Astra

by Naomi Foyle

  2.4

  She hadn’t wanted to become friends with Lil – she had hated Lil. But the girl swooped into her life and plucked out her resistance like a vulture disembowelling a lamb. First she was so unutterably grief-stricken – no one could hate someone so sad. Once she’d started crying she couldn’t stop. For a week Hokma gave Lil bowls of stew and mugs of warm oatmilk and let her lie on the sofa for hours, wrapped in a sheet. Astra came to Wise House after school, bringing wildflower bouquets from the path, and tried to entice Lil outdoors to the aviary to help with Silver and Helium. Lil trailed behind her to the field and watched the birds fly through swollen eyes. When at last, on the Sabbaday afternoon, she climbed up to the roof with Astra, she just sat there hunched over, plucking at stems of grass. Astra searched for crickets and carried one over on her wrist to show Lil its bright green legs and twitching antennae.

  Lil looked at it dully. ‘You have to cook it first,’ she said.

  Astra whipped her wrist away and released the cricket back into the meadow. ‘It’s not to eat! We don’t kill Gaia’s creatures here.’

  Lil shrugged, a lopsided twitch involving just her right shoulder. ‘You kill worms. They’re nice fried.’

  ‘We have to kill them or the Owleons would die,’ Astra retorted. But beneath her indignation, a strange sensation was stirring. Eat worms? Even though Hokma had long ago dropped the charade of medical euthanasia she had used Astra’s first time at Wise House, the thought of eating them herself had never occurred to her. As she considered it, she began to feel uncomfortably aware of the inside of her mouth. No, a worm didn’t belong in there. It would be gristly and sour and slimy, wouldn’t it?

  ‘My dad called it wild spaghetti,’ Lil continued. ‘You have to add garlic.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Astra announced.

  Lil tugged at a clump of grass, pulling it out of the turf, and Astra snapped, ‘Don’t do that. You’ve killed it.’

  ‘It’s just grass,’ Lil scoffed. ‘It seeds itself back. We used long grass for our beds.’

  Again, reactions wrestled inside her. The girl’s nonchalant contempt for Gaia was outrageous, but at the same time, she was like a horrible Old World story: even though it disgusted you, you wanted to find out what happened. ‘Well, this grass helps keep Wise House cool. So don’t destroy it,’ she ordered.

  Lil looked bored, but she patted the rootball back into the roof and brushed the earth from her hands. Then she sat back, stretched out her legs and idly scratched her Gaia mound. She had far more hair there than Astra: a curly black thicket.

  Astra fingered the tip of her dread. Two could play at that game.

  ‘Hokma said you haven’t got your Gaia-blood yet,’ Lil announced.

  ‘So?’ Astra sneered, but there was a pang in her chest. Was there no end to Hokma’s betrayal? Lil had used three or four pads a day in her blood panties when she arrived at Wise House, washing them out in the sink with Hokma and hanging them to dry across the lawn. Hokma had said Astra’s turn would come soon, and Nimma was already making her hipbeads for the Blood & Seed ceremony next month. There was no need for Lil to know any of that.

  ‘It only hurts sometimes,’ Lil informed her. ‘But when it does you feel like you’re going to die. You’ll probably get it when you’re thirteen.’

  Astra tossed her head, flipping her dread back behind her ear. ‘How do you know? I might get it sooner.’ Of course she wanted to get it during the ceremony, but Nimma had said that Gaia-bleeding wasn’t a competition: girls naturally started at different ages, just as boys produced seed at different ages, and the Blood & Seed ceremony welcomed all Year Seven graduates to adulthood together. She wasn’t going to talk to Lil about the ceremony, though. What if Lil said she wanted to come and Hokma let her, even though she was fourteen? Astra was the only Year Seven girl in Or, and as Nimma had been saying all year, she and Yoki would soon have the honour of representing their community at the Bioregional Congregation Site with girls and boys from all over the dry forest. She definitely didn’t want to have to share that honour with Lil – whom no one had yet, after all, proved was not a Non-Lander.

  Lil shrugged that minimalist shrug again. ‘You’re still quite undeveloped.’

  What? Just because Lil’s breasts were a fraction bigger than hers didn’t make Astra undeveloped. ‘We don’t make remarks like that here in Or,’ she announced icily. ‘Everyone develops in their own time.’

