Time Past (3 page)

“Yeah. We don’t like spies here,” said the other.

I snorted. “Vince, have you been putting this stuff in their heads?”

“Not me.” Vince shot me a look that said it was exactly what he’d done. He kicked the barred door. “I’m off then. If you see the kid, send him home. I’m sick of mucking around looking for him.”

Left alone with the four men, I tried reason.

“Who would I spy for?”

“Migrant Affairs,” the grunter said immediately.

“What would I tell them?”

“Names.” He glanced at the others in triumph.

I felt both exasperated and concerned. “How would I contact them?” The butcher nodded up at the office. “I seen all your radio stuff.” “That’s not a signaling device,” I said. At least, not to anyone on Earth. “Wait a minute.”

I went upstairs, heaved the telescope into my arms. It kept slipping to one side, but I descended crablike down the stairs, placed it on the floor while I unlocked the barred door, picked it up again with a grunt, and shoved past them. Wish I’d gotten around to making wheels for the mount.

Outside the house, I crouched and eased the scope down on the uneven concrete, hoping the dust-proofing on the casing and the screws would hold.

“Look through here,” I panted.

The sky was quite dark now in the east, except for the glow of the city low down. Often I’d get better viewing in the south.

The butcher took first turn to squint through the eyepiece at what looked from here like a stretch of dull black sky.

“Well?” said the driver, leaning so close that I was afraid he’d push the scope over.

The butcher withdrew, rubbing his eye socket. “You wouldn’t think you could see anything, would you?”

“Gimme a look.” The driver pushed him out of the way to see for himself. “Huh, nothing special.” But he sounded almost awed.

“Give me a go, then,” said the grunter.

“Wait yer turn.”

Most of them wouldn’t have seen the stars properly for years. The skies of Sydney were as polluted as any other big city in 2023, and in my five months there, I’d never seen more than Venus just before sunrise or isolated dots that might have been constellations directly overhead, with the naked eye. Many of the out-town residents wouldn’t even have seen the stars on their journey here, especially if they’d been jammed in the holds of boats sneaking past Customs patrols or drugged senseless in luggage compartments of aircraft.

On the rare moments I could see the stars, I loved the twinkling effect. I hadn’t seen it since I was a child, having spent the past twenty-five years mostly in space habitats without surrounding atmosphere.

“My go,” the grunter insisted. He squatted, looked, and became suddenly still. They wouldn’t see half the stars I saw from Earth as a child, because in my time the Invidi had helped clear the pollution from the atmosphere, but even this view was more impressive through the telescope.

“I told you, it’s just a hobby.” I didn’t try to keep the annoyance out of my voice and they all nodded and sidled back, except for the butcher.

“Yeah, well we had to check it out, y’know?” He looked hungrily at the eyepiece and wiped his hands on his apron, which smelled faintly of offal. “Reckon I could have another look sometime?”

“I don’t mind,” I said. “But not tonight, eh? I’m really tired.”

“Right.” He followed the others as they trailed away.

We needed the residents’ goodwill because it wouldn’t be hard to break into this old house. The people who lived in the tents and shacks along the riverbank knew the Assembly worked for them. They kept an eye on the office and we had to trust them, as we couldn’t afford to pay for professional security.

I carried the telescope back inside and up the stairs. It felt a lot heavier now the adrenaline rush had worn off, and my knees wouldn’t stop trembling as I made sure the computer was unplugged and checked the window catches were closed. Put the scope back—now I’m really too tired to do anything. I could push two of the chairs together and sleep on them. Or lie down on the hard green carpet— although the cockroaches made that an unsavory option. I could dump papers on the floor and use the table as a bed— it wouldn’t be the first time. Or I could walk the three hundred meters back down the street and into the maze of paths to my tent.

Vince’s words nagged at me. Had Will run off again? If he had, he’d be more likely to go first to my place. I sighed and locked the door behind me. Tent it is, then.

I’d shared the tent with Grace until recently. She picked me up off the street when I first arrived in the out-town, lost and disoriented. She found me occasional mechanical jobs around the out-town and then the job at the Assembly. And she nursed me through virus-induced illnesses and bacterial infections, and negotiated with the local clinic to supply me with asthma medication on her health card. I owed my survival in this century to her.

