The thousand earths, p.9
The Thousand Earths, page 9
And, watching her father work, she began to sense what her own career choice was going to be, in a few years’ time.
When she told her father, he exploded.
‘You want to train as a Magistrate? Really? Do you have to bring this up now? You know what your mother will say …’
She didn’t dare raise the subject again. But she and Ish were still curious about the Holding Camp – Ish for sheer curiosity, and Mela because she had the sense that this was the sort of thing Magistrates had to deal with.
Ish was all for breaking out of the town’s fence and just go jaunting out into the countryside. ‘We have to go see it,’ she said. ‘There are old people and children and everything, like a whole town out of nowhere. Come on! …’
But Mela was more hesitant. They needed some kind of proper permission. Father had talked to them about how much more hazardous the world was than even a couple of years earlier. ‘You may be young, but that matters less and less now if you break city laws. And especially if you go outside the fence …’
So now Mela insisted they go to Father to ask him for a couple of short-term Permits: permission slips for short journeys outside the fence. And she told him about going to the camp.
He pursed his lips, as expected. ‘Why do you want this?’
‘I want to see how it works, how we look after those people – I want to understand. If I’m ever to be a Magistrate … Come on, Father. You’re in charge of this stuff! Can’t you just organise it for me?’
‘Don’t tell me it would be educational.’
‘Well, it would be educational. Mother once said – well, that you have the power of life and death over Immigrants.’
The smile vanished. ‘She shouldn’t have said that. But now there is such pressure on our boundary …’ He looked at her steadily, seriously. ‘What I’m telling you is that if you mess this up I may not be able to get you back in. Back inside the fence. Do you understand? This isn’t a game!’
Mela felt deeply disturbed. ‘Do you really think we shouldn’t go, then? We won’t if you say not to.’
He closed his eyes. ‘Yes. You should go. I can’t protect you from the future. Nor should I try. I suppose you need to develop survival skills. Go. Try to understand what you see.’ He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Just be careful. Come home safe. All right?’
She promised.
He sorted out their passes, and the next day let them go.
Father’s passes sent them to the East Gate.
That, Mela suspected, was partly because Father knew one of the Fence guards posted here, a woman in her twenties called Tiso. Mela knew that Father only had Tiso’s name because she was some kind of friend of Tabor’s. And that was only because Father had been called in over some disciplinary matter concerning his son.
They slowed at the gate as they approached this woman, encased as she was in tough-looking armoured chest plate and helmet, with a variety of weapons visible, including a stabbing sword, a net, a shield. In her red-over-blue colours she looked like a bigger, meaner, female Tabor, Mela thought immediately.
She didn’t smile as the sisters approached. But she took their passage Permits, stamped them, handed them back. ‘One use only.’
‘We know.’ As Father had instructed her, when she got the Permits back Mela checked front and back to make sure they were indeed the passes she had just handed over; such bits of paper could be valuable. Father trusted Tiso, but he said there were a few Guards on the boundary fence who would swipe a too-trusting citizen’s ticket, substituting some fake, in order to sell the original to some desperate Immie from Arcturus or Capella.
Their passes approved, with Tiso watching them go, the sisters set off through the gate and headed further east. Mela didn’t feel comfortable until the Guard had receded from sight.
And as they moved away, Mela looked back to see the town fence from the outside, an unusual view for the twins these days. The fence itself had been reinforced with a wall of stout trunks, the smartwood studded with broken glass and bits of metal, and an outer barrier of tall spiked stakes anchored in the ground. Much of this was new, hastily built in the last few years.
And the ground around the fence was soiled, broken, some distance out. The landscape outside the town was generally less populated than before. The shanties to the south had been long dispersed, their inhabitants expelled – or, much more rarely, granted a place inside the city itself. With a start Mela realised she had no idea what had become of those others who had lived there, adults and children, families – some for years, even generations, she supposed. Father must know. Though if he did he’d said nothing about it.
