Dome house.
CHAPTER 18 – A NEW LIFE
09:10 (East Africa Time)
Tuesday, November 09, 2320
Todonyang Refugee Camp
Northwestern Kenya, near the borders with Sudan and Ethiopia
Africa
Nelson Onyango, who was about to enter the small prefabricated shelter he would use for his work, looked again around him at the sprawling refugee camp, with its hundreds of tents packed like sardines within the protective perimeter fence of the camp. The fence was there to protect the refugees from the depredations of passing thieves and looters, not to hold prisoner the 49,000 refugees living inside it, if you could call that ‘living’. Only nine kilometers away to the Northeast was the border with Ethiopia, from where most of the refugees living in the camp came. There were also a few thousand refugees from the South Sudan, which bordered Kenya to the Northwest. A few kilometers to the East of the camp, across some semi-arid terrain, were the waters of Lake Turkana. Nelson, a professional aid worker and human resources specialist, knew well the region, being a native of Northern Kenya, and he spoke fluently five of the languages and dialects used in this region of Africa. Today, with luck, he was going to be able to help a few of those unfortunate refugees escape this miserable camp.
Entering the air-conditioned shelter, Nelson smiled and bowed his head to the young Kenyan woman who would assist him in his interviews by finding and guiding to this shelter the refugees on his list of candidates for resettlement.
‘’Good morning, Miss Obando!’’
‘’Good morning, Mister Onyango. I have the list of refugees who claim to satisfy the basic requirements of your employer. It is however quite long. How do you wish to proceed?’’
‘’Let’s concentrate first on family groups of between three and seven persons with experience in farm work, cattle raising or work in hydroponic gardens. Another category that has a high priority in my mind is that of single mothers with one or two small children or infants. On the other hand, my employer is not keen on getting single, unaccompanied men and teenagers, unless they have advanced education and some special skills.’’
‘’Do you know why your employer doesn’t want single men, Mister Onyango? And who is your employer, if I may ask? This whole thing seems to be of a quite sensitive nature, judging from the discretion about it.’’
Nelson stared for a short moment at the young Aid For Africa worker before answering her.
‘’The reason why my visit has been kept discreet is that my employer, who is a member of the Spacers League Council, is afraid that agitators, ex-combatants or covert agents of the Southern Federation could try to get selected for resettlement, in which case they could cause troubles or inflame old hatreds among the refugees we will select for resettlement. Families with young children are much less likely to be such possible agitators or covert agents, and so do single mothers with children.’’
‘’I see! And if the candidates ask me where they could end up being resettled, what do I tell them? This is another information that has been kept vague, sir.’’
‘’I intend to show later on to the refugees who will be selected a video explaining where they will live. You will of course be welcome to watch it then. For the moment, tell them that they will go live off this Earth, on a Spacers settlement.’’
‘’You are really killing me with the suspense, Mister Onyango.’’
‘’Sorry about that, but the instructions from my employer were quite strict. And please, simply call me ‘Nelson’.’’
‘’Only if you call me ‘Winnie’.’’
‘’Deal! So, according to the priority criteria I gave you, who am I going to interview first, Winnie?’’
The young woman looked for a moment at the screen of her laptop computer before answering him.
‘’I have the Gebre, an Ethiopian family consisting of a couple in their late twenties and early thirties with three preteen children.’’
‘’Sounds good! Who would be next after that?’’
‘’Then, I have for you the Belay, another Ethiopian family. The parents are aged respectively 35 and 32 and they have a total of four children with ages between seven and thirteen.’’
‘’Perfect! You can go get them while I set up my kit here. Once I start my interviews, go fetch a new family on your list every time one family comes out.’’
‘’Understood, Nelson!’’
As Winnie Obando walked out of the shelter, Nelson, a 44 year-old, tall and thin black man who wore a short, well-trimmed beard, put his briefcase on the desk he was going to use and started taking out his equipment in order to set it up. First out was his laptop, followed by a small camera on tripod and a fingerprint recognition pad, both of which he plugged to his laptop. A small charger and UPS unit was next, which he plugged to one of the shelter’s power outlet. Powering up his laptop, Nelson opened a couple of specialized programs which he was going to use during his interviews, then opened a copy of the list of candidates Winnie had read from. He couldn’t help shake his head slowly on reviewing the very long list: it represented in reality years of suffering and misery endured by thousands of people through no fault of their own. If it would have been solely his decision at play, he would have simply signed up all of those people on the spot. However, New Haven’s infrastructures and services, while growing fast, were still limited and could only accommodate a finite number of refugees at this time. He and the other human resources specialists and aid workers hired by Tina Forster had been given a two-day tour of New Haven before returning to Earth yesterday, so he was very conscious of what the present limits were. What he could do, however, was to work fast and not waste time during his interviews, in order to meet as many candidates per day as he could.
