Time Past (14 page)

I looked down the road. The Assembly and my telescope were just over there, so close. The Invidi could be here any minute. History said their ships arrived simultaneously over big cities. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t remember exactly when and where the Invidi ships first appeared. “May first” covered a lot of hours in this age, when Earth had no single time. Every human child of my generation knew the Invidi’s first message, it was part of our shared heritage. So why couldn’t I remember exactly when they’d said it?

By the time we retraced our steps to the edge of the motorway the sun had risen and was warming our backs.

“No good.” Murdoch’s voice jerked me out of my daze.

The space along the edge of the river beside the unused railway track was cordoned off with police tape. One blue-uniformed man walked along the tape, then along the side of the battered brick building that backed onto the riverbank.

“Shit. What do we do now?” Heedless of the policeman, I squatted on the edge of the path. Across the river we could see smoke still rising from a dark mass of burned buildings. Yellow glimpses of a fire truck. A few figures moving near the wreckage. Cars parked close to the river path, unable to get in farther. Behind us, the muted roar of the motorway.

Murdoch squatted beside me. His shoulder felt warm and solid through my thin T-shirt.

“I guess we gotta wait.” He sounded as tired as I felt. “They’ll probably pack up by midday. Afternoon at the latest.”

“What if somebody loots the Assembly while we wait? Or the Invidi arrive?”

“You can still signal them afterward, can’t you?”

“Probably,” I conceded. “But there’s going to be a lot more interference then.” His words reminded me I might have to make adjustments before the signal could be sent, and pushed my impatience further.

“We’ll have to try to sneak through backyards.” I stood up. “Work our way past the police and over to Creek Road.”

“That’s a good way to get arrested,” said Murdoch, remaining seated. “Calm down and wait.”

I contemplated going without him, but part of me knew he was right. I looked up at the blue and apricot sky above the smoke haze. No alien ships up there yet.

“I got it.” Murdoch stood up with a grunt of stiffness. “We go on the march.”

“Why?”

“Aren’t you interested in the last May Day of human history?” He saw my expression. “Seriously, the police might put on a show, but I bet they won’t actually stop the march. So long as some idiot doesn’t attack them.”

“So?”

“So if we go on the march, we can detour around the police checks. The big meeting’s at Macquarie University, isn’t it?”

“Wherever that is. Florence took care of those details.”

“Well, we can start off with the march, then break off and cut back through West Ryde afterward. Or we can go part of the way, then come back along the far bank of the river. If Silverwater Bridge is still blocked, there’s always the footbridge farther along.”

“I suppose so,” I said doubtfully.

“You want to go?” Murdoch raised an eyebrow at me.

Better than sitting here waiting. “Let’s go.”

He nodded, relieved. If I didn’t know him better, I’d say he only suggested it to give me something to do while we waited for the Invidi to come.

Eleven

“
I
shouldn’t’ve come on this,” grumbled Grace. “Me feet hurt like shit. May Day, Labor Day, what crap. I haven’t even got a job…”

My feet hurt too. Dirt and dust chafed in the sensitive skin between first and second toes. I was tempted to take my sandals off altogether, but the footpath was too rough and hot. The edges had crumbled into the mess of holed asphalt at the side of the road itself, forcing us to walk in single file. A long line of bedraggled people, many in smoke-stained clothes. I’d spoken to Abdul earlier—he was up at the front of the line, carrying a banner he’d kept at his house on Campbell Street. He hadn’t been to the Assembly and told me I should stay away until he could go and check if it was safe. I made no promises.

“When you’re young,” said Grace suddenly, “you think you’re gonna be able to do it. Change the world. Look at the mess our parents made of last century. Not anymore, we thought. I remember sitting out there on the edge of the harbor, watching that word ‘eternity’ burn across the bridge on New Year’s Eve and thinking this century’s gonna be different.” She sighed and limped on.

“What about now?” I said, half interested, half wanting to keep my attention on the sky.

“Now? You know, things happen. I couldn’t find a job, then I lost the ones I did get. Then I met Vince’s dad and things were so bad and so good at the same time I never knew if I was coming or going. Then we left him. And he died.

