Read Online Blighted Star by Tom Parkinson - Free Book Online

softly on the door she
entered Amy’s room. The child lifted its sleepy head from the pillow.
    “Is
it about Daddy?”
    “Yes,
dear, we’ve found him. he’s all right but he’s broken his arm. He can’t get
back to see you just yet but he should be here at the end of the week.” She tussled
the child’s unkempt hair, then stroked it flat. Amy solemnly considered what
she had been told.
    “Daddy’s
arm, is it broken off?”
     
    <><><> 
     
    The
morning was now well under way, and everyone was up, even Hannah’s lazy husband
Daniel who slept in every day until nearly half past seven. They were digging
now at the trench which would fetch the stream closer to their camp site. They
had finished a whole section yesterday, and today they would finish the next.
The channel would have a very slow flow, for, like almost everywhere on the
planet the ground for miles around was pretty flat, but there would be enough
movement to ensure clean water all the time. Of course Daniel had been in
favour of moving the wagons closer to the stream and setting up camp there, but
Johan had managed to overcome his friend’s lazy inclinations by pointing out to
him the signs of occasional flooding around the stream’s present banks, and the
muddy shallow pool it flowed into so quickly. Bringing the stream to the lager
would also bring it nice and close to the fields they would soon create. After
that they would dig another channel to return it to the pond.
    The
digging had a rhythm which kept Johan going even when he was tired, with the
spade jabbing in, cutting through the turf and into the rich clay underneath
when given the weight of a man’s foot. A tug on the handle and the clod would
come away in a lump which then would be thrown up onto the bank, leaving a hole
which advanced the trench just a little bit. His rhythm and that of Daniel were
slightly different so that for most of the time they were not digging in at the
same moment. Indeed, it had become obvious that Daniel dug at a slightly faster
rate, making up for his lay-a-bed ways by harder work during the day. 
    At
the end of the morning, one of the children would be allowed to cut the turf
they had left as a baulk between today’s efforts and those of yesterday. As the
children whooped and squealed they would run alongside the newly freed water as
it chuckled down the new course to the end of the trench, a mere one last day’s
digging from their camp.
    Again,
Johan felt a deep connection with his pioneering ancestors. They too must have
done work like this, and it was amazing to think of the way in which, after
centuries of history ending in the tragedy of the loss of Earth, after billions
of miles of travel amongst the stars, after so many compromises, big and little
on the use of technology. It still all came down to a man with a spade,
digging through God’s good soil, providing for his family.
    The
thought of his ancestors gave Johan the familiar feeling of discomfort which,
he knew, most of the New Amish had. They had made too big a compromise when
they agreed to leave the doomed Earth, even though they all knew what had befallen
the zealots who stayed until the seas boiled. They too could hardly have been
said to have been living in the traditional way under their domes, until they
perished.
    Johanna’s
Great, Great, Grandfather had done what his Pastor had told him to do; had
passively resisted “The Expulsion” (or “The Intervention” as the English called
it). He had been loaded, stunned into unconsciousness, on a giant freighter,
and had woken up well outside the Solar System on an automated flight to the
distant stars. In the end their Pastors had told them to accept it as the will
of God, but even so they had had to put on one side a great deal of Biblical
Cosmology just to explain their being here in the heavens, and this threatened
to erode the very basis of their faith.
    But
surely this world, with its climate so perfect for mankind, had to be the