Time Past (2 page)

So the out-town situation felt uncomfortably familiar. Overpopulation, intercultural (or, in our case, interspecies) conflict, lack of jobs, and crime. But everyone on the station did have equal access, at least in theory, to health and social services, including food, security, and education.

It was in the Confederacy as a whole that the real inequalities lay. The thirteen member species were divided into the Four founding worlds and the remaining Nine. The Four kept a stranglehold on the rest of us because they controlled the only way to travel the vast interstellar distances between the member worlds—the Invidi jump drive.

At last, a place I knew. This lane with three blue tents should lead to a footbridge across a smaller river. I was too far west, because on my right I could see the motorway barriers and hear the sporadic roar of vehicles. But I could then head east, past stained brick factory buildings now used as apartments, across the footbridge, and under the motorway, where the noise of the vehicles echoed like spaceship engines in an enclosed dock and the smell of urine and filthy water would have made me throw up again except that I didn’t want to stop there.

Once over the river I headed northeast into my own part of the out-town. Shacks and tents were set on old factory grounds near the riverbank, but on the far side the trodden dirt tracks led into paved streets, which in turn led onto a larger road, down which vehicles drove north and south. Houses were brick and wood over here, and some of the original owners remained, refusing to flee from the real or imagined dangers of the out-town. Beyond that, you could see the tall Olympic hotels, secure behind their electric fences and serviced by private ferries.

Electricity could be tapped off established lines in this part of the out-town, and there was a sewerage system, although it had been designed for factory effluent, not human waste, one of the reasons for the foulness of the river water.

The problem with electricity was that the gangs wanted payment for illegal lines and many of the out-town residents, like myself, had no money to pay for it. No tribute, no electricity. The gangs were as ruthless as militias. They controlled the trade in illegal drugs and fake IDs, which made them all-powerful here. The only plus was that police seldom ventured into the out-town and therefore we were never asked to show identification we didn’t have.

I found it difficult to comprehend a government that was content to ignore the out-towns, on the condition that their people didn’t make a nuisance of themselves to the important parts of society, that is, those parts that could vote. A sordid bargain, in which the losers were the young, the sick, the elderly, and the very poor. I hated the way that the Four ignored much of the misery on non-Confederacy worlds, too.

Grace laughed at my dismay, when she’d drunk a few beers, which was often.

“They used to call it ‘outsourcing,’ darl. Means the gov’ment gets business to take all the stuff off their hands that’s a hassle. You know, unemployment payments, pensions, telephones. It’s the same with the gangs. Gov’ment doesn’t have to worry.”

I pointed out that governments usually didn’t exact interest payments of up to fifty percent on late payment of their services, or terrorize those who couldn’t pay.

“But the boys,” she meant the gangs, “keep order a lot better than the cops did. Keep the muggers in line.”

One of the few forces working to change the terms of the bargain was a tiny umbrella organization for community groups called the Assembly of the Poor. This was where I “worked,” if you could call the few dollars I received from them pay. The Assembly was part of the Earth-South network, but we didn’t receive much support from EarthSouth, which at this time was still a network of grass-roots organizations. In the social confusion following the Invidi arrival it would finally achieve mass support.

The Assembly office was in the upper story of a wooden house in Creek Road, which was a narrow dead-end street. Its asphalt was full of jagged holes, and the houses, which once stood in separate yards, merged into one another in clusters of additions and extensions. Some of the spaces between houses were filled with rusting parts of cars and machinery. Others held drums and plastic buckets of growing vegetables.

Today, the betting shop on the ground floor of the wooden house was open, and Indian music swirled out into the street. A hand-lettered sign next to the side door that led upstairs to our office read: CONSCIENCE IS NOT ENOUGH. Blue letters on a yellow background. Under this rallying call of the EarthSouth movement, smaller letters declared: IF YOU’RE SICK OF LOSING, JOIN US. IF YOU WANT SOME POLITICAL POWER, JOIN US. LET’S MAKE THIS TOWN A FIT PLACE TO LIVE. Someone had crossed out an “e” in “losing.” Below these exhortations sat a logo made up of four words in the shape of a face, the first word curved to make a fringe, the last, a frowning mouth: ASSEMBLY OF THE POOR.

