Time Past (4 page)

“Did you tell them we moved to Levin’s?” said Will, in time with his kicks on the chair. “So they know where to send my prize?”

“I told them. If we win, you mean.”

If the company running the competition was genuine, they wouldn’t be able to resist our entry. I had to use Will’s name to get the necessary national ID number. Which meant putting Will’s signature prints on the application. If we won, he got the prize, which was the whopping amount of twenty thousand dollars. I wanted to repay Grace somehow, but couldn’t think of a way to do it that she’d accept. Aside from the problem of not having anything to repay her with. If Will won that money, I thought it would more than cancel the debt.

We hadn’t told Grace about the entry, though. She didn’t like me teaching Will anything except his regular schoolwork, despite his obvious ability. “I just want him to be normal, y’know?” went the litany. “Nothing fancy, nothing off the rails like Vince. Just get a decent job and lead a normal life. So don’t fill his head with all that protest stuff, okay?” She approved of what the Assembly was doing in the out-town, but she didn’t think it needed to preach.

“Does Grace know you’re here?” I said, remembering Vince’s visit to the Assembly office.

He kept swinging his legs, accompanied by little
boopboop
sounds.

“Will?”

“She went out with Levin. I don’t like it when they’re mucking around. I told Mrs. Le I was coming here,” he added defensively.

“What do you mean, ‘mucking around?’ ”

“You know.” He kicked the chair legs quite hard. “Kissing and stuff.”

“Vince was looking for you earlier. Did you go home after that?”

“It’s not home. It’s Levin’s place.”

I couldn’t dispute that logic. It was why I hadn’t moved with them. “You can come too,” Levin had said, with that mocking, dare-you-to-disagree look that would have been understandable on a teenage face, but sat strangely on a man who was at least thirty.

“I’m hungry.” Will looked pointedly at the little pantry in the corner, raised on bricks like the bed. It was another converted wooden crate, lined with small-gauge chicken wire and fronted with the same material, to keep out rats.

“Nothing in there,” I said. “Didn’t you have dinner?”

“Don’t like chook feet.”

I sighed and wriggled my fingers around my trouser pockets. Maybe a stray coin...

“Mum gave me five dollars,” he said. “We could get some potato cakes.”

“We could get some fruit,” I said firmly. The family who lived across the courtyard from our row of tents cultivated fruit and vegetables on a patch right down near the river’s edge. They usually had some to sell. My stomach could handle something fresh, and it meant I wouldn’t have to cook on the open grill in the courtyard, which was always filthy. And I wasn’t a very good cook. In the twenty-second century I didn’t need to be.

“I’ll go,” he said happily, and jumped off the chair as though he had springs on his backside.

Three

W
ill and I had just sat down to a meal of mandarins and half a loaf of bread when Grace and Levin pushed open the door.

“Jeezus, you try my patience.” Grace slapped Will’s arm gently. He was sitting in the chair.

I stood up from where I’d been sitting on the bed. “Hello, Grace. Levin.”

“G’day, Maria.” Grace was about my own age, wary-eyed, round-faced, and running to fat around her breasts and stomach. She’d put on weight since she lost her job.

Levin, a long-bodied man with cropped dark hair and permanent stubble, ignored the greeting. He stepped around Will and sat down on the bed as though he owned the tent, legs spread wide in his tight black trousers. His eyes shifted continuously around the room and his big-boned hands grasped the edge of the bed with unnecessary strength. Levin’s hands made me nervous. He balled them into fists even when his face was calm.

“He’s supposed to be at home,” said Grace to me. “Kid his age shouldn’t be wandering around by himself at this hour.”

“I didn’t invite him,” I protested. “He turned up here.”

“Vince did,” said Will. “Go out by himself. When he was eight, he told me.”

“You’re you and he’s him, and you’re different people. And I’m talking to Maria,” said Grace.

“Grace, if you want me to baby-sit, say so,” I said. “But don’t attack me for nothing.”

“I’m not a baby,” protested Will, his mouth half full of bread.

“It’s just an expression,” I said. “You know that.”

“You encourage him,” said Grace.

“I do not.”

