Colonial Year 258, 207 Terran years after the Founding

Chapter 1: A Very Busy Afternoon

Christiana was in a hurry. A big hurry. She was going to be tardy to practice once again. Mrs. Parker, the teacher of her last period of the day, had held her after class for the third time this month.

To save even a few seconds of time, she did not properly strap her mask closed, nor did she double-check the seals. Instead, she used one hand to hold it tight against her face as she rushed through the 'lock before the outer doors finished opening.

While the teachers frowned upon such actions, they tolerated it for those dashing between structures on the small campus, since the buildings were fairly close together. Even if the children had a slight leak in their masks, five minutes of minimal exposure to the elevated see-ohh-too in the outside air wouldn't hurt them.

The problem was that she wasn't just rushing between buildings on the elementary school grounds. Instead, she was dashing from her campus to the middle school complex, which was roughly half of a kay-emm away. While five hundred and fifty emms did not sound very far, it was a major risk for the blonde-haired girl. After all, if she ended up being caught by someone on either school's faculty, the resulting lecture would cause her to be even later than she already was.

Christiana cut between two buildings and ducked in back of a nearby hill, trying to remain undetected.

'For once, being small comes in handy,' she thought as she rushed onwards. She kept hoping that the long scraggly grass covering the hillside would provide enough cover for her to go unnoticed.

After emerging from behind the mound, she continued to hurry until she reached the wide pond's backside, which marked the two schools' unofficial border. After all, students from both complexes would visit the pond regularly to feed the large colorful koi fish which lived inside. However, the students rarely visited the backside of the body of water because that was where the shed housing the pond's equipment was located. Technically, this area was off-limits to the children, but it didn't stop the kids from cutting through here from time to time.

As she moved by the building, Christiana could hear the pumps and see-ohh-too scrubbers inside of it hard at work. In her science class, they taught her they pumped the resulting cleansed air underneath the pond where it created tiny bubbles. These bubbles added extra oxygen to the liquid and forced out dissolved carbon dioxide. Jets circulated this see-ohh-too free water throughout the small lake, allowing the koi to live outside. During the same lecture, Christiana learned fish farms used the same process to cleanse the ocean aech-too-ohh that they use. However, the farms did things on a much grander scale.

After passing the building, she continued along the shore until she came to a set of stepping stones. These concrete "stones" cut across the water's surface to the side of the pond closest to the middle school. After looking around to see if any teachers were nearby, she began speed walking over top of the stepping stones to shave off a bit more time. As she quickly hopped from one small circular concrete platform to another, she could observe many koi swarming in the water underneath her.

"Sorry, I don't have any crumbs for you today," Christiana muttered with a little regret. She almost felt like she was teasing the poor fish since kids would feed the koi from these miniature platforms. Thus, the animals associated someone on the stepping stones with food. Right now she did not have time to stop and give them a snack, no matter how much she wanted to.

After crossing the pond, only fifty emms remained between her and the middle school. This was the most dangerous part of her journey since there was nowhere to hide between her and the closest educational building.

"Here goes nothing," she whispered to herself as she dashed across the open space, hoping that she would not get caught.

On that day, Christiana was lucky because none of the teachers saw her cross the grass-covered field. However, it turned out that she had had a very close call.

A few moments later, as she was about to turn a corner between two buildings just inside of campus, she came face to face with an instructor. The lecturer would have seen Christiana running across the open field if she had rounded the bend only a moment earlier. As it was, the middle-aged instructor scowled at her as she passed by, the eyes above the woman's fully fastened mask clearly communicating disdain. After all, she had her filter unfastened, and she had almost literally run head-on into a teacher.

In response, she gave the instructor a quick but respectful bow before dashing on. If the lecturer had taken offense to the girl's actions, the sensei would have called the girl back and given her a good tongue lashing. Once again, Christiana was in luck since the tutor simply continued walking, making no comment whatsoever.

