Of a Note in a Cosmic Song; Part One Read online

  “It’s not like he’s stupid. I bet he invited those idiots next door just to spite me.”

  Kaspi’s fingers poked Jema in the back so she’d move forward. Kaspi stood up and poured some more wine from the pack she’d opened yesterday on her own.

  Jema watched her move through the room. Kaspi was like a windless day; a waveless ocean despite her size. Her wide dress floated around her. As she moved, so the words she spoke came rolling gently ashore. “I’ll put meals in the oven.” Soft and melodious. She had less than six stations left, but even Life couldn’t hurry her.

  That calm was what Jema needed every day after Closed House. This place had been home after Kaspi had retired and moved down from the city two stations ago, just as Kaspi’s place had been home when Jema was young and she visited every day after Learners whether Mom worked or not; it was a peaceful home.

  The shelf on Kaspi’s sideboard held a combination of things collected from different places she’d once travelled, photographs of her children and grandchildren, and a few broken objects waiting to be tended to. Jema picked up the wine cups and followed Kaspi to the mealsroom.

  During dinner Kaspi talked of the time when Jema and her own two daughters were young. There was always a story; it helped Kaspi forget about the future for a while. “Sometimes I felt like you were mine a little. I remember many times having to go out and look for you late at night because you’d run away from home.”

  “Yeah well, Mom called you. I never asked you to do that,” Jema replied.

  “True. You’d have sat on the street all night.”

  Kaspi would throw the extra matress on the floor and tell her to stay over. It was always extra warm in Kaspi’s home on those nights despite the chastening.

  After meals Jema returned from throwing away the empty containers to find Kaspi standing up and watching the newscast.

  “Listen to this,” she said.

  For the next half an hour both watched in silence as the screen proposed what would be able to change all of Jema’s problems; a chance to leave not just Kityag but all of DJar. The space journey was planned for Station Six. It would be the first kabin of a fleet that was to colonize Kun DJar and they wanted volunteers. Anybody under five and a half kor would be considered if they had the skills that would be useful, workers included.

  The hairs on Jema’s arms stood on end. This was it. She didn’t need to think about it. It felt right.

  Kaspi didn’t take long before speaking. “This is your chance. Take it. Do it for me. I want to see you happy before I leave,” she said, taking down the address.

  “What about you?” But it was no use asking. Kaspi was too old by twenty years.

  Kityag had also heard the news. He had his opinion ready when Jema came in the next morning. “Losers, the lot of them. That kabin will never make it all the way. Life’s good here — what do they want?”

  What did she want? She wanted to get away from DJar, away from everything this planet represented. No procreation rules, for one thing; a chance to start over, maybe. That sounded good, but first she had to send a message to apply as a volunteer. That turned out to be a lot harder than she thought. She struggled to find the right words to present herself as useful for the new colony. She could do a lot of things but they would require proof and statements from officials; certificates of training and experience. She didn’t have any. She’d cleaned floors in a city hospital before the chance of a job on The Plantation had come up. The only reason they had offered it to workers, according to Mom, was that nobody in their right mind would want to work in a mental institution.

  Jema tried to list her skills anyway, but it sounded either too pretentious or too hesitant, too hopeful or too desperate. Who would want her anyway? They’d need farmers and craftsmen to start a new life: activators, who also weren’t considered much use on this planet as it focused only on technology and science. The only thing to her advantage was that workers were even more useless and DJar couldn’t wait to get rid of them.

  Kaspi asked about it many times in the next moon.

  “I’m working on it.”

  “It’s a message, Jema, a letter. How long can it take? If it was me I’d be in the city right now knocking at their door.”

  Eventually Jema managed to write it anyway with the help of the leftover wine from Kityag’s surprise party. She resisted reading back over it, transferred it to a partikel to carry to Kaspi’s home and sent it from there.

  Then she had to wait. She didn’t tell anybody, not even at work. As she sat with Nori she wondered if she couldn’t take the girl along if she was accepted.

  “Nori don’t exist,” Nori said.

  Jema stroked her back. “You exist for me.”

  “No, only Saret exists.”

  “Who’s Saret?”

  “Saret is master. He rules. Nori obeys. He gets angry. Nori repents.”

  It didn’t make any sense yet, but it was the most Nori had ever said.

  Ketemer

  1/5/1/6184

  If Anni was a daisy, fair and delicate, well-groomed and a delight to look at, then Laytji was a poppy, equally pretty but a bit blown apart by the wind, her charming dark red hair a warning of the mind-eluding properties within.

  Herself? Daili was the bed of soil they had sprouted from. Too big to justify just two flowers, weeping still for the loss of her firstborn and unwilling to become an empty bed when the girls, too, would leave home. Of course, that was still a long way away, nevertheless the idea of being two-thirds of the way frightened her. Life was a short season on DJar.

  But though poppies were willing to go where the wind blew, daisies preferred to stay in places they knew. Anni’s face turned from flush to pale in the few fractions she needed to make the connection between the information coming from the screen and the questions she’d been asked before.

  “Is that what you were talking about? You said ‘suppose’ but it was real? Are you really going, Mom, on that?”

