by Naomi Foyle
‘Quick, Astra,’ Hokma ordered. ‘Arjun wants to get off.’ Astra jumped into the back of the van and sat down on a side plank opposite Sorrel. Between them the floor of the van was filled with plants the urbaggers were delivering to shops and houses in New Bangor.
The van rumbled off and Astra sat quietly checking Tabby’s functions. Everything was fine. His emotional weather report was sunny and breezy, and on his school homepage there was a new download: the official photo of the two IMBOD medical officers. She showed Sorrel, who said, ‘Don’t they look impressive? But you’re going to get your shot from Dr Blesserson. Wow!’ Then Astra wanted to ask Hokma lots of questions, about Dr Blesserson and Cora and her Code father, and whether Klor had ever been back on the bus to Sippur. But when the driver, Arjun, asked Hokma what Dr Blesserson was working on now, she just grunted, and said, ‘Gaia knows!’ in a grumpy voice. So Astra put Tabby back in his pocket and examined the plants, asking Sorrel all about them. Sorrel was very friendly. She plucked a stem of yellow freesias and loosened the ribbon to add it to Sheba’s bouquet. And when they stopped at the Sunbat station outside New Bangor for Arjun to exchange the van’s solar batteries and for Hokma to take Astra to the toilet to pee, Sorrel bought Astra a bottle of peach nectar to drink.
The bus stop for Sippur was on the far side of New Bangor. Arjun drove there first to drop them off. Waiting by the side of the road, holding the flowers for Sheba, who had never woken up after being on the bus, was strange in itself, but other things were odd too. You couldn’t just walk up to the stop: there was a fence around it and an IMBOD officer at the gate who scanned their hydropacs and clothes with a paddle sensor. He even took Tabby out of his pocket and scanned him. When he’d finished, he didn’t give him back right away. He turned Tabby off.
‘What?’ Astra yelped to Hokma behind her. Tabby had only just been fixed. Was the officer going to take him away from her?
The officer pointed to a sign on the fence, a picture of a handheld with a red line through it. ‘No Tablette usage on the bus,’ he ordered, handing Tabby back.
‘Sorry, Astra, I should have told you to switch him off,’ Hokma said, reaching in her bag for her own Tablette.
Astra had wanted to tell the officer that her flowers were for Sheba, but she didn’t like him any more so she kept her mouth closed and waited for Hokma to be scanned. Inside the fenced enclosure, some of the other people were wearing clothes – skirts and robes. None of them, even the sky-clad ones, looked at Astra and asked how she was, or said to Hokma how good the bioregional security was, or what a beautiful day Gaia had brought, like people in New Bangor shops would have done. They just stood around, not looking at each other, occasionally peering through the fence down the road for the bus. There were four seats in the enclosure, but they were all taken. Behind them was a screen, displaying National and Bioregional Wheel Meet news. Astra waited beside Hokma, the bouquet in her arms getting heavier, almost as if the flowers were turning into a painted toxic metal, like in a fairy tale.
At last the bus drew up, shuddering to a stop and aligning its door with another gate in the fence. It was an ordinary bus, like the one that took her to school, but at the same time it was a big white metal shark that might eat you and keep you inside it forever. The IMBOD officer opened the gate and Astra hesitated a moment. Then Hokma put her hand on her shoulder and guided her firmly up the steps of the bus and to a window seat.
‘It’s a very scenic journey,’ she said sternly as the bus pulled back out onto the road, almost as if ordering Astra to look at it. But Astra was staring at the necks of the women in front of her. The women’s heads were shaved and each of them had a big red lumpy scar right at the base of her skull.
‘Hokma,’ she whispered, pointing at the women.
‘Shhh.’ Hokma scowled. She was tugging at her waistcoat. Maybe, Astra realised, she was in a bad mood because of the clothes.
Astra rested Sheba’s flowers on her lap, then took off her flap-hat and stuffed it between the seats. The bus rumbled down the road, winding through the forest north-west of New Bangor. The firegrounds were behind them here, and between stringybarks and pines were side roads signposted with the familiar names of her school friends’ communities – Boson, Higgs, Sonnenplatz, Shady Grove, Windfall. Then there was a long stretch of just trees and Astra returned her attention to the scar-skulled women. Suddenly, as she was counting the neat white holes surrounding the red lump directly in front of her, the woman grabbed her companion’s arm and said loudly, tapping at the window, ‘The Congregation Site shines today. Praise Gaia.’
