Read the book: «Earth Flight»

2

By the time Fian and I arrived in the hall for breakfast, the rest of the class had already set out the flexiplas tables and chairs. The wall vid was on, showing Gamma Sector News since most of the class were from star systems in that sector. I recognized a horribly familiar vid sequence and groaned. With my worries about Fian’s parents, I’d forgotten today was 1 June, the anniversary of Earth Flight.

Every Wallam-Crane day, all the vid channels showed the footage of the first portal experiment. Every Flight day, they ran a sequence about the first manned interstellar flight by drop portal. Thankfully, we’d missed most of the incomprehensible scientific bit about how the transmitting portal does all the work, and the instant when the drop portal dust ring simultaneously exists at both transmission and reception point, stabilizing its own incoming signal.

‘… together with power issues mean this is limited to dust particles. When a link is established between two normal portals, it can be held open indefinitely, but a drop portal establishes for a maximum of 5.13 seconds before the ephemeral receiving dust ring dissipates,’ said the commentator.

Fian and I went to join the queue at the food dispensers and I frowned gloomily at the available menu. The panic over the alien probe had disrupted their regular service and restock, so we’d run out of most meal options. I settled for a glass of Fizzup, a plate of toasted wafers, and some reconstituted Karanth jelly. There was plenty of Karanth jelly left because of the rumour that eating it made your baby Handicapped.

No one understood what caused a baby to be Handicapped, so norms had a lot of these nardle superstitions about it. Researchers were always claiming to be on the verge of a major breakthrough, but they hadn’t achieved anything since they first established the basic facts of the triple ten. There is a one in ten risk of a baby being born Handicapped if both parents are Handicapped themselves. One in a hundred if one parent is Handicapped. One in a thousand if neither parent is.

Fian and I carried our trays across to sit with the other three members of class dig team 1 at our regular table. Krath greeted us with an exaggerated weary sigh.

‘It’s not fair making us work on a holiday. Playdon’s a slave driver.’

Lecturer Playdon turned his head to call across the room. ‘I’m a slave driver with perfectly good hearing, and Flight day isn’t a holiday on Earth.’

Krath gave an embarrassed groan and looked at me. ‘I thought Flight day was a holiday everywhere.’

Amalie leant across to hit him on the back of the head. Krath was one of the big group of students from Asgard, who’d chosen a course run by their home university, while Amalie was from a planet in frontier Epsilon sector. I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on between them. Krath was definitely chasing after Amalie, but she seemed more interested in teaching him common sense than having a romantic relationship with him.

Krath sighed. ‘What did I do wrong this time?’

‘Think about it, nardle brain,’ said Amalie. ‘Most of the population of Earth is Handicapped and can’t portal to other planets.’

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Wallam-Crane day is a holiday here, because he invented the portal and we can at least portal around Earth. We don’t really celebrate it though, because that was the first step towards interstellar portals a century later. Flight day was the start of Exodus century, everyone pouring off world to new planets and leaving Earth to fall apart, so we just try to ignore it.’

I glanced over my shoulder at the vid. The commentator was talking about the S.T.A.R. – Simultaneous Transmission And Reception – series of automated probes, while the screen was showing an image of a curiously shaped ship in Earth orbit.

Dalmora gave me a sympathetic look. She was the only Alphan in the class, the daughter of the famous Ventrak Rostha who made the History of Humanity vid series, and I’d resented her at first sight. With her waist-long black hair adorned with flickering lights, and her lovely dark face delicately highlighted with makeup, I’d expected her to be a selfish, spoilt aristocrat. Instead, I’d discovered she was one of the kindest, most compassionate people I’d ever met.

‘Would you like the vid turned off, Jarra?’ she asked.

I shook my head. ‘I’ve seen it dozens of times before so it doesn’t bother me.’

I munched on my toasted wafers, keeping my back to the wall vid, but of course I could still hear it. They’d finally got to the interesting bit, so the odious commentator stopped talking over the ancient soundtrack. The calm female voice of the mission controller was calling for final confirmations from the various teams. I knew every word of this by heart, and the sound of all the different voices as they spoke the archaic accented version of Language from almost half a millennium ago.

