Time Past Read online

  I didn’t even know which part of Sydney Murdoch came from. Comes from. Will come from. One day I thought I saw him, from the back. A tallish, heavy-chested man with a rolling walk. The unhurried persistence was so like Murdoch that I strode after him, pulse pounding in my throat. When he turned, I could see he was, of course, a stranger. No way Murdoch could get here. As a human he’d have no access to a ship that could bring him here.

  As a human, one of the Nine, he couldn’t use the jump drive. The Four—Invidi, K’Cher, Melot, and Bendarl— guarded their monopoly of the drive as zealously as the inhabitants of Sydney’s inner city guarded their privileges. The Nine were limited to traveling on ships owned and operated by the Four. I wondered what happened back on Jo-casta when the Four found out I had used a jump-capable ship to get here.

  I hoped the three engineers who’d been involved in the research with me hadn’t gotten into too much trouble. When we planned the test, I told them if anything happened and I didn’t return, they were to blame the whole thing on me. Not that we expected anything to happen. Perhaps we should have put off the test until after the neutrality vote.

  The station, and by extension the star system in which it was situated, was a candidate for the status of planned neutrality from the Confederacy. The Confederacy Council, which contained representatives of all thirteen Confederacy member worlds, would vote for or against this. We wanted neutrality because the station’s residents were fed up with the Confederacy for a variety of reasons, including being left to endure an alien blockade for six months without assistance. The vote could have gone through already, it had been nearly half a year since we declared our intention to apply for neutrality. I’d been here on Earth for five months—what might have happened at home? Or rather, what will happen...

  I nearly ran into someone on a particularly dark track.

  “Watch it,” a man’s voice growled. A heavy body lurched past me, so close I could feel the heat of his breath and smell the alcohol fumes.

  Stop daydreaming and concentrate on getting back to the tent safely.

  A dog barked, hitting a corrugated iron fence with a thud that set my pulse racing again. I turned the last corner. In this lane there were no patches of uncurtained window light, only the glow from an open fire at the end of the lane. Laughter rose from the shadowed figures around it and tiny red dots from smokers winked on and off.

  My tent sat halfway down the lane. It had canvas walls, pulled tight on a framework of hardwood poles driven deep into the dirt, and a thin sheet of corrugated iron for a roof. The wall that faced outward on the corner of the row also had a sheet of wood nailed to the framework outside. It kept out some of the noise, but on windless nights the tent was stifling.

  The row of tents formed one side of a square that enclosed a courtyard paved with uneven brick fragments. The courtyard held a communal shower block and privy, a twisted lemon tree in a cracked plastic garbage bin, lines stretched between four sets of lopsided poles to hang washing on, and garden vegetables in rusting drums.

  I pushed open the flimsy screen door. Inside, a wooden crate I used as a table-cum-cupboard was built around the central pole. I reached up and switched on the small electric lamp high on the pole. I charged the batteries once a week with the Assembly’s solar generator.

  The only other furniture was a chair of battered green plastic, a small pantry, and an old door propped on four bricks, covered with folded cloths. I couldn’t sleep on a mattress like Grace. When she lived here she had flipped hers over one night, turned it on end, and sprayed pungent insecticide on all the insect life thus revealed. Shuddering, I told her a blanket was all I needed. She laughed at my squeamishness, but after that I slept on the door.

  You should be grateful, I told myself drearily, sinking into the hard chair and staring at the ground. Six bricks marked the place on the other side of the tent where Grace’s board and mattress used to lie. You should be grateful she picked you up and you’re not stuck in a detention center. Grateful you can work.

  And anyway, whose fault is it you’re here? If you hadn’t insisted on making the test run, if you hadn’t insisted on beginning the project in the first place...

  “Maria?” The small voice came from the doorway.

  I blinked away tears that had somehow leaked out. Feeling sorry for myself again. “Will, what are you doing here?”

  Grace’s younger son, Will, wiry as a monkey and twice as much trouble, shuffled into the tent, slamming the screen door on its uneven frame.

