Astra

by Naomi Foyle

  ‘But if she’s still here, will she come?’ Astra persisted. ‘I mean, the ceremony’s only for kids in the bioregion. Kids with communities. And she’s fourteen.’

  ‘We’d have to have a meeting about it,’ Nimma said firmly. ‘She did grow up in the bioregion after all. And it’s not her fault that she missed the ceremony last year.’

  Her Shelter parents were frowning a little at each other again. She was arguing too much, she knew. Astra acquiesced, but not before playing her trump card. ‘She hasn’t had her Security shot,’ she pouted. ‘She might upset Yoki.’

  Nimma patted her hand. ‘If she’s still here, we’ll see how she’s behaving closer to the time. Now you just put yourself to bed. And darling, do wash your hair in the morning – Eurasian hair dreads get so horribly greasy and rat’s-nesty. It’s not like you have nice springy Eurafrican hair like Meem.’

  Astra yanked her hand away. ‘I washed it yesterday. At Wise House,’ she lied.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t look clean. Hokma probably doesn’t have any shampoo up there, does she? What did you use, baking soda?’

  ‘I used water!’

  ‘That’s not enough. Soap, we said. Every two days.’

  ‘That’s right, Astra,’ Klor added. ‘That was the contract.’

  ‘Then I’ll wash it tomorrow night,’ she said, and stomped out of the room and up to bed.

  * * *

  The following week Lil helped Hokma make biscuits and wash the housecoats. She flew Helium and the two trainee Owleons, but she was respectful of Silver and only touched him if Astra let her. After the flying field, she played skipping games with Astra until Astra had to stop and admit she’d never be able to make the rope swing through the air the way Lil could. Veneday evening, when Astra was sleeping over again, Lil gathered wood from the forest to make a fire on the lawn.

  ‘That’s, er, illegal,’ Astra pointed out. Hokma had obviously forgotten what season it was.

  ‘No one will know if you don’t tell them,’ Hokma replied.

  Thanks. Make her sound like the criminal. ‘They’ll know if the forest burns down,’ she retorted.

  ‘Oh, it’ll be fine, Astra, just this once. We’ll get some water buckets.’

  So she and Hokma filled buckets and set them in a circle in case of sparks. Then they sat on a couple of logs and watched Lil prepare a tipi of twigs, filled with shruff and kindling. Next she stripped the bark off a thin stick of elder, placed the end on another, flat piece of wood and rotated the stick between her palms. Unbelievably, an ember formed. Lil gently blew the small glowing ball into a handful of shruff, which smoked for a minute, obscuring her face, and then with a whoosh flared into flame. She poked the shruff into the tipi and soon the kindling was crackling and Hokma was cheering. When the fire was properly blazing, Hokma improvised a grill from some bricks and a baking sheet and Lil fried chanterelles, wild garlic and mallow leaves in an old pan from the kitchen. The mushrooms were a little rubbery compared with how Nimma cooked them, but Astra knew Hokma would get annoyed if she said that, so she admired how frilly and golden they were, and how the mallow leaves turned all crispy. And the mushrooms weren’t bad. She ate them all, slowly, assessing this new intelligence about their guest.

  Okay, so Lil could forage and cook like a Boundary constable. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t a Non-Lander. Infiltrators must obviously study survivalist lore before they crossed into Is-Land, and of course enemy prisoners knew it was essential to gain people’s trust. At some point, though, the girl would slip up. That night, from Hokma’s loft, Astra watched Lil in bed. Lil was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. Her lips were moving as though she was silently reciting to herself. Then she turned off the nightlight, rolled onto her side away from Astra and curled up like a small brown fox in its den.

  ‘That wild dinner was good last night,’ Hokma said over breakfast. ‘Maybe this morning you two should go and see what else you can find in the woods. I expect Lil knows some good places.’

  Astra darted a glance at Lil. The girl had drunk her glass of oatmilk greedily and now a pale wet moustache glistened against her upper lip. She licked it away with a swipe of her pink tongue.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, flicking a glance back at Astra.

  Astra finished chewing her toast. A walk in the woods would be a chance to resume interrogation without interruption from Hokma. ‘Okay,’ she echoed.

  They left by the front gate and scrambled down the steep path to the crossroads. Lil turned right, heading towards the brook, and Astra followed.

  Presently, she touched Lil’s elbow. ‘There’s an almond tree over there.’

  ‘The nuts won’t be ready yet,’ Lil scoffed.

  Everyone knew that. ‘I’m just saying, that’s all.’

  But Lil was walking faster now so Astra had to jog to keep up. Together they breasted the brook and strode gleaming into the pine glade, Lil again moving ahead of her. When she reached the tree they’d both climbed so long ago, she stopped and waited for Astra to catch up.

  ‘That was me who chased you up there,’ Astra said.

  Lil looked at her sideways. ‘No. That was me who chased you away.’

  They both at the same time stooped and scrabbled for pine cones to throw at each other. Next they were running and dodging and screaming until Lil was twisting in the air and laughing like a hyena, and when Astra at last hit her, she rolled around pretending to play dead with her tongue sticking out and her eyes crossed, and Astra couldn’t help it, she was laughing hysterically too.