A few soft knocks on the door made Nelson look up from his computer some six minutes later.
‘’Come in!’’
Winnie pushed the door open and entered, then invited in two adults and three preteen children, all dressed in clean but well worn robes and sandals. Nelson then addressed the family in English, not because he couldn’t or wouldn’t speak their language, but to gauge their true level of proficiency in English. That criteria was in fact one of the most important ones listed by Tina Forster and Nelson completely understood why: when you were literally building a new world from scratch, you didn’t want to waste precious time and resources by having to put everybody through an accelerated language program. In this case, a basic working knowledge of English would be sufficient. While that fact pained Nelson, many of the original languages and dialects originally spoken around Africa had disappeared or faded away during the last three centuries, as more common and widespread languages, like English, French and Arabic, became official languages taught in African schools in the place of traditional languages.
‘’Please, sit down, my good people.’’
‘’Thank you, sir!’’ replied the father, a man in his early thirties. Nelson waited until the two adults and three children had sat on the row of chairs facing his desk, then looked at the man.
‘’I will now ask you to present yourselves individually, so that I could gauge the level of English proficiency of each of you. Are you comfortable with talking in English, or would you prefer to use Amharic instead?’’
In a way, that question was a trick one: if the family’s English proved too poor to be used during this interview, then it would be one strike against their case. To Nelson’s relief, all five of them nodded their heads and accepted to use English, each speaking a few English words in the process. The father then presented himself first.
‘’My name is Solomon Gebre. I am 33 years old and I came from Awasa, in Ethiopia, where I was working in an hydroponic gardens facility, preparing the seeds and mixing the fertilizer solutions.’’
On a look from her husband, the mother then spoke next.
‘’My name is Saba Teferi and I am 28 years old. I mostly stayed home to care for our children but I also raised a few chickens which helped supplement our diet with eggs and meat.’’
Nelson nodded his head as he typed that information in his laptop computer: he knew that, in Ethiopia, people didn’t use a ‘family’ name. Instead, everybody had a personal first name, followed by the first name of their father, a so-called patronymic. Sometimes, the first name of the person’s grandfather would also be added as a middle name. Nelson next smiled to the oldest of the three children, a boy close to ten.
‘’And you, my boy?’’
To Nelson’s satisfaction, the boy’s English proved the best of the lot to date, probably thanks to his schooling, which was now made entirely in English in Ethiopia.
‘’My name is Dawit Gebre. I am nine. I was studying at a primary school in Awasa, until the drought came and forced us out.’’
The next one was a young and shy girl who would have been truly pretty if not for her scarily thin body and emaciated face. In fact, the whole family looked seriously undernourished.
‘’I’m Beza. I am seven.’’
The last one was a toddler boy sitting in the lap of his mother.
‘’I’m Amare.’’ said the boy before holding up three fingers. Nelson smiled at that and typed that information, then looked at the family in general.
‘’Can you tell me how long you have been in this camp and the detailed reasons about what forced you out of your old home?’’
As he had expected, the father, as the patriarch of the family, answered him.
‘’We arrived here nearly two years ago with nothing but the clothes on our backs. The situation had already been bad for years in Awasa, due to the scarcity of water. Then, the last drought hit and the town’s lake completely dried up. The government did nothing to help, while waves of refugees from the East, where the drought had been going on for years, washed over Awasa, looting and taking the little food and water left in town. We tried to resist and protect our homes, but there were too many of them, with many of the looters being armed as well. We had to flee our house just before it was ransacked, then walked for nearly three weeks before arriving here.’’
