Free View from Ararat by Brian Caswell

charity circuit if you could snare a real flying job.
    Then, of course, it might not have been a crash. They were also pretty big on hijacks and random terrorism down there.
    Whatever . . .
    The end result was a perfect case for ‘Save the Children’ – two orphaned kids, and the plant manager’s wealthy wife as an interested sponsor – which translated into a big-break story for me.
    Except for a couple of small problems.
    One fact the file forgot to mention was that the particular foster family the program found for the pair weren’t just passengers on the Pandora , they were crew. Which meant that instead of sleeping away the whole trip in stasis, they’d spend eight Earth years running the ship, as part of the six-crew roster.
    It’s the only way they can get people to run the ship for what would be a lifetime for any one crew. Each crew does its eight years, then returns to freeze-sleep for the rest of the trip. For which they’re paid very well, and they arrive with enough to set themselves up in the new world. Not a bad deal really.
    Of course, even eight years is a long time, and the only way they could make it work was to crew the ship with entire families. Keep life as normal as possible.
    So my cute little eight-year-old was now sixteen – Earth standard – and her brother Ramón was eighteen, which was only two years younger than me, when you did the conversions.
    Next year they could both be voting for the President, so they weren’t exactly a couple of small and helpless innocents, saved from the cruel grip of poverty.
    I could see my story crashing down in flames.
    But I’d done all the background, and Abbey was behind it a hundred per cent. And Abbey didn’t like to be disappointed.
    It was too late to back out. So I looked for a new spin to put on the story – which was when I realised the one huge positive in the whole mess.
    You can ask a teenager the sort of questions that a little kid couldn’t possibly answer. About what it’s really like being poor on Earth, and what it meant to be given a second chance at life, through other people’s kindness.
    Suddenly this story didn’t seem such a disaster after all. We could still use the old footage from the ‘Save the Children’ file, to provide the ‘cuteness’ factor, but now we had the ‘before and after’, and a couple of (hopefully) intelligent talking heads for people to relate to.
    It might just work . . .
    Except for the second problem.
    For over two hundred years, since the arrival of the first C-ship, the new arrivals had always been shuttled down to the landing field just outside New Geneva.
    Always.
    Until this time.
    There was no explanation, just a terse announcement from a minor immigration official that the passengers would be in quarantine at the old Wieta Reservation, west of Edison, for a little over a month, and that there would be no interviews – in fact, no contact of any kind – until the end of that period.
    No reasons were given and none of the questions from the assembled newshounds were answered in anything but double- talk, but the rumour doing the rounds was that there was some kind of epidemic on the mother-planet at the time of the C-ship’s launch, and that this was a precaution.
    I checked the files later, and I couldn’t find any reference to something so dangerous that it would cause the Council to act with such speed and heavy-handedness. It worried me a bit, but there wasn’t much anyone was going to be able to do, so I filed what I had with the subeditor, with an instruction to keep it on ‘hold’ – a standard procedure when you were waiting for confirmation of a source or clearance from above for the release of sensitive information.
    Then I phoned Abbey for a new assignment.
    I managed to talk him into running the story in a couple of months, when the subjects could meet with me. It