  ‘You hit me in the bum,’ Lil shrieked. ‘I died a bum-death!’

  ‘Your face looked so funny,’ Astra gasped between giggles.

  And suddenly Astra was having the best day she’d ever had with another person.

  Lil took her on a long walk, further up the brook than she’d ever been, and on the way she started to talk: about the way trees talked to each other with their roots, and if they didn’t like another tree, they ganged up and strangled it below the soil. About fire ants, whose jaws, when they ate their prey, made the fastest movement in the whole of Gaia’s realm. And about – she lowered her voice – duck vaginas. Did Astra know that male ducks were nearly all rapists, so the females had a maze of false canals in their Gaia gardens to catch unwanted sperm before it could fertilise their eggs? Astra didn’t know that – she had only a dim idea of what a ‘rapist’ was – but she pretended that she’d studied duck anatomy in school. In return, she told Lil about the male green spoon worm, which lived his entire life as a parasite inside the female’s ovary, spewing sperm onto her eggs twenty-four hours a day until he died.

  ‘Really?’ Lil sounded almost impressed.

  ‘Yeah.’ Astra snickered. ‘Peat, he’s my Shelter brother, says there’s a Code clinic in Vanapur that everyone calls the Green Spoon Room. It turned out they took masses of sperm from just one donor and now there’s about a hundred kids in the bioregion who aren’t allowed to Gaia-play or cross-Code with each other. The clinic got in big trouble and the director lost her job.’

  Lil brushed her hand through a patch of dead nettles. ‘So is that where you were Coded?’

  ‘Nah.’ Astra hesitated. ‘I was a bonded baby.’

  ‘Me too,’ Lil said. ‘My dad said I was Coded on the night of a thousand fireflies.’

  Astra stepped around the nettles. This conversation was going in a bad direction. She didn’t want to talk about her Birth-Code parents. A year or so ago, when she’d first started having bad fights with Nimma, she’d begun to daydream that Eya would come and find her soon and take her to live in Atourne, where they’d search for her Code father together. But when she’d broached the subject with Hokma one day while they were gardening, her Shelter mother had put aside her spade and said Astra shouldn’t count on that. Eya probably wouldn’t ever come and find her, Hokma had said. She undoubtedly had more children now, with her husband, and she wouldn’t want him to know that she had lied to him about her past. ‘Y
ou’re stuck with us, kid,’ Hokma had said, tousling Astra’s hair. Later, Peat had told her that Shelter parents had more legal rights than Birth-Code parents, so even if Eya did show up, she wouldn’t be able to rescue Astra anyway.

  ‘Did your dad really go into communities and steal things?’ she asked, and when Lil said, ‘All the time,’ she pelted her with questions about living in the woods: What was the longest her dad was away for? How far up the mountains did they go? Did they ever see reintroduced bears or wolves? How did Lil brush her teeth?

  Some questions Lil answered; some she ignored. At last they reached a place where the brook rushed over a low craggy outcrop of rock. A host of watercress was blossoming in the water and on the banks, the bushy dark green leaves scattered with clusters of small white flowers. Lil sat down on a large flat stone, picked a stem of cress and ate it. Astra did the same. The leaf was peppery and invigorating, the stem fresh and crunchy. They could pick bushels and make soup later.

  ‘There are otters a couple of hours from here,’ Lil pointed upstream. ‘We made friends with one once. It used to come and eat fish with us.’

  Astra ignored the fish bait; Lil wasn’t going to upset her again. ‘Otters are extinct in Is-Land,’ she contradicted. ‘They all died when the water dried up. And they haven’t been reintroduced yet because of politics.’

  Lil twirled another stem of cress between her thumb and forefinger. ‘He must have been hiding. Him and his family. Once we saw him holding hands with another otter, and in the night they screamed like ghosts.’

  ‘Holding hands?’ Lil had made that up for sure.

  ‘Yes, it was so cute. While they were swimming. Like this—’ Lil lay down on her back, clasped her hands together at her chest and pulled a nibbly, rodent-like face. Then she craned her neck and ate the stem of cress. Despite herself, Astra giggled.

  But this was all wrong. She shouldn’t be having fun with Lil, and definitely not secretly envying her. She should be testing her, trying to catch her out. She dangled her feet over the edge of the rock, cooling her toes in the fast-flowing water. ‘Did you ever see the Boundary?’ she asked, as casually as possible.

  Lil was leaning back on her elbows now. ‘There’s too many constables at the Boundary. Same as the off-limits woodlands. We would have been caught for sure.’

  ‘They might have thought you were Non-Landers,’ Astra ventured, cautiously. ‘That you came through the tunnels.’

  ‘Nah.’ Lil examined a scratch on her elbow. ‘Non-Landers are fighters. They have guns and suicide bombs, and they wear clothes until they get to the roads. Anyway, the tunnels are all blocked up now.’

  ‘Did you ever see one?’ Astra pressed.

  ‘A tunnel?’

  ‘No, a Non-Lander. But yeah, a tunnel too.’