“Send him back straightaway, then.”

“I can’t send him back in the middle of the night.”

On the bed, Levin chuckled. “Studying history, Maria?” He waved a printed page at me. It was one of many in a pile hidden under the wad of towel I used as a pillow.

“ ‘On that fateful day in 2017,’ ” he read in an exaggerated tone, “ ‘who would have thought the portly figure of the unknown mayor would walk into history as a martyr of the fledgling EarthSouth movement. Would she have stayed away, had she known her fate?’ ” He picked up another page, then another. “ ‘Marlena Alvarez—the truth behind the legend’... ‘Marlena Alvarez talks to
Le Monde
’... ‘Did the EarthSouth movement begin here?’ ‘Mendoza on Alvarez...’ ”

“Leave them alone,” I snapped, barely able to control the urge to snatch the pages out of his hand.

“You’re wasting your time.” He tired of teasing and let the pages drop. “Like you waste your time with that Assembly. EarthSouth is already finished. It will never amount to anything.”

“I disagree,” I said. “Look at the alliances they’ve helped forge among the environmental groups. And the restrictions they’ve got passed to protect labor.”

“It doesn’t make any difference,” he said. “I grant you, Alvarez would have made a good leader. But without her, they’re nothing.”

I could feel my face flushing with annoyance. Alvarez didn’t die so that some arrogant street thug could make fun of all that she and the other women fought for...

Grace tugged Will’s hand and he slid off the chair, stuffing mandarins in both pockets as he went.

“If you two are going to talk politics, we’ll be here all night,” she said. “C’mon, Levin, let’s go.”

“Bye, Maria,” said Will as Grace towed him out.

“Bye, Will,” I called.

Levin shrugged and followed them. In his total selfcenteredness he reminded me of a K’Cher and I tried not to let him get close to anything I valued. His touching the magazines seemed like a violation.

In the doorway he turned as though he’d forgotten something. “You went to the parts dealer today.”

“How do you know?” Levin had connections everywhere.

“What is it that you want?”

“A kind of focused light beam device,” I said cautiously.

“If you mean a laser, I can get you one.”

“You can?” He couldn’t have surprised me more if he’d suddenly begun to yodel. “I mean, that would be nice. But it needs to be a specific type, and they’re out of production now.”

“Why do you need it?” I nearly said,
to send signals to aliens, okay?
but turned it into, “Part of the telescope assembly.” “Watching the skies. Can you see anything through the smog?” “When it’s finished I’ll take it out of the city to look properly.”

“Tell me the laser specifications and I will ask around.”

“Around where?”

“I have friends.”

“Why are you offering?”

He paused. “You are hardly in a position to be choosy.” It seemed as if he’d been going to say something else, then changed his mind.

“I’ll think about it.” I was too tired to do anything more that night.

“Don’t think too long,” he said. “You get out of the habit of doing.”

“Levin, you coming?” Grace called from outside.

He disappeared into the dark.

I latched the door behind them, although it wouldn’t keep anyone out. Then I scraped the mandarin peel and bread crumbs off the table and into a bucket, over which I placed a piece of fibro and held it down with a brick to keep inquisitive rats from helping themselves.

Then I picked up the papers Levin had dropped, wiping each of them on the dirty blanket. Cleaner than Levin’s touch. He was right. I was studying history. My own history, because Marlena Alvarez was my great-grandmother’s best friend, and if not for her, I wouldn’t have been born in Las Mujeres, because there would have been no village there. I was also studying the EarthSouth movement, which Alvarez had founded.

At least, my great-grandmother always spoke of Alvarez as if she single-handedly created the EarthSouth movement. I always thought that after her death in 2017 human rights and local autonomy groups across the world formed a chain of protest against oppression and poverty. The political upheavals following the Invidi arrival helped them bring their agenda into the mainstream of politics, while advances in medicine and agriculture allowed them to put many of their ideals into practice.