  For a moment, what looked suspiciously like a sneer distorted Lil’s mouth. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I meant, you’re young still.’

  Astra felt like leaving, but she knew she shouldn’t let Lil needle her. This was her turf, and she had to take control of this situation – now.

  ‘Why don’t you remember where your community was?’ she demanded.

  Lil picked a piece of grass out of her Gaia hair and twirled it between her fingers. ‘My dad said the forest was our home now.’

  ‘So your community wasn’t in this bioregion?’ Astra persisted.

  Lil wrinkled her nose. ‘There were some trees. But the land was flat, I think. I used to dream about it, but then I stopped.’ Her lip trembled and she looked so woeful again that Astra had to stop her interrogation. You couldn’t push a subject too far, she knew. You had to take her just past her limit, and let her recover before you started again.

  ‘Girls. I’ve made berry biscuits,’ Hokma called up from the verandah, and Lil jumped to her feet and headed to the ladder. Astra followed her down carefully, a worm of some uncertain emotion knotting in her stomach. She couldn’t remember the last time Hokma had baked anything. Normally she just sprinkled berries straight from the jar onto her cereal, but there they were: berry biscuits arranged in a crescent on a plate, beside three glasses of iced apricot nectar.

  Lil ate her first biscuit in two mouthfuls, then drank her nectar all in one go. ‘Thank you, Hokma,’ she said, for the first time in Astra’s hearing.

  ‘Good?’ Hokma asked Astra.

  Astra took another biscuit. ‘Yeah,’ she begrudgingly conceded. They were okay, but not nearly as thin and crispy as Nimma’s.

  * * *

  The next day when Astra woke up and climbed down from Hokma’s loft, Lil was in the kitchen, washing last night’s dishes. After breakfast Lil asked Hokma if she could help in the vegetable garden, where she proved to be very handy with a hoe. Hokma said her dad had obviously brought her up to be a hard worker.

  Lil’s head was down among the beans. ‘We worked in the mornings and played games in the afternoons,’ she said.

  ‘What kind of games?’ Hokma asked.

  ‘Skipping, hopscotch, singing, catch. Reading, writing, storytelling, snap,’ Lil recited. ‘Other stuff too. Keepie-uppie. Arrow practise.’

  ‘That’s a nice rhyme. We play all those games here, don’t we, Astra?’

  ‘We used to,’ Astra corrected. ‘I’m too old for snap now. And hopscotch.’

  ‘I suppose you are. But we still practise writing sometimes, don’t we?’

  ‘Sometimes.’ Astra shrugged. Along with her refusal to get a prosthetic eye and her insistence on living off-grid with no access to the internet, writing was one of Hokma’s eccentricities, as Nimma put it. All the metal tubes on her desk were antique fountain pens her Code grandmother had brought with her from Neuropa to Is-Land, and the bottles were full of coloured inks Hokma made from berries. She said that fountain pens were an important part of the development of Storytelling tradition, and she often tried to get Astra to use them. She’d taught her how to write the alphabet, the twenty-six Old World letters and the four Gaian diphthongs, but beyond the delight of writing her name in different artistic designs, Astra didn’t really see the point.

  Writing took ages and was strewn with peril: first you had to fill the pen and shake it out, risking blotting your page or the wall; when you dragged the nib across Hokma’s rough handmade paper it always caught on bits of fibre and ruined your letters; then just as y
ou were starting to concentrate properly you ran out of ink and had to refill the pen; until finally, you had to try to read what you had written. Astra did her best to write big and clearly, but Hokma’s joined-up writing looked like scattered leaves, her letters loopy and irregular, her fs like ts, and rs for some reason almost disappearing. Hokma had shown her how to write with a quill too, made from one of Helium’s feathers, but the scratchy nib was even more inefficient.

  Making paper, though, was the ultimate waste of time. Hokma did it once a year in the lab: pulping the hemp, soaking it in a flat basin on top of the alt-meat incubator, screening it into sheets, hanging the pages out on the line to dry. It had been fun to help when she was little, but now she was older Astra found the whole process tedious and pointless. Worse than pointless: it was backward. You couldn’t run a society on such primitive tech. It slowed your thinking. No wonder the people of the Old World had nearly destroyed Gaia.

