Earth Girl (21 page)

On the surface, none of that seemed to have the slightest connection to my unknown parents, but of course it did. Everything did. Everything in my life was because of them and their decision. Everything kept coming back to the shadowy figures who’d handed their ape kid over to Hospital Earth and walked away. If they hadn’t done that, my entire life would have been different, and I wouldn’t be telling a bunch of lies to an off-world class.

I’d tried not to admit it to myself, but I’d known the truth all along. I might have claimed that I’d joined this class to prove I was as good as any norm and yell abuse at them, but the class were just substitutes for my parents. I’d been just as obsessed as all my friends in Next Step. They’d been desperate for acceptance, while I’d been desperate for revenge, but it was just two sides of the same coin.

It’s not totally true that all my friends in Next Step were obsessed with their parents. Keon wasn’t. He was maddeningly lazy, irritatingly smug, and annoyingly intelligent, but I’d always admired one thing about him. When he was 14 years old, he’d said that it was far too much effort to be bothered about parents he’d never known, and he really meant it!

I lay back on my bed and sighed. There might not seem to be any logic in it, but I knew that the first step towards facing my class as an ape, was facing up to the issue of my parents. I was finally doing what my friends had done four years ago. I was 18 years old, I was at least theoretically an adult, but that wasn’t going to help me very much. The only advantage I had over the average naive 14-year-old, was that I’d seen what happened to my friends. I knew from bitter experience that this was going to be an utter disaster.

All of us, except Keon, had gone through difficult times when we hit that big Year Day that meant we were 14 and had two options offered to us. We could ask for information about our parents and attempt to make contact. We could also make one attempt to portal off world. We’d all been thinking about it for years beforehand of course.

I was the only one crazy enough to take up the portal option. Everyone told me not to do it. Issette must have said it a hundred times. The others said it about thirty times each. Candace said it about fifteen times. The Principal of my Next Step said it three times. The teacher who ran my school history club said it eight times. My ProDad insisted on our first meeting in over a year so that he could go on record as saying it.

Even Keon made the supreme effort to comment it was a bad idea. He pointed out that Hospital Earth didn’t make mistakes. The last confirmed case of someone being diagnosed as Handicapped in error was over a hundred years ago.

I knew that.

Keon pointed out it was going to be unpleasant. There’d be a medical team standing by off world to grab me on arrival as I went into anaphylactic shock. They’d then portal me back to Hospital Earth Casualty, who would have another medical team standing by to treat me. He said they probably wouldn’t let me die, but it was likely to be painful.

Keon came the closest to convincing me. I still went ahead anyway. I knew Hospital Earth hadn’t made a mistake. I knew what would happen, and that there was no chance at all, but I had to try. So I had ten seconds on another world and a week in hospital.

I only really needed a day in hospital, but Hospital Earth tend to be a bit neurotic because in very rare cases there can be some lingering after effects. I wasn’t a rare case, so there were no after effects. I was just a perfectly average ape girl cursed by a malignant fate. Everyone came to see me, brought grapes, and told me how stupid I’d been. Keon came too, but he just sat there eating the grapes.

I didn’t care if they all thought I was stupid. It was still worth it. I hadn’t just given in and been a passive victim. I’d tried to fight fate, and experienced the inevitable defeat, but I was proud that I’d tried. The only bad thing was that my psychologist didn’t say I was stupid. He said it had been a positive experience for me, and I said he could take his opinions and nuke them!

The others might have thought I was stupid taking up the portal option, but I thought they were totally out of their minds taking up the parental information one. My decision gave me one physically unpleasant day, but they went through mental agony with emotional after effects that lasted for years.

Issette was my best friend, so I was most involved with what happened to her. When she accessed the records, it was obvious that Issette’s parents had done the standard thing. Dump the ape kid, blame the neanderthal genes on each other, and head in opposite directions. They’d been from Beowulf, in Gamma sector. Their divorce had been initiated the day after Issette was born. They’d both changed their names. Issette’s father was now on a frontier planet in Epsilon. Issette’s mother had moved too, but only as far as another planet in Gamma sector.

