CHAPTER 3 – LIVING oN A NEW WORLD
07:16 (New Hope Time)
Friday, November 26, 2320 (Earth calendar)
Gebres’ family house, Number 12, Farmer’s Lane
Village of New Hope, New Haven (moon of planet New Shouria)
Wolf 1061 System, 13.8 light-years from Earth
‘’DAWIT! BEZA! STOP PLAYING WITH THAT BIKO AND GET READY TO GO TO SCHOOL!’’
The nine-year-old boy and seven-year-old girl sighed in regret at that command from their mother and started getting back on their feet. However, before returning inside their dome house to get their school bags, Beza gave a last piece of bread to the tiny quadruped they had been watching and feeding. That quadruped, called a biko, was a small and very cute alien lookalike of a squirrel, but with a blue-green fur.
‘’Here you go, Diri! Sorry, but we have to go now.’’
The biko quickly grabbed the piece of bread with its two four-fingered forward legs and, sitting on its ass, started munching the bread with gusto as Beza ran inside the family home. Going to the kitchen, the ex-Ethiopian refugee girl put on her school backpack before getting a quick kiss from her mother.
‘’Have a good day at school, my little treasure.’’
‘’Thanks, Mother!’’
Going down the stairs from the family lounge to the main entrance and taking her bicycle out of its rack, situated in a small storage space on the ground floor of the dome house, Beza rolled it out and got on it, pedaling to join up with her brother, who had been waiting for her. As a world where ecology-friendly, non-polluting solutions were mandatory, bicycles were highly encouraged as a means of individual transportation. Allied with the warm, generally sunny climate and the short distances within the village of New Hope, that meant that bicycles were indeed an ideal local mode of transportation. Since only two more villages like New Hope, plus the capital city of Camelot, all grouped around the western shores of Lake Avalon, had been mostly completed and had some population, the need for longer range mass transit was still not evident. Construction and installation of facilities on the large moon had after all been going on for barely over a month and there was still only a grand total of some 7,800 persons now living on New Haven, of which less than 1,400 lived in New Hope. However, things were happening at a dizzying speed, especially in the eyes of the thousands of ex-refugees from many poor areas on Earth who had been selected and accepted to come live a new life on New Haven. Beza’s family was part of those refugees, having arrived here only a little more than two weeks ago from their refugee camp in Kenya, near the border with Ethiopia. Now, Beza was able to go to a normal school and ate to her content, like the rest of her family. More importantly, they could now live normal lives away from violence, war, ethnic strife and privations.
Back at the family house, their father, Solomon Gebre, was also ready to leave home to head to one of the huge, multi-level hydroponics gardens where he worked.
A tall but thin 33-year-old man with dark black skin, Solomon didn’t have to grab a lunch box before kissing goodbye to his wife: like in the school frequented by his two older children, meals were provided to all at noontime at his place of work. Even his supervisors and the manager of the hydroponics gardens ate the same menu as him for lunch. This, along with other social measures and facilities, reflected the ideal that directed about everything on New Haven: to build a mostly agrarian, ecologically-friendly society where disenfranchised and dispossessed unfortunate innocents could find a new, simple life where basic human needs would be provided free to all, irrespective of social rank or personal fortune, as long as you were ready to participate in the development of the society and do some honest work. At first, right after their arrival from their old refugee camp in Kenya, Solomon had been a bit skeptical about those promises, his past life experience having accustomed him to abusive employers, corrupt officials and brutal local thugs. However, he had quickly found out that his fears were groundless.
Since his dome house sat a mere 200 meters from the hydroponics building where he worked, Solomon didn’t even have to use his bicycle and he started walking down the paved pedestrian trail that passed by the first row of five multi-level garden buildings of the village. As he walked, he was able to see some 500 meters away the gleaming surface of Lake Avalon, partially visible through the trees and buildings of the village. Solomon had been dumbstruck to see a lake that looked so normal and Earth-like on a world so distant from his native planet, but one of the supervisors at his place of work had told him that many more new worlds had been found where conditions and vistas were very similar to Earth. He had already led his happy family a couple of times to the recreational beach area of the village, where they had found a pristine beach with fine, clean sand and equally clean sweet water.
