Earth Flight - Janet Edwards

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three bathrooms for twenty-nine students, so I had to wait in a queue to shower. When I got back to our room, Fian was standing by the bed, his lookup discarded beside him. I didn’t like the grim expression on his face.

      ‘How bad was it?’ I asked.

      ‘Very bad.’ Fian hesitated for a moment before continuing. ‘My father ordered me to break our Twoing contract or he’ll disown me.’

      I had a sick, nervous feeling in my stomach. ‘I could ask my clan to postpone the ceremony.’

      ‘He isn’t just angry about you joining the clan, Jarra,’ said Fian. ‘I’ve always been a bit … careful when talking to my parents about how we met. My parents thought I’d known you were Handicapped all along, but now my father’s somehow found out what really happened.’

      I stared down at my hands for a moment. I’d done the unthinkable at the start of this year, pretended I was a norm and lied my way into a pre-history course run by University Asgard in Gamma sector, instead of joining a course run by University Earth. I still felt guilty about the lies and …

      ‘He’s found out we’re sharing a room as well,’ Fian continued.

      ‘Oh nuke!’

      ‘He said a scheming ape girl had seduced me into a Twoing contract, and ordered me to dump the throwback right away.’

      I fought to stay calm despite the insults. ‘He was understandably angry when he said that.’

      ‘I told my father that you’d apologized for lying, and I’d chosen to forgive you. I told him I was a very badly-behaved Deltan, and sharing a room was my idea not yours. Then I told him I’d no intention of breaking our Twoing contract and he could nuke off! He ended the call then.’

      Well of course he had. Fian’s father would never tolerate his son swearing at him. ‘Fian, I don’t want you falling out with your father because of me.’

      ‘It’s not just because of you; it’s because of a whole list of things.’ Fian’s face flushed with anger. ‘He spent years mocking me for wanting to study history instead of science, and saying what a disappointment I was compared to my brilliant older sister. His method of subtly breaking the news to my mother that he didn’t plan to renew their term marriage contract was to put their house up for sale. Then there was the way he reacted when he discovered an alien probe had arrived at Earth and I’d been drafted into the Military to help the Alien Contact programme.’

      ‘That was a bit …’

      Fian didn’t give me the chance to finish my sentence. ‘I actually thought he’d be impressed by that. His son playing a leading role in the first contact between humanity and an alien civilization! My mother was proud of me, but my father just started ranting on about how I should have nothing to do with the Military because of some ancient family grudge.’

      Fian had been on bad terms with his father for years. The big question was … ‘Did you talk to your mother too?’

      Fian nodded. ‘My father had already called her and told her everything. She said I should ignore him because he’s too cold-blooded to understand people with real emotions. She said all that matters to her is that we’re happy together.’

      I had a dizzy moment of relief. I should have guessed Fian’s mother would react that way. She wasn’t just a born romantic, but determined to take the opposite side to his father in every argument these days. Fian’s parents were at the end of one of the standard twenty-five year term marriages for people who planned to have children but didn’t want to sign up to an unlimited full marriage. Fian’s mother wanted to renew the term contract, his father didn’t, and the final weeks of the relationship were descending into open warfare.

      Fian was deeply upset by his parents breaking up, and I’d no idea how to help him. I’d only ever had a ProMum and a ProDad, paid by Hospital Earth to spend two hours a week with each of their ten ProChildren, and that was nothing like having real full-time parents. Candace was a wonderful ProMum to me, but I had to make appointments to meet her, and I’d hardly seen my ProDad since our big fight when I was 12 years old.

      I sighed. ‘When I first agreed to join my clan, I never thought anyone except the two of us would know or care about it.’

      Fian hugged me. ‘We’re famous now, and that changes everything.’

       2

      By the time Fian and I arrived in the hall for breakfast, the rest of the class had already set out the flexiplas tables and chairs. The wall vid was on, showing Gamma Sector News since most of the class were from star systems in that sector. I recognized a horribly familiar vid sequence and groaned. With my worries about Fian’s parents, I’d forgotten today was 1 June, the anniversary of Earth Flight.

      Every Wallam-Crane day, all the vid channels showed the footage of the first portal experiment. Every Flight day, they ran a sequence about the first manned interstellar flight by drop portal. Thankfully, we’d missed most of the incomprehensible scientific bit about how the transmitting portal does all the work, and the instant when the drop portal dust ring simultaneously exists at both transmission and reception point, stabilizing its own incoming signal.

      ‘… together with power issues mean this is limited to dust particles. When a link is established between two normal portals, it can be held open indefinitely, but a drop portal establishes for a maximum of 5.13 seconds before the ephemeral receiving dust ring dissipates,’ said the commentator.

      Fian and I went to join the queue at the food dispensers and I frowned gloomily at the available menu. The panic over the alien probe had disrupted their regular service and restock, so we’d run out of most meal options. I settled for a glass of Fizzup, a plate of toasted wafers, and some reconstituted Karanth jelly. There was plenty of Karanth jelly left because of the rumour that eating it made your baby Handicapped.

      No one understood what caused a baby to be Handicapped, so norms had a lot of these nardle superstitions about it. Researchers were always claiming to be on the verge of a major breakthrough, but they hadn’t achieved anything since they first established the basic facts of the triple ten. There is a one in ten risk of a baby being born Handicapped if both parents are Handicapped themselves. One in a hundred if one parent is Handicapped. One in a thousand if neither parent is.

      Fian and I carried our trays across to sit with the other three members of class dig team 1 at our regular table. Krath greeted us with an exaggerated weary sigh.

      ‘It’s not fair making us work on a holiday. Playdon’s a slave driver.’

      Lecturer Playdon turned his head to call across the room. ‘I’m a slave driver with perfectly good hearing, and Flight day isn’t a holiday on Earth.’

      Krath gave an embarrassed groan and looked at me. ‘I thought Flight day was a holiday everywhere.’

      Amalie leant across to hit him on the back of the head. Krath was one of the big group of students from Asgard, who’d chosen a course run by their home university, while Amalie was from a planet in frontier Epsilon sector. I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on between them. Krath was definitely chasing after Amalie, but she seemed more interested in teaching him common sense than having a romantic relationship with him.

      Krath sighed. ‘What did I do wrong this time?’

      ‘Think about it, nardle brain,’ said Amalie. ‘Most of the population of Earth is Handicapped and can’t portal to other planets.’

      ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Wallam-Crane day is a holiday here, because he invented the portal and we can at least portal around Earth. We don’t really celebrate it though, because that was the first step towards interstellar portals a century later. Flight day was the start of Exodus century, everyone pouring off world to new planets and leaving Earth to fall apart, so we just try to ignore it.’

      I

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