‘Countdown is holding at sixty seconds. Final checks. Drop portal focus?’

‘Drop portal focusing confirmed at 98.73 per cent of optimal.’

‘Telemetry?’

‘Telemetry is green.’

‘Power?’

‘Power is green.’

‘My board is showing clear greens,’ said the mission controller. ‘Mission Control to Earth Flight, are you ready for this?’

‘Earth Flight to Mission Control,’ responded Major Kerr. ‘I’ve been ready for this all my life. Let’s do it.’

‘Prepare to pick up countdown at sixty seconds and initiate power build on my mark,’ said the mission controller. ‘Mark!’

As the countdown started, I gave in and turned to watch the wall vid. The image on the screen showed the view through the front window of the Earth Flight ship, the blackness of space contrasting with the blue and white curve of Earth below.

‘Thirty-five. Committing to auto power spike sequence … Now!’ The mission controller’s voice and the background chatter stopped. They were on auto sequence now. Nothing could stop the power spike building and firing the primitive drop portal, so they could only count down the seconds and hope nothing went wrong. Of the thirty automated probes in the S.T.A.R. series, twenty-four had made it to their destinations, but six had exploded when the power spikes went unstable.

Everyone had stopped eating now, and was watching the wall vid in silence. There was something about this vid sequence that compelled you to watch it even though you already knew exactly what happened.

‘Five seconds,’ said the voice of the mission controller. ‘Four. Three. Earth Flight, take us to the stars!’

The image went totally black as the drop portal fired. There was an agonizing delay, with the sound of increasingly tense voices as Mission Control waited for contact from the tiny comms portal on board Earth Flight. Finally, there was a white flash that broke up into multi-coloured jagged lines. Those formed together for an instant, dissolved again into randomness, then stabilized.

It was a grainy picture now, from the days before they’d invented two-way comms portal twinning or message streaming. The scene it showed was almost identical to the earlier one, but the continents on the blue and white planet were a different shape.

‘Earth Flight to Mission Control,’ said the breathless voice of Major Kerr. ‘Drop portal from Earth successfully completed. The comms portal established after only three mill of fine-tuning. I hope you’re getting visual as well as audio feeds, because this is the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen.’

There was an audible sigh from around the hall, as everyone released the breath they’d been holding, and the class started eating and talking again. The vid sequence still had a few minutes to run, but no one was interested in Major Kerr’s spacewalk to detach the portal sections attached to the outside of his ship and assemble them. No one cared about how that created the first standard portal link between Earth and another star system, or the other ships that portalled in through it. No one wanted to hear how Major Kerr’s first description of the new world led to it being named Adonis. They only cared about the symbolic moment when Earth Flight took humanity to the stars.

I bit my lip, remembering the Flight day when I was 4 years old. I’d sat on the floor with the other kids in Nursery, watched the vid coverage, and asked a nurse when I could portal to Adonis. She’d shaken her head and gently explained I couldn’t do that because I’d die. It had taken me a few minutes to understand what she was saying. I already knew the people I saw in the vids had families, while my friends and I didn’t. I couldn’t believe I’d been cheated out of the stars as well.

I could still feel my shocked outrage at the monstrous unfairness of it. A feeling that was repeated again and again as I grew older. When I was 5 years old, laughing at a joke on the vids about stupid, ugly apes, and an older kid slapped my face and told me to stop laughing because the joke was about people like us. When I was 7, and there was a lesson at school about how Earth was run by the off-worlders on the main board of Hospital Earth. Other people, real people, got to vote about how their own world was run, but the Handicapped had no say in what happened on Earth.

The final insult was when I was 9, and discovered Earth was physically in the centre of Alpha sector but not legally part of it. The off-worlders hadn’t just rejected me and everyone like me, they’d rejected Earth itself because we lived there!

Fian gave me a worried look. ‘Are you all right, Jarra?’

My psychologist at Next Step kept telling me it was pointless making myself unhappy by brooding over things I couldn’t change. I didn’t have much faith in psychologists, but he was probably right about that. I forced away the old bitterness. ‘I’m fine.’