Arriving at the garden building where he worked, Solomon entered it and simply walked to his work section after going through the staff’s cafeteria room, situated next to the entrance. Here, everything worked on an honor system, so he had no need to punch in his time of arrival. Seven other coworkers, five men and two women, had already arrived at his section, which grew fresh lettuce in long, narrow and shallow hydroponics basins stacked four-high. Despite the fact that his section had been allotted only 3,000 square meters of floor surface, that was more than sufficient to produce enough fresh lettuce to provide for the needs of the village and still have a sizeable surplus that could be exported to the nearby town of Camelot. However, since the gardens had been completed and equipped only weeks ago, the first crop was still growing up, like most of the other crops cultivated in New Hope. That temporary gap had however been covered by the importation of fresh foodstuff from Spacer worlds in the Solar System, where similar hydroponics techniques were widely employed.
With two more employees joining them in the next few minutes, Solomon quickly got to work, verifying the levels of nutrient solutions in the basins, along with their temperature and acidity level, or Ph, which had to be maintained at 5.9,. In maybe three weeks they were going to be able to harvest their first crop of big, crispy and fresh lettuces, which came in three varieties. Then, they would plant new seeds and would start a new, eight-week growing cycle, producing more bio-clean lettuces. Such hydroponics techniques had proved their worth on Earth for a good three centuries now and Solomon, who held a professional diploma in hydroponics he had gained while still living in Ethiopia, was most familiar with them. Happy to practice again his old profession, he worked methodically and efficiently for four hours, along with his coworkers, before a small bell chime called the lunch hour. Another ex-refugee, this one originally from the Kashmir region of Earth, smiled to him as they walked together towards the cafeteria.
‘’I wonder what will be on the menu for lunch today, Solomon. They keep surprising us every day.’’
‘’Well, the menu should stabilize in a month or two, when the first crops of this village will be ready. But we truly can’t complain about the present food we eat, right, Rahul?’’
That made Rahul Duwal, a solid young man with a short beard and long moustache, grin.
‘’Complain? How could we in all justice complain about the food here? We eat to our content, which is a lot more than what my family was experiencing back in the Kashmir.’’
‘’Too true!’’ replied Solomon. They soon arrived in the cafeteria, where some sixty workers and supervisors were already lined up at the service counter. Solomon glanced at the old-fashioned chalkboard on which the day’s menu had been scribbled.
‘’Hum, they have curried chicken with Basmati rice, along with Italian spaghetti Bolognese.’’
‘’Curried chicken and Basmati rice?’’ exclaimed happily Rahul Duwal. ‘’Hell, I’m going to stuff myself with that. I hope that their curry is a decent one.’’
One of the two women who were helping to serve the workers, a graying and feisty Indian woman, heard him and shook her large service spoon in front of Rahul’s face.
‘’I prepared that curry dish, Rahul, so don’t come complaining about it!’’
‘’Then, it should be good. Please excuse me, Indira.’’
‘’I’ll accept your excuses…this time.’’
A few other workers, including Solomon, laughed at that exchange. Deciding to test the curry dish, he asked for a portion of it and smelled it quickly after being served.
‘’Hmmm! It certainly smells good, Rahul.’’
‘’Then, let’s go find a table, so we can sit down and eat.’’
They ended up sitting at a nearly empty table after asking the permission of the young teenage girl already eating at the table. Solomon knew her as being an orphan and ex-refugee from the Kashmir named Priyanka. Despite being quite thin from years of poverty, the fifteen-year-old could easily be said to be very pretty.
‘’So, Priyanka, how is the curried chicken?’’ asked Rahul while sitting down at the table with his food tray. The teenager smiled to him in response.
‘’It is truly excellent, Rahul. Indira did a good job on it and the curry spice she used is the real deal, not some kind of approximation produced outside of India.’’
‘’Good!’’ simply said Rahul before starting to eat his food with gusto. Solomon did so as well, but at a more measured pace than his comrade, while discretely eyeing pretty Priyanka a couple of times. Orphaned teenagers and even orphaned children were common around New Hope, as they had formed a sizeable minority of the population of the refugee camps on Earth from where they all came from. Such orphaned teenagers had been assigned on arrival on New Haven a tiny but still comfortable studio in an apartment block, along with other orphaned teenagers of the same sex. Those teenagers, most of them with little or no formal prior education except for some basic reading and writing courses received in their refugee camps, had still proven to be willing, hard-working persons able to fill the simpler, non-technical jobs around New Hope. In the case of Priyanka, she had been assigned to the section in charge of keeping the hydroponics complex clean, with part of her day also spent in a local class for adults, where she could gradually catch up with her deficit in formal education. That was another aspect in which New Haven was fulfilling its vocation as a resettlement world for destitute refugees from Earth. As Solomon thought about that while eating and enjoying his curry dish, he mentally thanked his good fortune for being here with his family, free to build a new life for themselves.