1

“So why did the United States of America break up?”
Unusually, Six Gee was taking this lesson of Geo-political history herself, and she expected complete attention from her students,
“…because the American Congress was run by the kowfi drinkers…!” said Rai. Jorja, sitting next to him as always, sniggered loudly,
“….the Tea Sippers, my dear…! But you are right, Madeleine Park felt she had no choice…she couldn’t afford another Shutdown like 2028 and those previously, and crucially this time she was backed-up by the US military…!”
Gee paused and surveyed her charges,
“So, put it another way, children! What were the underlying factors that precipitated the break of the Union? Han…!”
“…uh…the separation of powers that made America ungovernable…!”
“Excellent… Yes! Marta…?”
“The cultural split between the people on the coast…who believed in science…and working with other countries, and the people in the middle who thought America should stand alone and rejected evolution…!
“…and eventually rejected the whole notion of a Federal government…!” finished Nurse Gee, “…where did this split originate…?”
“From the Civil War…?” said Han,
“Essentially, yes…but, Marta…you have something to add…?”
“I read somewhere that the United States didn’t even have a President for the first few years…so the split goes back to the start of the country…”
Rai mimed yawning at this point, while Jorja checked her nails. Marta did her best to ignore them. Gee continued breezily,
“So, we have two fundamentally opposed forces at the heart of the American political system…and we have a system of checks and balances that ensures one of these forces can always stop the other from governing effectively…the result, deadlock…!”
“OK children! What happened next…? Marta!”
“President Park dissolved Congress and ordered fresh elections…in the meantime she ruled by decree…”
“And then…?”
“The Tea Sippers…uh…the people who opposed her went to the Supreme Court…because they thought she had acted illegally…but the Supreme Court backed the President…!”
“However, opponents of Park have always argued that this was a political judgement, not one based on the American Constitution…because President Park’s party had filled the Court with judges sympathetic to them…! What was the name of President Park’s political party…?”
“The Democrats…?”
“Well remembered, Rai!”
“So what was the next development…?”
“The United States broke up…”
Texas had seceded first, quickly followed by Kentucky and Oklahoma… By 2040, the formerly United States had split into two! Washington ruled the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida, and the industrial Midwest as far as Illinois and Minnesota. The West Coast had also stayed within the Union…although it became increasingly independent from Washington as time went on. This truncated ‘Federal United States’ also retained the UN seat.
In between a vast stretch of ‘Trans-America’, loosely aligned and governed, if that was the right word, from Fort Worth…
As ever, South Carolina had proved a sticking point! While North Carolina, and Georgia and Florida to the South had stayed within the Union, South Carolina, as in 1860, had seceded. The Palmetto State then demanded a corridor linking them with Tennessee. The ‘Feds’ countered by demanding that the coastal strip of the state was ceded to them in return. Eventually a compromise was reached whereby the Western corner of North Carolina was ceded to the other Carolina in exchange for the coastal strip. Charleston also remained as a Trans-American enclave, surrounded on all sides by Union territory…
That all this was accomplished by negotiation, and without violence, was held up as a tribute to the maturity of the American people…but nobody had wanted another Civil War…
Marta rather admired Madeleine Park who she saw as standing for Science, Truth, Law and Internationalism, facing down the forces of darkness, represented by the Tea Sippers. As a Korean American, and even in 2036, something of an outsider, Park also held an emotional appeal for Marta who took her Latin American heritage very seriously and instinctively sided with America’s ethnic minorities.
Marta had drifted off in her reverie….but realised that Gee was now looking directly at her,
“What other factors changed the balance of power in North America during the middle of the century…? Marta!”
She knew this one,
“Energy and the inundation of the coastal regions…!”
“Correct…and these factors led to…what? Sal…!”
“The formation of NAX…uh, the North American Axis…!”
And so it went on…
“…and how do you think history will judge Madeleine Park…?
“As someone who fought for and stood up for what she believed in…!” said Marta firmly.
“But is there an alternative view…? Sal….!”