Hokma was sleeping, but nearly everyone else in the bus craned their necks. Half-standing, Astra followed the woman’s finger. The Boundary in the dry forest ran high on the slopes or behind inhabited hills and was colour-blended with the foliage and rocks so even in photographs you couldn’t really see it. But there it was: the Bioregional Congregation Site flashing like a golden waterfall in the distance. The Congregation Site was designed to shine – it was for pilgrimages and ceremonies – and though Astra had been there once, she had been just a baby then and she wouldn’t return until the Blood & Seed ceremony, which was ages away, at the end of Year Seven. She hadn’t known you could see it from the bus. Why hadn’t Hokma told her? If only she was allowed to use Tabby – she could have taken a photo to show everyone at home. She fingered the flowers in her lap. Had Sheba seen the Boundary too?
Even more awesome than the glimpse of the Boundary was the descent to the steppes, which was a whole new bioregion. Though Astra had seen far more of the steppes from up in the pine tree, it wasn’t until the road levelled off and the bus left the mountains and foothills behind that she understood how unutterably vast they truly were. When you were up high, she realised, you felt huge, but travelling through the steppes, unable to see beyond the line of their rising slopes, you realised that you weren’t even a freckle on the face of Gaia.
That revelation was followed by a slowly unfolding shock. Before, the steppes had always looked neatly if eccentrically patterned, like a cape or quilt made from random bits of fabric someone had spent years carefully fitting together. Astra had always assumed that the pieces were all fields, planted or lying fallow. Now, though, with her nose pressed to the bus window, she could see that huge parts of Is-Land’s interior were almost as desolate as the firegrounds. The roads were lined at intervals with narrow fields of grain or vegetables and there was the occasional walled orchard or llama pen, but these cultivated plots were dwarfed by the huge dirt hills billowing in all directions, their bowls of dry soil etched only with dry, sage-coloured bushes. The steppes, she now knew, were largely a world without water or trees or anything humans needed to survive.
Was this Gaia’s crone face, Astra wondered: parched and cracked, gifted with supernatural endurance? It was a frightening vision, and a warped one too. Down here, the heat haze that had shimmered in the view from the pine tree was as thickly rippled as the glass in the Old World silver mirror that Nimma kept in a drawer in her bedroom. The swollen heat waves were pressing in all around them; if Astra peered down the aisle to look out of the driver’s big window it looked like the bus was swimming underwater. The road ahead even looked wet, but as the bus got closer to the black patches she’d first assumed were puddles, they mysteriously evaporated. The wildness of the steppes, she thought, in a tangled kind of way, wasn’t one of pathless woods and rampant growth; it was more like she imagined the Barren Mountains to be: a climbing loneliness, an almost-emptiness that snatched away everything you ever thought you knew.
She wanted to ask Hokma all about the steppes, but Hokma was still sleeping, her head rolling against the bus seat. Astra kept thinking surely she would jerk awake any minute, but she didn’t, so she turned back to her window.
There were dirt tracks off the highway, signposted to communities she’d heard of only in passing, or not at all: Ripen, Sarsaparilla, Aberffraulein, Mahā Vidyā. Occasionally the bus passed a van or a cart, the
carts pulled by garlanded cows or shire horses, but otherwise the road was empty. At one point the bus crossed an intersection, another main road between two steppes towns she did recognise: Sommerville in one direction and Nīrāgā in the other.
Then, after what seemed like ages, huge square buildings began to march along the sides of the roads, at least eight storeys high, twice as high as any in New Bangor, but all empty, with dirty, broken windows. Why hadn’t they been demolished? Peat would know. Perhaps IMBOD thought they might be useful again one day, or maybe the Bioregional Wheel Meet had run out of money for demolitions. These buildings were too nice to tear down, anyway: they were covered in mosaics, made of small tiles in patterns like needlework on a Craft House tablecloth. The colours had faded to shades of grey, and some of the tiles had fallen out, but you could still see that the design on each building was different from its neighbours’. That was very special. It made you want to keep staring and staring, never getting bored. Astra wanted to jump out and clean the tiles to make them gleam again in the sun.
