“We’re revising Farming Ecology today,” said Lomas, “starting with methods of limiting potentially harmful interactions between imported Earth and native Mirandan species.”
There was a chorus of groans, and one of the boys in the front row mimed strangling himself before collapsing on his desk.
Lomas sighed. “Year End is six months away now, and the school will be closed for a month during harvest. Those of you capable of subtracting one from six can work out you have barely five months of study time left before you leave school. You must pass all the modules of your Farming Studies Certificate before then, or you can’t register to do community service and earn yourselves a farm.”
“The others need to do community service to earn farms,” said Palmer Nott smugly, “but I don’t. I’ve already got a farm, because my father bought me one yesterday. We’ll be ordering my machinery next month.”
There was dead silence as every other boy in the room looked at him in shock, which rapidly changed to bitter resentment. Palmer was deeply unpopular in the class. That wasn’t because he was an incomer from Loki in Gamma sector, rather than born on this planet. Miranda had only opened for full colonization twenty-one years ago, so most of the class were incomers. Palmer’s unpopularity was because he constantly rubbed everyone’s nose in the fact his father was sickeningly wealthy. Since he arrived two years ago, we’d all had to suffer him showing off his expensive clothes that were totally unsuitable for farm work, and his fancy lookup with all the special features, but this …
All the other boys would have to do three years of community service to earn their farms. That was what my two older brothers were doing right now, patiently working to prepare farmland and build houses for others, waiting for the day that the next farm and house would be for them.
Palmer wouldn’t have to do that though. His father had just handed him a farm, and his easy ride wasn’t stopping there. All parents did their best to give their sons starting seed and livestock, especially the vital pair of horses, but Palmer’s father was buying him machinery too. No endless hours of backbreaking labour for Palmer. He was going to stand idly by, watching while his fields were ploughed by machines. Given how much I resented that on behalf of my brothers, chaos knew how the boys around me were feeling.
“Obviously I can’t start running the farm until I’m 18,” said Palmer, “but my father said it was best to buy me one now to make sure I get prime land by the river, and order the machinery early because there’s a waiting list for the next bulk shipments from Gamma sector.”
He turned to grin at me. “Amalie, I know girls don’t count marriage proposals from men without farms, but you’ll have to consider mine!”
If he’d been within arm’s reach, I’d have hit him. He wasn’t, so I gave him a withering look of contempt. “Come back when you’re a human being, Palmer.”
“Yaya! Yaya! Yaya!” All the boys in the room were shouting their approval of my words, hammering on their desks with their fists.
Lomas pointedly put his hands over his ears, waited until the noise started to flag, and then yelled at them. “Shut up!”
The shouting and hammering gradually petered out, and Lomas turned to Palmer. “Go home!”
“What?” asked Palmer.
“Go home!” repeated Lomas. “If you stay here and keep talking about your prime farmland, and ordering your machinery early to avoid the waiting list, someone is going to punch you. Quite possibly me.”
Palmer hesitated, and then stood up. “I don’t understand why you’re all acting like this. Rodrish Jain was in the year above us. Nobody minded when his father gave him a farm. In fact, everyone cheered for him.”
Everyone had been angry already, but now we were furious. Torrin was the fastest shouting a reply.
“Your answer’s in our settlement name, idiot! This is Jain’s Ford. It’s called that because Rodrish Jain’s parents led the first colonists here when the Military cleared Miranda to enter Colony Ten phase. Those colonists came when there was nothing but a heap of supplies and flexiplas panels. They had to clear the farms. They had to build the houses. Most of all they had to live here for ten years in quarantine to prove the Military hadn’t missed anything dangerous, and that Miranda was safe for humans. If there weren’t just the usual problems between imported and native species, but something utterly lethal, those first colonists would have died!”
Torrin paused for a second to breathe before ranting on in an impassioned voice. “That’s why we honour the Founding Families, that’s why they were rewarded with land grants, and that’s why everyone cheered for Rodrish. Your father’s rich, Palmer, so you jumped ahead of us in the queue and took prime farm land from under our noses. Rodrish wasn’t queue jumping, his father owned that land at Jain’s Ford before any of our parents set foot on Miranda. Rodrish wasn’t taking anything from us; his father gave us our world!”
“Yaya! Yaya! Yaya!” The other boys shouted their approval again.
Lomas lifted a hand to stop them. “Go home, Palmer, and don’t come back for a week. You’re suspended.”
“You can’t suspend me,” said Palmer. “I didn’t break any rules. My father will complain to the school board. You could lose your job!”
“Watch me cower in fear,” said Lomas, in his most sarcastic voice. “Since Teacher Horath moved to the school at the new Twin River settlement, I’m the only teacher in this school qualified to either teach or assess students working on their Farming Studies Certificate. I teach the 16-year-olds in first shift school from eight in the morning to one in the afternoon. I teach the 17-year-olds in second shift school from one in the afternoon to six in the evening. Four nights a week, I teach evening classes for all the boys who left school at 15 to work on their parents’ farms.”