On the side of the house local children had painted a red, green, and yellow mural of birds and trees. Some of it was still visible under black swathes of graffiti.

I dodged a heavy man who came out of the shop counting a handful of betting slips, waved a greeting at Mr. Deshindar who ran the shop, and fumbled inside my shirt for the keys, kept on a string around my neck. The lock on the barred iron door caught, then clicked open. I dragged it aside enough to slide in, then locked it behind me. Paranoid, yes. There isn’t much of value here, except our old computer, and the solar panels and recycled car batteries that we used during electricity cuts. And my telescope.

I went up the dim stairs and into the top of the building. I still felt queasy and my legs ached from the long walk, but at least I’d made it here. Daylight was fading and I wanted to put the money into our strongbox before I went back to my tent. I’d kept my own cash at the Assembly ever since the tent was ransacked and money taken from it, soon after Grace moved out.

The office was a single room, illuminated only by a dirty skylight and windows that let in the afternoon sun if we forgot to lower the blinds. Papers covered most of the threadbare green carpet and three rickety tables that served as desks. The drawers of two huge filing cabinets stuck half open, contents bulging. Nelson Mandela smiled from a faded poster on one wall at an infonet portrait of Marlena Alvarez on the other.
Talk to your enemies,
said the text below Mandela, but Alvarez didn’t smile back. Perhaps she didn’t like being an internationally recognized symbol, shared between human rights, women’s rights, and social justice movements. Like the Assembly of the Poor, which tried to service all of these as best it could.

We helped our member groups apply for funding, and the director, Abdul Haidar, lobbied local government. The Assembly itself was always in need of money. I was the “technical staff.” Florence Woo, the other staff member, wrote submissions for funds, that is, begging letters.

When I came for the job at the Assembly, I’d said that I was involved in the EarthSouth movement in Vaupés and named the largest town near Las Mujeres, sure it existed in this time.

I’d been using stories of my great-grandmother’s life to explain my presence in the out-town, masquerading as someone who knew Marlena Alvarez, the founder of the EarthSouth movement, the best known of the popular social justice movements in the early twenty-first century. At least, a century later it was the best known.

Alvarez was the mayor of the village of Las Mujeres from 2011 to 2017. My great-grandmother, Demora Haase, had been her chief of police. I grew up in that village hearing stories of Marlena. Her life, her sayings, her death by an assassin’s bullet in 2017. It was easy to put myself in supporting roles in the events my great-grandmother used to talk about, events that to these people happened only a few years ago.

I poured myself a drink of water from the jug on Florence’s table. Her papers were in neat piles.

Drinking water was the biggest expense for everybody in the out-town and in the surrounding suburbs. Since I arrived there’d been perhaps four days of rain, and none in the past three months. The tent cities had no piped water, and the water that came through the old pipes to these houses was often undrinkable. Water trucks came around regularly, but they charged just enough to make it difficult for a person on a subsistence wage to pay. Which meant most of the out-town struggled. We could boil piped water most of the time and get by. The last alternative was river water—nobody, seeing the rubbish and waste that ran through the drains, would willingly drink that.

One of the things the Assembly worked toward was getting water supplied free to everyone. Eventually we hoped to arrange sewerage as well as regular garbage collection. The enclosed environmental system of the space station recycled everything except a portion of heat waste, and I found it hard to believe this society still condoned the use of fossil fuel-burning engines and allowed production of nondegradable plastics. Still harder to believe was that some sections of the same city were left at below subsistence level, while others enjoyed the luxury of space and safety.

I knew how hard it was to persuade those with privileges to share with the less fortunate. On Jocasta we had enough space in the uppermost of its three rings to comfortably house most of the refugees and unregistered residents who stayed in the lower ring. But the upper ring residential area was owned and controlled by members of the Four—our “upper classes,” and do you think they’d give up their extra space? No more than the power-holders of this city would let the out-town residents into the harbor area or downtown.