I thought that made things pretty clear. A throwback baby had shattered her parents’ comfortable norm lives, and they had done everything they could to turn their backs on it, but fluffy-headed, romantic Issette was sure that they would feel differently now. She tried to contact them. Her father replied with an impersonal written one line mail. It was polite but basically it could be summed up in two words. Nuke off! Her mother sent a long emotional mail, kept promising to visit then changing her mind, and finally shut the door completely.

Issette was a mess and took years to get over it. Her ProParents got her extra psychotherapy for a year, which Issette thinks helped her immensely, but I think made things worse. Issette is very different to me. She likes sharing everything with people, while I get really angry about a psychologist trying to poke around in my head and tell me which of my feelings get a pass grade and which fail and need correcting.

Seven of my friends took up their parental information option at 14. They went through a lot of pain and only Ross got anything out of it in the end. His real father calls him every few weeks, and even visits a couple of times a year. I met him myself once, when he came to our Next Step. For an exo, he wasn’t that bad. He didn’t wrinkle up his nose as if I smelled.

So, I knew from my friends’ experiences exactly how slim the chances were that I’d end up having a relationship with either of my real parents. My call to Registry was going to lead to catastrophe, but in the end it was like my attempt to portal off world. It was going to fail, it was going to hurt, but afterwards I could be proud that I’d tried, and if I could face the issue of my parents then facing my class should be simple.

That was the point when I made another decision. I’d keep up the lies until I’d dealt with the parent nightmare, but then I wouldn’t wait for the class to spot the flaws in my deception. I’d do what the Betans had done. I’d march up to the front of the hall, and tell everyone the truth.

I knew that surviving the next three days would be hard. I’m good at doing things, not sitting around and waiting for them to happen. There was an extra complication as well. At breakfast the next morning, Playdon called Fian and me away from the rest of the class for a quiet word.

‘I’m going to swap your two roles,’ he said, with his most evil smile. ‘Fian, you’re going to tag lead, and Jarra will act as your tag support.’

I felt an instinctive surge of anger, but caught myself. I’d made this mistake before, and wasn’t going to repeat it. Playdon knew what he was doing and I should trust him. It was Fian who objected.

‘I don’t want to be tag leader.’

Playdon laughed. ‘It’s only for a few days.’

Fian developed a stubborn look. ‘Then why bother? I want to get better at my own job.’

‘Because this will help you both to get better at your jobs.’ Playdon turned to me. ‘Jarra, for a Foundation course tag leader, you’re outstanding, but you can be better still. It’s my job to help you achieve that. It’s perfectly obvious you’ve worked as a heavy lift operator, but never on tag support.’

‘It is?’

He nodded. ‘I’ve talked to Earth 19 about your work during the rescue of Cassandra 2, and they said exactly what I was thinking. You’re a dream tag leader for a heavy lift operator; you don’t just tag any stable point on a rock, but go for somewhere convenient for the heavy lift beams.’

I flushed with pleasure, but of course he followed the compliment with a criticism.

‘You’re a dream for the heavy lift operators, but a nightmare for your tag support. A few days changing roles with Fian will fix that. You’ll learn about blind spots and awkward beam angles that can make it hard for your tag support to pull you out of trouble. You’ll learn to avoid putting yourself in those places, and that will make the second or two of difference which might save your life one day.’

I was going to hate doing this, but I trusted him so … ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Fian, this is your chance to see things through a tag leader’s eyes. What they need to do, how they need to do it, the decisions they need to make. It’ll help you anticipate Jarra’s movements on a dig site, so you see the dangers coming before they actually happen.’

Fian reluctantly nodded.

‘And when team 1 aren’t working, I’ll try and get both of you spending some time watching sensors with me,’ Playdon continued. ‘If either of you progress to be a research or teaching team leader one day, you must be experts on sensors. That may be five or ten years away, but learning sensors takes time.’