When she lost her job packing pallets at a wholesale food distributor a month ago, she moved into her lover Levin’s house, which was across the motorway near Parramatta Road. I chose to stay in the tent, despite Grace’s invitation that I move with her; “Levin’s got an extra room upstairs,” she’d said. Levin’s house backed onto his business and stood in an area with steady electricity and water supply, but Levin and I didn’t get on at all. Grace said she moved in “for Will’s sake.” Levin resented my presence and the fact that I’d known Grace longer than he had. Will and I both resented Grace having anything to do with him at all.

I couldn’t work out what his business involved—the shop front was a neat office, with a sofa for people to wait and a stack of magazines. I’d never seen anyone in there on the few occasions I went past in the bus or visited Grace. Grace said simply that he was a “local entrepreneur.” She made it clear, in her blunt way, that she wasn’t interested in talking about it. I wondered if he was connected with the gangs. Vince called him “Mr. Levin,” and didn’t talk much in his presence; that in itself was enough to make me wary of him. Levin occasionally hinted at some kind of paramilitary past, too, usually by mocking another person’s less-than-expert opinion on firearms or military protocol.

Outside, the street was unlit except for irregular strips of light from windows and doorways. I tripped and stubbed my toe on raised pieces of concrete and potholes. As I left the paved area and moved between the out-town shacks, flickering lamps mostly replaced the electric lights. I could hear voices and see vague moving outlines in the darkness. Somewhere children giggled.

At the second corner down from Creek Road I passed through a yellow rectangle of light from the snack stall there. The woman inside waved her spatula.

“Nothing tonight, love?”

“No thanks,” I said. My stomach at the moment couldn’t tolerate a cup of tea, let alone slabs of potato fried in well-used grease.

“Night, then.” She wiped the sweat off her mustache with a red and white checked cloth.

“Good night.”

Her accent was unlike the accents of the majority of out-town residents—they used English as their lingua franca and to gain practice before paying off their fake ID cards and moving into suburban society, but it was not the mother tongue of most of them. Her accent was broad and local, and reminded me of Bill Murdoch.

Bill Murdoch was the chief of Security on Jocasta. He grew up on Earth in this very city, although at the end of this century, and his Earth Standard was as flat and idiosyncratic as the English in this time. Some days I could think about him and the station calmly—when the Invidi come I’ll talk them into sending me back there and then Murdoch and I will pick up where we left off and everything will be fine. More than fine, perhaps, since he made it clear he was interested in more than friendship. He kissed me, after all. We hadn’t done much about that more-than-friendship when I left; meals together when our schedules didn’t clash and occasional off-duty walks in the station’s gardens. Murdoch had been with me on the station for nearly five years, and when I didn’t think about it too much, I could assume he’d be there when I got back.

It was when I did think about it, or in unguarded moments when I listened to local voices, that I was overwhelmed by longing to hear his voice. And consumed by longing to be on the station again. What if Murdoch’s not there when I get back? He might have moved on, decided five months was long enough to wait. Why the hell didn’t I tell him…

I spent many long out-town nights considering what I should have told Murdoch. Plenty of time to consider many things, while the sirens howled down the motorway and rats scrabbled along the roof and the couple next door screamed their nightly abuse at each other before rocking the line of tents with noisy sex.

I didn’t even know which part of Sydney Murdoch came from. Comes from. Will come from. One day I thought I saw him, from the back. A tallish, heavy-chested man with a rolling walk. The unhurried persistence was so like Murdoch that I strode after him, pulse pounding in my throat. When he turned, I could see he was, of course, a stranger. No way Murdoch could get here. As a human he’d have no access to a ship that could bring him here.

As a human, one of the Nine, he couldn’t use the jump drive. The Four—Invidi, K’Cher, Melot, and Bendarl— guarded their monopoly of the drive as zealously as the inhabitants of Sydney’s inner city guarded their privileges. The Nine were limited to traveling on ships owned and operated by the Four. I wondered what happened back on Jo-casta when the Four found out I had used a jump-capable ship to get here.

