Earth Girl (7 page)

‘One last thing,’ I said. ‘When you seal the front of your suit, it runs an automatic self test sequence. If an alarm goes off, then your suit is faulty. Let Lecturer Playdon know, don’t just put it back in the store room.’

Playdon stood up. ‘Thank you, Jarra. Now everyone, I’ll issue you suits from the store room, and you can start practicing suiting up ready for our first trip outside.’

Lolia raised a hand. ‘I’ll need you to give me some advice on my underwear.’ She gazed suggestively at Lecturer Playdon.

‘I’m sure you can manage by yourself,’ he said.

‘I’m entitled to proper teaching, aren’t I?’ she said, reproachfully.

‘I can give you a hand picking something suitable if you like,’ I offered.

‘Perhaps Jarra could help me out with my underwear too,’ said Lolmack.

Lecturer Playdon and I exchanged glances, and changed at least temporarily from adversaries to allies. ‘Jarra will advise Lolia,’ said Playdon, ‘and I’ll help you, Lolmack.’

Lolia sighed. ‘You people are no fun.’

It wasn’t just Lolia and Lolmack who needed advice. Just about everyone did. Deciding what to wear under the impact suit was easy; actually putting it on was quite another matter. It’s hard to stretch a suit over your skin without the material locking up, so I could hardly blame this bunch of exos for needing some help. Playdon and I ended up doing patrols along the corridors, and responding to cries for help from rooms.

Helping novices with an impact suit is always a strange mix of frustration and comedy. If you don’t get the bottom half of an impact suit on properly, then it’s impossible to get it over your shoulders. I did my best not to laugh, but sometimes the look of despair on their faces when they realized they had to take it off and start all over again …

‘But I’m so close,’ said Fian, looking at me with a tragic expression. ‘It’s taken me twenty minutes to get this far. If I could just get my left arm in …’

‘It’s the only way,’ I said, trying desperately not to giggle.

‘I’ll never manage this …’ He sighed and started peeling the suit off again.

‘After a few times, you’ll get the hang of it.’ I realized I was enjoying the view of a semi-clad Arrack San Domex lookalike rather too much, and headed off to respond to a scream from Dalmora.

It took a mere two hours to wedge everyone into a suit. Even then, Lolia seemed to have a slight limp. Maybe she hadn’t stretched the suit over her legs properly, or maybe she’d managed to lock the suit material and pinch somewhere painful. I thought it was better not to ask.

‘Everyone finally ready?’ Playdon’s voice had the faint echo that you always get when you hear someone through the suit communication unit as well as in real life. ‘I’m talking to you on the team circuit. Answer when I call your name.’

He took us through the roll call slowly. ‘Good, everyone has their comms working on the team circuit. Always remember the importance of talking on the right channel when you’re in an impact suit. If you’re just talking to someone standing next to you, don’t use the comms at all. If you want your whole team to hear, talk on the team circuit. If you want to talk privately to me, there’s a private circuit that links you to your team leader. If it’s appropriate for every team on New York Main Dig Site to hear you, talk on the broadcast channel. Talking on the wrong channel can obviously be extremely embarrassing. If you’re asking a girl standing next to you for a date, then you don’t want hundreds of people on dozens of teams to hear it.’

There was an outbreak of nervous giggles.

‘For now, use the team circuit if you’re in trouble or out of ear shot, and don’t play around with the other channels or you’ll annoy all the other dig teams in the area. We move outside now.’

I was deeply thankful when we finally lined up and opened the dome door. This lot were worse than any history club group I’d been with. In fairness, they were all totally new to this, while our history club trips always included far more experienced people than novices, but it was still driving me crazy.

The door opened and we saw a grim world waiting for us. It was winter in New York. There were a scattering of trees on the hillside ahead of us, but they were barren of leaves, and the branches were each carefully etched with a layer of ice. I gazed at the winter landscape thoughtfully. I’d only been here in summer and this looked much more intimidating. The cold hit me as I followed Playdon out of the dome and my impact suit felt like ice on my skin. The next two minutes were going to be painful as my suit adjusted itself.

There were squeals of protest from the others as they followed us. ‘I’m freezing! How do we turn up the warmth on these suits?’ asked Krath.

