, and a lot of that anger was aimed at myself. When people keep telling you something, it has an effect on you. I’d had the perfect example of that with the Alien Contact programme. Everything I’d been taught, every mention of meeting aliens, had assumed humanity would meet them during Planet First explorations of a new sector. Even knowing that Alien Contact had called me in, I hadn’t been able to step back from that ingrained idea and work out that the aliens must have come to Earth.

Of course I’d been affected by the off-worlders’ views of the Handicapped as well. Every day of my life, I’d been reminded of them in one way or another. Growing up a ward of Hospital Earth because my own parents had rejected me. Hearing the jokes on the off-world vids, about how people like me were ugly and stupid. Knowing I’d never have the right to vote, or …

Part of me had absorbed those ideas, and felt I wasn’t really human. I’d tried to fight my insecurity by being the best at everything, dumping the subjects like science, where I could only manage to be average. That was why joining this class had been more about proving things to myself than to the hated exos.

I didn’t feel that way any longer. It had taken a combination of the acceptance of my friends and Fian, the Military awarding me the Artemis medal, and a truly alien race sending a probe to Earth to convince me, but it had finally happened. The words Candace and my psychologist had said to me a thousand times really were true. I was as normal and human and valuable as any off-worlder, I just had a faulty immune system.

That realization wouldn’t magically give me a family, mean I could travel to the stars, or stop some people from calling me names, but it still helped. My Handicap would always cause me problems, but I had a lot of good things in my life as well. Fian, my friends, and my joy in history. I was even an officer in the Military now. If it wasn’t for the threat of that alien sphere up in Earth orbit …