But the bus rolled on, and now the farmed fields and grazing pastures started to crowd out the barren stretches of the steppes. Astra saw a woman herding sheep, a girl placing flowers at a cow shrine and a man riding a horse toward an Earthship, and then there was a deep stretch of greenhouses, their pointed roofs reflecting the sun. The bus stopped in front of them to let some more people on. Was it here that the man with the bomb had got on Klor and Sheba’s bus? Astra shook Hokma’s arm.
‘Uh, are we there?’ Hokma stretched, and smiled for the first time all day. ‘You’ve taken good care of those flowers, haven’t you?’
They were nearly there, and yes, Astra had, and her reward was seeing the Shugurra River before Hokma did, a beautiful blue snake glinting ahead between its bright green banks. The bus crossed the water on a long low-walled bridge, and after that the land was green and lush everywhere, dotted with little sandstone retrofitted houses, their gardens filled with flowers: yellow flags, aurums, freesias and anemones, and other blossoms Astra had never seen before. There were people, too, watering their plants, sitting on porches or walking up the road, and apart from a few children, they were all wearing clothes. The women were dressed in tunics like hers, or smocks and skirts. Some of the men were in robes or sarongs and others were wearing loose trousers. Around her, on the bus, the sky-clad passengers were pulling robes and tunics out of their hydropacs and putting them on. The bus stopped again to pick up people and let others off, and when it started moving again, there in front of her, high on a terraced hill, was the basalt wall of Sippur.
The wall wasn’t spiny and craggy, like she’d imagined, but sheer-sided and crested as if with great rotting black teeth. Two massive white Is-Land banners were draped either side of its arched entrance, the Is-Land Shield standing proud in their centres, and green, gold and red wavy lines running across the tops and the bottoms. It was hard to imagine the loom that could have woven such banners. It would have to be a giant loom in an industrial warehouse, like the alt-meat vat factories.
The road looped steadily towards the archway. As they neared Astra could see that it was crested by a huge sculpture of … a black pigeon, its breast plumped out over the road and its feet gripping the block of basalt it was carved from.
‘Look, Hokma!’ She tugged at Hokma’s waistcoat.
‘I know. The pigeon is the city’s holy bird. For the people who built the wall it represented the goddess of love.’
The woman in front of Astra turned around and addressed them. ‘Gaia is the one true goddess of love,’ she said quietly. Astra flinched. The woman was unnerving. Her face was round and still, her eyes were unblinking and her gappy teeth were as black as the wall’s.
‘Gaia is all goddesses, and all men and women are Gaia’s ambassadors,’ Hokma replied.
The woman appeared to be satisfied with this response. She nodded serenely, and as the bus neared the archway, returned her attention to her companion. It was dark now, because the wall was at least five metres thick, but as they entered Astra could see that the basalt did have millions of little pores in it, like black speckles in the smooth sides of the bricks. Then for a moment, there was no one on the bus but whispering shadows, and the scars on the women’s skulls were two black, twisted eyeholes. A second later the bus re-emerged into the sunshine, and the driver pulled up in front of a fruit market.
This was where Klor and Sheba’s bus had exploded.
* * *
Everyone stood up. Clutching the flowers to her chest, Astra let Hokma put her flap-hat back on, then, one slow, inching step after the next, she followed her Shelter mother off the bus, and out of the bus-stop enclosure.
They stood on the pavement for a moment. The street was zooming with bicycles, carts and cars and the pavement was crowded with stalls covered with red-and-white striped awnings. People were examining apples, apricots, pomegranates and dates, fruit that must have been grown in the greenhouses. A seller called out to Hokma, who ignored him. Astra stood paralysed in the whirlwind of activity, the sun beating down on her arms.
‘There’s a lot of people here, isn’t there?’ Hokma said.
‘Umm.’
‘Do you know where they go to cool down?’
‘No.’
Hokma pointed across the street to a small park in the shadow of the wall. ‘To Sheba’s Fountain.’