  ‘One day, Astra,’ Hokma said good-humouredly, ‘you’ll be glad you can write.’

  Astra ignored her. They’d had this argument before, but Hokma wouldn’t listen. It was true that Server connections could be easily hacked, so you must never trust sensitive information to Tablette talk or emails. But Owleons couldn’t carry reams of paper on their ankles; that was a ridiculous notion: you used a password-protected memory clip and the recipient downloaded it onto a non-Server-linked Tablette. The only time you might conceivably need to write was if you were out on patrol, with no internet connection, and had to leave a message for your unit. But you wouldn’t be wasting valuable pac space carrying a pen and paper; you’d use local materials, rocks or bricks or sticks, and leave them in a pre-arranged Code pattern. Writing, as Klor said, was obsolete.

  ‘My dad said writing stitches our thoughts to Gaia’s eternal shawl,’ Lil said, in a high, sing-song voice.

  Astra wanted to gag, but Hokma leaned on her spade as if listening to the phrase linger in the air. ‘That’s a beautiful thing to say, isn’t it, Astra? What did you and he write with, Lil?’

  Lil didn’t look at Hokma. ‘We practised with a stick,’ she said, jabbing the furrow with the hoe. ‘In the earth. But he had a pen and berry ink too. Like yours.’

  ‘A pen. That’s nice. So did he have paper?’

  Lil’s back was still turned. ‘He had a notebook. He was saving it for when I wanted to write poems. I copied all my hymns in it and I put it in his pyre with him.’

  ‘That was very thoughtful of you,’ Hokma said quietly. ‘Did you write a poem too?’

  Lil shrugged. Both shoulders lifted and dropped this time. ‘I like singing. I might write a poem one day.’

  ‘Yes, I expect you might. Astra writes good poems, don’t you, Astra?’

  Poems: that was another thing Hokma banged on about. Astra wrote Gaia poems in school like everyone else, and they got high marks, but she wanted to write Code, not poems, when she grew up. Still, if it meant she could get the last word in this inane conversation, she would answer the question.

  ‘I wrote the best poem in the class last week,’ she said, nonchalantly. ‘It was called “Gaia Take Me Higher”.’

  ‘It’s a fantastic poem. And you translated it into Asfarian and Inglish, didn’t you? Maybe you can bring your Tablette next time and show Lil.’

  She wasn’t normally allowed to bring Tabby to Wise House, but for Lil, obviously, none of the normal rules applied. ‘Maybe,’ she airily replied. ‘Can we play knockout whist tonight?’

  ‘That’s a great idea, Astra. How does that sound, Lil?’

  Lil nodded, so that’s what they did after dinner. Astra won the first game, then Hokma won one. Lil won the next one, and then when the girls begged to continue, Astra won the fourth. Lil wanted to play one more, but Hokma said no, Astra had to go back to Or for some Me-Time before school. Then as Astra was putting the cards back in their box, Hokma asked Lil if she’d like to show Astra her Gaia hymnbook.

  Astra picked at a thread on the sofa arm. Despite her disdain for writing, she had to admit that books were interesting. Proper books were printed, not handwritten, so it was as easy to read them as a Tablette screen, but apart from the sewn notebooks she and Hokma used to make, she’d only ever seen one example of the ancient technology, in a glass case in the School Learning Resource Centre. Books were mostly illegal, because they were incredibly wasteful: they took acres of trees to make and you couldn’t update them. Family heirlooms were allowed, and so were very rare hand-crafted volumes, as long as they met the Wheel Meet criteria for ‘art object’. Lil’s hymnbook, Nimma had said, was a very early one from the Pioneer days. It probably had some nice pictures, but it wouldn’t have any new or updated hymns. She could tell Lil how archaic it was, and she could also tell everyone at school that she’d read a book and turned its pages.

  Lil was examining her fingernails. ‘Not today,’ she said at last.

  ‘Okay,’ Hokma said cheerfully, getting up with the dirty mugs, ‘maybe another time. Astra, will you help me wash up?’

  What was she, some kind of Old World slave? ‘Doesn’t Lil have to help too?’