So for the next three days I spent my dig site time doing things I hated, and couldn’t even resent it because I soon realized Playdon was right. I hadn’t known just how difficult the tag support job was. I sat tensely watching Fian tagging rocks, waiting for him to get into trouble, hardly daring to blink in case that cost a vital second that was the difference between Fian being unscathed and Fian being strapped to a hover stretcher on his way to hospital. In its way, this was much harder than my own job of tagging rocks, and Fian had handled the strain so casually and so competently even as a total novice. Well … respect!

Watching the ever changing swirl of sensor readings was a different sort of strain. Playdon wanted much more from us than just a casual check of where a stasis box might be. Fian’s scientific background might have helped him, but I was definitely struggling.

And all the time, sitting on the tag support sled, watching the sensors, listening to lectures or chatting to my classmates, part of my mind was always on that call to Registry. The reply would come exactly three days later. I knew the time down to the hour, the minute, and practically the second. I’d studied the instructions until I could recite them by heart. I just had to wait, and wait and wait.

Finally, the three days had crawled past, and I sat in my room with my lookup in my hand, its display already linked in to the wall vid. ‘Come on. Come on.’ I told it. ‘It’s got to be time …’

I broke off my complaint as I heard the soft chime of arriving mail. I tapped the look up, my fingers clumsy with haste, saw the code number I needed and entered it. It took me two attempts to get it right, and then I took a deep breath and looked nervously at the wall vid screen. I’d planned how to do this. I could ask for as much or as little information as I wanted. The first step was to query my parents’ birth sector. If it was Beta, I might have to think for a bit, but anywhere else …

And the answer flashed up on the wall in front of me. It was the same for both parents. ‘Not Applicable.’

What?

I sat there for a full minute. What the chaos? No sector? They must have been born on Earth, but in that case why dump me?

Well, all right, I obviously hadn’t thought of this, but I couldn’t leave it with ‘Not Applicable’. I queried my parents’ birth planets.

Instantly the answer flashed up. Again it was the same for both parents. ‘Not Applicable.’

‘Oh nuke that!’ I told my lookup. This was just total rubbish. What was going on? Did fate hate me that much? Had I wound myself up to face this, only to find Hospital Earth had lost my parental records? Had the maternity ward where I was born just thrown the nean baby through the portal and not bothered to send any medical records after her?

I glared at the lookup. ‘All right …’ I queried my parents’ exact place of birth.

The answers flashed up. Two different answers this time. Two Military bases. ‘Oh nuke … Oh zan …’

I sat there in shock. I didn’t know where these Military bases had been. They probably weren’t there any longer, it must have been more than 40 years since my parents were born and Military bases relocated sometimes. It didn’t matter anyway. My parents were born Military. I’d made up a lie; I’d been living a lie, and guess what?

So, they were born Military. The odds were that they were Military themselves. If they were, then I could see things in a whole new light. Most people, if they really tried, could move to Earth and still follow their career in some way. The Military couldn’t. I’d made JMK so real, I’d even been dreaming I was her, and I could picture how much it would hurt to give up everything to care for a Handicapped baby on Earth.

I asked myself a couple of questions. If I was a norm would I want to be combat Military? Yes, I would. If I was combat Military, could I give up the life I loved to move to Earth? It might be the right thing to do, but I couldn’t honestly be sure I would do it.

So, I tried another query. My parents’ exact location was restricted to Military access only, but they were currently on active duty with Planet First, Kappa sector.

I was still staring at that, absorbing that, when there was another musical chime from my lookup to tell me I had mail. I mechanically checked who it was from. The sender was Military Support.

The Military are incredibly efficient. Hospital Earth discovered in the early days that norm parents could really mess their ape kids about. They’d dump us, and then they’d change their minds and move to Earth and want us back. Then they’d decide they couldn’t cope and dump us again. Parents coming and going, having contact one minute and ignoring them the next, drove the kids crazy. Hospital Earth brought in strict rules to protect us. No half measures. Either you were a parent and on Earth regularly, or your ape kid was made a ward of Hospital Earth and no contact was allowed unless the kid requested it after they reached the age of 14.