Nelson gave the man a sympathetic look: many more people could tell a similar story, as Ethiopia, a member state of the African Union and of the Southern Federation, contrary to Kenya, which was a neutral state, had been all but officially a failed state for decades. The Makambo Regime had done nothing to help the little people of Ethiopia through a series of devastating droughts and famines, stealing instead much of the international aid sent to the country and stashing away the money from their sales into foreign bank accounts. Now, much of the country, which had always been quite arid, was turning into a permanent desert, condemning Ethiopia to a bleak future and sending millions of people into exile in more fortunate countries. Kenya, as a well administered country with a truly democratic government, had received more than its fair share of refugees and was struggling to cope with that burden. The discreet offer to help from Tina Forster had thus been received warmly in Nairobi, with the Kenyan government promising to support the resettlement campaign as much as it could.
‘’I see! Mister Solomon, you said that you worked in an hydroponic gardens facility. Did you learn your job as you went, or did you follow formal courses in hydroponics?’’
‘’I held an official professional certificate in hydroponics from the Awasa Agrarian Institute, sir. Unfortunately, my certificate was lost when our house was looted.’’
‘’And for how long did you actually work in an hydroponic garden, Mister Solomon?’’
‘’I worked at the Awasa Farms for fourteen years, sir, and had risen to the post of shift supervisor.’’
That last information finally decided Nelson and he selected a new program while smiling to the Ethiopian man.
‘’Well, Mister Solomon, you and your family appear to fill nicely the requirement set by the corporation which hired me to interview and select refugees from this camp. There is however one last, crucial point I want to clarify.’’
‘’Yes?’’ said Solomon, anxious, while his wife tensed up with nervousness.
‘’If your family is hired and resettled in another place, it will end up living among a very mixed human community, with people coming from either Spacers League worlds or from other countries on Earth. You may even meet people from the Somali Region, the same region from which the people who looted your house came. My question to you and all of your family is this: can you honestly tell me that you will be able to forget any past hatreds and prejudices that you may have held or are still holding? Please understand as well that, where you would resettle, the laws state that there is a complete equality of the sexes and that discrimination on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation is strictly forbidden. Are you ready to accept those laws and live under them?’’
‘’We are! The only thing I want is to be able to give a new, meaningful life to my family and to do honest work.’’
‘’Then, I believe that your family fully satisfies the requirements of our resettlement program, Mister Solomon. I will now take your individual pictures, along with your fingerprints, in order to sign you up. Before you ask, know that this program involves your resettlement on a new Spacers world, another planet which has been recently discovered. You and your family will thus be able to start a brand new life on a new, virgin world. Congratulations!’’
The whole family erupted into cheers at Nelson’s last words and nearly danced together in joy, watched by a moved Nelson. This was by far the part of his job that he liked the most: to help give back hope to others.
19:51 (East Africa Time)
Landing pad of the Todonyang Refugee Camp
Northwest Kenya
A crowd of 138 men, women and children were waiting near the improvised landing pad of the refugee camp, set outside the fenced perimeter, when a large passenger shuttle emerged from the obscurity of the evening sky and landed nearly silently on the pad, its navigation lights blinking in the darkness. As soon as its aft access ramp was lowered, a handful of aid workers and staff from the camp gently encouraged the refugees towards it, with a few Kenyan soldiers present to provide security to the shuttle and the departing refugees. Saba Teferi, her three year-old son Amare in her arms, hesitated a bit as she was approaching the space shuttle, stopping and turning her head to look towards the Northeast. Her husband Gebre, who was carrying the little possessions they had been given after arriving at the camp, also stopped near her and saw tears in Saba’s eyes.
‘’What’s the matter, Saba? We are finally leaving this camp for a better life.’’
‘’Yes, but will this mean that we will never see again our country of birth?’’
Nelson Onyango, who was close enough to hear her words, hurried to the couple and spoke softly to Saba.
‘’Don’t be afraid about that: while you will be living on another planet far from here, there will be a regular liaison between New Haven and Earth. You will be able to return for visits or vacation in the future, when you will feel like it. I was told that there will even be daily video news and entertainment programs from Earth, which will be recorded in advance and then brought by ship with only a day or two of delay. That way, you will be able to stay informed about how things are going in and around Ethiopia.’’
‘’They will allow us to come back for visits?’’ asked Saba, having difficulty believing that. Nelson gave her his best reassuring smile.
‘’Of course they will! I met Captain Tina Forster, who owns New Haven, and I can tell you that you won’t find a more generous or compassionate person around. Come, I will accompany you and your family inside the shuttle.’’
