Free View from Ararat by Brian Caswell Page A

wasn’t hard to sell him on the idea – considering we’d then also have an exclusive on how the new settlers responded to being locked away like prisoners, after travelling for a lifetime to get here.
    I was already writing my opening comments in my mind, as I headed off to interview a man who claimed he’d discovered evidence that he’d been accidentally swapped at birth with President M ü ller – whose real name, he claimed, was Renos Kohl.
    You might say that my mind wasn’t on the job at hand.
    I had an instinct about the story of the two kids who’d been lifted from grinding poverty to a world where freedom and the future were open to them, only to have that freedom snatched from them before they even touched the soil of their new home. It was powerful stuff.
    President M üller wasn’t about to let anyone on his staff talk to a junior Internet reporter about his being swapped, sixty years ago, with someone called Kohl in a maternity-unit mix-up.
    The enforced detention of innocent people, on the other hand, was a story with ‘legs’. Someone would have to respond on behalf of the government. And that meant prime-time coverage.
    I was going to make my two orphans into national identities, and they were going to move me beyond kids, animals and delusional flakes into serious reporting.
    Of course, I had no idea just how big the story really was. How could I? No one knew. At least, no one who was telling.
    And certainly no one on the wrong side of the fence they erected almost overnight around a small section of the old Elokoi Reserve, in the flatlands, about 30 clicks west of Edison.
    RAMÓN’S STORY
    If you come from Callas, there are two things that you never forget. The permanent hunger like knives in your stomach, and the smell from the separation plants.
    Always the smell.
    My sister Élita, who knows a little bit about everything, says it was the sulphur mixing with gases that they had banned for more than a century in most other parts of the world. But Callas wasn’t ‘most other parts of the world’. In our small corner of the planet few of the normal rules applied.
    So after Callas anything was mejo . . . an improvement – even the crowded holding-camp we found ourselves in, when they finally let us off the C-ship.
    Thirty thousand people were living in what was really a small town of portable buildings, which the government had erected for us on the coastal flatland 30 or so kilometres outside of Edison. The rumours said that it had taken them only a couple of weeks to turn a barren plain into the scene that met us as we stepped off the shuttle and into the unknown.
    From the beginning there was a sense of confusion in the camp. Nothing had been mentioned about quarantine before we left Earth. The authorities assured us it was just ‘precautionary’, that once the forty days were up, we would be transported to New G, ready to begin our new life. But there was still the uncertainty.
    â€˜Precautionary’ against what? Nobody was talking, and we didn’t have the power or the organisation to force them to answer our questions.
    Then, of course, there was the boredom.
    It’s not that there was nothing to do. They’d set up any number of activities to keep the inmates occupied. It’s just that it was too hot to think about doing anything. If they had to choose somewhere to hide us away from the rest of the citizens, they picked a great place.
    The flatlands are as near to desert as I ever want to get. During the day, temperatures can reach above forty, baking the earth, and driving winds sear in across the mountains from the desert to the west.
    The huts were air-conditioned and well insulated, but the moment you stepped outside . . .
    Well, if you were smart, you didn’t.
    I guess I wasn’t all that smart. But hormones will do that to you.
    There wasn’t anywhere inside the crowded camp where Maija and I