But Levin’s comments about EarthSouth may have smarted all the more because I hadn’t found much evidence of a united social justice movement in early 2023. From what I’d collected in written articles, downloaded from infonet archives, and heard from visitors to the Assembly, in these five years since Marlena’s death EarthSouth was only an umbrella organization of loosely affiliated groups that met once a year in some countries, more often in others, and had only met twice internationally. The first meeting in 2018 attracted media attention, but during the second meeting in 2020 the Olympic sporting events received more coverage.

And Marlena Alvarez was only one of the “inspirations” claimed by the movement. Earlier icons such as Nelson Mandela and Naomi Klein also featured large in their pantheon. I wondered whether my great-grandmother might not have overemphasized Marlena’s importance. Understandably, too, seeing that they worked and cheated death together in Las Mujeres for five years.

For five years after Alvarez became mayor, the women of Las Mujeres struggled to keep their village safe from government militias, private militias, guerrilla groups, starvation and disease. At least, that was what my great-grandmother’s stories told.

She told how Marlena got the idea of moving everyone to a new camp, leaving the old village as a decoy, to be presumed abandoned. The guerrillas moved on to collect tribute from more lucrative sources.

How Marlena went alone and unarmed to talk to an army commander who wanted the women to inform on their vanished sons and husbands. He left, persuaded that the women had been alone for so long they could know nothing.

How Marlena’s leadership united the heads of local governments enough to defeat the proposal to dam the nearby twin lakes and flood all the villages along the river.

Although I wouldn’t have admitted it to Murdoch or any of my colleagues on Jocasta, these stories, this image of Alvarez, was a comfort and an inspiration to me during the long, hopeless months of the alien blockade. When yet another station system failed, or yet another squabble broke out between alien and alien, alien and human, human and human, in these moments I’d ask myself, “What would Marlena Alvarez do?” I trained as an engineer, and while I could direct the flow of a construction site or coordinate projects within a larger design, nothing prepared me to be solely responsible for thirty thousand people. Alvarez was an example of someone else who had made the best of a job she took on without training or preparation—she’d been a solicitor’s clerk before becoming mayor.

I used to chide myself for relying on Alvarez’s memory, but the parallels in our situations were obvious: we were both isolated, with limited resources, and surrounded by enemies who outgunned us. When the responsibility for Jocasta sat particularly heavily on my shoulders, it helped to think that Alvarez had found a way out. She had insisted Las Mujeres not align itself with any of the powers in the region, and the women stubbornly maintained their independence until the changes in local government laws of 2046.

Alvarez’s insistence upon keeping neutral throughout the many wars and insurgencies that swept across the region influenced the EarthSouth movement’s determined political neutrality. And her ideas influenced my decision to push for neutrality for Jocasta, although I didn’t realize it at the time.

Since beginning work at the Assembly, I’d collected all the articles on Alvarez that I could find and downloaded as much information as I could from the infonet. And one memorable day, I watched her speak. It was a recording of a speech made shortly before she died.

It was early morning in the out-town about two months after I arrived. In the Assembly office Florence and I would work from seven to eleven, go home because it was too hot, then come back for a couple of hours in the evening.

On this particular morning, I found a reference to Alvarez in a file our computer could download, so I did, and fed it into “run video.”

I cried out with surprise and slapped my hand over my mouth. Florence looked up from sealing envelopes.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I mumbled, but she came and stood behind me.

“Alvarez? That’s the San Diego speech, I think.” Florence nodded to herself. “The only time she left her own country.”

I wasn’t interested in the details. The captions running at the bottom of the screen, the two smaller windows at the top that showed an edited history of the village and an explanation of the San Diego rally; all these were unimportant. Marlena was there, almost in person.

Beside the practiced movements of the suited man who introduced her, she looked small and awkward.

I thought she’d be taller. And I expected her to... glow, or something. Have an aura. But at first glance, she could have been one of the women who walked home from the bus stop each night from work in the factories, in her cheap dress and scuffed sandals. Graying hair pulled back from a large-featured face. Narrow dark eyes that glared from behind glasses.

Glasses. Nobody told me Marlena wore glasses. None of the photos showed glasses.

“You knew them, didn’t you?” said Florence.

“Alvarez was well known in the district,” I said distractedly. The glasses didn’t fit what I knew about her.