“As the President who destroyed the United States…”
“A little dramatic, perhaps…but many people held her personally responsible for the break-up of the Union and the subsequent decline of the country…these critics cite her refusal to compromise as central…”
“…But, the United States was declining anyway…and the people who opposed the President were just making it impossible for her…for any President to run the country…and in the end when the Tea Sippers threatened to close down the Government again she just refused to give into blackmail…”
Marta could feel the colour rise in her cheeks as she said this. She didn’t normally get so emotional about things, but she could just feel the other children around her…judging…disapproving….mocking…and it just made her even more determined to stand up for what she believed…
“Passionately argued, Marta…but the study of history has to be about considering all sides of the question …! And the fact remains, before Madeleine Park’s Presidency America was still a world power, less than thirty years later the country had become a backwater…”
Marta had no answer to this and could only sit there fuming, enduring Rai’s sniggering and Jorja’s disdainful looks…
Afterwards, in her bunk, she contemplated her place in Dome society. She understood, or thought she did, the reasons for Rai’s dislike of her. Marta was older, smarter…and indisputably the leader, both in the minds of the Nurses …and, more grudgingly, it must be admitted, in the minds of the other children… The gap between them was accentuated by the fact that girls matured earlier. But Rai itched to be in charge, and as the oldest boy thought it was his right…
‘So much for two centuries of feminism…!’ she thought ruefully, ‘it had met an immovable rock in the person of a spoilt adolescent boy…!’ But she also felt some sympathy for him, he had no male role models, being one of only three (almost) men in a settlement that was otherwise coded female…
Jorja ‘though was a different matter. Marta had always thought that they should be friends. As the two girls nearest in age, as the two Brazilians in the crew, they should have most in common. But it had never worked out that way…Jorja’s disdain for her, evident even as a small child, had only deepened as the years had gone by…Jorja had always been the prettier one, and the one who was interested in girl things…her hair, her nails, her clothes were always immaculate…! By contrast, she was the tomboy, the geek…the studious one!
Ever the precocious child, Jorja had also entered puberty early…! Something Marta, rather irrationally, resented her for, ‘Two years younger and she’s already catching me up…!’ and things had only got worse as a result. Rather belatedly she had reached the conclusion that Jorja regarded her as competition…!
The kudos she had gained from her recent adventures was also beginning to wear off. A society of children is always interested in the next new thing, and past achievements tended to lose their cachet very quickly. Marta had even noticed a change in Priya and Sal…a lessening of their previous hero worship. Sal had challenged her in the history lesson, something he would not have done before… After the lesson, it had occurred to her that Sal, as a Mexican, was (nominally at least) a citizen of the North American Axis, and thus bound to want to stand up for his ‘country’. But this was the first time he’d actually had the courage to say it out loud…Naturally where Sal went, so went Priya…
Han was as distant and diffident with her as ever…and after the fiasco of her last attempt at ‘conversation’, she’d tended to give him a wide berth. All in all, to use an expression she’d picked up from a historical teleplay, Marta was somewhat ‘pissed off’, and feeling increasingly lonely and isolated…

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2

Marta had determined that she must do something to re-establish her position amongst her peers. She didn’t exactly put it like that to herself but that’s what it amounted to…
“…but they’re intelligent creatures and we’ve got to try and communicate with them…!”
As was happening with increasing regularity, she was getting het-up about a point of principle,
“Hey…! I think Marta the martyr is turning into a crusty lover…!”
The jibe predictably was from Rai. Worryingly for Marta, it wasn’t only Jorja who laughed,
“Han, you were with me, you saw how they behaved…they were organised…! They had a plan…they must think about things and communicate….they can’t just be dumb animals…!”
As per usual, Han was uncomfortable being put on the spot,
“I don’t know…animals on Earth, like bees…and wolves and lions! They work together but nobody says they’re intelligent…not like humans are…!”
“…but their behaviour is instinctive…! It’s been built up over millions of years…by evolution. The pseudo-crustaceans have never seen anything like us before…so it can’t be instinct. It’s got to be intelligence…!”
Surprisingly, it was Priya who spoke next,
“I know you mean well, Marta! But the crusties are dangerous! They nearly got Sal, and they would have killed you and Han if they’d managed to reach you… I just don’t think it’s a good idea to get too close to them…!”
“But, we don’t even know they wanted to harm me and Han..maybe they wanted to study us…!”
She could tell by the looks of incredulity that she’d lost the argument. Rai made an insulting gesture indicating to the other children that he thought Marta had finally lost her marbles… Nevertheless, she made one more try,
“Priya, you’ve done experimental work with the smaller arthropods! Didn’t you tell me that they were actually smarter than we thought?”
Priya looked doubtful but said nothing,
“So if the little ones are smart, think how much brainier the bigger ones are going to be…!”
