Unwillingly to Earth (v1.0), page 1
CRAMMING FOR CLASSES!
I switch the reading machine on, it lights and starts to go.
Then it goes crazy.
What should have warned me, there is no click. There is the usual warm-up, slow then faster, but instead of a little jump and then ordinary speed it gets faster and faster and before I realize it I am caught.
It is like being stuck in concrete except this is inside me, in my head, and growing, it spreads and pushes, it is too big for my skull it is going to burst. …
Pauline Ashwell
UNWILLINGLY
TO EARTH
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
NEW YORK
NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
UNWILLINGLY TO EARTH
Copyright ® 1992 by Pauline Ashwell
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or
portions thereof, in any form.
Cover art by Boris Vallejo
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10010
Tor ® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
ISBN: 0-812-51929-9
First edition: August 1992
Printed in the United States of America
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Part One:
UNWILLINGLY TO SCHOOL
This may look like a movigram of Brownian Movement but no such luck; it is Russett Interplanetary College of Humanities Opening Day, four thousand three hundred twenty-seven other freshers milling around and me in the middle with a little ticket on my chest says Lee, L. because my given name is something not to mention; they say these kids came from four hundred twenty-four planets just to study at Russett but personally of all points in the known continuum this is the one I would rather be any place But.
Freshers come all sizes, all colors but a fair number are girls so there is one thing we will be finding in common anyway.
This may come as a surprise, that I am a girl, I mean. My tutor at Prelim School says my speech is feminine as spoken but written down looks like the kind of male character who spits sideways.
I reply that I talk like my Dad, he is a character all right, male too, but does not spit, if you spent your formative years with a filter in your kisser neither would you.
He says my flair for seeing the functional significance of the minutiae of behavior is obviously what got me chosen for the Cultural Engineering Course.
Huh.
I know what got me into that all right I am not so dumb as I look.
You think I flatter myself? Brother, by what goes on I look dumb indeed. Maybe this is because of my hair, curly and pale colored—all right, blonde. My eyes are blue as they come which is by no means sky color whatever the books say, my skin is pink in some places white others when washed and a visitor we had once said I had a rosebud mouth.
I am seven then, I do not hold it against her right away there are no roses where I grew up; when I landed here on Earth I hunt one up to see was it a compliment.
Brother.
I find later they come other colors but this one is frostbite mauve, and the shape!
I wish to state here my mouth has two lips like anyone else.
Where I grew up is Excenus 23, how I got hauled off it is due to a string of Catastrophes but the name of the biggest is D. J. M’Clare.
Excenus sun is what they call a swarmer, ninety-seven small planets in close orbits plus odd chunks too many to count. Twenty-three is the biggest, gravitation one point oh seven Earth, diameter a fraction less. If you ever heard of the place it was because they mine Areopagite there, Ninety-four percent production for sale in the known volume of space comes from mines on Twenty-three; but for that, no reason to live there at all.
My dad started as a miner and made his pile, then he took up Farming and spent the lot. He has it all back again now.
Areopagite forms only in drydust conditions meaning Humidity at ground level never above two and one half percent Rainfall None, hence from this forming on Ex-cenus 23 is something special, but miners are like other people they have to eat too.
When Dad started there was him and Uncle Charlie and their first year they fed 954 men, nowadays the planetary population is Three thousand three hundred twenty and there are seven other farmers, most of them started working for Dad and graduated to farms of their own. Nobody on Excenus 23 eats concentrates now.
Uncle Charlie is Hon. as in secretary meaning no real relation. He is an engineer, when Dad met him down on his luck but able and willing to build diggers, harvesters, weathermakers for ten thousand acres, out of any junk to hand. Had to be done like that because Excenus Haulage Company, the big company did all the shipping in and out of the planet, sold food concentrates. No competition welcome therefore no shipments of Seeds, agricultural machinery, all that, would have been allowed through.
It takes Charlie two years to do his job, meanwhile Dad bones up on the agricultural side. Nowadays there are a lot of books on drydust farming, they cover soilmaking, microbiology, economical use of weather, seed selection, plenty more; at that time there were fewer and Dad read them all.
If he had sent for the usual texts E.H.C. might have caught on and had a little accident in transit, so Dad gets them in as books I mean antique style, chopped in pieces and hinged together down the side. They are labeled Curio Facsimiles and disguised with antique picture covers mostly showing the damnedest females you ever saw, dressed in bits and pieces mostly damaged; some of them dead. People collect these things for some reason. Dad has one or two put on top with texts to match the outside, rest are textbooks on Agriculture like I said.
