Earth 2788 (10 page)

“Tremble,
oppressed ones of Delta sector. The corrupting influence of Gamma sector is
among you!”

Valin hit him,
and turned to eagerly look at me. “How was last night’s date with your
girlfriend? Did you get anywhere?”

I retrieved both
their secret lookups from under the floor and handed them over, before putting
the floor back into place, standing up, and answering the question. “I got my
face slapped, called a sexual pervert, and dumped!”

“Oh.” Valin
slumped down into one of the chairs. “Things didn’t go too well then.”

“Sexual pervert!”
Macall repeated. “What the chaos did you do to the girl?”

“I tried to hold
her hand,” I said. “I thought she wanted me to push the boundaries a bit, but
apparently I’d misread the signals.”

“All that for
trying to hold her hand?” Macall gave a sad shake of his head.

“No respectable
Deltan girl would dream of holding hands with a boy without a Twoing contract.”
I mimicked my ex-girlfriend’s voice as I quoted her.

I sat down at
the table, dropped my secret lookup on top of it, and stared down at it
gloomily. “It’s not as if I’d have objected to having a Twoing contract. My
father would throw a fit, saying I shouldn’t let emotions distract me from my
studies, but I’d have stood up to him over it. I just wanted a little
reassurance first.”

Macall laughed.
“A little reassurance that you wouldn’t fight a huge battle with your father,
and commit yourself to a legal contract for months, then discover you were
Twoing with a complete frost of a girl?”

“Well, yes,” I
admitted. “It’s so difficult to tell if a girl is freezing you off to obey
Deltan social conventions, or if she really is a human icicle.”

Macall sat down
in the third chair. “It’s been five years since my parents dragged me to
Hercules to further their wretched careers, but I still don’t believe how
prudish things are here. It’s so unfair. If I was back on Asgard in Gamma
sector, dating a girl there …”

There was
several minutes’ silence, while all three of us daydreamed about dating a girl
in Gamma sector. Macall had left Gamma sector when he was 12, so he’d never
actually dated anyone there himself, but he’d seen his older brother kissing a
girlfriend. Valin and I were basing our ideas on the Gamma sector vids we’d
seen.

Normally you had
to be 18 or have parental permission to watch Gamma sector vids, but Macall had
dual Deltan and Gamman citizenship, so he had free access. He let me and Valin
watch his vids with him. My personal favourite was a series called
Stalea of
the Jungle
.

“I wish I was
Stalea’s boyfriend,” I said.

“But she lives
in a jungle village on a world that’s been cut off from civilization,” said
Macall. “That vid series has a totally ridiculous plot.”

“It’s not that
ridiculous,” said Valin. “Civilization virtually collapsed after Exodus
century. A lot of worlds had their interstellar portals fail in the early part
of the twenty-fifth century and genuinely were totally isolated.”

“What about the
jungle though?” asked Macall. “The Military wouldn’t open up a new world for
colonization with a proposed inhabited continent covered in jungle. Especially
a jungle with monsters in it.”

“I don’t care
about the plot being unrealistic,” I said. “I like the way Stalea throws her
boyfriend across a jungle clearing, leaps on him, and forcibly kisses him. If
only my girlfriend, I mean my
ex
-girlfriend, was like that.”

“You’d need more
than a Twoing contract to get a Deltan girl to kiss you like that,” said Macall.
“I don’t think even marriage would be enough. Anyway, being thrown across a
jungle clearing could be extremely painful if you landed on a rock.”

“Stalea’s
boyfriend never lands on rocks,” said Valin, in a dreamy voice. “She always
throws him somewhere soft, and the way she kisses him is totally amaz. It’s a
pity the credits start rolling as soon as it gets really interesting.”

Macall shook his
head in mock disapproval. “I’m shocked! Well behaved17-year-old Deltan boys
shouldn’t be having impure thoughts about girls kissing them.”

