Earth 2788 (11 page)

“You mean that Father’s
been going round boasting about how he’ll get the Astrophysics Nobel this year,
so his enemies are going to make the most of his disappointment?”

She nodded. “The
next six months are going to be a very difficult time for him. We’ll have to be
prepared for him to be … a little impatient sometimes. I realize that’s likely
to complicate your plans.”

I groaned again.
I’d thought it was good that my father would find out about my university
application in the period between the announcement of the Nobel winners and the
awards ceremony, but if his coveted Astrophysics Nobel was going to other
researchers, particularly ones involved with the Military, then …

“Are you sure
you still want to apply to do history at University Asgard?” asked my mother.

“Not history, Mother,
pre-history,” I automatically corrected her. “The Foundation course focuses on
the period of history before interstellar portal travel, which is called
pre-history.”

She waved a hand,
indicating that she didn’t think there was much difference. “Pre-history then.
I thought your girlfriend was planning to study physics here at University
Hercules. Surely that changes things?”

I shook my head.
“Not really. My girlfriend dumped me last night.”

“Ah.” My mother
sighed. “So you’re positive this is what you want to do?”

I couldn’t bear
to go and study physics at University Hercules, with the shadow of the
brilliant Jorgen Eklund looming over me, and my father constantly watching me
and calling me a failure. I was going to study the pre-history I loved on the
world where those events had actually happened. I was going to be in a class
where no one knew or cared about my brilliant family, and people wouldn’t judge
me against impossible standards. Maybe I’d even meet a Gamman girl who wouldn’t
dump me for trying to hold her hand.

“I’m positive.”

“At first I
thought your interest in history wouldn’t last, but given you’ve put in so much
work over the last four years …” Mother paused. “I accept you’re old enough to
make your own decisions, and you’ve a perfect right to live the life you want.
I’ll support you in this, but your father …”

I nodded. “I
know. When Father finds out about this, he’s going to be furious. Things were
bad four years ago, but this time will be far, far worse. I’m not going to give
in though. Four years ago, Father could force his decision on me, but this time
he can’t. This time I’m going to win!”

Miranda, Epsilon Sector, June
2788.

I was going to the afternoon school
shift, so I didn’t need to get there until one o’clock, but I was still going
to be late. Partly because I’d been babysitting my three youngest brothers and
sisters all morning, partly because the water pipe from the spring needed
unblocking for the third time this week, and partly because I’d heard the
chickens squawking for help and had to go and rescue them from a moon monkey
that was peering nosily into the chicken run. Moon monkeys were one of the
original native species of Miranda, perfectly harmless herbivores, but our
chickens were terrified of their round, glowing faces.

These things
were all just excuses, of course. The real reason I was going to be late for
school was because I knew exactly what would happen when I got there. In fact,
it started before I was anywhere near the school, because Torrin Summerhaze was
lying in wait for me at the portal that was shared between the dozen nearest
farms.

It would take me
an hour to walk to the next nearest portal, so I gritted my teeth and marched
up to this one, pointedly avoiding eye contact with Torrin. That didn’t stop
him happily jeering at me.

“Old maid! Old
maid! Amalie is the old maid!”

I didn’t turn to
look at him, just reached out with my right hand to slap him on the back of the
head.

“Ow!” he
complained. “That hurt.”

“It was meant to
hurt.”

I reached out to
set the destination for the portal, but hesitated at the last moment. It was
one of the economy models, just offering the six most important local
destinations: Jain’s Ford Settlement Central, Jain’s Ford School, Mojay’s
General Store, the livestock market, the vet, and the medical centre over at
Falling Rock settlement.

If you wanted to
go anywhere else, you had to portal to Settlement Central first. That had a
proper portal you could use to travel anywhere on the inhabited continent of
Miranda, though naturally the portalling charges were a lot higher. The only
time I’d been through it was last year, when my parents took all eleven of us
to visit Memorial. We’d seen the sea, and the hilltop monument marking where
the Military handed Miranda over to the first colonists thirty-one years ago.
It was a totally zan day, apart from the twins falling in a rock pool so they
stank of seaweed all day.

Right now, I
felt like going to Settlement Central and portalling to Memorial again, or even
all the way to Northern Reach. I’d seen images of the great cliffs there on the
Miranda Rolling News channel. I could see those cliffs for myself, and have a
glorious day of freedom, far away from Jain’s Ford Settlement, Jain’s Ford
School, and people like Torrin Summerhaze. The snag was that I’d have to come
back and face them all at the end of it. I’d have spent credits I couldn’t
afford, and it would change nothing.

I set the portal
destination to the school, and walked through the second the portal
established. I arrived in the school field, and headed for the nearest of the
six grey flexiplas domes, the one that was labelled with a large white number 6
and a lopsided pink hummingbird.