  “Wanted to see you.”

  I wiped my eyes hurriedly. “You saw me yesterday.”

  Yesterday he skipped out of school and the principal told Grace, who then came to the Assembly office in a foul mood. She yelled at Will, which scandalized Florence, and dragged him back to school.

  Will sat on the chair and kicked his legs rhythmically. “When do the results come out?”

  “I told you, middle of May.”

  “Can I come and look with you?”

  “We’ll see.”

  When he and Grace lived here, I’d helped him with his schoolwork. Sometimes we went along to the Assembly office and used the computer to do research on the infonet. While doing this, we’d entered a competition to design a spaceship engine. Why, I wasn’t sure. We were both bored with his schoolwork. At the time, I’d had a vague idea that if the Invidi didn’t come or, worse, refused to help me, I could start a career in aerospace. It was a challenge—how to use my knowledge without revealing future technology to this age.

  “Did you tell them we moved to Levin’s?” said Will, in time with his kicks on the chair. “So they know where to send my prize?”

  “I told them. If we win, you mean.”

  If the company running the competition was genuine, they wouldn’t be able to resist our entry. I had to use Will’s name to get the necessary national ID number. Which meant putting Will’s signature prints on the application. If we won, he got the prize, which was the whopping amount of twenty thousand dollars. I wanted to repay Grace somehow, but couldn’t think of a way to do it that she’d accept. Aside from the problem of not having anything to repay her with. If Will won that money, I thought it would more than cancel the debt.

  We hadn’t told Grace about the entry, though. She didn’t like me teaching Will anything except his regular schoolwork, despite his obvious ability. “I just want him to be normal, y’know?” went the litany. “Nothing fancy, nothing off the rails like Vince. Just get a decent job and lead a normal life. So don’t fill his head with all that protest stuff, okay?” She approved of what the Assembly was doing in the out-town, but she didn’t think it needed to preach.

  “Does Grace know you’re here?” I said, remembering Vince’s visit to the Assembly office.

  He kept swinging his legs, accompanied by little boopboop sounds.

  “Will?”

  “She went out with Levin. I don’t like it when they’re mucking around. I told Mrs. Le I was coming here,” he added defensively.

  “What do you mean, ‘mucking around?’ ”

  “You know.” He kicked the chair legs quite hard. “Kissing and stuff.”

  “Vince was looking for you earlier. Did you go home after that?”

  “It’s not home. It’s Levin’s place.”

  I couldn’t dispute that logic. It was why I hadn’t moved with them. “You can come too,” Levin had said, with that mocking, dare-you-to-disagree look that would have been understandable on a teenage face, but sat strangely on a man who was at least thirty.

  “I’m hungry.” Will looked pointedly at the little pantry in the corner, raised on bricks like the bed. It was another converted wooden crate, lined with small-gauge chicken wire and fronted with the same material, to keep out rats.

  “Nothing in there,” I said. “Didn’t you have dinner?”

  “Don’t like chook feet.”

  I sighed and wriggled my fingers around my trouser pockets. Maybe a stray coin...

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nbsp; “Mum gave me five dollars,” he said. “We could get some potato cakes.”

  “We could get some fruit,” I said firmly. The family who lived across the courtyard from our row of tents cultivated fruit and vegetables on a patch right down near the river’s edge. They usually had some to sell. My stomach could handle something fresh, and it meant I wouldn’t have to cook on the open grill in the courtyard, which was always filthy. And I wasn’t a very good cook. In the twenty-second century I didn’t need to be.

  “I’ll go,” he said happily, and jumped off the chair as though he had springs on his backside.

  Three

  Will and I had just sat down to a meal of mandarins and half a loaf of bread when Grace and Levin pushed open the door.

  “Jeezus, you try my patience.” Grace slapped Will’s arm gently. He was sitting in the chair.

  I stood up from where I’d been sitting on the bed. “Hello, Grace. Levin.”

