Frontier

  He faced me, and spoke in an urgent voice. “Amalie, the next few days will be crucial. It’s absolutely vital that we do everything possible to please my parents. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, I understand,” I said.

  Shelby Summerhaze hated me. Bened Jain must hate me too. Even more worrying, the Rodrish Jain standing next to me at this moment bore no resemblance to the shy boy I’d known at school. This Rodrish Jain was a coldly ambitious stranger.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I normally worked hard on Community Days, but for the rest of that day I didn’t do any work at all. Other people laid the fast-drying concraz foundations for the new dome. Other people assembled its sections. Other people used the glowing beams of the heavy lift sleds to move the sections into position to be bolted together.

  I could only stand and watch that frantic activity. Rodrish had gone off to talk to his parents, and I’d hoped to get some peace and quiet to think, but the whole of Jain’s Ford Settlement wanted to wish me happiness. The second I escaped from one person, another would start talking to me. It was tiring being the centre of attention, I was feeling self-conscious about having my hair loose round my shoulders in public, and I was startled by the things people said to me.

  They kept repeating the same words over and over again. “You’re a lucky girl.” That bothered me because people said those words to a man, congratulating him on being lucky enough to get a wife, but never to a girl. They said she’d chosen well and wished her joy, but never said she was lucky.

  Intermingled with the general mass of people barraging me with good wishes, were a few more memorable conversations. The first was with Teacher Lomas. He walked up to me, directed a frown at the work on the new dome, and spoke in an angry voice.

  “The Mayor seems to think this bigger dome is the solution to the problem of me being the only fully qualified teacher here.” He made an exasperated noise. “Oh yes, the evening class will all be able to sit at desks instead of on the floor. That’s very nice, but it doesn’t give me any more time to help students with their individual problems, does it?”

  “No, I suppose it ...”

  Lomas interrupted me. “I’m disappointed that you won’t be getting your degree and joining University Miranda, Amalie, but I understand why you’d choose to marry Rodrish instead. I’m sure you’ll be very happy together.”

  He walked away before I could reply. I stared after him, frowning. There was nothing wrong with the words he’d said, but I didn’t like the faint scorn in his voice as he said them, as if he thought I’d taken a cowardly, lazy option.

  I shook my head and told myself not to be oversensitive. Lomas was only speaking in harsh tones because the Mayor had annoyed him.

  There was another flood of well wishers before the Mayor appeared to announce in a booming voice that I was a lucky girl. She was followed by some friends of my parents, who told me I was a lucky girl as well. I was relieved when a group of three girls, all old school friends of mine, came up to me. They didn’t tell me I was a lucky girl, but they gabbled their best wishes in nervous, respectful voices, and hurried away again before I could say a word.

  I gazed after them in bewilderment, heard a familiar laugh from behind me, and turned to face Cella. “Why did they act so strangely?” I asked.

  “Because you aren’t one of us any longer, Amalie,” said Cella. “We’re very happy for you, we’ll dance at your wedding and wish you well, but we know we’ll have nothing in common with you in future. We’ll be working hard with our husbands, building up new farms, and scraping around for credits. You’ll be living in luxury as a member of the most important Founding Family of Miranda.”

  I bit my lip. “You’re saying you can’t be my friend any longer?”

  “I’m saying they can’t be your friends,” said Cella. “I’ve always been a rebel, and I’ll still have the odd private chat to you in future. In public though, I must always treat Amalie Jain with deepest respect.”

  Amalie Jain? I’d expected to follow the usual custom on Miranda, either remain as Amalie Roche, or combine Roche and Jain into a surname for both me and Rodrish to use, but of course everyone would expect me to use the famous Jain surname.

  Cella glanced to her left. “Here comes Mojay. He’s looking unhappy about something, so I’ll leave you to talk to him alone.”

  Cella ran off, and I turned to Mojay. He looked reproachfully at me. “You could have given me a hint you were leaving, Amalie, so I had time to look for a replacement barmaid.”