He pulled a face. “I’m doing all that solo because the school board have been trying and failing to recruit another qualified teacher for the last fifteen months. If they fired me today, I could get a new job tomorrow, but everyone studying for their Farming Studies Certificate would have to join waiting lists for places at other schools, and given schools always give priority to students from their own settlement …”
He paused. “For the final time, go home, Palmer. You’ve been living on this planet for two years now, and you still don’t seem to understand the basics about a frontier world. You can’t buy respect with credits. You have to earn it yourself. Go home and think about that, before your classmates take you outside and beat the lesson into you.”
Palmer finally turned and left the dome. Lomas watched the door shut and then started talking again. “There are currently over two hundred known potentially harmful interactions between imported Earth and native Mirandan species. The following farming procedures must be followed to prevent these interactions. Firstly, apple trees can only be grown within secure caging since their juice is toxic to …”
I stopped listening, because I’d completed all my Farming Studies Certificate modules four months ago. Most of the girls in the class hadn’t bothered doing the final assessments, since having the actual certificate wasn’t relevant for a girl, but my mother said that a farmer’s wife needed to know these things to be able to help her husband.
Once I’d finished all the Farming Studies modules, Lomas had started sending me other texts to keep me busy. To begin with, they’d been on random subjects, but lately they’d mostly been about history. The latest one was about how the near collapse of civilization back in 2409 had left many worlds totally isolated when their interstellar portals failed.
I dutifully started scanning the text, but it was hard to concentrate on the problems of humanity several centuries ago when I had my own problems right now. Ever since I was 16, family, neighbours and friends had all been busily asking me what man I favoured. When I turned 17 last Year Day, the pressure had increased, with them actively suggesting husbands to me, or even pointedly reminding me of my duty to marry.
Chaos, I knew it was my duty to
marry. Miranda was a frontier world with exactly the same problem all frontier worlds had. Too many men. You needed a lot of people to build a new world, and there were always more male than female colonists arriving. Some men were happy to marry other men, but most wanted wives. It was a frontier girl’s duty to help solve that problem by marrying quickly, preferably to two men rather than just one, and having a lot of children, preferably daughters.
My parents had been patient at first, but three months ago they’d anxiously asked whether I had a problem about getting married. I couldn’t tell the full truth, which was that I didn’t have a problem about getting married, but I did have a problem about having children. As the eldest daughter in a family of eleven children, I seemed to have spent my entire childhood helping my mother change nappies and feed babies. Three of the Year Day brides had already proudly announced they were expecting babies. If I married now, then I’d probably be changing my own baby’s nappies within a year.
I didn’t want to go straight from caring for baby brothers and sisters to caring for my own baby. Saying that would sound like I was complaining, or criticizing my mother, and I wasn’t. Sons were expected to help their father with the farm work. Daughters were expected to help their mother with the babies. That was the frontier life. My parents had been generous, making sacrifices to let us stay on at school when most children had to leave at 15, and I was deeply grateful to them.
In the end, I just said that I didn’t want to rush such an important decision. My parents had accepted that, scolding my brothers and sisters when they made jokes about me, and saying I was sensible to take my time to make the right choice. A month later though, they started getting restless again, and my mother gave me a long lecture about being too choosy. She said that no man was perfect – even my father had had a few bad habits he’d needed to break when she married him – and it was silly to spend too long watching other girls marry the best men so I was left to pick from the rejects.
Since then, every time one of my friends got married, the nagging voices around me had got louder and more persistent. Now I was the last unmarried 17-year-old girl in my settlement, the old maid of Jain’s Ford, there’d be no respite at all.
I was going to have to marry someone, and it wasn’t as if I was short of options. What Palmer had said was right, girls didn’t count proposals from men who didn’t have farms, but I’d had plenty of offers from those who did. If I ignored the ones who’d been drunk at the time, were over 30, or had dubious reputations …
I made a list of names on my lookup, counted them up, and made it nineteen respectable offers. Nineteen men, or pairs of men, who’d make perfectly good husbands. Marrying two men had obvious advantages, because their two separate farms could be combined or traded to make one large one. If I was going to marry two men, then I felt it was simplest to marry brothers, so my best options would be …
“Amalie.”
I looked up, startled, and saw Lomas standing next to my desk.
“While the boys are working on their assignment, I thought we could have a private chat outside.”
He turned and headed for the door. I frowned, stood up, and followed him out of the dome, aware of the boys giving us curious looks. What was going on here? Lomas had never taken me out of the class before, and mentioning he wanted a private chat …
I blinked as the obvious answer occurred to me. Lomas was unmarried, so he was going to make me an offer. That was a disconcerting idea. Slapping down the boys in my class was easy, but refusing an offer from my teacher …
Lomas sat on the bench outside, and gestured at the space next to him. I sat down, keeping a careful gap between us. I daren’t look at Lomas, so I faced straight forward, focusing on the mauve flowers of a field of Mirandan medcorn, our main cash crop for the vaccine industry. Now I was starting to get over the shock, I realized Lomas might have advantages as a husband. The main one being that because he’d been my teacher, Epsilon law said he couldn’t marry me until a year after I’d left school.
