Time Past (6 page)

I knew when I was, but where? The stars said the Southern Hemisphere, but I didn’t think it was my home continent. I didn’t get as far as the Indian Ocean. Which left Australia. Murdoch’s homeland.

Might as well walk as sit here.

The sun rose. I was in a landscape of straggly trees, sharp grasses, prickly-looking shrubs. Lots of unfamiliar birdsong, among it a peculiar gulping cry, and a liquid warble that made me glad just to hear it. A wire fence drooped to the ground unmended. This sign of human habitation heartened me and I followed the fence to a road. But there were no houses and no sources of water. I finished the pod’s emergency water rations too quickly.

I kept walking along the side of the road. It didn’t look well maintained. The edges of the bitumen mix were crumbling and there were holes every ten or fifteen meters, some big enough to cover a quarter of the black surface.

The heat reflected off the road became worse as the day dragged on. I kept my outer shirt over my head as radiation protection, but by midday my head was aching so much I had to stop and sit beside a bush. Mouth dry, eyes full of dust. Not one vehicle in about six hours. They’d had groundcars in this period, surely. If so, none of them traveled this road.

A little later a hum in the distance became a growl, then a roar, and a long groundcar stopped with a hissing of brakes at my frantic waving. The driver waited for me to rattle open the cabin door. He glanced at me sideways from pale blue eyes with lines radiating from the corners. Suspicious and distant.

“Long way from anywhere to be walking.”

I nodded, unsure of twenty-first-century idioms. At least I understood his words. English.

“Car break down? Or somebody dump you?”

I nodded again. He gave me a drink of water, which I gulped down. The groundcar lurched into motion again. Unsettling at first, then soothing, the road rolled on endlessly, straight and gray, away from the sun. Eastern seaboard, I thought sleepily, population centers. From a photoimage above the window, a small dark woman hugging a young child smiled down at me. A dangling woven ball with a tassel rocked in front of them.

I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, the vehicle was stationary, the driver outside talking to an other man. Dark outside, except for lights on poles beside the road and bright lights over a low building beside it. The driver said I’d better get out unless I wanted to go through a checkpoint.

“They sent them back.” He pointed at the photoimage. “Guess helping you might even things out.”

He liked the boots. I gave them to him in thanks for the lift, and found myself in the out-town.

Night, nowhere to stay. I didn’t even remember going to sleep against a wall somewhere, but had a rude awakening just before dawn. Someone held my shoulders and covered my face while another grabbed the medkit and scanner I’d brought with me from the paratube. They disappeared into the warren of shabby buildings before I could stagger to my feet.

I’d thought that the moment I opened my mouth I’d be marked as an outsider, but nobody gave me more than a quick glance. Snatches of words in languages other than English drifted out of open doorways, people walked quickly along streets of small houses with red roofs. First I needed food, then shelter. Economic system should be money-based. I had no idea where to start.

I met Grace at the Help House near the church on Roma Street. I didn’t understand that the House was a charitable organization, providing food and a few clothes for nothing to the destitute and temporarily destitute. They said they didn’t need any work done, and Grace, who was there with a box of clothes to donate, laughed at me when I turned away in disappointment. If you want to work, she said, you can clean up my shower block. I went back to the out-town with her and cleaned the communal shower in the courtyard and fixed a couple of leaks in the pipe with a temporary patch.

“If you can fix things,” Grace said, “that’s a different story.” She fed me, then introduced me to a friend who owned a repairs workshop and said, “She’ll work for coupons and a rec-cert, won’t you?” looking at me in a meaningful way I totally failed to comprehend. “You do baby-sitting?” she asked. The word conjured up bizarre images, and while I dithered, she continued. “ ’Coz you can stay here for a while, if you don’t mind keeping an eye on my ten-year-old when I’m on night shift. I don’t want no business done here,” she added hastily. “It’s not that I’m fussy, but you get some weird punters these days, and the kid”... I said I’d be very grateful to stay, having deciphered the “sitting” part, and only a little while later worked out what she meant about “punters.” The option didn’t appeal to me and I was glad I’d met Grace before being driven to consider it.