The number 6 was
the official school dome label. The pink hummingbird was a legacy of when the
boys in the year above us got drunk on their last day at school and found a
stray can of paint. Rodrish Jain had climbed onto the dome roof to finish
painting the hummingbird’s wings, stopped in the middle to shout and wave at
the rest of us, fell off, and was portalled to the medical centre at Falling
Rock with a broken arm. There was a rumour that Doc Jumi had fixed Rodrish’s
arm, and then locked him in quarantine for twenty-four hours in case his pink
spots were a sign of a previously undiscovered Mirandan disease. It was
probably true. Doc Jumi had an evil sense of humour.

Torrin came
through the portal and chased after me. “Amalie, I could help you solve your
problem. Marry me!”

I stopped
walking, looked him up and down, shook my head sadly, and gave him the standard
frontier planet rejection line. “Come back when you’ve got a farm!”

He sighed, and
trailed along after me to dome 6. As we went inside, twenty boys looked at me,
stood up, and yelled it in unison. “Old maid! Old maid! Amalie is the old maid!”

Last year,
there’d been twenty-one boys and eighteen girls in our class. Here on Miranda,
as on most of the planets in Epsilon sector, you could have Twoing contracts at
16 and marry at 17. On Year Day 2788, we’d all turned 17, and seven of the
girls instantly proved themselves perfect frontier world women by having Year
Day weddings. Admittedly, in Rina’s case, there was a bit of a scandal over her
last minute change of husband.

Norris was still
fuming about that, and you could hardly blame him. He’d been Twoing with Rina
for ten months, so when she dumped him in the middle of their wedding and
married another man it was a shock for everyone. The fact the other man was
Norris’s older brother, made things even worse. Jain’s Ford Settlement was
pretty equally divided between those who thought Rina had done the right thing,
those who thought she should have stuck with Norris, and those who thought she
should have married both of them. I was the exception. I thought it would have
been much more sensible for Rina to cancel the wedding, and think things over
for a few weeks before she married anyone, but it was her life, not mine.

Over the next
three months, nine of the other girls had got married as well, though without
any more scandals. My friend, Cella, had held out for a further two more months
before caving into social pressure and marrying yesterday. Now there were
twenty-one boys, seventeen empty desks, and me. I was the class old maid. Worse
than that, I was the settlement old maid, because all the girls my age who’d
left school at 15 were married as well.

Teacher Lomas
let the boys enjoy their fun for a minute, before yelling at them. “Quiet!”

They reluctantly
calmed down, and Lomas turned to Torrin. “Why are you late? No, don’t bother
answering that. We can all guess the reason. We can all guess Amalie’s answer
too.”

“Come back when
you’ve got a farm,” yelled the mob.

Torrin blushed.

“Time for work
now,” said Lomas.

I sat down at my
desk, took out my lookup, turned it on, and frowned as I saw the display
flicker wildly for a moment or two before focusing properly. My lookup had
started doing this a couple of months ago, and it seemed to be getting worse. I
hoped like chaos that it wasn’t going to break down entirely. I was the third
eldest of eleven children. Schooling on Miranda was free, and my parents
believed in education, but it was a struggle for them to afford the vital
lookups we all needed to scan the school texts and send and receive work
assignments. A 17-year-old girl had no real need to be in school, so if my
lookup broke down …

“We’re revising
Farming Ecology today,” said Lomas, “starting with methods of limiting
potentially harmful interactions between imported Earth and native Mirandan
species.”

There was a
chorus of groans, and one of the boys in the front row mimed strangling himself
before collapsing on his desk.

Lomas sighed. “Year
End is six months away now, and the school will be closed for a month during
harvest. Those of you capable of subtracting one from six can work out you have
barely five months of study time left before you leave school. You must pass
all the modules of your Farming Studies Certificate before then, or you can’t
register to do community service and earn yourselves a farm.”

“The others need
to do community service to earn farms,” said Palmer Nott smugly, “but I don’t.
I’ve already got a farm, because my father bought me one yesterday. We’ll be
ordering my machinery next month.”

There was dead
silence as every other boy in the room looked at him in shock, which rapidly
changed to bitter resentment. Palmer was deeply unpopular in the class. That
wasn’t because he was an incomer from Loki in Gamma sector, rather than born on
this planet. Miranda had only opened for full colonization twenty-one years
ago, so most of the class were incomers. Palmer’s unpopularity was because he
constantly rubbed everyone’s nose in the fact his father was sickeningly
wealthy. Since he arrived two years ago, we’d all had to suffer him showing off
his expensive clothes that were totally unsuitable for farm work, and his fancy
lookup with all the special features, but this …

All the other
boys would have to do three years of community service to earn their farms.
That was what my two older brothers were doing right now, patiently working to prepare
farmland and build houses for others, waiting for the day that the next farm
and house would be for them.

