The Lost One (p. 3)

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A little luck and a few extra soles from his brother's wallet had gotten Elvir a seat on the aisle onboard the Johnson-Stutz Resource Development Co.-commissioned New Jersey, a luxurious vessel by his standards. As his inertia synchronized with the ship's, he began to relax into the padded cloth seat. They had told him that it would take at least two days to reach the Colony, even traveling faster than the speed of light. He intended to make the most of the accommodations.

Now that the hassle of getting tickets and boarding the ship -which incidentally looked little like the rocket on the cover of the brochure -was over, Elvir had the leisure to feel a surge of guilt over his actions at Santa Cruz's home a few nights ago. Granted, Santa Cruz was advocating some pretty unproductive beliefs, but after benefiting from his unquestioning Quechua hospitality and eating his aji pepper, he shouldn't have forced Solamina to have to separate them. But it was far too late now. There was no use feeling sorry when he was a world away from the person he ought to apologize too. He needed to move on.

A soft masculine voice startled Elvir out of his adjustment in the seat. He looked around, tracing the sound to a round speaker next to the light that illuminated him as well as the Limeño businessman who slumped, eyes closed and mouth open, into a thin pillow propped against the edge ofhis seat's backrest.

Having gotten the attention of those passengers still awake after thirty-six hours in lines for tickets and luggage checks, the voice continued:

"I hope you are all enjoying your accommodations." Elvir could pick out an unrecognizable voice behind the words on the intercom, as if someone was addressing them via a translator. "I am your host, James Tengstrand. It will be at least three hours before our pilot, Ms. Bethany Pierce, is ready to make the acceleration to the speed which will carry us most of the way to your new homes in the Colony. We thought it would be appropriate that our first in-flight movie be Star Wars. There was a low chuckle from the host's real voice. "But don't worry. It's the original trilogy. I don't think they even bothered to make a Spanish version of those horrible prequels." The translator said something Elvir couldn't catch, probably to the real host, in English. Then he resumed addressing the passengers. "Okay, I guess they did. But we don't have them, thank God." Elvir closed his eyes. He had no idea what the host was rambling about or why he was rambling about it, having been to the movies only a dozen times, and usually in the company of restless military personnel who wouldn't be interested in anything that could pass a space-line's board of censors. But he didn't care. He was on board the New Jersey, headed for the Colony, away from the gray sky, thick air, and transient employment of the Earth. He was on his way to opportunity.

"Right now, if you look at the screens, you will see we're not playing Star Wars yet. What you will see is a real-time picture from a camera mounted outside the hull."

Elvir's eyes snapped open. He looked up at the screen, where a disc of color was tacked to the black backdrop of space. A pair of brownish land masses speckled with green were visible between the whitish tufts that smeared across the globe. EIvir wondered if one of these was South America, and somewhere there was Huancavelica. He squirmed in his seat and retrieved his brochure. Carefully, he scrutinized the map on its backside for some clue as to the shape of his fornler homeland. But the map was naturally too small for that. Anyway, it didn't matter. The Colony was his home now. Huancavelica was a dead end, a symptom of a world too worn out to allow him to find a future there.

He looked again at the earth, now shrunken significantly. If the ship had gone straight up when it took off, one of those land masses should be South America. He squinted at the screen, looking for the gray haze of Lima, or even Caracas or Buenos Aires or Brasília. But no such markings were apparent at this distance. Beneath the slowly-moving smattering of clouds, there was just a mottling of browns and some greens. Green -- that would be the plant life, like that which had been seared from the peaks of Peru and lay brown on what had been the shores of Lake Titicaca. He marveled that so much greenery could remain alive to show up from space. Those blotches must be Amazonia, and the Gran Chaco, woodlands that various corporations in Huancavelica guiltily held fund raisers to save, while their smokestacks choked the eucalyptus that once graced the Peruvian mountainsides. As if anyone in Huancavelica had any money to spare for trees hundreds, even thousands of miles away when they lived in shacks built of homemade adobe and scavenged plywood and tin. Yet somehow the forests remained, in spite of industry's efforts. He remembered Santa Cruz describing how the mountains and the streams would take care of themselves, and of humanity.

