An Excerpt from "Coming Home"

A longer post today because my last one was delayed! Below I have a special treat, a short essay by Yuris Okan, but first do remember that my reading at Rain or Shine is this week, thursday the 20th, at 6:30. Please do come and please do invite whoever you like! This is an all ages/all types event and I would love to pack the house! And with out further delay, here is a bit from Okan, co-author of my next book "Coming Home"

***

Waiting at the Ume-Hoffbrau

Yuris Ookan had several drafts for Coming Home. Much of the work was simplified, synthesized, or reworked and made it into the final version. A few pieces were cut from the final draft but returned as separate articles. The following first appeared in the 2466 edition Autumn of Trans-Solar, which focused on Gardenza's post war transformation into a tourist destination and manufacturer of prescription drugs. It's provenience within Coming Home is uncertain and it may be a fabricated event, or cut from chapter four to maintain a sense of suspense.

+ + +

The delay for the train to Ume-Hoffbrau proved an ordeal. After three hours of waiting people began to get restless. The platform was a hot white slab of calcicrete that reflected the sun back upward. The buzz of off balanced cooling fans in the depot mixed with the distant sounds of traffic, a radio from the ticket booth, and waves of conversation amid the crowd. Now and then the wind would kick up, bringing wafting scents from the choked jungle across the train yard, but the air it brought was also hotter, and smothered with its humidity. At first, the lines were cut throat, individuals losing their place for the slightest infraction with bickering or bribery as the only recourse. After six hours the mercenary tone subsided a little. It was down to skeleton crews, individual families and friends taking turns to wait on the baking hot platform while their fellow travelers ran out to find food, water, or entertainment. Solo travelers, like me, were beholden to the kindness of these strangers, and after a few tries I managed to flag down a young girl careening through the crowd and beg her to refill my water bottle.

“Yeah, fine, it's done,” She consented with a deep country accent, the sort that seems pushy in adults but is still cute in children. When she returned I realized I had walked into a punchline. She wouldn’t release my bottle without something in return. I managed to stir up a few coins forgotten in a back pocket, paying probably more than five times what bottled water would have cost for what was certainly a portion of unsafe tap water. At that time it no longer mattered. It was late afternoon and the stench of sweat had flooded out all other smells. A thick pall of it mixed with tobacco smoke and the syrupy sweetness of Cadia fruit, brought by a local vendor who was apparently the first in town to hear that the trains were late. She must have had hundreds of them for sale, and her children ran rampant through the station selling as fast as they could hand them out. By the eighth hour of waiting, as evening fell, everyone who had nothing else to eat had bought one. This included me, even though I hate Cadia fruit. It’s an egg shaped thin skinned fruit not unlike a Sunten or, maybe more distantly, a well bruised peach. Underneath the semi firm skin, your fingers sink into it deep enough to find its seed pod, a segmented collection of semi-transparent blue hued pips that are almost too sweet to eat. The taste of the flesh is syrupy sweet, a thick and lasting aroma that is wonderful until it overwhelms you (which for me, happens almost exactly half way through.) But to tell the truth, I make it sound worse that it was, because after eight hours of standing in the heat with nothing but rust tasting water, that Cadia fruit was the best thing I had ever eaten. Even the soft texture, normally something that makes me wretch, seemed supple and inviting, and I ate even the crumpled skin cherishing the scent that had made me feel ill before I had been eating.

Every hour the time board would flip over to denote another hour delay in our train. All the same, we future passengers watched eagerly, trying to wait until the last moment to look at the board rather than be stuck staring at it for ten or twenty minutes and thus hardening the disappointment. I marveled at this. In Pearth people would not be this patient. After an hour, most would have been banging down the office door. After two, they might be seeking a different route. But here, it seemed like part of the daily routine. Even with the bickering over spots, it seemed like everyone knew the train would get there when it got there. As the sun went down, that patience ended all at once. A station steward ventured out of his office, only to be overwhelmed by questions and surrounded so closely he couldn’t get out his piece. Within seconds he abandoned his cause as the crowd surged to surround him. He pushed his way back to his office, frightened and throwing elbows to get through the mob of riders. A few moments later, he emerged from a second story window, flanked by an older (and probably wiser) steward who had chosen not to subject herself to the crowd. With waved hands and a little shouting he managed to silence the questions from below and raising his voice to be heard over the general drone of the station, explained that there was fighting further up the tracks, and that the train would not push through until it subsided. I, along with many others stared off to the west as if we expected to see explosions and melee that we had somehow missed for hours in the heat distorted horizon. There was nothing but empty track, of course. He explained that the train would push through as soon as the fighting died down, that it would have a repair crew running hard ahead of it to assure the tracks were clear, and that we should stay ready to get on board with little notice.

It was after this that things calmed down a little, if it could be said that they could get calmer than a line of waiting people. As the sun went down people began to abandon their spots in ones and twos, some opting to find a place to lay down with their packs, others arranging to leave and find a more suitable dinner for themselves and their families. As the first of the evening lights came on, and the bugs began to descend on our helpless herd, two twenty-somethings who had met each other in line broke out their guitars and started playing together. Then on the far side of the platform someone turned up a radio tuned to dance music. One by one people began to break out pastimes. Cribbage sets, books, and phones loaded with pirated films emerged one by one, like the stars on a clear summer night, slowly filling the platform with chuckles, loud children, and occasional shouts from a skunking two games down. The whole time I had been standing, along with a few others afraid of losing our spots; undesirables, miners, old men, or the truly stubborn people that assumed they would not be extended the fairness granted to other passengers. But as the evening set in, even we threatened travelers began to leave the front of the platform and find a place to sit.

It was one of few kindnesses in that wartime world. I think of how many like us sat waiting not for a journey, but for something darker. The soldiers that sat waiting a check points for an insurgent attack. The protesters who stood stalwart as they watched peace officers load their guns. The disappeared, the dissidents, the genetic pariahs, all those millions who stood waiting at the camps knowing full well that no one would be released. It was a kindness that we were left to wait for a train, not for the madness, in inhumanity that had rule of that place. It is a kindness we wait now, angry when we are made to wait on the platform before a flight. We are so frustrated by even twenty minutes delay before take off, so angry. Did we forget that we will travel between the stars when the flight begins? Did we forget when we wait for a busy kitchen that we are assured to never starve? Did we forget, when forced to restart our Personal Screens that we are free, alive, and bestowed that most precious gift? The gift of continued existence? Of stability? Of Peace?

It was a kindness that wait at Ume-Hoffbrau. I think as the crowd joined in games and stories, as we became a community rather than a mob, as we returned with good order to our spots when at last that train did arrive, I think we knew it. I think we knew that being made to wait can be a gift.