Time's Chariot

FIVE

For Jontan Baiget, a biotech journeyman on the Holmberg-Chabani-Scott plantation, the journey to the Dark Ages started like a perfectly normal day, five thousand feet below the surface of the Pacific, north-east of the Marquesas. It was the day before Union Day.

Jontan left the dormitory that morning and headed with his friends to the foreman’s office to be given the day’s tasks. His group and the women’s contingent got there at about the same time, to the strains of the usual repartee.

From the men:

‘Wha-hey!’

‘All right, girls?’

‘Over here, love, over here!’

From the women:

‘Do your mummies know you’re out, boys?’

‘Too small for me.’

‘Any three of you, OK? Any three of you.’

Back home in Appalachia ecopolis the journeymen could mix with whom they liked. On the plantation they were kept apart, except for their professional duties and carefully chaperoned offduty get-togethers. Journeymen were expected to keep their minds on their work. Jontan glanced up. Was she…

Yes, she was. Sarai Killin was there and looking as fed up with the catcalls as he felt. She met his eye for a moment, half smiled and looked away again.

They had known each other since childhood days in their module creche in Appalachia. As they got older he had become aware of two disturbing factors: she was becoming more and more attractive, with her dark eyes and short brown hair and slender figure that always lurked at the back of his mind and just wouldn’t go away, and he was becoming less and less so with what he considered his quite unreasonably big ears, general gangliness, hair that just wouldn’t do anything…

But tomorrow was Union Day, and all the journeymen would be going to the same party, so there was hope.

‘Baiget.’ The foreman called his name and he stepped forward. ‘Sector twelve, abnormalities at cellular level in nutrient solution.’

Two other journeymen and a supervisor were assigned to the same job and a grounder took them there, skimming along the path that ran through the golden corn. It was a sight that cheered him up and took his mind off the non-chances of ever getting closer to Sarai. The ground beneath was reclaimed sea bed, the ‘sky’ was pitch black — not much sun got through five thousand feet of water — and the plantation existed in a force bubble, full of artificial air and light, but Jontan felt completely at home there. And happy, and proud. The world around him held twenty billion people and the Holmberg-Chabani-Scott plantation helped feed them, and he, in his own small way, was helping with the process.

Their destination was a pumping station that looked over a thousand acres of reclaimed sea bed. The grounder approached in a curve to avoid the gaze of a nearby UV pylon that faced safely away from them and poured its beneficent ultraviolet rays into the force-grown corn.

Inside the station the journeymen got to work. The station supplied the solution that was meant to be nourishing the seed germs, and ‘abnormalities at cellular level’ essentially meant mini-cancers above the usual rate of cell division. The solution was notoriously unstable and could go bad at the slightest unwanted variable — the proportion of chemicals in it, the ambient heat, a slightly prolonged filtration session. The solution suffered, the corn suffered and the crop suffered.

The job was split between the three journeymen. One looked at the solution that entered the station, Jontan studied the mixing process and the third checked the output. The supervisor hovered in the background, somehow seeming to be looking over the shoulders of all three of them at once.

An hour later they had made progress, or at least they had eliminated possibilities. There was nothing contaminating the solution in the station and the supervisor was getting redder and redder in the face.

‘Nothing wrong at this end. Nothing at all. But the solution is cancerous when it gets to the far end. Well, laddies, looks like we’re going to have to check the pipework…’

Oh, goody, more work, Jontan thought. He pushed himself back in his seat and stretched, gazing out of the window at the corn that was the ultimate beneficiary of their hard work. He frowned, then smiled slowly and stood up.

‘Going somewhere, Baiget?’ The supervisor stopped him with his hand on the door.

‘Sir…’

‘It’s at the back, Baiget. You don’t go outside. That’d really foul up the solution.’

The other two journeymen sniggered.

‘Sir, that pylon’s directly between us and the field,’ Jontan said.

‘So?’

‘I’ll bet the pipeline from this station runs straight from us to the field, too.’

The supervisor frowned. ‘It can’t be…’ He turned to a display and called up a schematic of sector twelve. Sure enough, a red line ran from the square that was the station to the shaded yellow that was the edge of the field, and the UV pylon stood right over it.

‘Which moron moved that there?’ the supervisor bellowed. The pylons weren’t fixed and they got moved around according to the whims of the agronomists. Radiation spillage was quite enough to upset the cell chemistry of the solution passing through the pipes.

The supervisor symbed Control. ‘Request shutdown of pylon 12-UV-970. Don’t worry, won’t take long.’ A pause, then: ‘Right, you two, get over there and shift it. Stay here, Baiget.’

When the two other journeymen were gone, the supervisor shook his head. ‘How long had you known about that, Baiget?’

‘Um, I saw it just now, sir…’

‘And you were going to move it all by yourself? Did it occur to you you’d get fried? And if it did, did it occur to you that you don’t have the authority to shut it down to prevent frying?’

‘Um…’

‘You’re talented, Baiget,’ the supervisor said grudgingly. ‘You can think laterally — you don’t just go through the motions that the book says you should. Just learn to play in the team, OK? It’ll do you a world of good.’

A symbed call broke into both their thoughts. ‘Journeyman Baiget report to the foreman’s office immediately.’

Jontan looked at the supervisor in surprise. The supervisor looked back. ‘Still here, Baiget?’

There was another man in with the foreman — tall, dark-haired, bearded and immaculately dressed. Jontan immediately began to feel self-conscious on behalf of his working clothes.

‘This is Baiget, sir,’ said the foreman.

‘I see.’ For some reason Jontan expected the bearded man to walk around him and study him, but all he did was say, ‘You did well in your exams, Baiget. Congratulations.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Where’s the other?’ The man was talking to the foreman now.

‘Should be here soon, Mr Scott.’

Mr Scott! And this was the Holmberg-Chabani-Scott plantation. Jontan doubted he was the Mr Scott, head of the family, but he was a Mr Scott and that was enough. He would be a patrician, no doubt about it. And he was here.

The door opened and there were footsteps behind him. ‘Come in, Killin,’ said the foreman.

Jontan’s heart leaped and he hardly dared look round in case it was another Killin. But no, it was Sarai Killin, standing next to him and ignoring him completely; as he should be ignoring her, in the presence of a Scott and the foreman. With an effort he turned his attention to the front.