The world had no room for shanty towns any more. The only place you could go was the Holding Camp.
It was still a good way to the camp. They walked under a perfect blue morning sky, with a handful of brighter Earths hanging like toys in the light.
The Immigrants and their shelters and belongings were just a grimy smear on the horizon.
By now Mela had learned something of how the camp had come about, and why it was where it was. With time, as predicted, a stream of people had come north from the downstream cities as the threat of the perimeter had closed in on them. Mostly they had followed the River – but as they had started to approach Procyon in numbers, they had been forced away from the water, life blood of the town, and sent on a wide diversion into the drier land to the east of the River, before being allowed to set up what the town bureaucracy had chosen to formalise as the Holding Camp.
Mela wondered now how the Immies had got their water in the last stages of their march, if they were kept away from the River. She imagined there must be tributary streams to sustain them. Or perhaps not. She didn’t know. She had never thought to ask.
On they walked. Soon enough they came to the camp.
There was no formal boundary to it, Mela saw now, nothing like a fence, or even a boundary rope. It was a scar on the ground, grey on green, with shapeless people sitting among shapeless bundles. Few of them had any shelter, or anything like a tent. Smoke lifted from desultory fires. There was a stink, not quite human – almost animal-like.
The sisters hesitated. It was barely a camp at all, Mela thought, of any name. Just a scar on the ground, and people and their stuff.
And Khem of the river boats came walking out to meet them.
Mela stared in surprise.
Ish, apparently irritated, pointed. ‘You.’
‘Me,’ Khem replied, without expression.
Mela saw that Khem wore battered armour of leather and metal plate on her upper body – it looked very battered, well worn, and didn’t quite fit her. Under that a uniform of the city’s Guards, bright red over blue, just like Tabor now wore. Otherwise her trousers and muddy boots made it look as if she had walked up straight from the River’s bank.
Khem just stood there.
Mela said, ‘Not playing the usual answer before question thing today, Khem?’
She shrugged. ‘Not much of a place for games, is it?’
Ish said, ‘Father told you we were coming, didn’t he?’
‘Yep.’
‘He told you to meet us at the Holding Camp?’
‘Yep.’
‘Why?’
Khem shrugged. ‘I suppose he trusted me.’
‘Ha! More than he trusts us.’
Khem looked them up and down. ‘Can you blame him? No, it’s not safe out here.’
Almost the answer-before-question trick that time, Mela thought. Habits died hard. She said, ‘Then where is safe?’
Ish said, ‘And what are you doing here anyhow? Working for the city now?’
‘Sort of.’ Khem seemed uncomfortable. ‘Sometimes the Immies will go in for a bit of burglary or robbery or looting. More often city folk will come out here to harass them. But the Immies are mostly just families, parents and kids and old folk, trying to live. Just like us. The only difference is they have nowhere to live.’
Mela was puzzled. ‘More work here for you than on the River any more, right? So who pays you? If the Immies need to be protected from the city folk—’
‘The Immies pay, of course. Don’t you even know that much? Oh, we get a stipend from the city. But the Immies pay for everything, one way or another.’ She looked at them blankly. ‘Ask your mother. You may as well come see what you came for. Follow me. Or not. I’m no baby-sitter, and you shouldn’t be here. I can’t see your Permits. Keep it that way.’ She turned and stalked off, at a heavy, not-quick pace. The pace of a woman used to long-distance treks, Mela was able to recognise by now.
The sisters followed, and Ish would have pushed on ahead, closing the gap to the river woman, but Mela held her hand to keep her back.
And they approached the Holding Camp.
It was surrounded by a hinterland of bare, trampled ground.
‘No smartcrop here,’ Ish said, wondering.
‘All been cleared away from around here, long since,’ Khem said.
Mela asked, ‘Who by?’
‘The city, of course.’
‘So what do these people eat now?’