‘I strongly suggest you don’t,’ Playdon said, but a few of them tinkered with the temperature controls anyway.

Two minutes later, everyone who had listened to him was nice and comfortable. The ones who had messed with their controls were screaming they were too hot and turning the temperature down. Two minutes after that, they were freezing. I made a mental note of the idiots in the group. The Betans were on the list of course.

The Deltan boy, Fian, who I had rated as at least semi-intelligent, was sticking close to me. With faces entirely invisible through suits, it was hard to be sure, but my impression was that he was watching me and copying my every move. I felt this proved he was intelligent. At least I knew what I was doing just a little bit better than the ones who were currently screaming about being cooked alive for the second time.

Eventually, we had the temperatures sorted out, and Playdon called us all to gather round him. ‘We’re just going to head up to the top of the hill and get a view of the dig site. Everyone stay together and be careful. If you manage to get yourself lost, ask for help on the team circuit and stay where you are until we find you. Whatever happens, don’t take off your impact suit. Bears should be hibernating, but the wolf packs will be hungry this time of year.’

‘What’s a wolf?’ asked Lolia.

‘Wild ancestors of dogs,’ said Playdon. ‘They hunt in packs. The moose and deer herds shelter in the ruins in winter and the wolf packs follow them. I’ve got a gun, but I’d rather not have to use it. They tend to attack lone targets. If we all stick together, they probably won’t bother us.’

‘Are they dangerous?’ asked a female voice.

I checked the glowing suit name, and saw it was the girl called Amalie from Epsilon sector. If they all wore glowing name labels when they weren’t in suits, I’d find it a lot easier to work out who they all were. Playdon seemed to have us all tagged correctly, while Miss Personality from Alpha had names and life histories down pat, but the rest of us were struggling.

‘Without a suit, they would tear you into pieces and eat you,’ said Playdon. ‘In an impact suit, I doubt they could do you a lot of harm, but you probably wouldn’t enjoy them trying. Let’s get moving.’

We headed up the slope ahead of us at a very slow walk. I paused to wait for the rest of them to catch up. A suit labelled ‘Fian’ came up to me.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but how do you move that fast? My suit keeps jerking me to a stop.’

I noticed he’d been bright enough to set his comms to the right channel while he asked the question, so it wasn’t transmitted for the whole class to hear. I checked that I had mine set properly as well before I replied.

‘The trick is moving as smoothly as possible,’ I explained. ‘Sudden movements can trigger the impact suit material and it locks up.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Do we have to wear these clumsy things?’ moaned Lolia loudly from the back of the group.

‘Maybe we should let her take it off. The wolves could use a good meal …’ I muttered to myself.

Fian overheard me and laughed.

Playdon obviously enjoyed the dramatic, because he gathered us up into a group again just before we reached the top of the hill, so everyone got to see New York at once. I’d seen it before, but never in winter. In summer, it’s a vast black expanse as far as the eye can see, with the odd patches of green trying to make an impression on the mess. At this time of year, the white of frost and a dusting of powdery snow added an extra bleakness to the mounds of rubble and the blackened skeletal remains of skyscrapers still soaring up into the sky.

‘Dear God!’ said Lolmack.

‘Respect!’ chorused a few others automatically. Ever since the physicists found evidence that the universe was created by an unknown entity or entities, there’s been a general feeling that it’s wise to avoid swear words involving deities.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It was a bit of a shock.’

‘I’d no idea,’ murmured Fian. ‘I’ve seen some ancient vids, but the sheer scale of this …’

‘Welcome to New York, once home to twelve million people,’ said Playdon. He let us absorb the scene for a few minutes longer. ‘Anyone know when in pre-history the last skyscraper was finished?’

I laughed.

‘I see Jarra knows that’s a trick question,’ said Playdon. ‘The last skyscraper was built twenty-five years after the exodus started. By the time it was finished, the population of Earth was already plummeting. No one ever lived or worked in it.’

‘Why did they let it all get into this mess?’ asked Lolia.

‘After Exodus century, there weren’t enough people left to maintain the cities,’ said Playdon. ‘For every building in use, there were a hundred empty ones. It was a lot easier for the remaining people to gather together in selected small towns and villages, than to try and maintain a few buildings in the middle of a ruined city.’

