Vale of Stars (12 page)

She knew what he had meant—it was commonplace to refer to the
outside
whenever one wished to symbolically consign something to oblivion. Although the terraforming process had been going for almost eighty years, the chlorine-tainted atmosphere was still almost instantly fatal to unprotected humans. A glance at the expectant faces around her told Kuarta that the boy’s sentiments were echoed, albeit silently, by the adults around her.

One face in the crowd caught her eye, a young adult argie woman’s. The expression on her face was a mixture of emotions—sympathy for Yallia and Kuarta, hatred for the behavior of her fellow argies, and fear for herself. She looked up at Kuarta and made a tiny gesture with her shoulders, as if to say ‘I am not one of these people. I do not share their attitudes toward you and your child. But I cannot speak out.’

Kuarta nodded slightly at the sympathizer and turned back to Yallia.

“Let’s go see the science experiments,” she said to her daughter, as brightly as she could. She put Yallia down and, gripping her hand tightly, started to walk out of the loose circle that had begun to form around her.

She made every effort to avoid eye contact with the boys, but as she passed, she could not resist a quick glance in their direction. The spokesman was staring at her, feet rooted firmly in place as if to claim the land itself, while his compatriots whispered to each other. Kuarta caught the word “Halfner” from their conversation.

“Hey,” The lead boy said suddenly. Kuarta hesitated for a fraction of a second, then continued to move on.

“You’re Kuarta Halfner,” the boy said, a note of hostile accusation in his voice. “Your mother brought all you here.”

Kuarta needed to respond to that. Something about the way the boy spoke her name indicated that he was pointedly ignoring her new surname: Verdafner, a fusion of Dolen’s original Verdu and her Halfner, as was the custom. “We came here—” she started, then thought better of it. The boy did not want an explanation, nor did the dozen or so people who had by now gathered around her. She had to change tactics. “Where are your parents, young man?”

“Right here,” came the instant answer from behind her, alarmingly close. A burly man with thick black eyebrows looked down on her. “Why don’t you get out of here, shippie, and stop making trouble?”

While the context of his words indicated the museum itself, Kuarta knew the man’s thinly-veiled meaning was for her and her kind to leave the planet altogether. The slight nods and murmurs of agreement from the rest of the crowd confirmed the sentiment.

“All right, let’s just move on, okay?” said yet another voice from beyond the throng.  A blue-shirted museum worker wormed her way into the thick of the crowd and, through gestures and encouraging words, dispersed the twenty people around Kuarta. Soon, the area was all but deserted.

“Everything okay here?” she asked Kuarta with a smile. The woman was perhaps sixty-five, her raven hair only slightly less vibrant than that of those around her, her face only beginning to show wrinkles. The longevity of the
Argonaut
-descended was yet another difference that marked them as separate from, and superior to, the immigrants from Ship.

“It is now. Thank you so much,” Kuarta said, genuine relief flowing from her. Yallia looked up at the worker.

“Good. Hello there, little one,” the woman said to Yallia. “Do you like our museum here?”

“Yes. It’s fun.”

“Oh, good.” She smiled down at the girl and said to Kuarta, “I know you people love the museum. I’m just sorry that had to happen to you.”

Kuarta’s smile faded slightly.
You people.
“That’s all right,” Kuarta said automatically. “We still have you to thank.” Kuarta let go of Yallia, who wandered the few short feet back to the mineral display.

“Oh, don’t mention it. Our colony is your colony. We have to make you folks feel at home here and try to help you integrate into our society. How old is she?”

Kuarta hesitated only a moment to convert Ship age into New Earth age. “She’s—three and a half.”

“Oh, she’s so darling. It’s so good to see little ones enjoying the museum.” She watched Yallia for a moment, then added conversationally, “It’s funny, but she looks almost argie.”

The museum worker stared at Yallia, and Kuarta imagined the woman was wondering just how the resemblance to the superior elite had been achieved.

“Her father is
Argonaut
-descended,” Kuarta said softly.