Khem eyed her. ‘You still don’t get it, do you? The city provides a dole for work. Not much of one, and there is not much work. You buy food with the dole. Otherwise you use your savings, or exchange stuff for it. You eat whatever you can pay for.’
‘Buy from who?’
‘From whoever has food. Procyon traders come out here – the Immigrants aren’t allowed into the town. Or they buy it off each other, with whatever they have to sell.’
Mela thought that over. ‘Somebody must be getting very, very rich.’
Khem shrugged.
They approached a kind of boundary now, at last, even if it was just a scratch on the ground. Guards patrolled this line, Procyon Guards in their armour and city colours. Within this boundary—
Nothing. No order. Just a bunch of people sitting among heaps of possessions, some in rough-looking temporary huts or tents. Mela saw one woman draw out what looked like a bolt of cloth, showing it to somebody a little less grimy, a potential purchaser maybe. A bolt of cloth would have been a tough thing to carry, Mela thought, no matter how valuable it had once been.
That stink, of unwashed flesh, of lavatories, was stronger now.
Ish just stared. ‘What are they doing?’
Khem seemed to suppress a sigh. ‘Bargaining. Trying to find something worthwhile to sell for food, amongst the garbage that they’ve dragged here from the ruins of their town.’
Ish seemed puzzled. ‘Which town?’
Khem looked south, down the length of the River. ‘Probably Capella, where the Perimeter is about now. Forty kilometres south of here. Maybe some from the lost towns further south, if they couldn’t get into Capella but survived even so, and have been driven on. Or maybe even Rigel, north of Capella, which will be the next to go. The towns go down one by one, like baby birds in a row.’
‘Surely some would have been let into Procyon,’ Ish said.
‘Those who applied early, maybe, and had the right credentials, or money. Not many.’ Khem shook her head. ‘You just don’t get it. Town kids are never told. Yes, some would have been allowed in. A few. But all those others – well, walking is better than just lying down and waiting for the Tide, I guess.’
Ish seemed bewildered. ‘I suppose people just have to do the best they can.’
And Mela saw again that Ish just didn’t understand all this on some deep level. As if it was all some minor inconvenience, easily fixed. I really will always have to protect her.
Mela took her hand. ‘Home now, kid.’
But as they walked off, Khem took a few steps towards them. ‘Mela.’ She beckoned.
An instinct prodded Mela. She said to Ish, ‘Wait here.’
Ish looked back sulkily. ‘What does she want now?’
‘Nothing, probably. I’ll go see.’ She ran back the few paces to Khem.
Khem said, ‘I wasn’t sure whether to tell you. You maybe, not the other one. You ought to know.’
‘Know what?’
‘I’ve seen him.’
‘Who?’
‘Your brother. Tabor, was it? He was pointed out to me. He’s known here. Son of the Magistrate. You know how people are.’
‘Where?’
Khem hooked a thumb over her shoulder. ‘In there. With the rough sort. Doing stuff.’ She shrugged. ‘Not my place to stop him. Thought you should know.’
‘Doing what stuff?’
Khem hesitated, and drew closer. ‘You know, there’s always trouble in the camp. Low-grade stuff, robbery, violence, sex assaults. Grubby. But it’s folk coming over from Procyon itself, in the dark especially, that are the worst. You see, no matter how poor you are in the city, you can buy whatever you want in the camp. And it will get worse when people get hungrier, more desperate. Sex of any kind you want. There’s gambling. People will play suicide games to get food for their kids. I’ve even seen hunting before. Humans hunting humans. Not here, yet. The dark is the worst. The priests calm things down, sometimes. The Perseids in their green robes.’
‘And Tabor is part of this?’ Mela felt conflicted. She would have wanted to know what Khem was telling her about Tabor, but at the same time resented being told such news about her brother by a comparative stranger. She felt like jabbing back. ‘Why don’t you report him? Report all of it?’
She shrugged. ‘I’m in the Fence Watch too, temporary, paid by the city, remember. At least until I can get back to the River and my proper job. Not my business.’
