Earth and Fire Read online

  I heard the sound of someone shouting, and twisted round in my seat to look across at where people were entering Earth Europe Off-world the legal way through the security checks. A man clutching a plant was arguing with the guards. I shook my head in disbelief. Did he seriously expect to stroll through an interstellar portal carrying that? The dimmest of nardles should know that introducing random plants or animals to an alien world could cause havoc with the eco system. Even some of the most carefully planned introductions of Earth species to colony worlds had caused unexpected problems.

  Apparently this dim nardle truly didn’t know that, because he was shouting at the security guards so loudly now that everyone in the waiting area could hear him. “You’re a bunch of officious nuking idiots!”

  Issette turned to me and pulled a buggy-eyed, shocked face, which could either have been at the man’s stupidity or at him using the nuke word in public. I covered my mouth with both hands to stop myself laughing. If I was one of the security guards, I’d be strongly tempted to let the man try to take his precious plant through an interstellar portal. The bio-filters would instantly shut the portal down, and he’d be fined a fortune for attempting to breach interstellar quarantine.

  The security guards had a lot more patience than I did, because they just made soothing noises, took the offending plant into custody, and let the aggrieved traveller stalk off through portal 1 to Adonis.

  I was still exchanging grins with Issette when portal 7 came to life again. We both turned to see if this was another scantily-clad man from Beta sector, but this time it was a couple in the unremarkable clothes of Gamma sector. The woman was openly crying, uncaring of who might see her, and the man appeared to be torn between comforting her and keeping his distance. I’d worked out what was happening here even before an older woman in the formal grey and white uniform of a Hospital Earth Child Advocate hurried up to meet them.

  The man spoke before she could. “There’s no throwback genes in my family. This must be a ridiculous mistake, unless …”

  He turned to give a suspicious look at the crying woman, and she seemed to forget her tears as she glared at him in outrage. “There’s never been any apes in my family. It must be you!”

  The advocate hastily intervened. “Please remember that on Earth we prefer to use the official term, Handicapped, rather than derogatory slurs. I’m sorry, but there’s no mistake. Your son was born with a flawed immune system, so he can’t survive on any world other than Earth.”

  She paused for a moment. “There’s a random one in a thousand risk even with two normal parents, so this can happen to absolutely anyone, but you’ll be happy to hear your son was portalled here in time to save his life. He’s currently in a Hospital Earth Infant Crash Unit, but his condition should soon be stable enough for you to visit him. Before then, I’d like to give you information on all the options available to help parents move to Earth to be with their Handicapped babies.”

  The three of them headed off to the exit, with the advocate still talking in bracingly cheerful tones, but I could tell she was wasting her time. The man had a rigid, cold expression on his face, and the woman had the distant look of someone already rehearsing the speech she’d make to explain how she couldn’t possibly give up everything and move to Earth to take care of her son. She’d use the same excuses they all did, claiming it was nothing to do with the embarrassment or the damage to her lifestyle, but because she felt it was best to let the child grow up with his own kind.

  This couple were going to do what 92 per cent of the parents of Handicapped babies did. They were going to hand their son over to be raised as a ward of Hospital Earth, turn their backs on the reject, and walk away. That was what my parents had done when I was born. That was what Issette’s parents had done. That was what the parents of all my friends at Next Step had done.

  I turned to look at portals 9 and 10 for the first time. They were dark, but occasionally their lights would blink as they relayed a portal signal for an incoming medical emergency, sending a newborn Handicapped baby directly to a Hospital Earth Infant Crash Unit.

  I glanced at Issette’s face, saw she was on the verge of tears, and stood up. “We’d better go now.”

  We walked back to the door hidden behind the food dispensers. I’d just entered the code into the lock plate, and was opening the door, when I heard a sudden shout.

  “Hey! Where are you going?”

  Chapter Two

  I looked round, and saw a security guard heading towards us. I grabbed Issette’s hand, dragged her through the door with me, and kicked it closed behind us. Hopefully, the guard wouldn’t know the code to open the door and …

  There was a series of clicks from the lock plate, and I saw the door start opening again. I groaned, turned, and ran down the corridor, tugging Issette along with me. The ceiling glows overhead were automatically turning on for us, just as they’d done earlier, but now we were moving too fast for them. We were running on the edge of darkness, with the pool of light always a pace or two behind us. I could hear the sound of heavy footsteps chasing after us, and noisy, irregular gasps for breath from Issette. Was she breathing like that because of the physical effort of running, or because she was about to panic?

  There was a dark shadow on the wall to my left. A side corridor! I turned and skidded into it, towing Issette with me. I was hoping that we could hide while the guard ran past us, but of course the glows overhead started turning on, signalling our location.

  “Nuke it!” I cursed my own stupidity and ran on, taking another couple of random turns. We’d been moving faster than the guard to start with, but now I was horribly aware the footsteps behind us were getting steadily closer. Our best chance would be to split up, because a single guard could only chase one of us, but I couldn’t leave Issette on her own in the darkness.

