Although Gretana’s knowledge of the area was good, it had been derived from maps and texts, and she was unprepared for the vividness of the sunlit reality which greeted her as she emerged from the shade of the trees. The statistics on overcrowding, famine deaths and pollution levels had led her to expect uniform vistas of smoke-laden squalor, but here were untrodden pastures, and in the middle distance swathes of forest land gradually yielding to blue-green ranges of hills—all without any obtrusive signs of habitation. The air was clean and scented by grass and…
Gretana gasped as she saw jewel-like flecks of blue and yellow here and there in the sloping meadow that lay ahead, and it came to her that the wild flowers were coloured. She picked several tiny blossoms and stared at them, entranced, trying to reconcile their incredible glowing actuality with the bare fact—she now recalled it from the recent imprint on Terran ecosystems—that many plants here were attractive to minute winged creatures called insects.
Why, she wondered, does Mollan import gold and pearls?
Something far away emitted a mechanical wailing sound and, tentatively identifying it as a train, she was reminded that she had hundreds of kilometres to travel to her assigned base area near Washington, D.C. It seemed prudent to cover as much of the distance as possible by daylight. She put the flowers into a pocket and walked briskly down the long slope, towards the unknown, rehearsing some of the salient facts of her new existence.
This is May 10th, 2002 AD. I am Greta Rushton, aged twenty, one, unmarried, American citizen, but grew up in Aberdeen, Scotland—which accounts for any atypical features of my accent or unfamiliarity with current American usage. My father was an oil company executive. Both he and my mother were killed in the Saudi Arabian revolution of 1997, but their overseas investments provide me with an adequate income which lets me indulge my interest in travel.
She reached the bottom of the meadow, crossed a small bridge which spanned a drainage ditch, and found herself at the side of a blacktop highway which was showing signs of disuse. Some distance beyond it was the edge of the Greenways housing development, which was actually the westernmost offshoot of the small city of Carsewell, but she knew that entering it without a resident’s identity disc would involve her in an exchange with security guards. It was, she felt, too soon for anything so taxing—her first conversations should be with disinterested parties.
She crossed the highway, walked a short distance to a link road and turned south on a two-lane orbital which curved away towards the city. Sensory overload, a continuous bombardment of new impressions, filled her with a bemused numbness, damping her reactions to the astounding fact that she, Gretana ty Iltha, was alone on the planet Earth—Earth!—and was committed to it for perhaps seven decades.
Her job, as outlined by Vekrynn, was simply to act as a human recording machine—reading, watching, listening without any conscious selection, receiving a general impression of how the populace in her assigned area reacted to the historical forces that shaped their everyday lives. She was also to return to Station 23 twice a year and make a “cerebric deposition”—a near-instantaneous process, akin to an educational imprint in reverse—which would be processed and fed into the Bureau’s data banks.
In some ways it was the least demanding job imaginable—except for the ambivalence of her feelings towards the Terrans. On the one hand there was a choking pity over the tragic brevity of their lives, on the other was the physical revulsion and fear inspired by beings who were condemned to wallow in sickness and death almost from the moment they were born, but who accepted their fate with such resignation.
It took her an hour to reach Carsewell’s Warren Station. The Bureau’s basic training enabled her to get through the procedure of buying a ticket and boarding the correct train, but all the while she was uncomfortably aware of something she had never experienced previously—the pressure of eyes. Men who were seated near her or were passing along the carriage were the most persistent, but she also found that women tended to stare at her for longer than seemed necessary, their expressions indecipherable and cool. She had been assured by the Bureau surgeons that her face was based on a computer amalgamation of many thousands of Earth women’s faces, and that it was therefore bound to be quite unremarkable to Terran eyes, but she was unable to rid herself of an uncomfortable feeling that somehow there had been a miscalculation.
You’ve got to relax, she told herself. Acting nervously is only going to make matters worse. She picked up a discarded newspaper and sheltered behind it, pretending to read as the train progressed slowly and haltingly down the Hudson River valley, but all the while she was absorbing images of the world which drifted by outside. Occasionally she caught glimpses of gardens and was spellbound by their banks of varicoloured blossoms.
She successfully changed trains at Peterson and again—having by-passed New York and Philadelphia—at a new super-junction in Wilmington for the last leg of the journey. The train was old, slow and shabby, and had a broken public address system which made it necessary for guards to patrol the carriages announcing the numerous halts. The sheer frequency of the stops impressed Gretana, but it was the onset of night which gave her her first real indication of the density of the area’s population. Nightfall on Mollan meant a generalised plunge into darkness, with some glimmerings of artificial light in the distance, but here the landscape—when viewed from an elevation—was a rich and complex pattern of beaded illuminations whose lines and clusters merged near the horizon into a continuous radiant haze. The unexpected beauty produced an easing of tension which in turn made her aware that she was very tired. She closed her eyes briefly, experirnenting with the possibility of sleep, and the sounds in the compartment seemed to grow faint…
“That’s right, baby—just you snuggle up to old Des and we’n have ourselves some fun.” The voice close to her ear jolted Gretana into wakefulness, but several seconds went by before she realised there was an arm around her shoulders. She tried to start upright, away from the black-clad young man, but he tightened his grip, drawing her into a forced intimacy with his body odour of dank leather and perspiration.
“I don’t think she ’ppreciates you none, Des,” said a shaven-headed youth, leaning towards Gretana from the opposite seat. He smiled, revealing teeth which had been enamelled blood-red. “She don’t look too happy.”
“Bull,” Gretana’s captor retorted. “She’s gotta get used to me, that’s all. What d’you say, honey?” He turned his head and pressed his mouth against her forehead. She felt his tongue flickering on her skin.
Temporarily paralysed with fright, she extended the radius of her awareness to take in the fact that the train was still swaying through the darkness and that the passengers who had been nearby before she slept appeared to have migrated to another section of the carriage. Using all her strength, she pushed herself away from the man’s embrace and into an upright position. He tried to pull her back to him but, somewhat to her surprise, she was able to resist him and break free. From arm’s length she saw that Des was shaven-headed and crimson-toothed like his companion.