“Oh,” the woman said, her voice betraying the strain of forced nonchalance. Immediately, the woman shifted her weight to the foot away from Kuarta and seemed to withdraw into herself. She gave Kuarta the courtesy of watching Yallia for a few more seconds before saying, with too much enthusiasm, “Well, I’d better be going back to work. The museum won’t run itself. Nice to have met you.”

Kuarta watched her retreat to another part of the museum before she gathered her daughter and left the place altogether.

*   *   *

Botanical Section Nine (more commonly referred to as “the forest of Arden” both because it was the section that housed most of the deciduous trees in New Chicago Dome and because it was the favored retreat of young lovers) was empty the next morning when Kuarta and Dolen took one of the strolls they arranged whenever their work schedules allowed. They lived as close to Arden as was possible, given the topography of New Chicago, the official name for Dome Six. Fully half of the nine-thousand occupants lived in the sixteen towering buildings in the center of New Chicago where the Dome ceiling was ninety meters high, while the rest lived in shorter buildings that formed a series of concentric rings around the metropolitan area. Next came forests, such as Botanical Section Nine, and beyond them, towards the edges of the Dome, were the various industries that kept New Chicago a working, functioning part of the massive Dome Complex, of which it was one of six. New Chicago was home to many shippie families: by now, twenty years after planetfall, shippies had spread beyond their New Frankfurt Dome and were beginning to live in others. The distinction between shippie and argie was made all the more overtly to compensate, it seemed.

But now, Dolen and Kuarta were merely two people out for a walk in the trees.

“There was more trouble yesterday with Yallia,” Kuarta said softly after the pair had been walking in silence for a time.

“What kind of trouble?” Dolen’s oval, somber face turned to meet hers. He listened attentively as Kuarta relayed the story of the encounter in the museum, stopping her for brief moments to ask clarifying questions. She could almost feel his anger rising, even while he displayed no sign of distress. He was like that—able to mask virtually any emotion or feeling he wished from almost anyone; Kuarta, however, had learned to read his moods despite his almost perfect inscrutability.

When she had finished, Dolen said, “I suppose we will have to talk to Yallia. No sense in bringing it up with Jene.”

“You’re saying we shouldn’t tell my mother?”

Dolen sighed. “If we tell her, she’ll have to try to balance her own feelings against her position as Commissar. I know Jene—she’s a fine politician, but no one should be placed in such a delicate situation. She’d get into trouble, politically as well as morally.”

Kuarta knew he was right. In the near-perfect socialism the colony had organized, the mere hint of favoritism in the political circles could bring down the most capable of legislators. If Jene acted to protect her family, she would soon find herself facing the Board of Inquiry. 

Dolen added, “Plus, if we do anything, the incidents of harassment will only get worse.” He hesitated. Kuarta knew he was holding back something.

“What else?” she asked, stopping in the middle of the path.

He turned away and looked abstractedly at the nearest tree. “I’ve heard…talk. At the University.” At his partner’s expectant silence, he continued. “It was nothing I was supposed to hear, I know. I was coming back to my office during one of my classes a few days ago—I’d forgotten the holo of those old Earth scenes, the ones from the mid-twentieth century United States, all about immigration. You remember those? With the ships and Ellis Island and all that?”

Kuarta smiled despite the gravity of the situation. Dolen had a habit of trailing off into side issues and completely forgetting his main point. His students could frequently miss an entire class-worth of instruction if they managed to get him talking about Earth history’s more interesting moments.

“Yes, dear. I remember. You were talking about something you overheard?”

“Oh, right. Well, I was going back to my office in the middle of class, as I said, and there were two, no, three young student-professors in the history office, which is the one right past mine. But you know that, don’t you? You’ve been there before. In any case, I was going to go straight into my office and get the holocube, then go back to the class, when I heard my name from the history office. ‘Professor Verdafner must have it bad for shippie tail,’ I heard.”

Kuarta’s smile vanished. She knew that there had been similar accusations leveled at her, but in reverse, of course. Still, she bristled at the thought that she was just some kind of vessel for an argie’s lust.