Charlie offers to make reader-reels from them but Dad turns him down. He still has all those books packed in a row, when I was little he used to tell me how he learned all his farming studying that way, without using Reading Machines, it just showed you could still do it if you had to. Dad never had any education and it bothers him; I used to think that was why he kept on telling me this.
Well there are plenty of troubles not least with E.H.C. but Dad is not the type to give up; reason he started farming in the first place was he caught on E.H.C. were making it Impossible for people to do just that; Dad does not like people to try and stop him even if it was not what he wanted to do in the first place.
I am born soon after the farm is really set. My mother walked out when I was three. She was fresh out of college with an agricultural degree when Dad met her, maybe the trouble was he caught on she knew less about drydust farming than he did, maybe other things—Excenus 23 is no place for a woman they say.
It is O.K. by me but I was born in the place.
Dad and Charlie raised me between them like the crops, which is to say carefully.
There are plenty more people now in Green Valley where the farms are, fifty or so and they change all the time. People who come out farm for a bit make their pile then go. We even get women from time to time. People’s wives from Town come out to board sometimes, Dad lets them because he thinks they will Mother me.
Well mostly I manage to steer them off and no hard feelings, it is My home after all they got to be reasonable about it if they want to stay. Seems they do as a rule. Town is kind of tough to live in. Several stayed a year or more. So it is not true to say I grew up in a Wholly Masculine Environment, I knew up to seven women for quite a while.
Green Valley is outside the mining area and about six hundred miles from Town. This has to be. Town gets most of its water combing the air and so do the weathermakers for the farms; anyway mining and farming do not mix so good. The Valley is twenty miles each way hedged by hill ridges up to seventy feet high. Outside is stone flats, dust bowl and tangled mats of Gordianus scrub. Forty miles around about it I know pretty well but the rest of the planet is about the same, except for Town.
This is where I was bom, I was all set to stay there before Dad had his Accident; first Catastrophe on the way to this place.
I am up one day in a helivan watching the harvest on a thousand-acre strip at the edge of the farm, there is a moderate wind blowing from over the hill, so we are keeping the weather-lid over each row until just before the harvester gets there so as to keep the dust out of the grain. I am directing this.
Here at the edge the weather-lid is just above the crop, it runs from the weather-maker in the middle of the farm in a big cone like a very flat tent, fifty feet high in the middle and four miles across. You cannot see it of course unless the wind blows dust across, or there is rain inside; the lid is just a layer of air Polarized to keep dust one side, water vapor the other; just now you can plainly see where puffs of dust go skittering across.
The harvester gets to the end of a row on the far side from the toad. I signal Biff Plater at Control and he draws the weather-lid in twenty yards. The harvester lifts its scanner at the end of the strip, wheels, and comes through the next swath, with the big cutter pushing six inches above ground, stalks sliding back into the thrasher, bagged com following on the trailer behind.
Then I see Dad come alo
The harvester is half up the field. I do not want the kor to be scared. I yell to Biff, 1im it off quick! but the controls are on the other side of the shack from the weather ones.
Then the kor sees the scanner rearing on its stalk, it is not frightened at all thinks this is the Great great grandfather of the species and charges straight across to say Hello.
I am yelling to Biff and got my eyes shut, then he is yelling right back, 1 have to open them and look down.
The kor has gone straight into the cutter the second before it stopped. Dad has been thrown and the harvester stopped with one tread a foot from his head and the comer gone over his arm.
I bring the heli down yelling for help on all frequencies.
Dad is breathing but flat out; fractured skull, ulna and radius like a jigsaw puzzle, multiple injuries to the chest; the kor is in three pieces mixed up with the machine.
We call the hospital in Town and they direct First Aid over two-way visiphone while the ambulance comes. It takes seventy minutes and I am swearing to myself we will hire a permanent doctor if we have to shanghai him, after this.
The ambulance arrives and the doctor says we have done as well as can be expected, fortunately Dad is tough but it will be a two-month hospital job at the least.
They crate him up in splint plastic and load him into the ambulance. Buffalo Cole has packed me a bag. I get in too.
I am out again first thing, passengers Not Allowed.
I get out the long-distance heli and go straight to Town, I am waiting in the hospital when they arrive. I wait till they have Dad unpacked before I start to inquire.
These hospitals! It is all they will do to let me look at him; when I do he is lying in a kind of tank, his chest is the wrong shape, there is a mass of tubes round his head running to a pump, this for Resorption of blood clots in the brain; more too the other end for External aeration of the Blood, he is not going to use his Lungs for a bit.