For the first few weeks I was too busy coping with attacks by local viruses on my unprepared immune system. At first I thought my twenty-second-century medical regulators had been disabled in some way by the jump to the past. Then I realized that they were probably still working, which was the only reason I was still alive.

When I finally experienced a few hours without feeling sick, I wanted information about the town, about the world, about my ancestors, and I needed to work out a way to contact the Invidi when they arrived. To do this I needed access to a computer, those ugly, primitive boxes that had to be physically connected to a source of electricity most of the time. Primitive maybe, but they were expensive by the standards of the out-town, and Grace certainly didn’t have one in her tent.

The local store ran noninteractive broadcast programs, what older people called TV and younger ones called vidnet. It was the only place within a couple of streets that had a screen. Or I could access the local library’s network, which connected only to other public libraries; or I could use the Net Café over the other side of Parramatta Road, but I’d have to borrow someone’s account as you needed an NID to set up a new account. At the café I could surf the older internet, but most of the information I needed, for example about military communications satellites and higher level scientific information, was on Safenet, which was another system entirely and which had far stricter controls. So I tried to study ways to access different systems without authority—“hacking.”

About a month after I arrived I found another temporary job with a mechanic. I picked up the essentials of the work quickly, but it was an hour’s walk each way and there was no infonet access at the workshop.

One day, about a month and a half after finding that job, I was walking back to the tent by a different route and saw the words “EarthSouth Movement” on a poster outside an old house. I went inside to see what it was, and found myself in the Assembly office. A tiny, neat woman with a stern voice asked me if I’d come about the job. I said yes. She said Abdul’s just stepped out, you can talk to me until he gets back.

She introduced herself as Florence Woo and asked me why I wanted the job. I said, having seen the posters and the slogans, that I’d been involved with the EarthSouth movement in South America. And that I needed a job closer to the out-town. We don’t pay much, said Florence, naming a figure about half of the tiny amount I received from the mechanic. By now I knew that illegal immigrants couldn’t hope to be paid fair wages for any job. But I saw the computer on the desk and calculated that the drop in pay would be tolerable if I didn’t have to spend most of it at the café. And I could keep giving rent to Grace.

Florence said she’d “discuss” my application with Abdul. When I went back the next day, she said I’d got the job. Which was, I found out, a combination of mechanic, electrician, and computer repairperson.

None of which would come in handy when I got back and found myself ex-head of station, which would happen if Earth was annoyed at the way I’d borrowed funds to complete the
Calypso II
project, then thoughtlessly become lost in the past. If the jump point maintained its correspondence of ninety-nine years between 2023 and my own time of 2122.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed, being careful to first whack the ground with the short stick I kept handy for that purpose. Rats usually stayed around the outside garbage heaps where food was freely available, but I’d put my bare foot on a large cockroach once and the memory still made me shudder.

The dirt felt cool and gritty under my toes as I felt around for my sandals. Bluish white light snuck through cracks in one side, from the floodlights across the little river, where a clinical waste incinerator ran twenty-four hours, seven days a week. On the door side of the tent, yellow light would grow brighter, then fade again as somebody carried a lantern or torch along the track.

I reached for the jug and poured a glass of water. Sometimes it calmed the wheezing from the asthma attack. The water tasted stale and sour, although it was bought, filtered stuff. Even Jocasta’s recycled water tasted better than this.

I finished sipping and leaned forward with my head resting on my folded arms on the crate table. A change of posture sometimes helped with the wheezing, too.

During the day I could think about telescopes and contacting the Invidi, and all the minutiae of daily life. I’d never imagined all the small, dreary tasks that had to be done to function at even this century’s standard. All these
things,
out to get me. Like the viruses, lining up to get past my immune system. I wasn’t used to taking care of anything but my job. On Jocasta, food preparation, cleaning, and waste disposal was done for us, silently and mostly efficiently.