“I’m a very
badly behaved Deltan boy,” I said. “Just ask my father and he’ll tell you!
Anyway, the thing I like best about Stalea is that she makes it perfectly clear
what she wants from her boyfriend. If my ex-girlfriend had made her rules clear
to start with, then we might still be together.”

I paused and
sighed. “Maybe it’s a good thing my girlfriend dumped me. Being involved with a
girl would make things even more difficult. I couldn’t leave Hercules if I was
in a relationship, not unless she’d leave with me, and …”

“Forget the
girlfriend!” said Macall. “We have work to do. We’re supposed to be reading up
on the expansionists winning the key vote in 2370.”

We all turned on
our secret lookups, and there was total silence while we read the recommended
history text on how the expansionist victory meant the Military could continue
opening up the Beta sector planets for colonization. Personally, I felt the
historian who’d written it was far too positive about the expansionist victory
being a good thing. The greedy colonization of more and more worlds had led to
the near total collapse of civilization and the loss of huge amounts of human
knowledge. Vast swathes of historical knowledge, culture and …

A bell rang
loudly overhead, telling us the first school class of the day was starting. The
three of us shut down our lookups, waited exactly five minutes, then cautiously
peered out of the door. There was no one in sight, so we sprinted for the dome
next door, skidding in through the open doorway, and pausing to close the door
behind us.

“Welcome,” said
the history teacher, Larsson. “As I was saying, I’ve now got your first round
of examination results.”

The four legal
members of the history class were sitting at the front desks. They were all
boys, of course. Schools on Hercules all accepted both boys and girls, but even
the tiniest classes were strictly segregated.

Macall, Valin,
and I sat down. We had the three desks closest to the big display board, so if
any outsiders walked into the class, we could hide behind it. That had only
happened three times in the last four years. History, literature, and art
classes were always timetabled on science rest days, when there were just a
handful of teachers and students at the school.

Once we’d sat
down, Larsson continued. “You’ll be glad to hear that you’ve all got the top
grade. It’s a shame I can only put four of you on the official school results
list. If I put all seven of you down, then that would put this school at the
top of the Hercules history results table for this year.”

He paused. “Now,
although I deeply admire the determined way our three gatecrashers have given
up their free time to stick with their history studies over the last four
years, we’re reaching the real crisis point. The Cross-sector University
Application Process opened today for all courses starting immediately after
Year Day 2789. I could quietly add names to a history examination entry list
without anyone noticing, but university applications are a very different
matter.”

He pulled a face.
“I’ll happily assist any of you wishing to apply to do a Pre-history Foundation
course but, given the way your parents blocked you moving from the school
science stream to the school history stream, I assume you’ll meet strong
opposition at home.”

Macall nodded. “We’ve
got a plan to deal with that. We’ll start by doing what our parents expect,
putting in applications to University Hercules to study physics. We can change
those applications at any time until the application process closes. We wait
until the last day, and then change them to …”

All three of us
chorused it in unison. “Pre-history Foundation course at University Asgard in
Gamma sector!”

“I hope you
realize that you won’t actually do the course on Asgard,” said the teacher. “All
Pre-history Foundation courses are held on Earth. You’ll be learning about the
days when humanity only lived on Earth, and studying the ruins of the ancient
cities.”

“We understand
that,” I said. The course would be run by University Asgard under Gamma sector
rules, but the classes would take place on Earth, the home world of humanity.
I’d be seeing the places where the ancient civilizations had flourished,
walking in the steps of the famous people of pre-history. It was going to be
utterly perfect, totally zan, all my dreams coming true at once!

Larsson shook
his head. “All right, we’ll have everything ready so you can make your changes
quickly, and swap your physics teacher’s supporting statements for mine, but
you’d better think through exactly how your parents will react when they find
out what you’ve done.”

“Maybe they
won’t be that annoyed,” said Valin.

“They won’t be
annoyed,” said Macall. “They’ll be incandescent with rage, but what can they do
to stop us? By the time they find out, the Cross-sector University Application
Process will have closed, so they won’t be able to change anything.”