  “I’ll keep working until the wedding,” I said. “I haven’t decided what I’ll do after that, but you’ve got at least a month to find a new barmaid.”

  His eyes widened in disbelief. “You expect to walk into my bar tonight and carry on working as a barmaid?”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “At least twenty of our regular customers work for the Jain family, either as farm workers or as household staff in the Great House. The rest would love the chance to work for them too. The Jains don’t just pay their men well. They’ve got a lot of machinery, and will let their more trusted workers borrow it to plough their own fields.”

  He paused and sighed. “Our customers wouldn’t even dare to speak to you, in case a wrong word caused offence and stopped them ever working for the Jains.”

  “I’ll reassure them that I won’t be offended.”

  Mojay gave me a pitying look. “They won’t be afraid of offending you, Amalie, but of offending Rodrish Jain.”

  That problem hadn’t occurred to me. Both Cella and Rina had decided to keep working in Mojay’s Bar after their marriages. Their husbands had to accept them giving the customers a professional smile, because an unreasonably jealous husband could be quickly divorced and replaced.

  I’d assumed my situation would be the same, but Mojay was right. All the bar customers would be nervously aware that Rodrish Jain could get them banned from ever working for his family in future.

  I’d thought I could carry on working as a barmaid, but I couldn’t. I wondered uneasily how many other things I’d taken for granted about a marriage would be different when the marriage was to Rodrish Jain.

  “I suppose you’re right,” I said aloud.

  Mojay groaned. “I’ll have to give your sister, Lisbet, a trial as barmaid after all. I’ll go and find her now, and tell her she can take your place in the bar tonight. You’d better make sure she understands that any mention of my waistline will get her fired.”

  “I will.” I tried to shake off my feeling of stunned hurt and be sensible about this. I’d thought I’d be the one deciding when to quit my job, not have Mojay tell me to leave, but I should be feeling pleased about Lisbet getting her chance as a barmaid. It wasn’t as if I needed to keep working to buy myself a new lookup. Not when Rodrish had given me a brand new one.

  I found it wasn’t that easy to be sensible. My whole world seemed to have turned upside down in the last few hours. My betrothal had cost me my school life, my job as a barmaid, and my friends. I’d grown up learning a set of rules about marriage, and now I was discovering those rules wouldn’t apply to mine.

  On top of everything else, all the comments about how lucky I was to be chosen by Rodrish Jain had started me worrying about my appearance. I’d noticed the women in Rodrish’s family all had dauntingly perfect hair and clothes. Even when I wore my best dress, I never looked that polished, and my outfit today was one of my mother’s cast offs that I wore to help with building work.

  I frowned down at the fabric that was limp with age, its colour faded to an unflatteringly drab brown. When all those people kept saying I was a lucky girl, they probably meant that they couldn’t believe such an unattractive girl was betrothed to Rodrish Jain. Chaos knew what Inessa Jain had thought when she saw me.

  “Amalie!”

  Rodrish’s voice made me jump. I turned to look at him, and saw he was grinning at me.

  “At breakfast this morning, Mother was making plans
. Since it’s only a couple of days until Founders Day, my parents have a whole host of important engagements, but Mother said she’d make time tomorrow to take you round my farmhouse and discuss what furniture and colour schemes you’d like.”

  I’d grown up in an overcrowded house, where the main question was how many beds you could fit in a room. I’d no idea what would be suitable for Rodrish’s farmhouse, so I’d have to agree with whatever his mother suggested. “That’s very kind of her.”

  “Yes, but the plans have changed now,” said Rodrish eagerly. “My parents have decided to invite us to lunch at the Great House, and show you round that instead. Do you realize what that means, Amalie?”

  I had a bad feeling I did. “Not really.”

  Rodrish spelled it out to me. “I never thought it possible, but it’s really happening. My parents are thinking of giving me the Great House and its estate!”

  Rodrish’s house and farm had seemed vast to me. Now I pictured an even bigger house with four times as much land. That was terrifying enough, but then I remembered what Mojay had said. There wouldn’t just be a host of farmworkers helping Rodrish. I’d have a lot of household staff working for me too.