Dolen continued his story, apparently unaware of the effects it was having on Kuarta. “It was just student-profs griping about us oldsters, you know. Happens all the time. Still, this had gone too far. As you can imagine, I stopped then and there and was ready to go into the history office to have a word or two with those inside, when another comment floated outside into the hallway where I was standing. And that comment made me pause.”

He stopped. Kuarta did not prompt him—she knew he would speak when he was ready.

“Someone in the office said, ‘Those damn shippies think they’re entitled to everything’ and someone else replied, ‘I wonder how they’d do outside?’ and the whole bunch of them laughed.”

Kuarta nodded. “Dolen, dear, that’s no different than what we have been hearing for a while now.”

“Yes, but to joke about genocide? That’s….” He could not find the words.

Kuarta smiled at her partner. His depth of knowledge about certain subjects, ancient history, for instance, was matched only by his incredible ignorance about the darker side of his society. He could see evil in history books, perpetrated by human beings one on another, but he sincerely seemed to believe the human race had evolved beyond such institutions as racism and prejudice. He was not capable of seeing it all around him, even when he himself was the target. Kuarta could not bear to shatter her husband’s innocence by telling him the students were not joking.

Kuarta patted his arm soothingly. “I know, dear. Let’s talk about something else. Have you noticed the leaves are staring to turn?”

*   *   *

Yallia was an unusually bright girl for her age. Even among the already naturally intelligent argies (who, after all, possessed not only a genetic advantage over their immigrant brethren but had the intangible environment of the colony itself to support them) she stood out. It was for this reason she had been placed in the four-year old (New Earth years) class. There, she could work with others of her ability and receive appropriate instruction. There was no denying, however, the active resentment the other children and their parents felt at the presence of this precocious shippie child, the granddaughter of a Commissar.

Helena Murgat’s parents were perhaps the most resentful. They had elected to withdraw their daughter from Cassiopeia School, the school that Yallia and four hundred other children attended in New Chicago, and move to another Dome entirely rather than have to associate with filthy shippies. For their daughter, it meant, of course, abandoning friendships that Helena was just beginning to form and becoming the “new girl” in a different school in a different Dome.

All of which was in the back of young Helena’s mind as she prepared the concoction for the cause of all her troubles. Yallia Verdafner would pay for what she had done. Helena scooped another handful of the foul-smelling soil into the bowl. There had been little difficulty in opening her father’s soil sample case—as Helena had never showed the slightest interests in her father’s work as a xenobotanist, he had never thought to keep the samples of Epsilon Eridani III topsoil under tight security. A bit of observation and a stepstool later, and Helena was mixing the potion that would make Yalli as physically sick as Helena felt inside at the impending move.

Helena smiled a crooked half smile as she saw tiny native worms wriggling in the mixture of dirt, milk, and beer.

The school day went by uneventfully until first recess. Helena had already contacted her confederates through carefully scrawled notes passed during the day—when the children were released for recess, Helena’s crew went into action.

“Hey, Yallia,” Helena called with false bonhomie. “Come on over here. I’ve got a present for you.”

Yallia was under no illusions as to her status with her class. She was well-hated by all, and there were none that hated her with more fire than Helena. She looked across the playground warily and shook her head.

“Come on, Yallia. I want to be your friend,” Helen wheedled.

The ruse worked. Yallia, smart as she was, could not resist entirely the possibility that Helena might be undergoing a change of heart. Yallia came over but stopped some distance away.

“You don’t like me,” she called out. She waited for an explanation.

“Yeah, well, since I’m leaving soon, I want to tell you something. I’m sorry for everything I did to you.”

Yallia scanned the faces of the three girls standing nearby. They radiated malice even as Helena spoke. Something was not right.

“You are?” Yallia kept her eyes on the three girls.

“Yeah.” Helena got up from the bench on which she had been sitting and approached Yallia. Her flankers moved with her. “Can I give you a hug?”

Yallia did not answer immediately. Her inexperienced intellect told her not to trust this situation (and her suspicious Halfner genes did as well), but the overriding need for acceptance trumped all her rationality. She nodded slightly.