There was a traffic light on the corner. Normally Astra was supposed to hold an adult’s hand when she crossed the road, but she wanted to carry the bouquet properly, so she walked in front of Hokma instead, with Hokma’s hand on her shoulder. She held the flowers up high and the cars and bikes and horse carts all stopped for them.
The pavement was busy, but the park was peaceful, a triangular lawn planted with a circle of apple trees, the grass strewn with blossom. At its centre was a shallow basalt basin, a black lens resting on a slender concave pillar, from which a fragile spine of water rose about a metre in the air, gradually separating as it fell into graceful sprays shining silver in the sun that arced back down to the basin. Astra drew closer and saw there were three gleaming metal cups set into niches in the pillar, which was buttressed by a curving set of steps so that even the smallest child could lean over and drink from the spray. Above the cups was a small silver plaque. It said, For Sheba, who loved to dance in the trees.
The Fountain was like a tiny willow tree, eternally weeping on a thin black moonshell. It was too sad for words. But it was achingly beautiful too. Sheba was there: Astra felt her. She wasn’t wearing a flap-hat. Her hair was streaming in a breeze no one else could feel, and she was crying and laughing and dancing at the same time. Her tears were keeping everyone cool, and as they hissed into the air they sang sister, sister, sister.
‘Where can we put the flowers?’ she whispered. Hokma showed her a trough curving round the steps for dogs and cats to drink from. The trough had a central bank with recesses for flowers. Other people had been tending it: a row of cherry and apple branches were shedding their petals into the water.
‘Can Tabby take a photo for Nimma and Klor?’ Astra asked. ‘Me putting the flowers down? And one of the Fountain, just by itself?’
‘That’s a nice idea.’ Hokma took Tabby and stepped back to frame the photos. She took the one of the Fountain first, and then Astra knelt and carefully placed Sheba’s bouquet into the bank, making sure you could see the orchids and Sorrel’s freesias and the sprig of apple blossom among the daisies and then she had to check that all the stems were dipped into the water. It didn’t feel right to smile or even look at Tabby. She just kept her hand on the stems for a minute so that the picture wouldn’t be blurry and it would be clear which flowers were from Or. Afterwards Hokma showed her the photos and they were perfect. The Fountain was casting no shadow and on her knees, reaching across the petalled water, Astra looked exactly like she felt: full of awe and respect. Reverential. Somehow, she realised, being in this place even for a few minutes had changed her feel
ings about Sheba. Before she had secretly been afraid of Sheba: terrified of the bus-bomb and scared to ask questions in case of upsetting Nimma. Now she felt like she knew Sheba a little. And she liked her. Sheba wasn’t like Meem or Silvie or any other girl Astra knew. She was pretty and playful, but she was wise and comforting too.
‘When a person returns to Gaia,’ she said slowly as Hokma turned Tabby off, ‘after a while, Gaia gives them back to us, doesn’t She?’
‘That’s exactly right, Astra,’ Hokma said. ‘She gives us back the best part of everyone. Now, shall we let Sheba give us a drink?’
* * *
After they left the park Astra wanted to explore Sippur, but Hokma said that Dr Blesserson was expecting them right away so they took a taxi up a wide road lined with all kinds of shops, a bit like New Bangor Square, but long and thronging with people. The buildings were tall, not like the crumbling apartments on the outskirts, but four or five storeys high. Is-Land flags were rippling from the roofs, and more banners were draped down the walls, giving the city a holiday feeling. But Astra asked the taxi driver, who said it wasn’t a special festival: everyone here celebrated Is-Land every day. They also liked shopping. Beneath the banners, each block was devoted to a different type of produce. First, there was food everywhere: garlands of dried peppers hanging from canopies; colourful bins full of pistachios, almonds, walnuts, sunflower seeds, dried figs, dates and apricots; sacks of grains and pulses, all set out on the pavement to tempt passers-by. Then came a street of soap- and perfume-sellers, followed by a block of Tablette shops, the shiny devices lined up neatly behind the glass shop fronts. The taxi turned down another long road and here the pavements were filled with clothes, masses of them, all fluttering on rails next to racks full of sunglasses, hats and hydropacs. Astra and Tabby took pictures of everything.
‘Hokma?’ she asked at last, ‘why do people in Sippur wear clothes?’