“That’s true for
you, Macall,” said Larsson, “and for Valin too, because your parents are ordinary
school teachers. Fian’s in a very different situation though. His father doesn’t
just work in the Physics Department of University Hercules, he runs it, and may
be able to persuade his colleagues to accept a late application.”

“My father could
definitely persuade them,” I said. “Everyone in the Physics Department is
terrified of him, but he can’t change my course application without my
agreement. I just have to stay firm for two weeks until the course places are
allocated.”

“I wish you the
best of luck with that, because it won’t be easy,” said Larsson. “After the
incident when you took a history module, I had the dubious pleasure of meeting
your father, so I know exactly what you’re up against.”

I knew it would
be far from easy, but I was counting on one thing to help me. The Cross-sector
Nobel Committee formally announced its decision in October, and the awards
ceremony was at the start of December. My father would find out about my
university application in the ecstatic period between being officially
announced as the Nobel Prize winner and actually holding the award. It was over
optimistic to think that he wouldn’t care what I was doing, but he should be
too occupied with accepting the congratulations of all his colleagues, and
gloating over fulfilling his lifelong ambition, to spend much time shouting at
me.

Larsson dropped
the subject of university applications after that, and started us debating the
set text we’d been reading. I argued the case that the expansionist victory was
a disaster, while Macall claimed it was a good thing. Earth had already been
strained too much by founding all the colony worlds of Alpha sector, and would
have collapsed anyway.

“Yes, but …” I
broke off my sentence because my lookup was chiming for an emergency call. I
grabbed it, checked the caller, and saw it was my mother. She wouldn’t call me
on my secret lookup unless something was desperately wrong.

“Sorry,” I said,
“I really must answer this.”

I hurried
outside, sprinted back to the safety of the sports dome, and answered the call.

My mother looked
apologetically at me. “I’m sorry to call you like this, but I had to warn you …”
She seemed to be looking past me, checking what she could see of my
surroundings. “Nobody can hear us, can they?”

“No,” I said. “I’m
totally alone.”

Despite my
words, she lowered her voice to a barely audible whisper. “It’s your father. A
friend on the Cross-sector Nobel Committee has called him with some unfortunate
news.”

I stared at her.
“You don’t mean …?”

She nodded. “Two
researchers at University Mextli have announced an incredible breakthrough.”

“But … It’s
surely too late for their research to be considered for this year’s Nobel.
Nothing is eligible unless it’s independently verified and replicated by other
researchers before the deadline, and that’s only days away.”

“Apparently it’s
already been verified,” my mother interrupted me.

“What? But if
that’s true, why didn’t Father know about it?”

“This was a
joint civilian and Military research project, so the results were classified.
The findings were given to two other University research groups to verify, but
they had to keep them secret as well. Nobody else knew anything about it until
yesterday, when the Military cleared everything for publication.”

“Oh.” I was
silent as I thought this through. “Is there any chance at all of the Nobel?”

Mother shook her
head. “Viewed dispassionately, your father’s work is solid, thorough, but not
exactly innovative.”

My mother wasn’t
just my father’s wife, but one of his research assistants, and his staunchest
supporter. If she admitted that my father’s work was solid, but the rival
research was an incredible breakthrough, then all hope of a Nobel had gone up
in smoke. My father and I did nothing but argue, but I still had to feel sorry
for him.

“This is
obviously going to be a huge disappointment for Father,” I said.

“And a major
embarrassment too,” said Mother. “Everyone was assuming he’d get the Nobel. All
the staff at University Hercules were counting on it boosting the prestige of
not just the Physics Department but the whole university, and your father …”

She hesitated
for a moment. “Your father’s made a few premature remarks about getting the
Nobel this year. There are one or two people with reason to dislike him, and
they may take the opportunity to make his life difficult.”

I groaned. I
knew Mother was politely understating the situation. The truth was that my
father had been making cutting remarks about other people’s research for years.
By now, there weren’t just one or two people who disliked him, but a whole host
of people who really hated him.