“Marta, it’s too dangerous, and we’re not going to do it…!” This was the first time Sal had spoken, and it ended the argument…
But Marta couldn’t let it rest, so she tried Six Gee. Surprisingly she was sympathetic,
“It’s funny you should say that, my dear, we have been thinking along similar lines ourselves…! The large pseudo-crustaceans are clearly social animals, and may have something analogous to intelligence…and we think this could be tested experimentally…!” Nurse Gee paused,
“Naturally, there will be safeguards! We must identify a suitable subject for your experiment. We don’t know how they communicate, and they may be able to do so over considerable distances…! Therefore, we must identify an animal sufficiently isolated from others of its kind to obviate the risk of any other creature responding to its call…you must also devise a suitable test for the animal…maybe a task it could perform for a suitable reward…there is plenty of literature on the subject in the Mission files… And you must be accompanied…”
Her heart sank at this point…none of the children would want to help her…and if they were to be ordered to by the Nurses it would make her even more unpopular…
Nevertheless she commenced her research. The first part of the problem, locating a suitable test subject proved to be the easier. Ever since their ill-fated Mission to Carl Sagan minor all of the local pseudo-crustaceans had been monitored from space by Earthcomm downlink using its array of sensors. The sensors had noted that the twenty surviving animals had dispersed from the crater in the days following the landslip. The survey had also confirmed that these creatures were in fact the only crusties within the hundred kilometre monitoring zone, with each arthropod ordinarily patrolling an extensive territory. Meetings between them were rare and did not appear to result in conflict, with each pseudo-crustacean merely turning around and going about its business. As a result Mission AI judged that these meetings always took place on the boundaries of each animal’s normal territory. Only one crusty had stayed in the vicinity of the crater. Marta spent an hour monitoring the creature, and although the resolution was fuzzy she noted that the animal was both inordinately large and appeared to lack a leg on each side. She named the beast ‘Harvey’.
Devising a suitable experimental methodology proved more difficult. She quickly learned that the study of animal intelligence was known as ‘animal cognition’. She also quickly learned that the indicators of intelligence in animals had been agreed many years ago. They included memory, the ability to plan, the capacity for abstract thought, basic arithmetic including counting and addition, and a demonstrable ability to make and use tools…
How you tested these abilities was more difficult. As far as Marta was concerned the events in Carl Sagan minor demonstrated both memory and the ability to plan on the part of the crusties…but science demanded that results like this were repeatable, and that particular experiment wasn’t something she felt like repeating…
Ideally, the experimental subject would be captive…but that was out of the question…Marta knew she was going out on a limb already…and she had still to ask any of the other children…!
Eventually, she decided on an experiment designed to test the creature’s ability to recognise number and sequence, and programmed the technology she needed. Now all they needed was to gain the creature’s attention. The girl reviewed what they knew about the animals, concluding that it wasn’t much! It was assumed that they were carnivorous, but this was based largely on the attack on Sal. The truth was they had never actually been observed feeding. We now had more data as a result of satellite observation, and the arthropods had been observed to spend long periods in the groves of indigenous vegetation. Whether they were feeding on the pods or hunting smaller arthropods was not known.
Coincidentally, she was to accompany Priya on an expedition that would take them close to Carl Sagan in two days time. The aim of the Mission was to install the latest in a series of repeater stations designed to improve communications with base while planetside. Rather than tell Priya in advance, Marta decided that she would inform the younger girl once they were Out, explaining this was an additional task that Six Gee wanted them to perform.
The Mission went according to plan. They installed the repeater station on a rocky outcrop, hopefully out of reach of any curious arthropods. While Priya was packing up their gear Marta returned to the rova and opened one of the carrying cases, removing a large tablet-shaped visual display unit she walked round to the front of the vehicle. She then used her interface to command the vehicle to grasp the device in its robotic arms,
“What are you doing…?” asked Priya, somewhat taken aback by her teammate’s actions,
“Nothing to worry about…It’s just a late addition to the Mission…something Nurse Gee wants us to do…!
“Why didn’t she say anything at the briefing…?” Priya was confused and worried, “…and why didn’t you say anything…?”
She had to think fast,
“Look, it’s something we were talking about, but we hadn’t actually decided on when we had the briefing…! Gee confirmed it with me while we were installing the mast…!”
“I didn’t hear you talking to her…” said Priya doubtfully,
“She sent me a message…via my ‘face! Look, it’s only a short detour, and we’ll be finished in no time…”
“OK….!” Priya was still dubious about the whole thing, but thankfully didn’t insist on radioing Dome for confirmation…
They set off, curving ‘round behind the crater to the spot where ‘Harvey’ was last reported,
“What’s the display for…?”