Fian knelt cautiously down and scraped his hand along the ground. The struggling grass became smeared with black. ‘There were fires here?’

‘There were many fires after it was abandoned,’ said Playdon. ‘There were inflammable materials left in a lot of the buildings, chemicals, even explosives. One massive fire continued burning for nearly two months. Always keep in mind that the ruins themselves are dangerous. It’s not just wild beasts, there are vicious pieces of glass and metal, decaying chemicals, and buildings that can collapse if you just breathe on them. Never trust the ground underfoot because it’s treacherous. They built downwards as well as up, and you can fall through into underground sewers, cellars, the transport network, even underground waterways. If you ever need to find your own way through the dig site, then look for the marked clearways, or failing that the deer trails. The herds have worked out their own safe routes.’

‘But why?’ asked Lolmack. ‘Why bother going in there?’

‘We’re looking for lost history, culture, and technology,’ said Playdon. ‘During Exodus, the new planets were focused on their own immediate problems. They thought humanity’s store of knowledge was safe on the home world. They thought Earth would provide all the technology, spare parts, and medicine whenever they needed them in the future, but so many people left so fast that the whole infrastructure of Earth fell apart. They learnt their mistake one night in 2409 when the Earth data net crashed. The few staff left did their best to patch it and get it running again, but there was a second catastrophic failure. Some fool tried to do the regular data backups and he couldn’t have done anything worse.’

Playdon paused. ‘The Alpha worlds sent back their best experts, and they salvaged what they could from the corrupted backups, but we’d lost half of humanity’s data. After that, they took action. They tracked down all the major art and museum collections they could, and shipped them out to the Alpha worlds.’

‘Alpha sector is honoured to be the guardians of human culture,’ said Dalmora.

Playdon ignored that remark. The other sectors are a bit jealous of all the ancient relics being kept by Alpha.

‘Independent data archives were set up at every university, and we constantly run cross checks between them looking for flaws. The idea is we’ll never lose data again, but there are huge gaps in what we have. Some of it may still be out there.’ He nodded at the ruins.

‘It’s hard to believe anything can have survived in that,’ said Fian.

‘You get the odd freak survival by pure chance,’ said Playdon. ‘Last year they found an entire dry cellar packed with stuff. There were even two real books. More common are the stasis boxes. People were leaving Earth and you couldn’t casually portal between worlds then. They were going and never expected to come back. It was the fashion to leave a stasis box behind them, as a sort of memorial. They left them in their abandoned houses, preserving oddments, souvenirs, and records of who had once lived there. They’re still out there, we’re still finding them, and you never know what treasure trove may be inside the next one we open. In 2310, humanity’s science and technology was at its peak. We’ve now surpassed them in the areas of medicine and portal technology, but we’re still painfully regaining the rest.’

‘They were the magicians,’ I said. ‘Think of the glorious cities they built. New York, New Tokyo, London, Moscow, Paris Coeur, Berlin, Eden … Now it’s all in ruins, and we’re scavenging for scraps of their knowledge.’

‘Exactly.’ Playdon’s voice sounded startled, and I saw his head turn to look in my direction. ‘Most of this class will suffer their compulsory year on Earth’s dig sites, then leave and never come back, but a few of you may be caught by the joy of discovering the past, or even by its financial rewards, and make this your career.’

His emotion was obvious in his voice, and now it was my turn to be startled. Playdon felt the same way that I did about these sprawling ruins of the past, and the people who had lived there, and the discoveries waiting for us. I’d never managed to make Issette or Candace understand, even most of the school history club didn’t share my feeling that the past was still alive, but Playdon did. It was strange to recognize my own passion for pre-history in an exo.

We all stood there for a while after that, silently thinking. Finally, Playdon spoke again in a brisk voice. ‘Tomorrow, we’re working in Sector 22, and we’ll be heading out on to the site along the clearway that you can see over there.’ He pointed out the path, with its glowing markers, leading off into the ruins.

Playdon had been carrying his lookup with him. Now he worked on it for a moment, and a miniature model of the New York Dig Site appeared in mid air ahead of us. He increased the projection to a huge size that would be quite a drain on the lookup’s power, and zoomed in. We could see the clearway now, with ruined buildings either side.