Elvir shook his head. Those trees were probably half-dead already, their leaves scarred like Santa Cruz's corn, the new roots of their seeds seared by the contaminants in the soil. He had seen the pictures in the brochures for the fund drives. Elvir felt a sort of smug pity for Santa Cruz and others like him, those who had remained behind out of desire, not out of inability to procure the funds. Those who lost their chance because they placed themselves in the hands of others -- of God, of the mountains, of other powers they didn't understand. Santa Cruz had called him 'chinkan,' lost. But it was Santa Cruz who was really chinkan.

Elvir felt around for his water bottle, then remembered that it had been in his pack, which had gone into the luggage bay with the hand-woven satchels and ugly suitcases of the other passengers. A grunt and a shush of fabric on fabric turned Elvir's attention from the shrinking globe to the seat next to him, which he now realized he had rammed his elbow into while searching for his water bottle. The man seated beside Elvir, dressed in a short-sleeved button-down that was hopelessly wrinkled, yawned and smiled.

"Hola. I'm Felipe Quispe Arguedas."

"I'm Alfonso Arriaga Elvir."

"Nice to meet you. What position you headed for?"

"Position?"

"Yeah, job in the Colony. I'm hoping to work for Residential Planning. I've had eight years of school," he added proudly.

"Oh. I don't really know. I guess that'll be up to Johnson-Stutz. Whatever they offer me."

"I admire that kind of faith. Last week I got all bent out of shape worrying about ... excuse me." Arguedas covered his yawn with his elbow. "Well, I'll go back to sleep, if you don't mind. Good night."

Faith? Elvir stared at the screen. His trip wasn't about faith. Faith was what kept people like Santa Cruz, the ones who were chinkan, stuck on a dying planet. It was initiative, and effort, that propelled a man forward, took him onward to the opportunities of the Colony. He had saved up his money ... his brother's money. Elvir had earned that money by coincidentally, unknowingly, choosing to enlist in the army -- a job that, as it turned out, only covered living expenses -- just before the Epidemic.

He shook his head, trying to clear the tiredness from it. If he thought about this logically, he would see that his trip was a triumph of effort, even if it was paid for with his brother's money.

Elvir pulled out the brochure again. He flipped through it, looking at the artists' renderings of the perfect cities, the unspoiled flora of the Colony. With this as his guide, he had planned his path to success. He had deliberately taken the steps to get there. He turned to the the eighth and final page, to the map. Where in here had it discussed positions? Literate friends had read it to him in its entirety several times How had he missed the part about positions? He flipped through it again, knowing that he couldn't decipher the letters printed on the glossy pages. It hadn't talked about positions.

It hadn't talked about positions because the brochure was propaganda, not a guide. Like the posters tacked to the sides of the shanties in the pueblos jóvenes. He had trusted in Johnson-Stutz Resources Development Co. to bring him out of the life of a day laborer and soldier. Like Santa Cruz waiting for God to clean the sky and heal his corn.

No! He shouted at himself. What was God? Did Santa Cruz even know? Elvir's faith was in something concrete, a human corporation running by definite business rules. Trust inJohnson-Stutz wasn't faith, it was knowledgeable and infornled planning.

So why hadn't he known about positions? Did he even know what Johnson-Stutz Resources Development did? Their plant in Huancavelica had refined zinc But neither EIvir nor his few friends had ever worked for the zinc plant, or even worked in that district of the city. He had no idea how a zinc plant was run. And 'Resources' meant recursos, plural. Not just zinc. He waspretty sure the Puno plant processed tin. And there were certainly others.

Elvir looked back at his neighbor. Faith. Johnson-Stutz Resources Development Co. was an unknown, as powerful and important to him as God to Santa Cruz. If faith made Santa Cruz chinkan, Elvir had also become chinkan when he gave up his future to Johnson-Stutz, the moment he stepped aboard the truck on the advice of the brochure that his hand was now closing around, wadding it into a ball. He rested his suddenly very heavy head against the back of the seat in front of him.

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