  Daili had parked her solid self in between the girls on the couch when the program started. Now she put an arm around each of them. “That is what I was talking about.”

  “You’d die on the way,” Anni said.

  Daili squeezed her oldest daughter, so mature for her fourteen years. “Yes, there’s a risk involved, just as there is a risk in travelling by birdwing or airfloat. I’ll have you know the people who organized the journey know that too. They are doing everything they can to make it as safe as possible.”

  “And there? I mean, on Kun DJar? How can you even know you’ll be able to live there?”

  Daili explained her involvement with the team that had programmed the instruments for the probe to Kun DJar. She’d been the djarologist on that team prior to coming to Ketemer eight years ago. The data returned to them had confirmed that Kun DJar had an atmosphere much like DJar and could be inhabited by people. “Do you really think they’d spend the resources if there was no certainty about us being able to live there?”

  “What about plants and animals?” Laytji asked, resting her head against her mother’s chest.

  “That we don’t know. That’s why they want scientists to go and study. But there’s liquid water and oxygen, so it’s likely there’ll be vegetation.”

  “But you can never come back?”

  “Never, but if all goes well there will be communication and maybe a next generation can.”

  For a while the newscaster’s voice, explaining what Daili should have told the girls herself a long time ago, was the only sound in the room. The 3-D pictures showing the trajectory of the journey, the schematics of the kabin, and the planet that would be its destination filled the big humidified-air screen of the wave-unit and the space in front of it. Like most people, Daili had the unit positioned so the large screen faced the family couch while the pulseboard-interactive side faced a desk chair.

  “Suppose,” was all she’d said before tonight. “Suppose I got a job so far away we could never come back?”
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  She had explained that the research she’d been involved in on Ketemer was coming to an end, to which Anni had remarked that she would have liked a mother with a decent job. So Daili had waited with mentioning the project Kalgar had asked her for. Maybe she’d waited too long.

  “What’s wrong with the city?” Anni asked when the program finished.

  Nothing was wrong with the city, except that Daili would really like to be a part of the journey now that she’d been working with the idea for nearly a year.

  “Why can’t you ever come back, Mom?” Laytji asked.

  Daili explained it was too far and it would take too long for both stars to meet up again while travelling around Bue.

  “Are we going to fly around Bue?”

  “No we’ll fly straight—”

  “Don’t say ‘we’!” Anni interrupted.

  Daili rephrased her sentence. “They are going to fly straight to Kun DJar, but our planet and Kun DJar both travel around Bue.”

  “Actually, DJar orbits Bijar and Kun DJar orbits Kun and the whole lot goes around Bue but not all at the same speed,” Anni said to her sister and then turned to Daili. “I’ll never go on such a journey, Mom.”

  “I’ll go alone with Mom then,” Laytji said, proving that a nine-year-old had no idea what that would mean.

  Daili took Anni’s hand. “No, you both have to want to come with me. I cannot go without both of you. It’s not even determined yet if children are allowed to come.”

  “Well that’s stupid. How can they start a colony without children? All the old people would just die out,” Anni stated.

  Daili started to laugh. Her slightly embarrassed daughter promised she didn’t mean that Mom was old or anything.

  At 4:32 the next morning, Daili, still in her nightgown, was putting the breakfast containers into the mealmax oven when the girls came in. Laytji, her hair still uncombed, had bags under her eyes. Last night the timedisk had been at fifteen before she’d finally fallen asleep. An hour before midnight was two hours after her normal bedtime. Too excited with the whole idea, she’d not stopped talking about it. But today was Learners.

  “Do you really want to go, Mom? I mean really really, but you would stay on DJar if I really really didn’t?” Anni asked.

  Daili answered she would stay even if Anni didn’t want to go only a little bit. “This is no small decision. We all have to be totally sure.”

  “I’m totally sure I want to go. I don’t care if we don’t ever come back,” Laytji said.

  “But not so long ago you told me that you didn’t want to move to the city because you wouldn’t see your friend every day.”

  Laytji had to think about that.

  The oven started ringing to announce that breakfast was ready. A moment later the timedisk on the wall above it beeped twelve minutes to leaving. They’d have to hurry.

  Anni was ready, except for breakfast. “Mom, are you going to be sorry if you didn’t go and other people did? When we’re grown up and you’re alone would you be sorry you didn’t?” she asked.

  Daili leaned on the table after putting the trays down. She’d not expected this kind of insight, even from Anni. “I might be.” She stroked the tidy blonde hair briefly. “But then I would have made a choice that was best for all of us now.”

  “I was thinking about Grandma,” Anni clarified.

  Daili’s own mother had left for the Land Beyond one day after Anni’s eighth birthday, bitter about lost opportunities. Anni had been old enough to remember the depressing visits to her grandmother and now had Daili unable to respond.

  After a silence Anni gave her a hug. “I love you, Mom,” she said, and stood up to leave.