  ‘Lil did the morning dishes – without being asked. Let her relax, Astra. You and I can catch up.’

  Lil had done the morning dishes. Astra got up and followed Hokma to the vestibule entrance. At the door she stopped to say, ‘Thanks for the game, better luck next time.’ But Lil had turned her back on the room. She was spread out on the sofa, her head leaning on the armrest and her legs stretched out over the cushion Astra had just been sitting on. Astra shut the door with a bang.

  * * *

  Hokma’s idea of catching up was nagging Astra about her homework. After she’d dried the stupid dishes, she walked back to Or with her solar lamp. When she got back to the Earthship she called out Hi, then went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of oatmilk. There was a plate of Nimma’s berry biscuits on the table. Good. That would take the taste of Lil’s smug victory out of her mouth. She sat down and ate one.

  As she munched, Nimma and Klor’s voices drifted in from the living room. ‘Goodness, these forms get more complicated every year,’ Klor complained. ‘Now they want to know Parent and Steering Committee meeting attendance percentages.’

  ‘If you kept track as you went along, darling, instead of waiting until the last minute, you wouldn’t have to go back over all the minutes.’

  ‘I have kept track, my deep-rooted lotus blossom. I just need to calculate the percentages. Surely someone at IMBOD could program a Tablette to do that.’

  ‘I expect all their statisticians are tracking the progress of the Sec Gens,’ Nimma consoled.

  ‘Probably so, probably so,’ Klor agreed. There was silence for a few minutes, filled only with the clicking of Nimma’s needles as she sped through her rows. Astra let a biscuit melt in her mouth. Perhaps they would talk more about the Sec Gens.

  ‘Reasons for absence!’ Klor sounded impatient now. ‘Project deadline. Sick. Sick child. Working abroad. Working elsewhere in Is-Land. Other. But we don’t keep a record of reasons.’

  ‘If IMBOD wants to know, it must be important. We’ll have to start keeping track.’

  ‘Keeping track of Hokma, you mean. She’s the top absentee. Twenty-four per cent.’

  ‘Gracious – that is high.’

  ‘They don’t have a category for “Sick Owleon”,’ Klor chuckled.

  ‘Surely Gloria’s been absent more often. Poor woman.’ Nimma tsked.

  Gloria was Congruence’s other Shelter mother. She hadn’t been well lately. No one knew what was wrong so she was going to Atourne for tests soon. Nimma, Astra knew, thought Torrent should have ‘taken that into consideration’, but Klor had said goodness, the boy’s not responsible for the girl’s mother’s health. Not that Torrent was bothered. His Code-Shelter father, Russett, seemed to care about Torrent’s reputation far more than he did. Russett, Astra thought, probably had a parents’ meeting attendance record of one hundred and fifty per cent. />
  ‘No,’ Klor was saying, ‘only twenty-two per cent. And she has a valid reason.’

  ‘We’ll have to talk to Hokma about it. I’m sure she doesn’t want a black mark on her record. Or ours. Astra,’ Nimma called, ‘are you still in the kitchen, darling? Come in and say goodnight.’

  She set her empty glass by the sink and shuffled into the living room. Nimma was on the sofa and Klor was in his comfy chair, his Tablette on his lap.

  ‘How did the weekend go?’ Nimma asked.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, hovering by the sofa arm.

  ‘Is Lil settling in?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Is she talking more?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘But you’re not, now, is that it?’ Klor commented.

  Astra rolled her eyes. ‘I ask her questions, but she doesn’t remember anything from before.’

  ‘It’s not your job to find out about that.’ Klor put his Tablette down on the side table. ‘IMBOD is still checking the records.’

  ‘Just be nice to her, Astra,’ Nimma said.

  ‘I am being nice! We played cards, and I let her win a game.’

  ‘Good girl. Now time for bed.’

  Astra lolled against the sofa arm. ‘Nimma?’

  ‘Yes, darling?’

  ‘Lil’s not coming to the Blood & Seed ceremony, is she?’

  ‘I don’t know. It will depend.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On a lot of things.’ Nimma looked over at Klor. ‘Whether IMBOD finds her family, for one.’

  ‘Oh, I expect they will soon,’ he said. ‘There can’t be too many missing single Code-Shelter fathers in Is-Land.’