  I was expecting to be grabbed from behind at any moment, when the sound of footsteps suddenly stopped. I risked turning my head for a second, and saw the guard standing still, leaning against the wall and panting for breath.

  “He’s given up!” I said.

  We ran on down another couple of corridors, before stopping to rest and get our breath back. I was rejoicing in our escape, when Issette spoke in a shaky voice.

  “Is it far to the way out?”

  There was a sick feeling in my stomach as I tried to remember all the turnings we’d taken during the chase. We must be far away from the route we’d used to get to the Off-world. I tried to keep my voice calm and confident as I answered her.

  “There are several ways out. Let me check the plans on my lookup to work out which is closest.”

  I tapped my lookup, and stared at the maze of corridors. We’d taken a right turn, run past two more turnings, taken a left, and then … No, according to the plan, the left turn we’d taken didn’t exist. Either I’d forgotten something, or I’d missed seeing some side turnings in the darkness. I couldn’t work out where we were, or even which direction we should be going. There was a numbered door nearby, but that didn’t help because there were no numbers on my plan.

  I daren’t tell Issette that we were lost. If we kept going straight on, then we must get somewhere eventually. If we didn’t … Well, we could use our lookups to call for help, but we’d be in an awful lot of trouble.

  “We go this way,” I said.

  I led the way down the corridor to the next junction and went straight on. At the next two junctions, we went straight on again, but at the third we had to turn left or right. I’d just decided to go right, when there was a cry of delight from Issette. I turned to look at her, and saw she was pointing to a faded sign on the wall. A fire exit sign!

  We followed the sign down the corridor to the left, found another sign pointing to the right, and a corridor that ended in a red door. I waved my hand at the door release, the door opened, and a combination of heat and bright sunlight hit us as we went through it. We’d escaped!

  I stopped and shielded my eyes with one hand as I
looked around. We were standing outside a massive building, its grey flexiplas wall dotted with small doorways and windows. At the far end of it, I could see some much larger doors, and a huge sign saying “Earth Europe Off-world”. If we wanted to, Issette and I could come back when we were 18, go in through those doors and see those ten chunky portals again. What we couldn’t do, what we could never do however old we were, was walk through one of the portals.

  I knew exactly what would happen if we did, because Hospital Earth allowed its wards one attempt at portalling off world when they were 14, to prove there hadn’t been a mistake in diagnosing them as Handicapped. I’d been one of the very few fool enough to try it. I’d portalled from a hospital rather than an Off-world, arrived on an Alpha sector world, collapsed into the arms of the waiting medical team, and been thrown back through the portal. Things were a bit hazy for a while after that, but I remembered enough pain to make me absolutely certain I never wanted to try it again.

  Interstellar portals were for the norms, not for me and my friends. Whether you called us the officially polite but sneering word, Handicapped, or the open insults like throwback and ape, didn’t change anything. Every other handicap could be screened out or fixed before birth, but the doctors couldn’t do anything about this one. There were over eleven hundred inhabited planets spread across six different sectors of space, but we were imprisoned on Earth. Any other world would kill us within minutes.

  Chapter Three

  As soon as our eyes had adjusted to the sunlight, we started walking away from the building. Issette was looking much more herself now, relieved and happy to be outside, but I was still furious with myself for letting her come here with me. I’d known there was a danger of getting caught, but I hadn’t realized how creepy that maze of corridors would be, and I hadn’t even considered the risk that we’d get an unpleasant reminder of how our parents had dumped us at birth. Chaos stupid of me. Given the number of Handicapped babies portalled to Earth, there must be a constant stream of distressed and defensive parents arriving in every one of Earth’s five Off-worlds.

  “I’m really sorry you saw that couple talking to the advocate,” I said.

  Issette shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter. I was an idiot to even think of doing this. I was just so chaos frustrated waiting to leave Next Step, and then there was Earth Flight day with all the vid channels full of norms celebrating the anniversary of the first interstellar flight by drop portal. I thought going to see those interstellar portals, confronting my problem head on, would somehow …”

  I waved my arms in a gesture of hopelessness. “I don’t know what I thought it would do. I blame my nuking psychologist for putting silly ideas into my head. He keeps saying I have to find a way to accept the stars are out of my reach, stop caring about it, and move on. He may have stopped caring himself, but I can’t. I never will. Coming here wasn’t going to change anything, and seeing that couple has upset you.”

  Issette shook her head again. “You don’t need to feel guilty, Jarra. I see far worse things when I’m sitting in my own room at Next Step and watching vids. The off-world dramas use the Handicapped baby plot so often you’d think the risk for norm parents was one in ten, the same as a Handicapped couple, instead of one in a thousand. What I hate is the way the story always focuses on how awful it is for the parents, and how it destroys their lives. Nobody ever considers what it’s like for the baby. My psychologist says …”

  “No! Please don’t tell me what your psychologist says. It’s bad enough having to listen to my own psychologist without suffering yours as well. I think all psychologists should be thrown into the California Rift!”

  Issette giggled. “I’ve always felt sorry for your psychologists. How long have you had the latest one?”