Palmer wouldn’t
have to do that though. His father had just handed him a farm, and his easy
ride wasn’t stopping there. All parents did their best to give their sons
starting seed and livestock, especially the vital pair of horses, but Palmer’s
father was buying him machinery too. No endless hours of backbreaking labour
for Palmer. He was going to stand idly by, watching while his fields were ploughed
by machines. Given how much I resented that on behalf of my brothers, chaos knew
how the boys around me were feeling.

“Obviously I
can’t start running the farm until I’m 18,” said Palmer, “but my father said it
was best to buy me one now to make sure I get prime land by the river, and
order the machinery early because there’s a waiting list for the next bulk
shipments from Gamma sector.”

He turned to
grin at me. “Amalie, I know girls don’t count marriage proposals from men without
farms, but you’ll have to consider mine!”

If he’d been
within arm’s reach, I’d have hit him. He wasn’t, so I gave him a withering look
of contempt. “Come back when you’re a human being, Palmer.”

“Yaya! Yaya!
Yaya!” All the boys in the room were shouting their approval of my words,
hammering on their desks with their fists.

Lomas pointedly
put his hands over his ears, waited until the noise started to flag, and then
yelled at them. “Shut up!”

The shouting and
hammering gradually petered out, and Lomas turned to Palmer. “Go home!”

“What?” asked
Palmer.

“Go home!”
repeated Lomas. “If you stay here and keep talking about your prime farmland,
and ordering your machinery early to avoid the waiting list, someone is going
to punch you. Quite possibly me.”

Palmer
hesitated, and then stood up. “I don’t understand why you’re all acting like
this. Rodrish Jain was in the year above us. Nobody minded when his father gave
him a farm. In fact, everyone cheered for him.”

Everyone had
been angry already, but now we were furious. Torrin was the fastest shouting a
reply.

“Your answer’s
in our settlement name, idiot! This is Jain’s Ford. It’s called that because
Rodrish Jain’s parents led the first colonists here when the Military cleared
Miranda to enter Colony Ten phase. Those colonists came when there was nothing
but a heap of supplies and flexiplas panels. They had to clear the farms. They
had to build the houses. Most of all they had to live here for ten years in
quarantine to prove the Military hadn’t missed anything dangerous, and that
Miranda was safe for humans. If there weren’t just the usual problems between
imported and native species, but something utterly lethal, those first
colonists would have died!”

Torrin paused
for a second to breathe before ranting on in an impassioned voice. “That’s why
we honour the Founding Families, that’s why they were rewarded with land
grants, and that’s why everyone cheered for Rodrish. Your father’s rich,
Palmer, so you jumped ahead of us in the queue and took prime farm land from
under our noses. Rodrish wasn’t queue jumping, his father owned that land at
Jain’s Ford before any of our parents set foot on Miranda. Rodrish wasn’t
taking anything from us; his father gave us our world!”

“Yaya! Yaya!
Yaya!” The other boys shouted their approval again.

Lomas lifted a
hand to stop them. “Go home, Palmer, and don’t come back for a week. You’re
suspended.”

“You can’t
suspend me,” said Palmer. “I didn’t break any rules. My father will complain to
the school board. You could lose your job!”

“Watch me cower
in fear,” said Lomas, in his most sarcastic voice. “Since Teacher Horath moved
to the school at the new Twin River settlement, I’m the only teacher in this
school qualified to either teach or assess students working on their Farming
Studies Certificate. I teach the 16-year-olds in first shift school from eight
in the morning to one in the afternoon. I teach the 17-year-olds in second
shift school from one in the afternoon to six in the evening. Four nights a
week, I teach evening classes for all the boys who left school at 15 to work on
their parents’ farms.”

He pulled a face.
“I’m doing all that solo because the school board have been trying and failing
to recruit another qualified teacher for the last fifteen months. If they fired
me today, I could get a new job tomorrow, but everyone studying for their
Farming Studies Certificate would have to join waiting lists for places at
other schools, and given schools always give priority to students from their
own settlement …”

He paused. “For
the final time, go home, Palmer. You’ve been living on this planet for two
years now, and you still don’t seem to understand the basics about a frontier
world. You can’t buy respect with credits. You have to earn it yourself. Go
home and think about that, before your classmates take you outside and beat the
lesson into you.”

Palmer finally
turned and left the dome. Lomas watched the door shut and then started talking
again. “There are currently over two hundred known potentially harmful
interactions between imported Earth and native Mirandan species. The following
farming procedures must be followed to prevent these interactions. Firstly,
apple trees can only be grown within secure caging since their juice is toxic
to …”