“It’s for…a sort of experiment…!”
“What kind of experiment…?”
“You’ll see…!”
Again, as she had hoped, Priya lacked the confidence to question her further…
In the distance, near the top of low hill, Marta could see the unmistakable hulking black shape of a pseudo-crustacean…
“Is that what I think it is…?” said Priya apprehensively,
“That is Harvey…! Our experimental subject…!” she replied, in an attempt at levity,
“I thought we weren’t going to do this…in the meeting, we decided…!”
“Well, I talked to Nurse Gee, and she agreed with me…!” said Marta sharply,
“Look Priya! We’re scientists…we have to find things out about these creatures…! We have to do things even if they’re scary…because we’re the ones here…! Think how important it would be, back on Earth…for Science, if we could prove that not only is there life on A5…but intelligent life…..! Think what that’s going to do for your research project…!”
“…but they’re dangerous…!”
Marta could see the fear in the younger girl’s eyes…and thought this is probably the first time she’s been close to one of the creatures since the incident with Sal…
Priya held the rifle while Marta drove, and she could see the girl’s knuckles whiten as she clutched the weapon,
“There’s really nothing to worry about…! I’ve designed this experiment so we don’t have to leave the rova…and if the creature makes any threatening moves, I promise you…we’ll get out of there as fast as possible…!”
Priya said nothing which Marta took as tacit agreement. ‘Harvey’ was now moving off down the slope. It’s direction of movement taking it at an angle across their path. So far, it had shown no indication at all that it was aware of their existence. She altered course slightly so that rather than intersecting its path they would cross ahead of it, she then turned again so they approached the beast head on…
The pseudo-crustacean halted. Seen close up, the creature was a formidable sight! Marta had stopped ten metres away, and the creature’s head was level with the cab,
‘It must be almost three metres tall…!” she thought.
‘Harvey’ was the largest crusty the expedition had observed. Mission AI believed that the creatures continued growing throughout their lives, and that they were extremely long-lived. Assuming that brain size continued to increase…as was the case with many fish on Earth…this made Harvey one smart pseudo-crustacean!
For a while both parties just stood there observing each other, neither moving. Or at least the children didn’t move, but Marta could see the constant movement of its complicated mouth parts…! She could also hear the rhythmical hiss made by its primitive lungs. Its large eyes were mounted on stalks, rather like crabs back on Earth…but from this range Marta could see the visual organs had a distinct oval pupil, resembling the eyes of fish or mammals….She began to feel apprehensive! The creature was huge! It must be at least eight metres long, and so dark that it appeared to be made out of coal or ebony. It glistened in Alpha B’s orange sunlight,
‘If this is going to work,’ thought Marta, ‘we’ve got to get closer…but nice and slowly, so as not to alarm it…!’
Tentatively she commanded the rova’s arms to raise the display so it was level with the creature’s eyes…then she switched the unit on…
Her experiment consisted of a series of slides and an animation. The first slide was an image of a crusty…the best one they had, taken by rova one in Carl Sagan two months previously. This dissolved into the image of the creature itself as seen through their rova’s forward cam. This dumb show was designed to test one of the fundamentals of intelligence…the notion of self awareness…!
At first the arthropod didn’t react, but then very, very slowly it began to move forward…
“It wants to take a closer look…!” she marvelled. She could feel the excitement building up in her…until it was almost unbearable…
“Yes!” said Priya softly.