  “G’day, Maria.” Grace was about my own age, wary-eyed, round-faced, and running to fat around her breasts and stomach. She’d put on weight since she lost her job.

  Levin, a long-bodied man with cropped dark hair and permanent stubble, ignored the greeting. He stepped around Will and sat down on the bed as though he owned the tent, legs spread wide in his tight black trousers. His eyes shifted continuously around the room and his big-boned hands grasped the edge of the bed with unnecessary strength. Levin’s hands made me nervous. He balled them into fists even when his face was calm.

  “He’s supposed to be at home,” said Grace to me. “Kid his age shouldn’t be wandering around by himself at this hour.”

  “I didn’t invite him,” I protested. “He turned up here.”

  “Vince did,” said Will. “Go out by himself. When he was eight, he told me.”

  “You’re you and he’s him, and you’re different people. And I’m talking to Maria,” said Grace.

  “Grace, if you want me to baby-sit, say so,” I said. “But don’t attack me for nothing.”

  “I’m not a baby,” protested Will, his mouth half full of bread.

  “It’s just an expression,” I said. “You know that.”

  “You encourage him,” said Grace.

  “I do not.”

  “Send him back straightaway, then.”

  “I can’t send him back in the middle of the night.”

  On the bed, Levin chuckled. “Studying history, Maria?” He waved a printed page at me. It was one of many in a pile hidden under the wad of towel I used as a pillow.

  “ ‘On that fateful day in 2017,’ ” he read in an exaggerated tone, “ ‘who would have thought the portly figure of the unknown mayor would walk into history as a martyr of the fledgling EarthSouth movement. Would she have stayed away, had she known her fate?’ ” He picked up another page, then another. “ ‘Marlena Alvarez—the truth behind the legend’... ‘Marlena Alvarez talks to Le Monde ’... ‘Did the EarthSouth movement begin here?’ ‘Mendoza on Alvarez...’ ”

  “Leave them alone,” I snapped, barely able to control the urge to snatch the pages out of his hand.

  “You’re wasting your time.” He tired of teasing and let the pages drop. “Like you waste your time with that Assembly. EarthSouth is already finished. It will never amount to anything.”

  “I disagree,” I said. “Look at the alliances they’ve helped forge among the environmental groups. And the restrictions they’ve got passed to protect labor.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference,” he said. “I grant you, Alvarez would have made a good leader. But without her, they’re nothing.”

  I could feel my face flushing with annoyance. Alvarez didn’t die so that some arrogant street thug could make fun of all that she and the other women fought for...

  Grace tugged Will’s hand and he slid off the chair, stuffing mandarins in both pockets as he went.

  “If you two are going to talk politics, we’ll be here all night,” she said. “C’mon, Levin, let’s go.”

  “Bye, Maria,” said Will as Grace towed him out.

  “Bye, Will,” I called.

  Levin shrugged and followed them. In his total selfcenteredness he reminded me of a K’Cher and I tried not to let him get close to anything I valued. His touching the magazines seemed like a violation.

  In the doorway he turned as though he’d forgotten something. “You went to the parts dealer today.”

  “How do you know?” Levin had connections everywhere.

  “What is it that you want?”

  “A kind of focused light beam device,” I said cautiously.

  “If you mean a laser, I can get you one.”

  “You can?” He couldn’t have surprised me more if he’d suddenly begun to yodel. “I mean, that would be nice. But it needs to be a specific type, and they’re out of production now.”

  “Why do you need it?” I nearly said, to send signals to aliens, okay? but turned it into, “Part of the telescope assembly.” “Watching the skies. Can you see anything through the smog?” “When it’s finished I’ll take it out of the city to look properly.”

  “Tell me the laser specifications and I will ask around.”

  “Around where?”

  “I have friends.”

  “Why are you offering?”

  He paused. “You are hardly in a position to be choosy.” It seemed as if he’d been going to say something else, then changed his mind.

  “I’ll think about it.” I was too tired to do anything more that night.