The Earth Flight vid sequence ended. Krath went over to the wall vid just as a Gamma Sector News presenter started talking. ‘Now the news headlines for today. Major Jarra Tell Morrath is to join one of the Betan Military clans.’

The entire class stopped talking and stared at me as if I’d grown an extra head.

‘Talks between the two political factions on Hestia have failed to reach an agreement,’ continued the presenter. ‘The …’

Krath turned off the wall vid and gave me a grazzed look. ‘Jarra, that story’s a nardle mistake, isn’t it? You aren’t Betan.’

This was chaos embarrassing. Like most of the class, I’d grown up with prejudices about Beta sector. Only months ago, I’d been joining in their jokes about Betan sex vids, giggling at the scanty clothes Betans wore, and saying Beta sector couldn’t be trusted because it had been on the verge of war with the rest of humanity during its Second Roman Empire period.

Then I discovered I’d been born into a Betan clan, and they actually wanted contact with me. Anyone who’d grown up in Hospital Earth’s residences would understand exactly why I’d promptly rethought my attitudes, but I was in a class of norms. They wouldn’t know how rejected kids longed to have a family, and I didn’t want to explain that sort of private emotional stuff, so I kept my response simple and matter of fact.

‘It’s perfectly true. I was raised on Earth, but my birth family were Betan. You should have realized that. The newzies have been talking for weeks about me being descended from Tellon Blaze, and he was Betan.’

‘Tellon Blaze was Betan!’ Krath waved his hands in disbelief. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ said Lolmack, open contempt in his voice.

Lolmack and Lolia were the only two Betans in our class. They were older than the rest of us, married, and had a Handicapped baby. At the start of this course, Krath had made some remarks about the Handicapped being subhuman apes. He’d changed his opinions now, but Lolmack still held a grudge against him.

‘The other sectors never mention Tellon Blaze, the hero who saved humanity from the chimera of Thetis, was from Beta sector,’ continued Lolmack. ‘They never admit it was Beta sector that saved civilization from total collapse after Exodus century. They never tell our side of the Second Roman Empire, or try to understand our culture, or …’

‘That doesn’t matter now,’ Lolia interrupted in an oddly tense voice. ‘Jarra, is it true what Earth Rolling News is saying? The Tell clan are making you a clan member?’

Lolmack made a horizontal, air-slicing movement with his left hand; a classic Betan gesture of rejection. ‘That’s just an outlander news channel making a mistake.’

‘It’s not a mistake,’ I said.

Lolmack stood up and hurried over to me. ‘You’re sure, Jarra?’ he demanded. ‘The Tell clan aren’t just acknowledging your birth, but offering clan membership?’

I didn’t understand the urgency in his face, but I nodded. ‘The presentation ceremony is in three days time.’

‘A presentation ceremony!’ Lolmack turned to his wife. ‘That would …’

‘One of the Handicapped being formally presented to a clan of the gentes maiores!’ Lolia put her hands to her face. ‘If that happens …’

I was shocked to see she was crying. ‘I don’t understand why this is so …?’

‘Jarra,’ she said, ‘a handful of clans have acknowledged a Handicapped birth, but none has ever offered clan membership. The Tell clan are of the gentes maiores, the aristocracy of Zeus. If they do this, it could change our lives!’

I stared at her, totally bewildered by her dramatic words.

‘There’s a lot of prejudice against the Handicapped on Betan worlds,’ said Lolmack.

‘It’s like that in all the sectors,’ I said. ‘I’ve grown up watching off-world vids, and they all use the same insults. The only difference between Handicapped and norms is a fault in our immune system, but they call us throwbacks, Neanderthals, and ugly, smelly apes.’

‘It’s a bigger problem in Beta than the other sectors though, because of the clan system,’ said Lolmack. ‘The shame of a Handicapped birth doesn’t just affect the parents, but the whole clan.’

Lolia nodded. ‘When our baby was born Handicapped, the other partner in our triad marriage instantly divorced us. Lolette wasn’t genetically his child, but …’

Lolmack went to put his arm round her. ‘By saying that, he proved himself lower than the clanless. If things had been reversed, I would still count Lolette as my daughter, and still be here with you on Earth.’