  Chaos, this situation was ridiculous. Ever since I turned 17 last Year Day, I’d been trying to delay marrying because marriage meant babies, and babies would need their nappies changing. I should be delighted at the idea of having people doing the cooking, the cleaning, and the nappy changing for me, but somehow I wasn’t.

  If all those things were done for me, what was there left for me to do myself? Was Rodrish Jain’s wife supposed to stand around like a delicate, ornamental vase? I didn’t see myself as a delicate, ornamental type of girl, but someone solidly practical and useful. I wasn’t a vase, but a bucket.

  Rodrish gave me a puzzled look. “Isn’t that wonderful, Amalie?”

  I tried to hide my panic and smile happily. “Yes, it’s totally zan.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Amazingly, I made it through the rest of the Community Day without getting one of my stress headaches. I returned home to spend the evening with an unnaturally polite family. Now I was betrothed to Rodrish Jain, even the twins spoke to me with awed respect. To make things worse, several sets of neighbours came to visit, and told me what a lucky girl I was.

  The next morning, I dressed in my best clothes ready for my visit to the Great House. Mother didn’t let me help feed the baby at breakfast, or do any chores, in case something stained my pale blue, floral dress. I sat there feeling useless, and worrying that my whole life would be like this after I married Rodrish Jain. When Mother suggested Odette could take the lunch pail to Captain Mobele, I rebelled.

  “I can take the lunch pail on my way to the portal. It’s important that Captain Mobele doesn’t get disturbed by a lot of strangers.”

  Mother frowned. “There’s more than just the lunch pail to carry. The Mayor has sent her eldest son over with a Military all-weather sleep sack and a bag of uniforms.”

  “I’ll manage,” I said.

  I slung the carrying handle of the sleep sack bundle over my shoulder, picked up the bulky bag of uniforms in one hand and the lunch pail in the other, and set off towards the almond field, moving a lot slower than usual because of the heavy load.

  I was only halfway down the track when I saw some figures in the distance, obviously yet another deputation of neighbours on the way to our farmhouse. I couldn’t bear to listen to any more people telling me I was a lucky girl. I instinctively left the main track, walking along the side of a medcorn field to reach a group of young willow trees by the stream.

  I’d put down everything I was carrying, and was peering cautiously through the trailing foliage of the willow tree to check I couldn’t be seen by the people on the track, when I heard a whisper from behind me.

  “Why do we need to hide? Is there something dangerous coming?”

  I looked round, and was startled to find Captain Mobele crouched beside me. “There’s nothing dangerous, and I’m not hiding,” I said hastily. “I just wanted to sit in the shade of the willow trees for a while.”

  “Ah,” said Captain Mobele. “I felt there should be limited dangers on a world that hadn’t just been cleared by Planet First as safe, but gone through the Colony Ten years and into full colonization as well. On the other hand, I lost my right arm as a Lieutenant fresh out of the Military Academy because I didn’t have the sense to run when everyone else was running. Since then, my policy has been to run when people run, hide when people hide, and ask why we’re doing it later.”

  He saw my instinctive look at his right arm, and laughed. “Planet First bases have medical centres that can handle virtually any physical injury that doesn’t involve brain damage. I just had to spend a few weeks in a regrowth tank getting a new arm.”

  I didn’t want Captain Mobele to think people on Miranda were ignorant of advanced medicine and technology. “Of course I know about regrowth tanks. They have to be reserved for serious injuries because frontier worlds have a shortage of medical experts, but I’ve seen the amaz things they can do. When I was 9 years old, one of the boys in my class at school was watching some men felling trees. He didn’t stay where he was told, and a tree came down on him and crushed his left leg. He had to have that regrown like your arm.”

  I preferred not to mention what had happened when Jorge got back to school six weeks later. Proudly waving his regrown leg at us, he’d told us the whole story in graphic detail. The blinding agony and the blood, the ride on the hover sled ambulance with Doc Jumi, and the trips through portals on a hover stretcher to reach Hospital Miranda’s Major Injury Unit.