Somewhat reassured by Nelson’s presence, Saba walked to the access ramp, little Amare still in her arms, followed by her husband and her two oldest children. They were met at the entrance by a young woman dressed in an apple green adjusted coverall with a few patches sewn on it.
‘’Welcome aboard! May I ask you to each put in succession one thumb on this fingerprint recognition pad?’’
The five Ethiopians did so in turn, with the crewmember then nodding her head and smiling to them.
‘’Thank you very much! Here are your boarding passes. You will have to present them later on, after our arrival on New Haven.’’
‘’Will the trip be very long, miss?’’ Asked Gebre.
‘’The trip between the two solar systems will actually be nearly instantaneous, sir. However, climbing to Earth orbit and then descending from orbit once in the Wolf 1061 System will take about one hour. If you will now step forward, my colleague will show you to your seats.’’
‘’Well, this is where we have to part, I guess.’’ said Nelson Onyango. ‘’I wish you a good trip and a nice new life on New Haven.’’
‘’Thank you!’’ replied Gebre while shaking Nelson’s hand. ‘’You were most kind with my family.’’
‘’It was a pleasure, sir.’’
Nelson then walked back down the ramp to go speak with another family who was lining to board the shuttle. Himself feeling a pang of the heart, Gebre then led his family inside the passenger cabin proper and was quickly met along the aisle by another female crewmember.
‘’Could I please see your boarding passes, please?... Thank you! Your seats will be in Row 23, four rows ahead, and are the three seats on the right side of this aisle, plus two of the seats on center section.’’
Following her indications, the family was soon in its assigned seats, with seven year-old Beza sitting next to the right side window. Saba, who sat next to her, then saw that the ‘window’ was actually a large 3D holoscreen. Similar but smaller holoscreens were in fact installed on the back of each seat, allowing all the passengers to have their own view of the outside of the shuttle. Some six minutes later, the images on the seat viewing screens changed to show one of the flight attendants they had met, speaking in English.
‘’Good evening and welcome aboard the shuttle MERCURY, of the New Haven Star Lines. We will be departing for New Haven shortly. If I could have your attention for a minute, I will explain to you the safety procedures for this flight, as well as describe to you the facilities on this shuttle.’’
The members of the family, none of whom had flown in any kind of craft before, listened religiously as the flight attendant spoke, buckling their seat belts when told to. The Gebre children, like nearly all the other children aboard and many of the adults, shouted excited exclamations when their shuttle started rising from the ground. Those shouts however quickly subsided as they gained altitude and started seeing the curvature of the Earth and the African continent under them, the view from above mesmerizing the passengers. Some twenty minutes after takeoff, as they had passed Earth’s low orbit, a brief orange flash surprised the ex-refugees. Saba, who then looked at the lateral view screen of her row, nearly choked with astonishment at the sight of a nearby red star.
‘’GEBRE, THE SUN HAS CHANGED COLORS! IT IS NOW RED!’’
All the passengers crowded at once at the viewing screens on the right side of the cabin. The voice of a pilot then came out of the cabin’s overhead speakers.
‘’Ladies and gentlemen, we are now in the Wolf 1061 System. This system is centered around what is called a red dwarf star, a star smaller than our Sun and also cooler. The system counts three planets, an asteroid belt and a total of four moons. You will soon see on our right side the second planet of the system, which is now known as ‘New Shouria’ and which is the new home world of the Koorivars, who were themselves made refugees after their planet was pulverized by a wandering brown dwarf planet some 361 years ago. New Haven, our destination, is the first and biggest of three moons orbiting New Shouria. We should land there in about 45 minutes.’’
Gebre, like his wife and children, was nearly hypnotized by the view of New Shouria they soon got: the planet was half covered with blue seas and numerous lakes of various sizes dotted its continents, which were definitely quite different from those on Earth. Many white clouds also floated around the skies of the planet, making it look like a perfect haven for life. Their attention soon shifted to a big moon they approached after turning half around the planet. As the shuttle got closer to it, Gebre was struck by how big it appeared to be. Its surface also looked a lot like Africa: a place of savannahs, lakes and mountain ranges. Somehow, that helped partly reassure Gebre about their new home world.
‘’Look, my children: there is our new home.’’
As they avidly examined New Haven from orbit, their seat viewing screens also showed the moon, while the voice of a flight attendant came out of the cabin’s speakers.