“Now I’m nearly forty and this century isn’t any better. It’s getting worse. And I keep thinking of Will going off the rails like Vince. I get this sick, hollow feeling in me stomach, you know?”

“Will’s not going off the rails. He’s fine.”

She sighed. “I hope so. You asked me why I went off with Levin.” She looked around and dropped her voice. I had to strain to hear her when a truck went past.

“I lost my job, so no more proper healthcare, no more train pass, no more... you name it, when yer out of work, you don’t have it. Levin was an extra chance, I took it.”

It will get better, I wanted to say. Not immediately. But from today, things start to change.

“You know what they’re saying about the fire last night?” Grace added after a moment. She’d dropped back behind me.

“No, what?” I looked up at the sky above the city, stubbing my toes again on uneven concrete. The sky remained empty.

“They reckon it was those Cabramatta gangs come up here, didn’t get the action they wanted, and torched the place.”

“Who reckons?” Personally, I thought the fire had probably been started by someone’s careless use of a cooking fire, and been spread by the wind among flammable building materials.

“I dunno, everyone. But you know what they say.” She put her hand on my shoulder to support herself while she pulled a stone out of her sandal.

“What?”

“No smoke without fire.”

I turned, shocked, and saw her grinning at me.

“Joke.” She chuckled, and swept on ahead. I couldn’t help grinning back.

We’d gone through Rhodes and crossed Ryde Bridge about half an hour ago, and would soon join another group of marchers at Ryde Park where many of the groups were gathering before the long walk to Macquarie University. This would be a good chance for Murdoch and myself to slip away and head back southwest to get to the Assembly.

What if I was wrong about time and the jump points? There seemed no explanation for the way we’d jumped ninety-nine years instead of ninety-five. Murdoch and I might have simply wandered into another universe, one in which the Invidi never came to Earth, or in which the Bendarl got here first and enslaved the indigenous population like they did on Achel. I looked up at the sky, blue above and gray at the edges, and had to tell myself again,
It’s today.
The fire, the march, all the events of this present were so close, the prospect of an alien first contact so far away.

We left the main road, to everyone’s relief, as trucks kept trundling past too close to us, some of them swerving to avoid potholes. This must have been a lovely area once. Small brick bungalows and churches. One, two, three churches. Oak trees sheltered us from the sun as we passed, but their roots had made a broken mosaic of both footpath and road to trip over. Their lower branches were all gone and graffiti continued from the wall around the church onto their trunks. Barbed wire around one of the church walls, broken glass scattered over the footpath outside it.

Onto another large road, fewer potholes. Not only trucks, but a couple of passenger cars passed, their windows black and impenetrable. I looked for Murdoch, to ask him if we should split off from the others, but he wasn’t in sight. Grace walked up ahead.

On either side of the road, three- and four-story buildings with smooth walls were set back from the footpath, alternating with smaller shops. Most of them had heavy bars on the windows. Behind the bars, colorful displays showed glimpses of a world I’d seen only on televid. Racks of coats in gradations of brown from fawn to chocolate, black sequined dresses on mannequins; men’s suits hung like dead crows against a wall; silver, red, white, and yellow machines for kitchens and bathrooms; textured materials covering window after window of sofas, beds, chairs...

It was like the extra pages tucked into the newspaper. I hadn’t taken seriously those pictures of hundreds of varieties of things, thinking it was an exaggeration. Nothing like that in the corner shops and markets of the out-town area. But here was a multitude of things, lined up for anyone with money to buy. I forgot to look at the sky and peered in the shop windows, feeling like I did the first time I saw the mercantile section of a Confederacy port. Amazed, bemused, and embarrassed at my own gaucherie.

Used to the species-based discrimination within the Confederacy, Earth’s economic discrimination confused me. So senseless and extreme. Would the K’Cher, for example, exploit a world so much that the inhabitants had no food or shelter? They wouldn’t care about much beyond whether the world could produce enough for their trading needs, but surely they’d try to induce the best conditions for productivity...