  The bit about lying there screaming while people cut his leg off, and how he’d hung helpless and paralyzed in a tank for weeks with tubes sticking out of him, horrified us so much that Torrin Summerhaze threw up and we all went home and had ghastly nightmares.

  The school got so many complaints from parents afterwards, that Doc Jumi came to the school to reassure us that Jorge had been telling us a pack of lies. The truth was that Jorge had passed out from loss of blood before the hover sled arrived, and been kept unconscious through the entire treatment process until the doctors woke him up to get him to exercise his newly regrown leg. After that, I’d refused to believe a single word Jorge said unless he had at least two reliable witnesses.

  “The Military sent some things.” I pointed at the sleep sack and uniform bag. “I was taking them to the almond field for you. Have you moved your camp site to somewhere else?”

  “No,” said Captain Mobele. “I came this way to look at the farmhouse, but I couldn’t make myself go near it. I couldn’t even go close to whatever those netting things are.”

  “I think you must mean the caged areas where we grow fruit.”

  “It was ridiculous of me to react like that,” he said. “It was only netting, but my mind still saw it as an enclosed space where I could be trapped. My fear of technology makes no sense either. It was a power generator that exploded, so why am I scared of things like portals and lookups?”

  The Military had said Captain Mobele had been hurt on a Planet First mission on a world in Kappa sector. I put the clues of his words together, and pictured an explosion leaving the man lying trapped somewhere, injured and helpless, surrounded by monstrous creatures.

  “Fears aren’t always logical,” I said. “I’m nervous of horse riding, which makes no sense at all. I was born here on the frontier. I’ve been around horses all my life. I’m perfectly happy standing on the ground next to them, but the second I’m in the saddle I start worrying about falling off. Chaos knows why.”

  “Perhaps you fell off a horse when you were very young,” said Captain Mobele.

  I shrugged. “Perhaps. Anyway, it’s horribly embarrassing, so I try to hide my fear from people. I’ve got a whole host of excuses I use to avoid riding horses.”

  “I understand the embarrassment problem.” He pulled a face. “When I first came to Miran
da, I was avoiding people because I was too confused to cope with conversations. Once my head was clearer, I kept on avoiding them because I was worried everyone would laugh at my fears.”

  He paused for a moment. “You might find a psychologist could help you with your fear of horse riding. I’m supposed to contact my Military psychologist when I’m in a fit state to talk about my problems. I don’t think I’m quite ready for that yet.”

  “We don’t have a lot of psychologists on Miranda.” I sneaked a furtive look towards the neighbours on the track, then realized I didn’t need to hide any longer. The neighbours wouldn’t come near me while I was with Captain Mobele.

  I stood up and reached for the lunch pail. “We’d better get your things to the almond field.”

  “Let me carry them.” Captain Mobele hung the sleep sack from his shoulder, picked up the lunch pail in his left hand, glanced at the bag, and sighed. “I see someone in Military Support has helpfully sent me a hover bag despite the fact my current fear of technology means I won’t be able to use the hover attachment. It was very considerate of you to struggle across the field carrying it, rather than turning on the hovers and letting it float along behind you.”

  He picked up the bag in his right hand. “Which is the best route back to the almond field?”

  I was staring at the bag. I’d thought it was unusually large and heavy, but hadn’t worked out that was because it had a built-in hover system. I’d only seen hover luggage floating along after its owners on vids from other sectors. I wished I’d known what the bag was earlier, so I could have seen it chasing along after me.

  I saw Captain Mobele was still waiting for me to answer him. “We can cross the stream on the stepping stones and take the path through the next medcorn field.”

  I led the way along the stream, picked my way carefully across the smooth flat rocks, and waited on the other side as Captain Mobele followed me. When he joined me, he suddenly stopped, laughed, and pointed at the tall stem of a stray Mirandan cabbage that was growing by the stream. There was a cluster of young leaves at the top of it, with a panda mouse nestled among them. It was blissfully asleep, lying on its back, with a bulging tummy filled to bursting with leaves.