Lolia smiled up at him. ‘I know that. He was more of a loss to you than to me.’ She looked back at me. ‘Hospital Earth rules meant Lolmack and I had to choose between making our daughter their ward and never seeing her again, or moving to Earth to be with her. Clan council ordered us to give up our ape child or be disowned. To have our own clan calling our daughter an ape and threatening us …’

‘Clan council had no choice,’ said Lolmack. ‘Alliance council had ruled the alliance could not afford the loss of status of a Handicapped birth, and threatened to remove our clan from the alliance if our child’s birth became known.’

He pulled a face. ‘So we joined this course to have an excuse for being on Earth. All this time, we’ve lived with the fact that if Lolette’s existence becomes known, our clan cluster must disown us to save their position in the alliance, but if the Tell clan welcome you as a clan member …’

‘It would change everything,’ said Lolia. ‘Just seeing you on the newzies has already made a difference to the way Betans speak of the Handicapped. Every clan was watching the vid coverage when you and Fian sent the signal to the alien sphere. Every clan saw how you looked and spoke and acted like any normal human. Every clan heard you named as a descendant of the great Tellon Blaze.’

Her words tumbled out eagerly now. ‘Jarra, if a clan of the gentes maiores make you a clan member, alliance council may agree to acknowledge Lolette’s birth, perhaps even permit her to be formally presented.’

Lolmack shook his head. ‘Don’t build your hopes impossibly high, Lolia. The vital thing is to have Lolette openly acknowledged, so we can stop living in fear of being made clanless. We must contact clan council at once.’

I was startled to hear Lecturer Playdon join in the conversation. ‘I’ll excuse both Lolia and Lolmack from this morning’s dig site work so they can discuss this development with their clan. Tomorrow, we’ll still be working on the Eden ruins in the morning, but in the afternoon we’ll be packing and moving to London Main Dig Site.’

‘But the General Marshal’s making a statement about the Alien Contact programme tomorrow afternoon,’ said Krath. ‘We can’t miss seeing that.’

‘The announcement is at 17:00 hours Earth Africa time,’ said Playdon. ‘We’ll stay here to watch it, but I want everyone to be packed ready to leave directly after it finishes. Fortunately, Earth Africa is on Green Time plus two hours, while Earth Europe is on Green time, so we’ll gain two hours in the move.’

He paused and pointedly glanced towards Fian and me. ‘I’ll do a last inspection of the dome just before we leave. Students aren’t allowed to move dome walls, so I’m sure I won’t discover any of them are missing.’

Fian and I exchanged embarrassed glances, while the rest of the class laughed at us. Everyone knew we’d illegally moved the wall between our two single rooms to make a double.

‘How many days holiday do we get before starting work on London Main?’ asked Krath.

Playdon gave him one of his evil smiles that meant bad news. ‘None.’

There was a collective groan from the class. We all knew Playdon’s smile meant there was absolutely no point in arguing, but Krath tried it anyway.

‘None? We’re supposed to get at least three days break when we move dig sites!’

‘You all missed an entire week of work due to the alien probe,’ said Playdon, ‘so you’ve got some catching up to do. Clear away breakfast now.’

I started piling plates on to a tray, picked it up, and looked at Fian. ‘Do you believe me becoming a clan member will really help Lolia and Lolmack?’

‘They obviously think so. It’s much bigger than just those two and their baby though, isn’t it? 92 per cent of Handicapped babies are handed over to be wards of Hospital Earth. The older sectors have the highest populations, so at least a quarter of those babies must be being born to Betan clans. If the clan attitudes change so it’s easier for Betan parents to come to Earth with their baby, it could mean thousands of children each year have a chance to grow up with their family.’

Fian was right and my psychologist had been totally wrong. It wasn’t pointless making myself unhappy over the unfairness of things, because there was something I could do to change them for the better.

When we sent the signal to the alien probe, it had been a significant moment for humanity. When the Tell clan of Zeus welcomed me as a clan member, it would be just as significant a moment for the Handicapped children of Beta sector.