I hoped the three engineers who’d been involved in the research with me hadn’t gotten into too much trouble. When we planned the test, I told them if anything happened and I didn’t return, they were to blame the whole thing on me. Not that we expected anything to happen. Perhaps we should have put off the test until after the neutrality vote.

The station, and by extension the star system in which it was situated, was a candidate for the status of planned neutrality from the Confederacy. The Confederacy Council, which contained representatives of all thirteen Confederacy member worlds, would vote for or against this. We wanted neutrality because the station’s residents were fed up with the Confederacy for a variety of reasons, including being left to endure an alien blockade for six months without assistance. The vote could have gone through already, it had been nearly half a year since we declared our intention to apply for neutrality. I’d been here on Earth for five months—what might have happened at home? Or rather, what will happen...

I nearly ran into someone on a particularly dark track.

“Watch it,” a man’s voice growled. A heavy body lurched past me, so close I could feel the heat of his breath and smell the alcohol fumes.

Stop daydreaming and concentrate on getting back to the tent safely.

A dog barked, hitting a corrugated iron fence with a thud that set my pulse racing again. I turned the last corner. In this lane there were no patches of uncurtained window light, only the glow from an open fire at the end of the lane. Laughter rose from the shadowed figures around it and tiny red dots from smokers winked on and off.

My tent sat halfway down the lane. It had canvas walls, pulled tight on a framework of hardwood poles driven deep into the dirt, and a thin sheet of corrugated iron for a roof. The wall that faced outward on the corner of the row also had a sheet of wood nailed to the framework outside. It kept out some of the noise, but on windless nights the tent was stifling.

The row of tents formed one side of a square that enclosed a courtyard paved with uneven brick fragments. The courtyard held a communal shower block and privy, a twisted lemon tree in a cracked plastic garbage bin, lines stretched between four sets of lopsided poles to hang washing on, and garden vegetables in rusting drums.

I pushed open the flimsy screen door. Inside, a wooden crate I used as a table-cum-cupboard was built around the central pole. I reached up and switched on the small electric lamp high on the pole. I charged the batteries once a week with the Assembly’s solar generator.

The only other furniture was a chair of battered green plastic, a small pantry, and an old door propped on four bricks, covered with folded cloths. I couldn’t sleep on a mattress like Grace. When she lived here she had flipped hers over one night, turned it on end, and sprayed pungent insecticide on all the insect life thus revealed. Shuddering, I told her a blanket was all I needed. She laughed at my squeamishness, but after that I slept on the door.

You should be grateful, I told myself drearily, sinking into the hard chair and staring at the ground. Six bricks marked the place on the other side of the tent where Grace’s board and mattress used to lie. You should be grateful she picked you up and you’re not stuck in a detention center. Grateful you can work.

And anyway, whose fault is it you’re here? If you hadn’t insisted on making the test run, if you hadn’t insisted on beginning the project in the first place...

“Maria?” The small voice came from the doorway.

I blinked away tears that had somehow leaked out. Feeling sorry for myself again. “Will, what are you doing here?”

Grace’s younger son, Will, wiry as a monkey and twice as much trouble, shuffled into the tent, slamming the screen door on its uneven frame.

“Wanted to see you.”

I wiped my eyes hurriedly. “You saw me yesterday.”

Yesterday he skipped out of school and the principal told Grace, who then came to the Assembly office in a foul mood. She yelled at Will, which scandalized Florence, and dragged him back to school.

Will sat on the chair and kicked his legs rhythmically. “When do the results come out?”

“I told you, middle of May.”

“Can I come and look with you?”

“We’ll see.”

When he and Grace lived here, I’d helped him with his schoolwork. Sometimes we went along to the Assembly office and used the computer to do research on the infonet. While doing this, we’d entered a competition to design a spaceship engine. Why, I wasn’t sure. We were both bored with his schoolwork. At the time, I’d had a vague idea that if the Invidi didn’t come or, worse, refused to help me, I could start a career in aerospace. It was a challenge—how to use my knowledge without revealing future technology to this age.