‘’Ladies and gentlemen, we are now arriving in orbit of New Haven, the first moon of New Shouria and your new home. New Haven is slightly smaller than Earth and has a mass equivalent to eighty percent of the mass of Earth. The felt gravity is inferior to that on Earth, at 0.78 G and its atmosphere is also slightly thinner than Earth’s atmosphere, with a bit less oxygen in it. For those of you who were living on high plateaus above an altitude of 2,000 meters, New Haven will thus feel to you much like home. Its climate is also quite similar to that of Northern Africa. Being tidally locked to New Shouria, New Haven always presents the same face to its parent planet, like the Moon does with Earth. It and New Shouria complete an orbit around the central red star in a bit less than eighteen of our days. Because of this and of the small light level differences between the local ‘days’ and ‘nights’, it was decided to keep using both the time system and calendar in use on Earth. We are thus still officially on Tuesday, November ninth of 2320 and the time, set on Greenwich Universal Time plus two hours for your time zone, is 21:18 in the evening. If you look at the bottom right corner of your seat viewing screens, you will see the precise Universal Time displayed, so that you could change the time on your watches and wrist videophones. Our final destination is the village of ‘New Hope’, your new home town, situated on the shores of Lake Avalon and some seven kilometers northeast of Camelot, the administrative center of New Haven. The mayor of New Hope, Alice Zedong, will be greeting you on arrival and will have assistants ready to bring you to your respective homes after a preliminary briefing on local conditions and general rules. The temperature in New Hope is presently 27 degrees Celsius and the sky is mostly clear, with a few dispersed clouds and with a nine kilometer per hour wind from the East.’’
Gebre and Saba exchanged pleased looks then: that sounded a lot like a typical day in Ethiopia. The fact that they would live on the shores of a lake would also remind them of their past, happy days in Awasa. Young Dawit, their nine year-old son, suddenly pointed an excited finger at an orbiting object now visible on the screens.
‘’Hey, a spaceship!’’
Gebre and Saba concentrated their attention on that object on hearing Dawit. That object, which the shuttle was approaching, soon revealed itself to be huge, attracting a comment from Saba.
‘’My god, that ship is as big as a mountain.’’
Gebre, fascinated by the big ship, could only agree with his wife.
‘’I didn’t believe that such big ships existed, or were even possible.’’
One flight attendant passing by on the aisle, temporarily stopped and smiled to them.
‘’This is the KOSTROMA, the armed cargo ship belonging to Captain Forster, who is also the owner and CEO of New Haven.’’
As the attendant continued down the aisle, Gebre and Saba exchanged knowing looks.
‘’So, this is the infamous KOSTROMA our government was so vilifying.’’
‘’Yes, but all that was probably just propaganda, Saba. How could someone offering us a new life be as evil as our government made that Captain Forster to be?’’
The couple then fell silent and stared at the viewing screens as the shuttle flew by the huge ship, something that took many seconds, enough to deeply impress them.
‘’It certainly deserves the qualifier of ‘mighty’. Hopefully, Captain Foster will prove as benevolent and generous as we hope her to be, Saba.’’
‘’I am also hoping for that, Gebre. Our family’s future is depending on it.’’
Their shuttle soon entered the atmosphere of New Haven, producing a somewhat terrifying show of flames and howling hypersonic winds as they went down towards the surface. However, their flight soon became more normal as their speed went down. The surface they were now overflying proved to be covered mostly with savannah-like fields of dispersed trees and long grass, with a number of small lakes and streams, the latter flowing down from the numerous hills and mountain ranges dotting the surface of the moon. They then started to overfly at medium altitude the blue surface of a big lake, with that view exciting Saba.
‘’Look at that splendid lake, kids! It appears even bigger than Lake Turkana and is way bigger than Lake Awasa. Living on the shores of such a large lake should make life quite pleasant. For one thing, we will have plenty of water available.’’
As the shuttle was approaching what looked like a small town on the northwest shores of the lake, Saba saw another shuttle fly by them, apparently climbing back to orbit after taking off from the town.
‘’You saw that other shuttle, Gebre? Maybe other refugees were just dropped off in our new town.’’
‘’Probably, Saba. Everything we saw and heard up to now seems to point to a large scale resettlement program centered on this New Haven. I would be very surprised if we would be the only refugees to have been transported here. However, the mayor of our new town is supposed to brief us on arrival, so let’s just watch and wait for the moment.’’