On the sixth day, Playdon took everyone else to Asgard for Joth’s funeral, and I went to the portal room to wave them off. Asgard custom was to take flowers and candles to a funeral. Interstellar portal quarantine procedures stopped you portalling off world with fresh flowers, but everyone had a candle and Fian was taking an extra one for me.
The portal activated, and people started heading through to Earth Africa Off-world. The last one in line stopped and turned to face me. Steen, the tag leader for team 4.
‘There won’t be any more trouble, Jarra. Playdon offered to transfer Petra to another Pre-history Foundation course with a vacancy, but she said no because it would mean her repeating some theory work and missing others.’
He shrugged. ‘The rest of us can’t make her go, but if she stays then some things are going to be different. We aren’t calling you names to please her any longer, and we aren’t letting her call you names either.’
Steen walked through the portal before I could work out what to say, and it shut down behind him. There was normally a faint background hum of conversations and music in the dome, but now it felt weirdly quiet. I’d planned to stay here but …
I pressed my hand on the check-out plate to show I was portalling out of the dome, looked up the portal code for Zoo Africa, and then changed my mind. The tropical bird dome in Zoo Africa was even more impressive than the one in Zoo Europe, but its safely sanitized jungle plants would remind me too much of Eden’s rainforest. I’d go over to the Pyramid Zone instead.
As an afterthought, I sent a quick message to tell Playdon and Fian what I was doing. I didn’t want anyone worrying if they came back and found me missing. Then I dialled the portal, and stepped through to the Pyramid Zone reception area. They were obviously having a busy day, because there were queues waiting at all four internal portals for the next pyramid tours.
I wasn’t here to join a crowd of chattering tourists and hear the tour guide recite the information I’d heard a dozen times before. I headed away from the portals to the exit that led into the desert. The man on the door handed me a hat and one of the tracker armbands they insist on you wearing to stop you getting lost. He started telling me the safety instructions, but I shook my head.
‘I’m from Eden Dig Site, and I’ve walked the desert path several times already. I know all the refreshment and portal points, and how to call for help.’
He accepted that and waved me through. I glanced at his display screen as I went past, and saw two clusters of dots that were probably school parties, but they were both on the short route. The longer desert path looked nice and peaceful.
Once outside, I followed the paved path with its information points displaying holo images of what this area had looked like in the twenty-third century, before Tuan created his genetically modified creeper to reclaim the desert. I ignored them, preferring to see it as it was now. Deceptively delicate greyish-green leaves mixed with turquoise flowers carpeted the ground, the colours merging together in the distance to look like a blue ocean.
The path divided, and I took the left turn for the desert trail. I remembered seeing the distinctive turquoise of a Tuan creeper high up in the Eden rainforest when we were searching for Joth, and stopped at the first refreshment point to collect a bottle of water and use my lookup to send a question to Pyramid Zone Information.
Their reply came a few minutes later. Apparently, I could have been right about it being a Tuan creeper. Genetically modified plants didn’t always do exactly what their creators intended, and in some very rare cases Tuan creepers had been found living an arboreal existence in the rainforest, clinging to a tree trunk and managing to survive on nutrients absorbed from the humid air.
That sounded a bit like me. One of the Handicapped was as rare and out of place in a norm class as a Tuan creeper in the rainforest, but I’d managed so far and things should be a lot easier now. Steen had said there wouldn’t be any more trouble.
I pulled a face of angry self-mockery as I walked on along the path. At the start of this year, I’d declared war against a class of norms. I’d defeated them now, but what sort of victory was this? My enemies hadn’t learned to like me. They just blamed Petra for Joth’s death, and being nice to me was a way of punishing her.
The victory wouldn’t last for long anyway. Next year, Playdon was going to be running a pre-history degree course for University Asgard. It would be heavily practical, and based on Earth, so Fian and I planned to join it. Some others from our class would be joining it too, but there’d also be a lot of new people. There was bound to be someone prejudiced against the Handicapped, so I’d have to fight the battle all over again.