As an afterthought, I sent a quick message to tell Playdon and Fian what I was doing. I didn’t want anyone worrying if they came back and found me missing. Then I dialled the portal, and stepped through to the Pyramid Zone reception area. They were obviously having a busy day, because there were queues waiting at all four internal portals for the next pyramid tours.
I wasn’t here to join a crowd of chattering tourists and hear the tour guide recite the information I’d heard a dozen times before. I headed away from the portals to the exit that led into the desert. The man on the door handed me a hat and one of the tracker armbands they insist on you wearing to stop you getting lost. He started telling me the safety instructions, but I shook my head.
‘I’m from Eden Dig Site, and I’ve walked the desert path several times already. I know all the refreshment and portal points, and how to call for help.’
He accepted that and waved me through. I glanced at his display screen as I went past, and saw two clusters of dots that were probably school parties, but they were both on the short route. The longer desert path looked nice and peaceful.
Once outside, I followed the paved path with its information points displaying holo images of what this area had looked like in the twenty-third century, before Tuan created his genetically modified creeper to reclaim the desert. I ignored them, preferring to see it as it was now. Deceptively delicate greyish-green leaves mixed with turquoise flowers carpeted the ground, the colours merging together in the distance to look like a blue ocean.
The path divided, and I took the left turn for the desert trail. I remembered seeing the distinctive turquoise of a Tuan creeper high up in the Eden rainforest when we were searching for Joth, and stopped at the first refreshment point to collect a bottle of water and use my lookup to send a question to Pyramid Zone Information.
Their reply came a few minutes later. Apparently, I could have been right about it being a Tuan creeper. Genetically modified plants didn’t always do exactly what their creators intended, and in some very rare cases Tuan creepers had been found living an arboreal existence in the rainforest, clinging to a tree trunk and managing to survive on nutrients absorbed from the humid air.
That sounded a bit like me. One of the Handicapped was as rare and out of place in a norm class as a Tuan creeper in the rainforest, but I’d managed so far and things should be a lot easier now. Steen had said there wouldn’t be any more trouble.
I pulled a face of angry self-mockery as I walked on along the path. At the start of this year, I’d declared war against a class of norms. I’d defeated them now, but what sort of victory was this? My enemies hadn’t learned to like me. They just blamed Petra for Joth’s death, and being nice to me was a way of punishing her.
The victory wouldn’t last for long anyway. Next year, Playdon was going to be running a pre-history degree course for University Asgard. It would be heavily practical, and based on Earth, so Fian and I planned to join it. Some others from our class would be joining it too, but there’d also be a lot of new people. There was bound to be someone prejudiced against the Handicapped, so I’d have to fight the battle all over again.
This battle would always be part of my life. There would always be people who didn’t think I was really human. I’d been bitterly angry about that for years, and a lot of that anger was aimed at myself. When people keep telling you something, it has an effect on you. I’d had the perfect example of that with the Alien Contact programme. Everything I’d been taught, every mention of meeting aliens, had assumed humanity would meet them during Planet First explorations of a new sector. Even knowing that Alien Contact had called me in, I hadn’t been able to step back from that ingrained idea and work out that the aliens must have come to Earth.
Of course I’d been affected by the off-worlders’ views of the Handicapped as well. Every day of my life, I’d been reminded of them in one way or another. Growing up a ward of Hospital Earth because my own parents had rejected me. Hearing the jokes on the off-world vids, about how people like me were ugly and stupid. Knowing I’d never have the right to vote, or …
Part of me had absorbed those ideas, and felt I wasn’t really human. I’d tried to fight my insecurity by being the best at everything, dumping the subjects like science, where I could only manage to be average. That was why joining this class had been more about proving things to myself than to the hated exos.
I didn’t feel that way any longer. It had taken a combination of the acceptance of my friends and Fian, the Military awarding me the Artemis medal, and a truly alien race sending a probe to Earth to convince me, but it had finally happened. The words Candace and my psychologist had said to me a thousand times really were true. I was as normal and human and valuable as any off-worlder, I just had a faulty immune system.
That realization wouldn’t magically give me a family, mean I could travel to the stars, or stop some people from calling me names, but it still helped. My Handicap would always cause me problems, but I had a lot of good things in my life as well. Fian, my friends, and my joy in history. I was even an officer in the Military now. If it wasn’t for the threat of that alien sphere up in Earth orbit …
I was lifting my head to give the usual instinctive look at the sky, when my lookup chimed. I accepted the live link from Asgard, and forgot about aliens while I listened to the funeral of a friend. It was happening on a distant planet in Gamma sector, while I was standing among a sea of turquoise flowers on one of the deserts of Earth. When it was my turn to speak, people had to wait a few seconds before they heard my voice because of the comms portal lag as my words were relayed through Alpha and Gamma sector to Asgard, and Fian had to light my candle for me. None of that mattered. I could still take part in the funeral as we said goodbye to Joth.
18
It took a while for things to get back to normal after the funeral. The Dig Site Federation Accident Specialist insisted on us suffering an entire day of boredom while Playdon repeated all the special Eden safety lectures. The following day, Eden Dig Site closed entirely while a doctor went around every dome giving people special inoculation shots. The class did get outside the next morning, but we didn’t go further than the edge of the ruins, and spent the whole time practising specialist sensor sled alarm drills.
Repeating lectures had just been tedious, but the drills were four solid hours of screeching sirens and hard physical work. Most of the time, the sensor sled just screams its standard alarm that means pull the tag leader out of the danger area, but some alarms warn of a serious threat to the whole team. Unstable ground, you get to the clearway as fast as possible. Tower falling, you get away as fast as possible and just keep going. Magnetic, you cut all lift beams, abandon sleds, and run like chaos before things start exploding or your own suit kills you. Radiation, you head for the nearest evac portal and get Dig Site Command to warn Hospital Earth Casualty to prepare for a hot team arrival. Chemical is like radiation, except you pause on the way to the evac portal to spray yourselves with decontaminant.
Four hours of that added up to an awful lot of running, which is no fun at all when you’re wearing restrictive impact suits. We all hated it, but even Krath had enough sense not to utter a word of complaint. Playdon had had to portal to Asgard at two that morning to be interrogated by his department head back at University Asgard, and had barely got back in time for breakfast. He was even more exhausted than we were.
That evening, I watched Petra’s old friends pointedly ignoring her, and felt sorry enough for her to try approaching her myself. She answered my attempt at sympathy in a savage voice. ‘Don’t you realize I’d rather not have any friends than be friends with you. Nuke off!’
I got the message and left her to sit alone for the rest of the evening. I suppose it was stupidly insensitive of me to have even tried talking to her, but …
The day after that, the Dig Site Federation grudgingly gave us clearance to work on the dig site again. Since we were well ahead with theory lectures now, we spent two long days excavating the Eden ruins, only stopping when forced to by the inevitable rain.
On the first day, we found nothing, but on the second day we found a stasis box. Playdon let me help him run the Stasis Q safety checks, and we opened it to find the usual data chip with a farewell vid from a family leaving Earth in Exodus century, as well as something completely different to anything I’d ever found before. A set of diaries, actual physical books, handwritten by some eccentric back in the first half of the twenty-fourth century.
I’d have liked to spend the evening reading them, but Fian and I had arranged to portal over to Earth Europe and meet my friends from Next Step. We all went to Stigga’s MeetUp as usual, because Maeth had talked Stigga
