LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      ‘This is the way we’ll be going tomorrow. I’m getting this image from the data mosaic for New York Main. This is how the area looked at the last aerial survey about ten months ago. I can look at it in several ways. Plain image like this one, or hazard rated by grid square.’

      The image changed. Now it was coloured in patches of red, amber and green squares.

      ‘As always,’ said Playdon, ‘green is good, red is bad, and black is access forbidden, but bear in mind that the hazard ratings are only a best guess from the computer. I can add in the information on which grid squares have already been worked and they go blue.’

      Some squares changed to blue. Not surprisingly, the blue squares tended to cluster near the clearway.

      ‘Notice some areas are flashing blue.’ Playdon pointed at one. ‘Those mean they’ve been partially worked, but still contain something interesting. I can call up further information on those. Usually, people stopped work because they came across an unexpected hazard, but tomorrow we’re going to a grid square where they just ran out of time. The team dug out a stasis box from there, and believed there was a second one but didn’t have time to reach it. Normally they’d come back for it the next day, but this was just before Year End and their last day at New York Main. Tomorrow, we’ll be picking up where they left off, and we hope they were right about that second stasis box.’

      Zan, I thought joyfully. Tomorrow we would be digging, and with every chance of finding a stasis box!

      Playdon turned off his lookup, and led us all back to the base. ‘You’ve got an idea now of the conditions you’ll be facing. This afternoon, I want you all to practise suiting up. I’m sending details of styles and prices of skintights to your lookups. If anyone wants one, let me know this evening. We can get a discount on a group order, and they usually deliver within a day.’

      ‘That’s all for now,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow we start the real work.’

      We headed into the dome and there was a race to get out of our suits and be first into the bathroom. I won!

      6

      The next day we headed out for our first dig. It was another slow start, with people still struggling with impact suits. We finally got outside and Playdon opened up the big doors of the huge sled storage dome that sat next to the accommodation dome like a big brother. He turned on the glows, which slowly beat back the shadows and illuminated the huge space. There must have been nearly twenty hover sleds, in varying sizes, and I couldn’t even see some of the ones at the back.

      ‘We have several types of small specialist sleds, as well as the big transport sleds.’ Playdon looked round at us. ‘Who’s had experience driving a hover sled?’

      I put my hand up. In an Earth class, just about every hand would have gone up. Here only about half the hands did. I suppose exos don’t have as many hover sleds around as we do on Earth. We get more solar storms, so have more portal outages to worry about, and every settlement has its emergency hover sleds.

      ‘Good.’ Playdon made notes against names on his lookup. ‘If you can’t, then it’s really simple to learn, but for our first trip we’ll stick to giving people jobs they know as far as possible. Now, who can drive a big transport sled?’

      I put my hand up again. There were a lot fewer hands going up this time, but even on Earth not many people can drive the big sleds. It would be quite an achievement to get into trouble driving an ordinary hover sled, given the small

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