  I grinned. “Two years now. It’s a new record.”

  “Hospital Earth must be paying him a special bonus to keep seeing you,” said Issette. “We can’t risk going back into the Off-world, so where do we go to portal home?”

  I took out my lookup and studied it for a moment. “There isn’t a proper settlement here, just the Transit, the Off-world, some offices for Portal Network Administration, and a minor history site.”

  “Nooo,” Issette wailed. “You’re going to drag me to this history site, aren’t you? Can’t we go back to the Transit and portal from there?”

  “We could, but we’d have to walk most of the way round the Off-world to get there, and that takes us straight past the history site.”

  Issette gave a groan of despair.

  I tried bribery. “There’s an ice cream dispenser at the history site. I’m buying.”

  “Oh, all right then.” Issette fanned her face with one hand. “I can’t believe how hot it’s been this week. You’d think it was August instead of June.”

  I laughed. “It’ll probably rain as soon as the school summer break starts.”

  We walked down a narrow path between the vertical wall of Europe Off-world on one side, and the curved wall of a flexiplas dome on the other. All the flexiplas had been left in its natural depressing grey colour, and there were none of the flowerbeds and trees you had in settlements. We finally reached a grassy area, where the stones of an ancient ruin had been excavated and sprayed with a protective transparent coating.

  The ice cream dispenser was next to the portal. I bought chocolate ice cream for myself, while Issette had the disgustingly sweet Adonis peach flavour she adored. We stood there licking our ice creams and looking at the ruins. Issette didn’t seem impressed by them.

  “Is that all there is?” she asked, in a disparaging tone.

  I sighed. “This is a villa built three thousand years ago by ancient Romans. Rome fell. Europe went through the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, a lot of people sailing around in boats, the Industrial Revolution, and umpteen wars.”

  Issette attempted to put her fingers in her ears without dropping her ice cream.

  “Wallam-Crane invented the portal in 2206,” I continued. “There was the century of United Earth, and the adoption of Language as the common tongue of humanity, then some idiot invented the interstellar portal.”

  Issette took her fingers out of her ears, so she could lick her melting ice cream. “Have you finished yet?”

  “No, I haven’t! Modern history started with the colonization of Adonis, then Exodus century emptied Earth, and for nearly four hundred years this world has just been a dumping ground for the Handicapped. That villa has been through an awful lot, Issette, so yes, that’s all there is left!” I paused. “You’ve got ice cream in your hair.”

  Issette used her lookup as a mirror and checked her hair. “There’s no need to get so excited about your rubble. I was just commenting there wasn’t much of it.”

  “We could portal over to Athens,” I said. “It’s far more impressive and incredibly beautiful. There was a major project to flatten or remove the more recent ruins a century or so ago, so now there’s just the ones from ancient Greece in the middle of the forest. I went there with the school history club last year. We spent three days helping to spray the Parthenon with a new layer of preservative.”

  “It’ll still be just ruins though,” said Issette. “No people. The Rome Alive exhibit made a lot more sense to me. They’ve got proper buildings and holo people.”

  I groaned. Rome Alive was, in my opinion, horribly tacky. It had reproduction buildings, with holo versions of historical characters acting out melodramatic scenes. The exhibit had been set up to attract off-world visitors, especially the ones from Betan worlds, since Beta sector prided itself on basing its culture on ancient Rome and Greece.

  There weren’t enough off-world visitors to keep the place busy, so Rome Alive also encouraged school parties to visit. Issette and I went there with our school when we were 13, and I was thrown out for pointing out some of the more blatant historical inaccuracies. Betan visitors wouldn’t care about them – half their ideas about anc
ient Rome and Greece had been wrong to start with and the rest had got hopelessly mangled over the centuries – but I did.

  “You don’t need stupid holo characters,” I said. “Just imagine the real people who lived here, slept here, ate here. They fell in love, married, had children, went through times of joy and tragedy the same as people do today. Look at that bit of mosaic pavement.”

  Issette sighed. “All right, I’m looking.”

  “Three thousand years ago, ancient Romans were standing exactly where we are now, admiring the new mosaic floor in their house. Isn’t that an amaz thought? Men in togas, women in …”

  I broke off my sentence and frowned at Issette. “Why are you giggling?”

  It took her a few seconds to recover enough to speak. “Betans wear togas, don’t they?”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Modern Betan formal dress for both men and women is supposed to be based on ancient Roman togas, but the Betan togas aren’t remotely historically accurate.”

  “So ancient Romans didn’t dress like that Betan man we saw in Europe Off-world?” asked Issette.

  I blinked. “Of course not. That Betan man wasn’t formally dressed.”

  Issette grinned. “He was barely dressed at all. I was just thinking that Rome Alive would be far more interesting if the holo people wore clothes like his.”

  She started giggling again after that, so I gave up trying to talk about history. We sat down on a three thousand year old piece of wall, finished eating our ice creams, then dialled the portal.

  We’d just stepped through to the foyer of Next Step E241/1089, when a voice spoke from next to us. “You look absolutely amaz, Jarra.”