Dalmora gave me a sympathetic look. She was the only Alphan in the class, the daughter of the famous Ventrak Rostha who made the History of Humanity vid series, and I’d resented her at first sight. With her waist-long black hair adorned with flickering lights, and her lovely dark face delicately highlighted with makeup, I’d expected her to be a selfish, spoilt aristocrat. Instead, I’d discovered she was one of the kindest, most compassionate people I’d ever met.
‘Would you like the vid turned off, Jarra?’ she asked.
I shook my head. ‘I’ve seen it dozens of times before so it doesn’t bother me.’
I munched on my toasted wafers, keeping my back to the wall vid, but of course I could still hear it. They’d finally got to the interesting bit, so the odious commentator stopped talking over the ancient soundtrack. The calm female voice of the mission controller was calling for final confirmations from the various teams. I knew every word of this by heart, and the sound of all the different voices as they spoke the archaic accented version of Language from almost half a millennium ago.
‘Countdown is holding at sixty seconds. Final checks. Drop portal focus?’
‘Drop portal focusing confirmed at 98.73 per cent of optimal.’
‘Telemetry?’
‘Telemetry is green.’
‘Power?’
‘Power is green.’
‘My board is showing clear greens,’ said the mission controller. ‘Mission Control to Earth Flight, are you ready for this?’
‘Earth Flight to Mission Control,’ responded Major Kerr. ‘I’ve been ready for this all my life. Let’s do it.’
‘Prepare to pick up countdown at sixty seconds and initiate power build on my mark,’ said the mission controller. ‘Mark!’
As the countdown started, I gave in and turned to watch the wall vid. The image on the screen showed the view through the front window of the Earth Flight ship, the blackness of space contrasting with the blue and white curve of Earth below.
‘Thirty-five. Committing to auto power spike sequence … Now!’ The mission controller’s voice and the background chatter stopped. They were on auto sequence now. Nothing could stop the power spike building and firing the primitive drop portal, so they could only count down the seconds and hope nothing went wrong. Of the thirty automated probes in the S.T.A.R. series, twenty-four had made it to their destinations, but six had exploded when the power spikes went unstable.
Everyone had stopped eating now, and was watching the wall vid in silence. There was something about this vid sequence that compelled you to watch it even though you already knew exactly what happened.
‘Five seconds,’ said the voice of the mission controller. ‘Four. Three. Earth Flight, take us to the stars!’
The image went totally black as the drop portal fired. There was an agonizing delay, with the sound of increasingly tense voices as Mission Control waited for contact from the tiny comms portal on board Earth Flight. Finally, there was a white flash that broke up into multi-coloured jagged lines. Those formed together for an instant, dissolved again into randomness, then stabilized.
It was a grainy picture now, from the days before they’d invented two-way comms portal twinning or message streaming. The scene it showed was almost identical to the earlier one, but the continents on the blue and white planet were a different shape.
‘Earth Flight to Mission Control,’ said the breathless voice of Major Kerr. ‘Drop portal from Earth successfully completed. The comms portal established after only three mill of fine-tuning. I hope you’re getting visual as well as audio feeds, because this is the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen.’
There was an audible sigh from around the hall, as everyone released the breath they’d been holding, and the class started eating and talking again. The vid sequence still had a few minutes to run, but no one was interested in Major Kerr’s spacewalk to detach the portal sections attached to the outside of his ship and assemble them. No one cared about how that created the first standard portal link between Earth and another star system, or the other ships that portalled in through it. No one wanted to hear how Major Kerr’s first description of the new world led to it being named Adonis. They only cared about the symbolic moment when Earth Flight took humanity to the stars.
I bit my lip, remembering the Flight day when I was 4 years old. I’d sat on the floor with the other kids in Nursery, watched the vid coverage, and asked a nurse when I could portal to Adonis. She’d shaken her head and gently explained I couldn’t do that because I’d die. It had taken me a few minutes to understand what she was saying. I already knew the people I saw in the vids had families, while my friends and I didn’t. I couldn’t believe I’d been cheated out of the stars as well.
I could still feel my shocked outrage at the monstrous unfairness of it. A feeling that was repeated again and again as I grew older. When I was 5 years old, laughing at a joke on the vids about stupid, ugly apes, and an older kid slapped my face and told me to stop laughing because the joke was about people like us. When I was 7, and there was a lesson at school about how Earth was run by the off-worlders on the main board of Hospital Earth. Other people, real people, got to vote about how their own world was run, but the Handicapped had no say in what happened on Earth.
The final insult was when I was 9, and discovered Earth was physically in the centre of Alpha sector but not legally part of it. The off-worlders hadn’t just rejected me and everyone like me, they’d rejected Earth itself because we lived there!
Fian gave me a worried look. ‘Are you all right, Jarra?’
My psychologist at Next Step kept telling me it was pointless making myself unhappy by brooding over things I couldn’t change. I didn’t have much faith in psychologists, but he was probably right about that. I forced away the old bitterness. ‘I’m fine.’
The Earth Flight vid sequence ended. Krath went over to the wall vid just as a Gamma Sector News presenter started talking. ‘Now the news headlines for today. Major Jarra Tell Morrath is to join one of the Betan Military clans.’
The entire class stopped talking and stared at me as if I’d grown an extra head.
‘Talks between the two political factions on Hestia have failed to reach an agreement,’ continued the presenter. ‘The …’
Krath turned off the wall vid and gave me a grazzed look. ‘Jarra, that story’s a nardle mistake, isn’t it? You aren’t Betan.’
This was chaos embarrassing. Like most of the class, I’d grown up with prejudices about Beta sector. Only months ago, I’d been joining in their jokes about Betan sex vids, giggling at the scanty clothes Betans wore, and saying Beta sector couldn’t be trusted because it had been on the verge of war with the rest of humanity during its Second Roman Empire period.
Then I discovered I’d been born into a Betan clan, and they actually wanted contact with me. Anyone who’d grown up in Hospital Earth’s residences would understand exactly why I’d promptly rethought my attitudes, but I was in a class of norms. They wouldn’t know how rejected kids longed to have a family, and I didn’t want to explain that sort of private emotional stuff, so I kept my response simple and matter of fact.
‘It’s perfectly true. I was raised on Earth, but my birth family were Betan. You should have realized that. The newzies have been talking for weeks about me being descended from Tellon Blaze, and he was Betan.’
‘Tellon Blaze was Betan!’ Krath waved his hands in disbelief. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ said Lolmack, open contempt in his voice.
Lolmack and Lolia were the only two Betans in our class. They were older than the rest of us, married, and had a Handicapped baby. At the start of this course, Krath had made some remarks about the Handicapped