I sighed and checked the sky again. No sign of the Invidi.

Murdoch fell into step beside me.

“Where were you?”

“Checking the crowd. A lot more people in front of us.”

“If
they
get here this morning we’ll all see the show.” I glanced up at the sky, which was now eggshell-blue. “What’s the time?”

He tapped his empty wrist. “Must’ve left my timer in the tent.” He peered in one of the shop windows. “Looks like about eleven.”

“We need to get back to the Assembly,” I said with renewed despair.

He nodded. “Let’s get a drink at the park first, though. Didn’t you say there’d be refreshments there?”

I had to agree. I wouldn’t make it back to the out-town without a rest.

We passed a café with a televid screen, and I wondered for a moment if the Invidi had already arrived and official sources had suppressed the news. But that wasn’t what the history files said happened.

Into the park. Tents around the edges, people living there. On a bowling green in the corner of the park, a group of elderly people stared as we walked thankfully off the hot street and sank down on the cleanest-looking patches of brown grass.

We could see more marchers gathered on the other side of the park. Some were dressed in bright costumes, some had painted their faces in red or green or yellow. They stood in groups of twenty or more, talking and chattering. Some of them picked up their placards and started moving out of the park. Two tall men wore black masks with a curious logo on the back of their heads—the symbol for nuclear power scored over with a red cross. By comparison the out-town crowd seemed dull and disorganized, everyone trailing along at their own pace in twos and threes, sometimes in a family group.

Then the music started. Six people in green clothes played a lively jig on pipes and horns that woke us all up. A couple of the out-town marchers who had brought pipes joined in.

A group of women held their banner and performed some kind of mini-play involving much yelling and gesticulating for media reporters with cameras and recording equipment. A truck parked on one side of the park said YOUR CHANNEL on its side.

The ground around the pond in the middle of the park was crowded with people buying drinks and snacks from the stalls set up there. Many of them seemed to be local residents rather than marchers. Many sat under the trees or under beach umbrellas, ready to watch the show.

It’s not merely disorganization, I thought, but a disparity of purpose. The out-town crowd wants justice on a local scale. The red and yellow and green people and the black-masked ones want progress on a global scale.

If Marlena Alvarez was alive, she’d mold this crowd. They’d follow her. I wish, sometimes, that I was more...

Like her. Like I thought she was.

I remembered the dowdy figure with the hesitant voice and glasses. Maybe she couldn’t have united the crowd after all.

Murdoch tapped my arm and pointed. The Assembly of the Poor group was squeezed together beside one of the trees. Grace waved at me. We joined them and shared cups of tea from a chipped, foam-covered flask that one of the women had brought. I recognized her, she’d lived two lanes across from the Assembly, on the border between the tent city and the proper streets. I asked her if her family’s shack was damaged in the fire. “We was okay,” she said. Her English had a soft lilt. “But one of them fire trucks clipped a pole and half the loo came down. Good job no one was in it.” She smiled to show the last bit was a joke. I smiled back. If her place was all right, the Assembly would be safe too.

The music set all our feet tapping. I looked at their tired, sweaty faces and felt glad I’d stayed here. Glad I’d seen this small, dusty corner of history. And how important it was.

Murdoch went and filled our water bottles at one of the stalls.

“We can go now, I reckon.” He shaded his eyes against the glare and looked over to the main street beyond the park. “The police still have their checkpoint over on Victoria Road, but I saw a bloke in a van from that big furniture warehouse near Rydalmere, and he said they’re gone from Silverwater Bridge.”

I took a swig of water from the bottle and felt better. With any luck we’d get the telescope set up in time. When the history files said the Invidi arrived on May first, they might have meant the day of May first in Europe or North America, which would be early tomorrow morning, our time. It could be later tonight.

Rachel Dourif, one of the Sleepers from
Calypso,
said,
Everyone remembers what they were doing on that day
of the Invidi arrival. She also said,
I couldn’t forgive them for taking over our future.

What about children like Will and Vince, who may not have a future unless the Invidi come?