  “Don’t think too long,” he said. “You get out of the habit of doing.”

  “Levin, you coming?” Grace called from outside.

  He disappeared into the dark.

  I latched the door behind them, although it wouldn’t keep anyone out. Then I scraped the mandarin peel and bread crumbs off the table and into a bucket, over which I placed a piece of fibro and held it down with a brick to keep inquisitive rats from helping themselves.

  Then I picked up the papers Levin had dropped, wiping each of them on the dirty blanket. Cleaner than Levin’s touch. He was right. I was studying history. My own history, because Marlena Alvarez was my great-grandmother’s best friend, and if not for her, I wouldn’t have been born in Las Mujeres, because there would have been no village there. I was also studying the EarthSouth movement, which Alvarez had founded.

  At least, my great-grandmother always spoke of Alvarez as if she single-handedly created the EarthSouth movement. I always thought that after her death in 2017 human rights and local autonomy groups across the world formed a chain of protest against oppression and poverty. The political upheavals following the Invidi arrival helped them bring their agenda into the mainstream of politics, while advances in medicine and agriculture allowed them to put many of their ideals into practice.

  But Levin’s comments about EarthSouth may have smarted all the more because I hadn’t found much evidence of a united social justice movement in early 2023. From what I’d collected in written articles, downloaded from infonet archives, and heard from visitors to the Assembly, in these five years since Marlena’s death EarthSouth was only an umbrella organization of loosely affiliated groups that met once a year in some countries, more often in others, and had only met twice internationally. The first meeting in 2018 attracted media attention, but during the second meeting in 2020 the Olympic sporting events received more coverage.

  And Marlena Alvarez was only one of the “inspirations” claimed by the movement. Earlier icons such as Nelson Mandela and Naomi Klein also featured large in their pantheon. I wondered whether my great-grandmother might not have overemphasized Marlena’s importance. Understandably, too, seeing that they worked and cheated death together in Las Mujeres for five years.

  For five years after Alvarez became mayor, the women of Las Mujeres struggled to keep their village safe from government militias, private militias, guerrilla groups, starvation and disease. At least, that was what my great-grandmother’s stories told.
r />   She told how Marlena got the idea of moving everyone to a new camp, leaving the old village as a decoy, to be presumed abandoned. The guerrillas moved on to collect tribute from more lucrative sources.

  How Marlena went alone and unarmed to talk to an army commander who wanted the women to inform on their vanished sons and husbands. He left, persuaded that the women had been alone for so long they could know nothing.

  How Marlena’s leadership united the heads of local governments enough to defeat the proposal to dam the nearby twin lakes and flood all the villages along the river.

  Although I wouldn’t have admitted it to Murdoch or any of my colleagues on Jocasta, these stories, this image of Alvarez, was a comfort and an inspiration to me during the long, hopeless months of the alien blockade. When yet another station system failed, or yet another squabble broke out between alien and alien, alien and human, human and human, in these moments I’d ask myself, “What would Marlena Alvarez do?” I trained as an engineer, and while I could direct the flow of a construction site or coordinate projects within a larger design, nothing prepared me to be solely responsible for thirty thousand people. Alvarez was an example of someone else who had made the best of a job she took on without training or preparation—she’d been a solicitor’s clerk before becoming mayor.

  I used to chide myself for relying on Alvarez’s memory, but the parallels in our situations were obvious: we were both isolated, with limited resources, and surrounded by enemies who outgunned us. When the responsibility for Jocasta sat particularly heavily on my shoulders, it helped to think that Alvarez had found a way out. She had insisted Las Mujeres not align itself with any of the powers in the region, and the women stubbornly maintained their independence until the changes in local government laws of 2046.

  Alvarez’s insistence upon keeping neutral throughout the many wars and insurgencies that swept across the region influenced the EarthSouth movement’s determined political neutrality. And her ideas influenced my decision to push for neutrality for Jocasta, although I didn’t realize it at the time.