But now, in the hours of darkness and silence here on Earth—unlike on the space station, where we have night-shift workers, and aliens who work their day shift at night, and the whole complex machinery of life support and recycling hums on in the background—in the hours when everything shuts down except the incinerator, my memories of the past creep up on me. My past, but this world’s future.

I can see the chain of events that led to my being stuck here in the past quite clearly. A line of dominoes, set up in some pattern only the Invidi can understand. Every night in the out-town I sit wheezing in the dark and line them all up in my mind. Every night I give one of them a push, and watch as the line falls.

First—although, depending on which domino I push, it might not be first—there was the Abelar Treaty. Named after the star system within which Jocasta is situated, the Abelar Treaty was designed by me and my advisers on Jo-casta and was signed by two alien races and myself, as governor of the Abelar system and therefore representative of the Confederacy. This was in early 2121. The treaty made the two alien races, the Seouras and the Danadan, co-monitors of each other’s affairs within the Abelar system, which hopefully would stop their fighting with each other and destroying the neighborhood.

The Abelar Treaty was significant because when a different group of Seouras arrived several months later, we thought they also recognized the treaty. But these Seouras were different. Domino number two. Their heavily armed gray ships attacked the station and blockaded us from any contact with the Confederacy. The Seouras wouldn’t say what they wanted, they just kept us prisoner in Jocasta.

For nearly six months we tried to find ways to circumvent the blockade or communicate with the Confederacy, and to keep the station’s residents safe and fed. Six months of hell. Then domino number three arrived—a ship called
Calypso
appeared suddenly and activated a jump mine, which killed all but three of the crew. This was in January 2122.
Calypso
’s presence was a mystery at first. It couldn’t have traveled from Earth to Jocasta in flatspace within fifty years, which was how long the cryogenic sleep system was set to preserve the crew. On the other hand, human ships were not equipped with jump drives, nor was there a recorded jump point in the place where
Calypso
appeared. It couldn’t have jumped from Earth to Jocasta, because no jump points existed off the Central network. So we thought.

The
Calypso
crew’s plan was to head for Alpha Centauri from Earth, and after fifty years of frozen sleep, to decelerate and look for habitable planets in that system. A mad idea, and if they’d arrived on schedule in 2076, they would have found a small but thriving Melot station there. But instead they arrived near Jocasta. And we couldn’t tell how long they had been asleep.

Calypso
’s arrival signaled the end of the Seouras blockade. When we talked to the crew, they told us that an Invidi called An Serat helped them to leave Earth. We suspected then that
Calypso
might have jumped from a point somewhere along its course to Jocasta. I thought of An Serat’s help as being domino number four, although a little out of time.

It certainly set things off on Jocasta. I wanted to take a look at
Calypso
’s engines, because I thought the Nine should be able to have jump technology. Our resident Invidi, An Barik, wanted
Calypso
’s engines so the Nine would not have a chance at learning about them. A terrorist group who’d infiltrated the station also wanted the engines so they could use the jump drive to help them fight the Confederacy. And, finally, it turned out that the Seouras ships we had been resisting for six months were in fact ships of a different alien race called the Tor, who had taken the Seouras prisoner and forced them to communicate with the station for the purpose of... getting hold of
Calypso.

I tended to lose track of my dominoes at this point. Sometimes I put in extra ones for the gray Tor ships and the imprisoned Seouras. The Tor ships contained no live Tor, an aggressive alien species who’d fought a war with the Invidi for nearly a century. But after the Tor withdrew suddenly from Invidi space less than a decade ago, Earth time, we’d seen no sign of them. We never found out if the Tor ships had been traveling for millennia in flatspace, or if they appeared from their own jump point.

At any rate, the closest gray ship found out about
Calypso
and tried to take it. Murdoch and I stopped them by damaging the gray ship using a bomb he planted inside
Calypso.
The gray ship was damaged and retreated, leaving a field of debris behind.