  The rest of the moon all over the island people talked about the news. Daili didn’t tell them about her involvement. Kalgar had made her this ultimate job offer when the chances of finding a job on DJar were limited for a person of Daili’s age, who had opted for a third child over the points and Telemer lifestyle associated with a teaching position. She’d tried to upgrade last year, but had been too aware of her size and grey hair in a room full of kids. “It’s not like I’m senile,” she had complained to Kalgar, and then he’d surprised her with his straightforward request.

  “I’m looking for scientists, Daili. You’d be the only djarologist on Kun DJar; a whole planet to yourself.”

  She had reacted like Anni had, with disbelief, when he’d shown her the plans. She’d asked her own questions.

  “Fact is, there aren’t many answers. Fact is, it’s technologically possible, we still have a major population problem on DJar and it would be the scientific opportunity of a lifetime,” he had answered.

  He had convinced her with the promise that nowadays they had sophisticated technologies and everything they would need to establish life on an empty planet could be taken on the kabin. She’d said yes. “But no children, then no djarologist — at least not me.”

  Now that the news was out he asked her to be available to help with the interviews. It also wouldn’t hurt to have a look for other jobs while she was in the city, so Daili travelled up and down every moon.

  As the news spread and the number of volunteers increased, she started to get regular wave messages and calls from people who wanted to be signed on. Her spinner never seemed to stop beeping. In the meantime she worked on ideas to get the government to allow the travellers to take their children. Everybody she talked to said the rule was ridiculous, but the government had decided people had to be capable of making the decision about their own life, seeing the danger involved, and children couldn’t do that. A rule was a rule and so she was turned down every time she tried. Laytji came home regularly with stories about the journey. Anni never spoke of it.

  “Why do you want to go?” Daili asked the people she met. She wanted, needed reasons; for herself maybe more than for the kids.

  “A chance to live past Life; to get old,” Kalgar said.

  “But what’s so good about living long?”

  “It’s better than to be just gone… forgotten,” he answered.

  Daili had that too. How little twenty years seemed when she had already lived more than twice that. Maybe on Kun DJar people could live longer; die of old age or a disease or something. It might not be so hard to go then.

  Another thing she’d like to get away from was the pressure of finding a job and saving some points for later, and the endless battles over Learners and homework.

  “All the other kids get help at home. Trika’s dad does her calculations for her. If you don’t help me I’ll never get the marks I need for postlearners, Mom. I don’t want to become a worker,” Anni complained.

  “Darling you’ll never become a worker. You have no bad behaviour marks.”

  “I don’t want to be an activator either. I don’t want a trade, I want a diploma. I don’t want to be looked down on and I want the chance to live on Telemer.”

  Daili didn’t point out that the MAC-tests and final exams were still three years away. It wasn’t Anni’s fault. The teachers were already threatening that the rest of their lives and careers were at stake. So Daili spent hours struggling over what she had once known because it was a Learners requirement.

  Then Laytji came home with a project she just couldn’t do: Why I am proud to be a Geveler citizen.

  “I’m not, but if I say that they get all pissy,” Laytji told her.

  Daili called Marita on the wave. Her sister had always been available for advice.

  “You’re romanticizing the idea, Daili. Life is going to be just as difficult somewhere else; more so, probably. You’re projecting your own misery from Learners onto the kids. Kids complain, they all do, but they all get over it.”

  Daili thought about that. Had she gotten over it? Was it normal for children to be miserable for the biggest part of their life just so they could get a good job at the end of it? Were her daughters as miserable as they made out to be? As she had been?

  Not even a moon later La
ytji came home in tears. As was normal for her when there was a problem, she let the water run in torrents.

  “What’s up this time?” Anni asked, irritated with her sister’s dramatic expressions.

  It turned out that Laytji had been in trouble with her teacher for not following instructions. She had argued and as a result lost another two graduation points. “Then the kids all started singing that stupid song at me again,” she sobbed.

  “What song?”

  “About me being a ponderer.”

  Daili knew that song. She had lived with it as long as she’d been at Learners: Ponderer, ponderer, dream your life away. Soon you’ll be a worker, cleaning night and day.

  She explained to Laytji that she had not become a worker despite also being called a ponderer. “I got a creator certificate and the highest marks of all in science.” For all the good that had done her in finding a job now.

  “I’m never going back, Mom. I’d rather go to the Land Beyond than to Learners.”

  Daili held her for a while, stroking the dark red locks that never wanted to be combed. She knew what Laytji felt. It made her angry and sad at the same time. The only thing to do was to go talk to the teacher.

  The young woman showed her the offensive drawing Laytji had made, which sat tucked away in the far corner of the display. At first sight it did look sloppy.

  “What was the assignment?” Daili asked the teacher.

  “To draw the basic survival needs for people.”

  Daili could see they had all done that. Each of the children had divided their plastiboard into four equal sections. Each showed mealmax containers or ovens, water storage tanks — padlocks included — a standard cubicle home as they all lived in, and clothing. Some had even drawn the Learners’ uniform. Laytji’s drawing had a fifth part squashed in. In each section was a small picture; not a work of art but recognizable nonetheless: people in animal hides, water in a stream, fire with meat roasting on it, a hut made of straw, and air to breathe.