That complacency made Mela angry. ‘Your precious River. But even the River is wearing out. Pouring off the edge of the world. These people lost their cities. Won’t you lose your River some day?’
Khem eyed her calmly enough.
Then she turned and walked away, back to her station.
15
When they got back to Procyon, and walked through the cosy, familiar streets in which they had grown up – privileged and protected, Mela was coming to realise – Ish opened up, chatting about the sights they had seen, even gruff Khem.
Mela let her talk. Get it all out of her system before they were dumped back into the increasingly fractious atmosphere of home. Where Mela, unreasonably exhausted, hoped for nothing more than a hot bath, to wash the dust and stink of the desolate Holding Camp out of her hair, her skin, her clothes. If Mother hadn’t used up all the hot water in the tank.
But when they got home there was a carriage parked up in the street outside – a grand thing that looked as if it needed a dwarf aurochs or two to pull it, let alone horses … certainly grander than most you saw in the streets of Procyon now.
Mela wasn’t surprised, when they got closer in, to see that the carriage bore the sigil of the City of Sirius, capital of the world – a rather obvious crown of Earths around a bold tower. As if the city were the capital, not just of this Earth, but all of them.
‘Wow,’ Ish said as they walked up. ‘What I would give for a ride in that!’
Mela felt faint disgust at such a comment, after such a day. ‘Your last mouthful of food?’
Ish looked at her strangely, but, characteristically, turned away and bounded up the steps to the front door, which was unlocked. Once inside the house, Ish ran off to their shared bedroom.
Mela followed more slowly. Sirians in the house could only mean complications for her parents, and so for the twins. She stood in the hall, listening for voices. Mother was silent upstairs. Father was evidently downstairs in his own study, speaking more calmly over a rustle of paper.
Father first. She walked that way and knocked gently on the door.
The door was briskly opened by a woman, perhaps Mother’s age, dressed in a smart black uniform, a Sirian Earth-ring sigil sewn on just below her shoulder. Her hairstyle was unique, jet-black hair half obscuring her face on the right-hand side, her scalp shaven on the left.
There might have been a flash of irritation on her face at the interruption. But the woman smiled, genuinely enough. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘One of the twins? Ish, is it?’
‘Mela. My sister is Ish.’
‘How charming. I’m Bel Petro.’
A Sirian name – a famous family, Mela had heard.
‘I’m a colleague of your mother’s.’
‘I guessed that.’
‘And you’re just in time,’ she said.
‘For what?’
Mela’s father came bustling up behind her. Mela saw that he was wearing his Magistrate’s badge of office at his neck. This must be important business, then, if Father was involved too. Even formal.
‘We were just about to have some tea. Love, would you mind—’
‘No. Of course not. I’ll make it.’ She genuinely didn’t mind. She knew how important her father’s work was – to the city, and to the family, especially with a visitor from Sirius.
The Sirian smiled. ‘I’ll get back to your mother.’ Elegantly, she swept upstairs.
Father closed the door to, and, standing in the hall with Mela, wiped his brow with a crumpled handkerchief. ‘It’s hard going, I don’t mind telling you. Not like before.’
‘What is?’
‘Distributing Permits for the new Immigrants from Capella.’
‘It’s always been this way. The Immigrants have always come—’
‘Not in these numbers. Not from so close. And not from so close to Sirius either, by the way. That’s why Bel is here, officially, to contain the Immigrants as far as possible. This is the border of the Hinterland, remember. So the imperials have come to order us around.
‘But it’s never been their problem before, not directly. We’ve never had such a flood before, bypassing the towns, some even pushing into the Hinterland, where they are not welcome. It’s said some have already tried to get all the way through to the Provinces themselves. The imperial troops just push them back, but …’ He wrung his hands together, anxious, stressed. ‘But what are we supposed to do with them? Our imperial rulers can’t seem to see – Bel Petro in there can’t seem to understand that if we have no room, then we have no room, not for anybody.’