After running for another five minutes, she finally made it to her aim: the middle school gym. However, by that moment, despite all of her rushing, she was still a quarter of an hour late...

-----

After a long and grueling practice, Christiana emerged from the gym with her long blonde hair wet from the shower and her mask properly fastened. Saito-sensei had held her well after the normal time to make her do extra calisthenics and weight training to punish her repeated tardiness. As a result, by the time she left the building, Mainday had ended, and Alterday had begun.

Since the Fall Quartanoctis was only two weeks away, a-cent-a was already high in the sky, even though a-cent-b had only recently set. By the illumination of the second sun, Christiana could see her surroundings clearly. However, that would not be the case this time of the evening in three and a half months when Winter rolled around. If the teacher held her this late near the Winter Longanocte, then she would have to walk to the bus stop in the darkness of Night. That was not something that she looked forward to, despite the many lights lining the walkways.

'I really don't want to be caught out here by myself during the Night,' she thought as she trudged away from the Middle School with her aching muscles. 'It's bad enough that I have to take part in the blasted tournament. Punishing me for being late was just the cherry on top.'

She slowly walked towards the motorcoach shelter and therefore downtown. As she did so, her eyes automatically went to the tallest structures in the small city, namely the carbon precipitation towers. These fifty emm tall pillars in-took see-ohh-too processed it and released ohh-too back into the air. It then transformed the pure see into solid square chunks of five see-emms per side. They later hauled away the resulting "synthetic coal" via train and buried it, thus sequestering it and speeding up the terraforming process.

She could easily see the irony in this, despite her young age. She had learned in history class people had mined coal for centuries back on Old Earth. Meanwhile, here on Cooper's World, the exact opposite was true.

The squeal of the motorcoach's air brakes drew her out of her musings when it arrived. After scanning her bus pass, she nodded to the driver before taking the first open seat. Soon thereafter, the motorcoach pulled off in a cloud of diesel fumes.

They had discovered the technology of creating gasoline and diesel fuel from coal on Old Earth back during the early twentieth century. Here the colony had replaced the coal with see captured directly from the air to make "carbon neutral" fuels. However, there was only one place that produced such liquid fuels, and that was all the way to the far east in Cooper's Landing. They shipped those fuels via rail from the capitol two thousand five hundred kay-emms away, through Planetfall, and finally here to the small mining city of Simmon's Town.

As she thought about her hometown, she watched the buildings lining High Street pass by in the weak illumination of Alterday. Luckily, the sky was almost cloud-free, so the light from a-cent-a remained unobstructed. However, despite the clear skies, the second sun's luminosity was currently only about twelve hundred times as bright as the full moon back on Old Earth. Therefore, Alterday was only about as brilliant as a very cloudy Mainday. Still, that was more than bright enough for the girl to see the constructions interspersed with the occasional tree as the motorcoach made its way downtown.

Since it was late, there were few pedestrians on the streets. However, a few masked figures were rushing by on the narrow sidewalks, hurrying from one destination to another. Most of these people had long, flowing hairstyles like her own, but a few had shorter, more utilitarian bobs. No matter how attractive long locks were on a woman, some jobs made flowing tresses too dangerous. Having one's hair get tangled up in machinery was a good way of becoming hurt, maimed, or even killed. She shuddered at the thought of some gruesome accidents that she had heard about from her peers. Here on Cooper's World vanity could lead to tragedy if a lady wasn't sufficiently careful.

When the motor coach stopped at a traffic signal, she pulled out her com'. She sent a typed message to her eldest Sister Anastasia-onee, letting Ana-onee know she was on her way home. If she had forgotten to do so, the poor girl would have had a long trek from the closest bus stop to her house. Doing that after her strenuous practice would not be pleasant, and she wanted to avoid that walk at all costs.

