FRAN TELLS A STORY ABOUT GRANNY ADA
New was not a word they would have understood. On Planet Gossum people lived entirely off what had been made or grown before. If I had to say what creature they most resembled it would be a carrion one, like an ant, gleaning and cleaning and making do - except they were all too different to really be like ants - they were scavengers - yes - scavenger creators! that's what they were. People called Gossum: Poor Gossum - low grade - high activity, and said, "If you lived there, my dear, you would spend half your working time farming and half of it picking up things to make and mend, but mark this! you would spend all your waking life talking".
My granny Ada Dementiana was a great talker, she came from there to Oldearth by accident. She and her college friends were headed for Prisdel on a day out but the bus driver missed the 462 bus strobe and came in on a 47 one instead. By the time they had alighted and stopped talking for a minute long enough to realise their mistake - Prisdel being nothing like Oldearth - the bus had gone again.
You know, Gossums were very resourceful and clever but really had no idea what the rest of the universe was like. No-one had vids let alone threedee ones. None of them had been away from Gossum before so you can imagine what it was like to come to such a profligate planet as Oldearth. Ada kept a journal, she had stitched random photos together and wrote on the back of them - like everyone on Gossum, she believed in the spirit of the collage, the shock of pain and pleasure as we turn a forboding page!
We know from her journal that at first she thought everyone on Oldearth had poor eyesight because they wore spectacles and they often stumbled. Of course they had glasses on so they could watch soaps all the time and anytime, as well as see to negotiate their way. Vidspecs - she had never seen them before! but when she did find out I think she knew it was, well, as she said: "a bit unhealthy!"
She talks about the fact that everyone wore new all the time - she keeps on repeating new - playing with it - as if she is both shocked and delighted with the thought of it - " new cars, new clothes, new gadgets, new smoke, new cough, new sky, new this, new that!" But then after a few days: "Found some old new clothes in a second-hand shop, fancy patterns - very, very, very cheap - yum, yum, yummy! - did some unpicking, cutting and snipping - then some adding and stitching and - wow - what a sight! Look now! - I am made up! Now I am at home!"
A few pages on and she is going on about the rubbish: " Its up to the eaves in some places. I ask them why. They say all the valleys are filled, so there is nowhere else for it to go. I say to them, "'Look, where I come from we would have been all over this, ransacked it! its a treasure trove, there's enough prime material here to make you all trillionaires!' But the fact is that new is so easy to come by that new is what they must all have!" And a week later she is complaining about the air, and that she will have to wear a gas mask, and don't they know about converting polycarbonates to oxygen and the rest, and why does everyone talk about Buggerenders all the time, and why can't you get fresh water anywhere?
It turns out that Granny's lost party all got temporary jobs so as to get by whilst they waited to return to Gossum. Some of them made metal and electronic things from scrap they picked up, and some like Ada made fashion garments from rags and remnants for the costume trade and called their wares the New New New. But in the week before their bus was due the fuzz got to hear about them and they were taken in for questioning and then thrown in gaol on suspicion of unlicensed labouring, pilfering from waste sites, going round undesignated areas, not paying taxes and looking suspicious. Then there was a court case and they were declared illegal aliens and there was another case and they were accused of being terrorists and ordered to be deported to Oblov and other planets for reprocessing, which really meant that because one had been sent to another quite separate administration one could be tortured.
It was reciprocal really. When Oblov collected some suspicious visitors they would be shipped off to Oldearth and tortured there, and nobody the wiser where they had gone. Why does anyone want to torture anyone, eh? Is it retribution?
You ask why if they were all young and innocent they would be so mistreated? Why didn't anyone in authority say: "Hang on, this isn't right, this stinks, these people seem OK so why should we not believe them? It was our Interstella bus brought them here, why don't we just send them back?" But the fact was that they were different - I mean no basic difference physically - but they seemed different in a weird yet undefinable way and they looked like they could see what was going on and the Oldearthers felt that just by being there and asking questions was unsettling, especially when Gossums asked things like: "Look if half a trillion people are watching Buggerenders are you sure you want to as well? Wouldn't you like to be different?"
I think it was because Oldearthers felt guilty that they contrived all sorts of bogus accusations to hurt people from other planets and get rid of them. According to Ada they said things like: "You're after our blokes! You're scroungers after our generous welfare give-away thises or thatses! You've come to snatch our children! You have come to steal our jobs!"
It wasn't more than three years after this the waste caught fire and set the air alight and the whole of Oldearth went up like a catherine wheel, and then it was easy for people from other planets to say: "Well they should have done this and done that and it could have been avoided." But those Oldearthers were so soft headed from the vids they were blind to the signs, when the blaze started they thought it was the next spectacular episode of Buggerenders. The fact is, they needed strangers however weird they looked! They should have listened. If they had not been so keen to deport them, strangers might have shown them how not to die.
Most of Granny's friends disappeared on Oblov. She was on the run for a year before she got away dressed in gent's clothes. She slipped on board a188 and the bus conductor gave her a conspiratorial wink and didn't look at her papers or tickets and when she alighted in Farout at the end of the line she invited the conductor out to dinner - there still were conductors on Interstella buses at that time. They had fourteen children - all girls.
Why had no-one at Oldearth bus station suspected her of being anything other than a regular Oldearth female? Her gent's suit was brand new!
Emile Sercombe
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