Papers covered most of the threadbare green carpet and three rickety tables that served as desks. The drawers of two huge filing cabinets stuck half open, contents bulging. Nelson Mandela smiled from a faded poster on one wall at an infonet portrait of Marlena Alvarez on the other.
Talk to your enemies,
said the text below Mandela, but Alvarez didn’t smile back. Perhaps she didn’t like being an internationally recognized symbol, shared between human rights, women’s rights, and social justice movements. Like the Assembly of the Poor, which tried to service all of these as best it could.
We helped our member groups apply for funding, and the director, Abdul Haidar, lobbied local government. The Assembly itself was always in need of money. I was the “technical staff.” Florence Woo, the other staff member, wrote submissions for funds, that is, begging letters.
When I came for the job at the Assembly, I’d said that I was involved in the EarthSouth movement in Vaupés and named the largest town near Las Mujeres, sure it existed in this time.
I’d been using stories of my great-grandmother’s life to explain my presence in the out-town, masquerading as someone who knew Marlena Alvarez, the founder of the EarthSouth movement, the best known of the popular social justice movements in the early twenty-first century. At least, a century later it was the best known.
Alvarez was the mayor of the village of Las Mujeres from 2011 to 2017. My great-grandmother, Demora Haase, had been her chief of police. I grew up in that village hearing stories of Marlena. Her life, her sayings, her death by an assassin’s bullet in 2017. It was easy to put myself in supporting roles in the events my great-grandmother used to talk about, events that to these people happened only a few years ago.
I poured myself a drink of water from the jug on Florence’s table. Her papers were in neat piles.
Drinking water was the biggest expense for everybody in the out-town and in the surrounding suburbs. Since I arrived there’d been perhaps four days of rain, and none in the past three months. The tent cities had no piped water, and the water that came through the old pipes to these houses was often undrinkable. Water trucks came around regularly, but they charged just enough to make it difficult for a person on a subsistence wage to pay. Which meant most of the out-town struggled. We could boil piped water most of the time and get by. The last alternative was river water—nobody, seeing the rubbish and waste that ran through the drains, would willingly drink that.
One of the things the Assembly worked toward was getting water supplied free to everyone. Eventually we hoped to arrange sewerage as well as regular garbage collection. The enclosed environmental system of the space station recycled everything except a portion of heat waste, and I found it hard to believe this society still condoned the use of fossil fuel-burning engines and allowed production of nondegradable plastics. Still harder to believe was that some sections of the same city were left at below subsistence level, while others enjoyed the luxury of space and safety.
I knew how hard it was to persuade those with privileges to share with the less fortunate. On Jocasta we had enough space in the uppermost of its three rings to comfortably house most of the refugees and unregistered residents who stayed in the lower ring. But the upper ring residential area was owned and controlled by members of the Four—our “upper classes,” and do you think they’d give up their extra space? No more than the power-holders of this city would let the out-town residents into the harbor area or downtown.
I felt too tired to work on the damn telescope, sweaty from the walk and the hot room... suddenly the claustrophobic heat became more than I could bear, and I pulled up the dusty blind and opened one of the windows. A hot, dry breeze entered, but at least the air was moving now.
I needed to
Talk to your enemies,
said the text below Mandela, but Alvarez didn’t smile back. Perhaps she didn’t like being an internationally recognized symbol, shared between human rights, women’s rights, and social justice movements. Like the Assembly of the Poor, which tried to service all of these as best it could.
We helped our member groups apply for funding, and the director, Abdul Haidar, lobbied local government. The Assembly itself was always in need of money. I was the “technical staff.” Florence Woo, the other staff member, wrote submissions for funds, that is, begging letters.
When I came for the job at the Assembly, I’d said that I was involved in the EarthSouth movement in Vaupés and named the largest town near Las Mujeres, sure it existed in this time.
I’d been using stories of my great-grandmother’s life to explain my presence in the out-town, masquerading as someone who knew Marlena Alvarez, the founder of the EarthSouth movement, the best known of the popular social justice movements in the early twenty-first century. At least, a century later it was the best known.
Alvarez was the mayor of the village of Las Mujeres from 2011 to 2017. My great-grandmother, Demora Haase, had been her chief of police. I grew up in that village hearing stories of Marlena. Her life, her sayings, her death by an assassin’s bullet in 2017. It was easy to put myself in supporting roles in the events my great-grandmother used to talk about, events that to these people happened only a few years ago.
I poured myself a drink of water from the jug on Florence’s table. Her papers were in neat piles.
Drinking water was the biggest expense for everybody in the out-town and in the surrounding suburbs. Since I arrived there’d been perhaps four days of rain, and none in the past three months. The tent cities had no piped water, and the water that came through the old pipes to these houses was often undrinkable. Water trucks came around regularly, but they charged just enough to make it difficult for a person on a subsistence wage to pay. Which meant most of the out-town struggled. We could boil piped water most of the time and get by. The last alternative was river water—nobody, seeing the rubbish and waste that ran through the drains, would willingly drink that.
One of the things the Assembly worked toward was getting water supplied free to everyone. Eventually we hoped to arrange sewerage as well as regular garbage collection. The enclosed environmental system of the space station recycled everything except a portion of heat waste, and I found it hard to believe this society still condoned the use of fossil fuel-burning engines and allowed production of nondegradable plastics. Still harder to believe was that some sections of the same city were left at below subsistence level, while others enjoyed the luxury of space and safety.
I knew how hard it was to persuade those with privileges to share with the less fortunate. On Jocasta we had enough space in the uppermost of its three rings to comfortably house most of the refugees and unregistered residents who stayed in the lower ring. But the upper ring residential area was owned and controlled by members of the Four—our “upper classes,” and do you think they’d give up their extra space? No more than the power-holders of this city would let the out-town residents into the harbor area or downtown.
I felt too tired to work on the damn telescope, sweaty from the walk and the hot room... suddenly the claustrophobic heat became more than I could bear, and I pulled up the dusty blind and opened one of the windows. A hot, dry breeze entered, but at least the air was moving now.
I needed to
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