Marta had to stop herself from jumping out of her skin at this point. She hadn’t realised she’d spoken out loud…and she’d even forgotten that the other girl was there…
The creature had stopped moving, so Marta decided maybe they could move a little closer… And so by increments the distance was cut between them as each party moved steadily closer,
‘Time for part two…!’ thought Marta, triggering the next display. They were both now monitoring the feed from the unit on their ‘faces. The image of the pseudo-crustacean was replaced by a series of numerals, one to nine, which appeared one by one, accompanied by a simple graphic showing the quantity represented… After this had been repeated several times the screen cleared again…..and this was the part she was really proud of…an animated pseudo-crustacean was shown approaching a rova…the image then cut to its claw moving towards the screen…and touching the first numeral which then lit up…this sequence was repeated several times before the screen cleared and the numbers appeared again…this time they lit up in sequence one to nine until they were all glowing…finally, they were replaced by a picture of human being…
She ran this sequence several times and waited…
The creature then did something completely unexpected! Marta had anticipated that it would touch the screen with one of its claws, indeed she had been willing it to do this for the last several minutes. Instead, tentatively, gently even, it had reached forward with one its complicated mouth parts, presumably normally employed for shovelling food into its maw, and touched the first symbol on the screen. This flared into life…! After a pause that seemed like eternity…it reached forward again and pressed the second symbol…she didn’t dare breathe…beside her Priya was staring as if hypnotised… The second pause was even longer, but finally the creature touched the third symbol…
But then with almost brutal suddenness the spell was broken as the creature reached forward with one of its massive claws and grasped the display unit, crumpling it like paper…! Without seeming effort the arthropod tore the unit free from the rova’s extensors and waved it front of the vehicle’s windshield,
“Time to go, I think…!” said Marta tersely. Throwing the vehicle into reverse she backed away at maximum speed… The arthropod made no attempt to follow them, but stood where it was waving the crumpled screen gently from side to side as if engaged in some kind of weird alien semaphore…
“We better get back…!” said Priya in a small voice…
Marta learned later from Mission AI that the pseudo-crustacean had held on to the VDU for several hours before finally discarding it…even afterwards it had returned several times to the device…picking it up and apparently examining it…as if willing it back to life…

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3

Neither girl said anything on the way back, but Marta didn’t mind. She couldn’t stop thinking about what they had achieved. Feelings of vindication mixed with elation threatened to overwhelm her. She was glad that Priya had offered to drive as she wouldn’t have been able to concentrate, not while she contemplated the magnitude of what had just occurred.
Oddly, Nurse Gee wasn’t there to meet them when they got back. They did see Han and Rai but neither spoke to them. This wasn’t unusual for Han but out of character for the other boy. Neither one would meet Marta’s eyes…
‘They know!’ thought Marta. Suddenly feeling very uncomfortable, she excused herself from Priya who was only too glad to see her go, and headed for her bunk. She didn’t quite make it,
“Marta…!” it was Sal, the last person she wanted to see,
“I can’t believe you just did that…after what we said… After what we decided in the meeting…!”
“Nurse Gee said it was OK…”
“Nurse Gee thought that we had all agreed…and she had no idea that you were just going to go out and do your stupid experiment without telling her…”
“How did you know…?”
“Priya sent me a message on her ‘face while you were driving back… Look, you practically kidnapped her…you put both your lives in danger….and you broke every protocol by going off-Mission…you, of all people….!”
“Look, we were never in danger…”
“Tell that to Priya…that thing could have killed her…”
“You’re forgetting one thing, Sal! The crusties haven’t killed anyone…”
“Not for want of trying…”
“But we’ve killed…I’ve killed two of them…and they’re intelligent…and I can’t forgive myself…” she was now close to tears but didn’t want Sal or anyone to see, so pushing past him, she ran for her bunk…
Marta stayed in her quarters for nearly a day after that… Eventually Six Gee came to see her,
“…I hope I am not disturbing you, my dear…! But we were worried…”
“…you mean you were worried…I don’t see any of the others coming to visit me…!”
For a while Nurse Gee said nothing, as if contemplating how to deal with a resentful child,
“…they are afraid of you, Marta…! They never know what you will do next….and it scares them….!”
“…but I try so hard to do the right thing, while Rai just sits around and whinges, so why is he more popular than me…?”
“Because you ask more of them than he does, my dear!”
If Gee had been capable of sighing she surely would have done so,
“…you have to remember that they are children, Marta! You are the grown up…you understand the challenges that we must face…Rai, Jorja, Han, also Sal and Priya, they want to remain innocent for a while longer…because the alternative is too frightening…!”
“…but now they will all hate me…”
“To be right is not always to be popular, my dear…! And you were right…! You have made a marvellous discovery…and if history has any sense of justice, you will be remembered for it…”
‘I’m like President Park!’ Marta thought to herself later, ‘I believe in talking to others even if they’re not like us…and I believe in finding out the truth…! The others, they just want to stay babies forever…’
In the days that followed her prediction came to pass. She found herself excluded from the games…the conversations of the other children… She still went out on Mission with them, of course, and discussed Mission business… Her ostracising by the others was subtle…but all the more complete for being so…! Leadership of the group passed almost by default to a loose alliance between Sal and Rai…aided and abetted by the other three…
It occurred to her that there was a curious parallel between her situation and the fate of her hero, Madeleine Park… President Park had stood up for what she believed in and had ended up being rejected… eventually, even by those on her own side…
She put her theory to Nurse Gee who said, cryptically,
“….Those who do not understand history, dear, are condemned to repeat it…..”

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Chapter 5. Earthsister >>