I felt too tired to work on the damn telescope, sweaty from the walk and the hot room... suddenly the claustrophobic heat became more than I could bear, and I pulled up the dusty blind and opened one of the windows. A hot, dry breeze entered, but at least the air was moving now.

I needed to explore other options to contact the Invidi. What if I can’t get a laser? Arrival is only three weeks away.

I groaned inwardly and switched on the small globe suspended from the roof girder in the middle of the room. Then, after first putting my cash in the strongbox and sliding it back behind one of the filing cabinets, I took out the telescope from its box under my desk and sat on the floor beside it.

My knees creaked as I sat, and it worried me that something else was going wrong. I thought I knew this, my body. I’d lived with it for thirty-seven years. Now it was behaving like an unreliable machine and the things that happened to it here were frightening. I couldn’t control the incursions of viruses and bacteria, and what they did to me. My body was alien, a flimsy thing that didn’t work as I expected it to.

I found myself heeding Grace’s warnings about dangerous places, dangerous times of day, aware that physical damage here could be permanent; conscious of the frailty of my own flesh and bones, conscious that the medical treatments I used to take for granted would not be made until decades after the Invidi come. In this decade, a broken bone could take months to heal. Bruises remained for weeks.

Don’t think of that. Think of getting back to your own time, where you won’t have to worry—at least, not as much. Think about the telescope.

A fat tube with ungainly legs, it sat waiting for its computer connections to come alive. The lens was in place, and a hell of a job I’d had finding a workshop that would let me grind it. I was still accumulating pieces of hardware in order to motorize the tracking. For the time being, the scope had to sit static on its mount. I opened the toolbox, selected a screwdriver. The mount needed to be more stable.

I stood up again with a grunt, found the page I’d scribbled notes on, sat back down again. Most obliging of amateur astronomy groups to post telescope construction manuals on the infonet. After Grace had laughingly instructed me in basic computer usage, I found there were manuals for everything on the net, from bombs to kitchen renovations. Including the hacking manuals that allowed me to develop my computer skill further.

The floor shuddered slightly as someone rattled the door downstairs. The sound of male voices floated up through the open window.

I stood up, heart beating much faster than it had a few seconds ago. Maybe they want the betting shop, not the Assembly.

The door rattled again.

Maybe if I ignore them, they’ll go away.

“Hey, Maria,” called a familiar voice.

Two

I
t was Grace’s older son, Vince. Some of the tension in my shoulders relaxed.

He’d probably either be trying to borrow money or looking for a place to hide something illegal. That’s what he used to do when Grace lived with me. At least, I assumed the neatly wrapped packages he used to leave in Grace’s tent were illegal. No reason to hide them otherwise. I lifted one once and it was heavy, the heaviness of metal. I asked Grace if Vince’s group was connected with one of the larger gangs. “I don’t want to know,” was all she would say.

I turned on the weak yellow bulb on the stairs as I went down and looked through the bars. “Hello, Vince.”

He stared at me with his usual sulky expression and jiggled his hands in his pockets as he spoke. In spite of the heat he wore a short blue jacket with the collar turned up, jeans, and a black T-shirt. It infuriated Grace that he always had cash to buy clothes.

“You seen Will?” he said. Will was Grace’s younger son, ten years old. “No, he hasn’t come here. Is he out alone?” I heard my voice sharpen like Grace’s. “Just checking. So you can tell her I asked.” He jerked his head back. “These blokes want to see you.” Four men stood behind Vince. I squinted into the gloom—the local butcher and the bus driver I knew. His bus ran between the Clyde yards south of the motorway and the streets closest to the tent city. The other two men were strangers.

“You said she’d show us the tellyscope,” said the driver. He poked his narrow nose up to the bars and stared up the stairs. The brim of his cap bumped the bar.

“Now?” I said. “And why? It’s just a homemade telescope.”

“That’s what you say.” One of the unknowns grunted from behind the butcher.