If I agreed to marry Lomas, then even if I left school today, I’d have a whole year before the wedding. A whole year when no one would call me old maid, or criticize me for not doing my duty, because I was going to marry Lomas, a man who everyone in the settlement, with the possible exception of Palmer and his father, respected.
“Amalie,” said Lomas, “I’ve been watching you with great interest for the last few months. As far as I know, you haven’t accepted any marriage offer, though I’m sure you’ve had plenty. Is there an arrangement that you’re keeping quiet for some reason? Perhaps there’s a man you like, but he hasn’t got his farm yet.”
I liked the way Lomas was doing this. Checking his offer would be welcomed before he made it. Making sure he wouldn’t put us both in an embarrassing situation. It showed he was a considerate man, and, looking at things practically, a teacher was a good match. It was one of the few jobs on Miranda that was paid solely in credits instead of bartered goods. Lomas might be a fraction over 30, but not much, so …
I took a deep breath and said the words that would reassure him that I was ready to hear his offer. “There’s no arrangement.”
“In that case …” He paused for a second. “Amalie, I’m a member of the Planetary Development Board Education Subcommittee.”
Those weren’t exactly the words I was expecting him to say. I turned to give him a bewildered look.
“Epsilon isn’t the newest sector any longer,” he continued. “The first Kappa sector worlds are coming out of Colony Ten phase and opening for full colonization. It’s time for the worlds of Epsilon sector to start thinking beyond things like basic farming. A century from now, we want Epsilon to be a proud, established, self-sufficient sector, the way Delta sector is now. That isn’t going to happen unless we start solving some major issues. What’s the biggest problem that Miranda has right now?”
I just stared at him. It was clear now that Lomas wasn’t making me an offer, so I’d absolutely no idea why we were having this conversation.
He sighed. “Think, Amalie. Remember all the things I said to Palmer about what would happen if the school fired me.”
“Oh. Miranda doesn’t have enough teachers.”
Lomas nodded. “Not enough teachers. Not enough doctors. Not enough skilled people of any type. Not many of them come to the frontier as colonists, so every world in Epsilon sector has the same problem. It’s crippling Epsilon’s efforts to educate our next generation and to build a proper infrastructure for our worlds. The only way forward is to train our own teachers and doctors.”
He paused. “The first few worlds colonized in Epsilon sector are all arguing about which gets to be the permanent capital planet. Miranda is one of the newer worlds, so they consider us insignificant, but the Planetary Development Board don’t intend things to remain that way. We’ve been studying what happened in Delta sector. No one expected Isis to become the capital planet of Delta sector. No one expected Hercules to have the huge influence that it does. They became the most important worlds in Delta sector because they were the first to have true universities and train their own skilled people.”
“I understand,” I said, still not understanding anything at all.
“Miranda is going to follow their example,” said Lomas. “Our planetary development plan involves concentrating a lot of our resources on founding University Miranda in four years’ time, so we have one of the first universities in Epsilon sector. Building a university isn’t a problem, but staffing it is. We hope to attract a few lecturers from the older sectors, but we also want some lecturers who were born here on Miranda. Their job won’t just be to teach students, but to be role models, showing the young people of Miranda that they can aspire to more than farming.”
He finally turned to face me. “We’d especially like the Miranda-born lecturers to include some women. I believe you could be one of those women, Amalie.”
I blinked. “Me? But … How could I? You need qualifications to b
e a lecturer.”
“Obviously you’d need to get your degree first, which will involve you going to a university in another sector.”
I ran my fingers through my hair. Leave Miranda, leave Epsilon, leave all my family and friends to go to another sector! That was …
For a second, I imagined myself travelling to a world in one of the established sectors, seeing the sort of amaz places I’d only ever seen in vids, getting my degree and coming home to be a lecturer at University Miranda, but then reality hit me. “I’m afraid that’s quite impossible, Teacher Lomas. The cost of it … My parents’ farm has fine land, the cash crops give a good yield, but they have eleven children to provide for. They can’t spend all their credits on me.”
He nodded. “I understand, but that needn’t stop you doing this, Amalie. The Education Subcommittee has arranged for our chosen students to be given a small grant from the Miranda Planetary Development Fund, and there’s also a cross-sector system where students can borrow the cost of doing their degree. You’d have to pay it back later through education tax, but that wouldn’t be a problem when you’ve a guaranteed post waiting for you at University Miranda.”
I shook my head. “But a university in another sector would never accept a student with just a Miranda Farming Studies Certificate.”
He seemed to be trying not to laugh. “Oddly enough, the Education Subcommittee has thought about that issue too. All universities have a small number of places available to students under the special access scheme. This scheme was designed to assist students who come from a background that limited their educational opportunities. As a girl from a frontier world, you’d qualify for the special access scheme anyway, but with our Planetary Development Board supporting your application and stating you’re a potential lecturer for one of the first universities in Epsilon sector …”