I wish she’d tell me the truth. I’m not a little kid or an idiot, he thought. That wasn’t the only reason she was talking to Maurice Farr so much. “John Hosten, Probationer-hereditary,” he replied aloud.
A Probationer-hereditary was born to the Chosen and automatically entitled to the training and the Test of Life; only a few children of Protégés were adopted into the course. Then he flushed. He wasn’t going to be a Probationer long, and he could never have passed the Test, not the genetic portions. Not with his foot. He couldn’t be anything but a Washout, second-class citizen.
“You don’t have to worry about all that crap any more,” Jeffrey said cheerfully, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the liner Pride of Bosson. “We’re all going back to civilization.”
The flag that fluttered from her signal mast had a blue triangle in the left field with fifteen white stars, and two broad stripes of red and white to the right. The Republic of Santander’s banner.
John opened his mouth in automatic reflex to defend the Land, then closed it again. He was going to Santander himself. To live.
“Ya, we’re going,” he said. They both looked over towards their parents. “Your mother?”
“She died when I was a baby,” Jeffrey said.
There was a crash behind them. The boys turned, both relieved at the distraction. One of the steam cranes on the Bosson’s deck had slipped a gear while unloading a final cargo net on the dock. The Protégé foreman of the docker gang went white under his tan—he’d be held responsible—and turned to yell insults and complaints up at the liner’s deck, shaking his fist. Then he turned and whipped his lead-weighted truncheon across the side of one docker’s head. There was a sound like a melon dropping on pavement; the docker’s face seemed to distort like a rubber mask. He fell to the cracked uneven pavement with a limp finality, as if someone had cut all his tendons.
“Shit,” Jeffrey whispered.
The foreman made an angry gesture with his baton, and two of the dockers took their injured fellow by the arms and dragged him off towards a warehouse. His head was rolled back, eyes disappeared in the whites, bubbles of blood whistling out of his nose. The foreman turned back to the ship and called up to the seamen on the railing, calling for an officer. They looked back at him for a moment, then one silently turned away and walked towards the nearest hatch . . . slowly.
The gang instantly squatted on their heels when the foreman’s attention went elsewhere. A few lit up stubs of cigarette; John could smell the musky scent of hemp mingled with the tobacco. A few smirked at the foreman’s back, but most were expressionless in a different way from Chosen, their faces blank and doughy under sweat and stubble. They were wearing cotton overalls with broad arrows on them, labor-camp inmates’ clothing.
“Hey, that crate’s busted,” Jeffrey said.
John looked. One wood-and-iron box about three meters on a side had sprung along its top. The stencils on the side read Museum of History and Naturel Copernik. He felt a stir of curiosity. Copernik was capital of the Land, and the Museum was more than a storehouse; it was the primary research center of the most advanced nation on Visager. He’d had daydreams of working there himself, of finally figuring out some of the mysterious artifacts of the Ancestors, the star-spanning colonizers from Earth. The Federation had fallen over a thousand years ago—it was 1221 A.F. right now—and nobody could understand the enigmatic constructs of ceramic and unknown metals. Not even now, despite the way technology had been advancing in the past hundred years. They were as incomprehensible as a steam engine or a dirigible would be to one of the arctic savages.
“What’s inside?” he said eagerly.
“C’mon, let’s take a look.”
The laborers ignored them; John was in a Probationer’s school uniform, and Jeffrey was an obvious foreigner—an upper-class boy could go where he pleased, and the Fourth Bureau would be lethally interested if they heard of Protégés talking to an auzlander. Even in the camps, there was always someplace worse. The foreman was still trading cusswords with the liner’s petty officer.