'I don't even want to become Johnathan-nii's Keeper!' she thought as she impatiently waited to hear back from her oldest Sister. 'While it would be nice to spend the school day with oniichan, I don't want to be parted from my womb-mate. Why are they forcing me into this predicament?'

Moments after sending the message, she received a positive reply. Apparently, Anastasia-onee would meet her at the bus stop with their matFam's minivan, but she would have to wait a little while. After all, it was just about dinnertime, and cooking was one chore that Ana-onee was in charge of.

'At least I won't have to walk,' she thought. Even if she had to idle around for half an hour for Ana-onee to give her a ride, it was better than the alternative. Simply thinking about that trek made her legs ache more than they already did.

While idly wondering what the family would have for dinner, her gaze was once again drawn to the passing scenery. At that point, the motorcoach stopped and picked up more passengers in front of city hall.

With its surrounding swath of vegetation, this ornate structure stood in strict contrast to the plain but functional buildings that made up the rest of Simmon's Town. According to her Mother, an ancestor of the current mayor had the government building constructed in her great grandMother's time. They had built the pretentious edifice just after they had completed the nearby hydroelectric dam.

That mayor Toyama had expected a large spurt of municipal growth because of the additional available electric power... a period of development which never quite came about. After all, the prefectural authority had already earmarked most of the electricity provided by the dam for the Washington mines, copper refinery, and electric transmission line production facility. That was only fair, because the Washingtons had paid half of the bill for the hydroelectric facility, and they had done so for that very reason. The Toyamas, however, saw things in a different light, and the two most prominent families in Simmon's Town had been feuding ever since.

After finally passing through the center of the municipality, the motorcoach stopped a few more times, picking up additional passengers until they filled the vehicle almost to capacity. As the automobile made its way along the edge of the Lyons River, the bus pulled into the parking lot of the Simmon's Town train depot. Upon reaching the small city's transportation hub, the great majority of the conveyance's riders disembarked, leaving only a handful of people on board.

As she looked out of the window, she could see the motor coach's former occupants head toward the many passenger vans parked near the train station entrance. Both fuel and automobiles were expensive on Cooper's World. Therefore, it was much more economical for the average citizen to use these transport services rather than to own their own cars. Besides, most private companies offered a travel stipend as an employment incentive. Why pay for gasoline and a car payment out of pocket when your employer covered three-quarters of the cost of a daily ride on a shuttle van? Especially when that vehicle dropped you off and picked you up at your own front door?

Once the mass exodus of passengers ended, the motorcoach sped away in yet another cloud of diesel smoke. Her gaze drifted to the rocky, rapid-filled Lyons River, which paralleled the road on which the automobile now traveled. Because the train station was on the northern edge of the city, the river's view to the east became less obstructed as the bus approached its last stop.

Since the buildings rapidly tapered off, and because there were almost no trees planted beyond the outskirts of Simmon's Town, there wasn't much else to look at. The municipality was in the Fuji mountain range's foothills, so the barren and undeveloped hillsides obscured the west's view. Meanwhile, the panorama of the Fuji Mountains themselves was lost in the distance because of the dimness of Alterday. Despite having passed its zenith, a-cent-a did not cast enough light to illuminate the peaks which were located several kay-emms away. Besides, the hills often impeded the mountains' perspective even during Mainday as the motorcoach followed the roadway beside the waterway.

"I'm almost at my destination anyway," she whispered to herself. Her family's dwelling was only three and a half kay-emms north of town on the Lyon's River banks. However, by that point, the road had veered away from the riverside to the north-northwest. That was why Christiana had let her Sister know she was heading home. The dirt lane stretching from the bus stop to her family residence was quite long because of the paved road's sudden change in direction.

Just moments later, the motorcoach came to a halt at her destination. After standing up, she gave the driver a friendly wave before disembarking into the small copse of trees. This marked the entrance to the dirt road leading to her home. Yet again, the bus belched a cloud of noxious fumes as it pulled off to finish what little was left of its route.