The result was all these faces, all anonymous, more and more all the time, and if you listened to their voices you could hear accents that hailed from across America and even from abroad, from South America, Europe, people from all over driven by the flood to wash up against these cold fences. Holle never forgot that if not for a chance of fate, if her father hadn’t been smart or fortunate in the choices he’d made in his life, she could have been on the other side of the fences too. She was relieved when they passed out of the old town limits and the press of faces let up.
They rolled along Canyon Boulevard, a twisting, rock-rimmed track into the mountains. Maybe a dozen kilometers out they came to a community called Boulder Falls, where a twenty-meter cascade spilled onto the rocks. Even here the IDP camps crowded the streets, right up to the hog-wire barrier that protected the road. Don said loudly that some of the eye-dees had to pitch their shanties so close to the waterfall they got sprayed on day and night. He laughed at this, and Kelly snapped at him. Don rarely spoke about his work, but Holle knew he had been reassigned from urban policing duties to border control and IDP processing, and she could guess what that was doing to his soul. But he never showed any bitterness, even when he was forced to spend so much time with the Candidate corps from which he’d been excluded. The bus with its escort rolled through the town without stopping.
The canyon opened out into a wider plain. They were heading for the town of Nederland, and would go further still, up into the mountain country of the Indian Peaks Wilderness.
Holle tried to concentrate on the country outside, and ignore the chafing of her suit. The idea of the sim was to get them used to how they might have to live and work in the first days and months after their landing on Earth II. Their yet-to-be-decided destination was expected to be Earthlike, otherwise there would be no point going there in the first place, enough that you would be able to walk around outdoors without a pressure suit. But you would almost certainly need a sealed environment suit. The partial pressure of oxygen might be too low or too high, there might be various toxins floating around, and even, conceivably, some biohazard that might target your utterly alien system.
But Holle detested her suit. Supposedly manufactured by AxysCorp in its high-tech base in the Andes before it was overrun by rebels, the suit was made of a smart material designed to let her skin sweat normally, while filtering out any pasties from the environment. The mask over her mouth secreted a moisturizer and mild anaesthetic to ease the friction with her skin. There were light packs on her chest and shoulders containing supplies for the suit scrubbers, and fresh water and food. Her goggles were self-cleaning and demisting, which was fine until they broke down.
She ought to be able to survive without replenishment sealed up in this thing for twenty-four hours, and with replenishment indefinitely-the manufacturers’ lower limit was a month. She understood the necessity of learning how to live and work in such conditions. But after a few hours in the suit she always began to feel like a pale, desiccating worm, as the joints chafed and the thing filled up with her own stink. On sim days you had the additional irritation of medical sensors taped to your skin, and the unnerving presence of miniature cameras on your shoulder and helmet-even inside your helmet, so your face could be watched at all times.
Most of the Candidates didn’t mind enclosure, or even the continual surveillance. They talked quietly, pulling absently at cramping folds in the suits. They had all been raised in enclosed, heavily monitored environments since they had joined the program, for most of them, for most of their lives. But Holle hoped that Earth II would be benign enough for her to be able to take her gloves and boots off, to soothe her feet in running water and run her fingers through alien soil, and maybe feel the breeze on an exposed cheek.
They passed through Nederland, an old mining camp that had become a hippyish tourist magnet, and then, like everywhere else, a camp and processing center for the dispossessed. They headed on west toward Brainard Lake. From here the views of the Wilderness mountains opened up, and the Candidates leaned toward the bus’s small windows to see. The scenery was spectacular, and it was unusual to take in a view that had no humans in it; these rocky slopes were too steep for the most desperate of refugees to cling to. But the mountains were bare of life, safe for withering trees; the shifting climate zones had made the slopes unviable. Though it was December there was no snow save on the highest slopes. There had been no snow at all in Denver, not for a couple of years.
As they neared the sim site, Holle saw smoke climbing into the air, black and oily. At last they approached what looked like a tangle of wreckage, scattered across a rocky plain.
25
The bus pulled up and the doors hissed open. The Candidates filed off, and stepped down onto stony ground. They had nothing but the suits they stood up in, save for Don who carried a canvas bag.
The bus sealed itself up and pulled away, tailed by the other vehicles. Holle wondered where the surveillance eyes were. They would be watched constantly for security, and backup would never be far away.
The Candidates looked around at the wreckage that littered the ground, the twisted metal and plastic panels and the tangle of cables and pipes. Boxes of supplies, toughened to withstand impact, were strewn about. Somebody had started a fire where plastic popped and melted, creating that pillar of black smoke. Gruesomely, dummies dressed up in environment suits had been thrown over the ground, their plastic limbs broken back in unnatural angles. Some of them were children-sized, like seven- or eight-year-olds perhaps, and there were a couple of bright orange sacks, like holdalls, that were baby shelters. Children being an element of exercises like these was a new thing, and followed the social engineers’ newest pronouncements about breeding and demography which had shaken everybody up.
Don pulled a plastic splint out of his pack, and beckoned to Zane. “Good news, buddy, you’re a casualty.” Resigned, Zane rested one hand on Don’s back as he slipped his leg into the splint, which inflated rapidly.
Don stepped back, leaving Zane on the ground, his “bad” leg stuck out in front of him, and addressed the group. “OK. Your shuttle has crashed, here on Earth II. You can see your gear scattered around. You’re far from the other shuttles and there are no comms; there’s no rescue possible in the short term. Air pressure is normal, gravity is high, but the air is unbreathable-acidic. Keep your suits sealed up. You can see you had casualties, Zane here with a broken limb, some deaths. I was told that the rest of you ought to improvise injuries, and generally remember how beat-up you’d be after a crash.”
Kelly nodded at that. “Sensible enough.” Always eager, she bent down to one of the dummies, used a pocketknife to cut away a strip of environment-suit leg, and wrapped it around her upper body as a sling, improvising a broken arm.
Don said, “That’s all I know. I’m not here. Exercise starts now.”