I think this does not look real, Dad in all this plumbing; then I hear my breathing goes odd, next thing you know the doctors steer me outside.
They say it will be a week before the blood clots go and Dad wakes up but they will report by visiphone every day.
I say No need they can tell me when I visit each day.
They are deaf or something, they repeat they will call Green Valley each day at thirteen o’clock.
I say Is this when they would prefer me to call in?
At last they have got it, they say Surely I will not fly six hundred miles every day.
I say No I shall be stopping right here in Town.
Then they want to know what friends I am stopping with, I say At a hotel.
Consternation all round No place for young girls to stop in this town, they make it out the toughest hell-hole in the known volume.
I say Nuts, there are hotels for Transients and their wives too.
They flap wildly in all directions and offer me a bed in the Nurses’ hostel which is Men Only ordinarily, but they will make an Exception.
I say Thanks very much, No.
In the end they tell me to go to the Royal Hotel it is the most respectable of the local dumps, Do not on any account make a mistake and go to the Royal Arms which is a pub in the toughest quarter of the town; they tell me how to go.
I put my luggage in my pocket; for some reason I have clutched it throughout; and I go.
Way I feel I do not go to the Hotel straight off, I walk around a bit. I have been into Town of course shopping with Dad, maybe twice a year, but I do not seem to know it so well as I thought.
Then I find I have got to the Royal Arms or just near it anyway.
It is now late evening, the sky is black except for stars, planets, and meteors crashing through every minute or two. The town is lit up but there are few in the streets, quiet folk are home in another quarter the rest still fueling up indoors. Way I feel some toughery would suit me fine to take my mind off, because Taming kors was my idea in the first place. Maybe I will get a chance to try out that Judo trick I learned from Buffalo Cole.
So I slip through the noise-valve doors one after another and go into the Pub.
Brother.
The Noise trap is efficient all right, outdoors no more than a mutter so there is a real wallop inside. Every idea in my head is knocked clean out of it, even the thought that I might go away. Among other things are three jukeboxes in three comers going full blast and I cannot hear them at all.
Part of the decibels come from just conversation, part is encouragement to a three-way fight in the middle of the floor. I am still gaping when two of the parties gang up on the third and toss him all the way to the door. I dodge just in time, he rebounds off the inner valve and Falls right at my feet.
Everyone turns and sees me, and the jukeboxes all become audible at once.
I go down on my knees to see if the Character I have just missed meeting is still breathing or not. His pulse is going all right but his face is a poor color wherever blood lets me see. I yell for water but Competing with the jukeboxes get nowhere. I am taking breath to try again when someone turns them off at the main, Silence comes down like cotton-wool.
I ask for water in a whisper, someone brings it and tries to take me away.
I find I am clinging to the guy yelling He is hurt, he is hurt! There is blood balling in little drops on my Ever-cleans and smeared over my hands, I am trying to wipe it off with a disposable, Not suited to this of course it crushes and goes away to dust and then the cotton-wool feeling in my ears spreads elsewhere.
Then I am lying on my back with water running down my chin and a sensation of Hush all round.
I try to sit up and something stops me. Someone murmurs soft Nothings that fail to make sense.
I keep quiet till I have it sorted and then I figure I have fainted clean away.
Me, Lizzie Lee.
I sit up and find I am on a couch in a sort of backroom and there are Faces all round. Half of them seem knocked out of shape or with knobs on, bashed recently or previous.
The faces all jostle and I hear they are telling those behind She is sitting up! and the glad news getting passed along.
Someone pushes through the faces carrying a tray with food for Six, I deduce they think I fainted from Hunger or something.
I would put them right on this, but I realize the feeling in my middle is because I last ate ten hours ago.
I weigh in and they appear pleased by this.
So I feel an Explanation is owed and I tell them my Dad is in hospital with an accident, you would not think they could get so upset about a perfect stranger, Sure this will not last but it is a genuine feeling just now for all that.
There is more buzzing and a kind of Rustle and I find they are taking up a collection.
I am horrified, I cry No, no, they are very kind but I truly cannot accept.
And they think this is Proper pride or something, they start to mutter again and someone says Well then, no need to worry, Knotty will give me a job as long as I need it, won’t he? Knotty is in the crowd somewhere, seems he is keeper of this Pub. He seems to agree and I figure he’d better.
I do not see why they are so sure I am Indigent until I happen to glance down. I am still in my work Evercleans I was wearing when Dad got hurt; also it breaks on me suddenly that this is the worst quarter of the Town, no girl would come here if she could afford to be elsewhere, even then not into the Royal Arms unless full of sweet innocence or something.