  Lil shook her head. ‘There aren’t any Non-Landers in the forest any more. Only otters.’ She paused. ‘We saw a cave once with boulders stacked up over the entrance. It didn’t look like a rockfall. My dad said that was probably a tunnel. We got out of there quick, in case there were constables patrolling.’

  Practically everyone thought there weren’t any Non-Landers left in the forest. It was so frustrating. ‘There are urban infiltrators though,’ Astra declared. ‘There was a mass arrest last year, in Sippur. They caught a whole cell, six Non-Landers using Gaian ID papers. One of them was even pretending to be an IMBOD officer. And they were going to go to the forest. On the news it said their plan was to dig a new tunnel out of the off-limits woodland. I think they had accomplices outside the Boundary and they were going to meet in the middle. So the constables might have thought you were in disguise as Is-Landers. Maybe they’d think you had nanogrenades in your pacs.’

  Lil sat up straight and lifted her arms in the air. ‘My dad said if I ever saw a constable, I was to raise my arms and chant “O IMBOD Shield”. Or sing “Gaia We Love You”. ’

  Astra eyed her warily. ‘That’s my favourite hymn,’ she said.

  ‘O Gaia You are beautiful …’ Lil crooned.

  Astra couldn’t not join in. Together they sang the hymn, sending the notes soaring out into the forest:

  We belong to You

  We worship Your magnificence

  In everything we do

  Without You we are hollow husks

  Adrift in lonely space

  To sow the seeds of human dreams

  We need Your earthly grace

  We lost our way, we hurt You

  We burned Your holy trees

  You boiled and raged and prophesied

  We drowned in Your hot seas

  But thanks to Your benevolence

  We are born anew

  We will not fail a second time

  Gaia we love You

  The last long note hung in the air, vibrating like the cloud of midges that had descended over the brook. But Astra and Lil were wearing citronella oil and didn’t wave the insects away. After you had sung a Gaia hymn, you needed to stay still and listen so you could hear Her welcoming you deeper into Her open heart, Her secret truths. The brook was splashing over the rocks and sunlight was caressing the slender grey trunks of the hornbeams. Two were growing together, their branches gently intertwining. Astra noticed them and with an almost painful queasiness felt Gaia nudging her. Be nice to Lil.

  ‘I like the word “benevolence”, ’ she confided. ‘It sort of wraps you inside it. That’s what Gaia does if you respect Her.’

  A caterpillar ambled by Astra’s finger, carrying a torn bite of leaf. Astra could nearly hear his little feet pittering. Lil put her finger in its path and let it crawl over her knuckle. ‘I like “magnificence”, ’ she said. ‘It makes everything bigger when you sing it. My dad had a magnifying glass and we looked at ants with it, and made fires too. But then I dropped it and it broke.’

  ‘Was he mad?’

  ‘No.’ Lil picked up a pebble and rolled it between her palms. ‘He said you could never totally rely on technology. You always had to have a biological solution to every problem too.’

  That was interesting. Most Is-Land products were biotech – elegant, exciting and innovative – but every Or-child knew that ultimately these were two different systems, that every component had to be detachable and feed back into its own recycle loop. If you lived off-off-grid, like Lil and her dad, then of course you had to depend on exclusively biological processes, but normally you didn’t learn survivalism until the first year of IMBOD Service. Lil’s dad had probably been good at that course, Astra thought.

  ‘Was he a Craft worker or a Code worker?’ she asked. ‘In your community, I mean.’

  Lil threw the pebble into the brook. It landed with a plop, like a frog. ‘He was a Crafty worker.’

  For the first time, Astra tried to imagine this man. He couldn’t be like Klor, tall and booming, or Ahn, ethereal and remote. He must be like a wild stag, bony and alert. ‘Was he thin like you?’ she asked.

  Lil turned and looked her in the face. When she spoke, the whites of her eyes flashed. ‘When I placed him on his pyre, he weighed as much as an empty bees’ nest.’

  Astra didn’t know what to say. But from her silence emerged an Imprint, one of the first ones she’d ever learned at school; the one she had chanted this year at Elpis’ Return Ceremony.

  ‘Gaia will gather your loved one in Her eternal shawl and glowing like the warm rays of Her heart, he will be around you always,’ she recited. As she did, she felt in her blood it was the right thing to say. Imprints were so reassuring.

  ‘I know. That’s what he said.’ Lil slipped her feet into the water. ‘He had dreads, like you.’

  Astra fingered her loc. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. But he wanted me to have hair like my Birth-Code mother’s. So he combed and brushed mine every night.’

  ‘Do you want a dread now? I could help you make one.’

  ‘Nah. I didn’t like it getting all matted when I was by myself. Yours looks good, though.’ Lil stood up and waded into the brook.
‘You have to snip the cress with your fingernails. Don’t pull it up by the roots.’

  * * *

  They gathered cress until they had enough for a big pot of soup, and then they returned to Wise House, singing Gaia hymns and foraging for vetch, nettles and wild asparagus until their hydropacs were full. As they walked back down the path to the crossroads, Lil, for the first time, asked Astra a question.

  ‘Are you going to be an Owleon Coder like Hokma when you grow up?’

  Astra frowned. How did Lil know she’d been asking herself that question all the time lately? Much as she loved Silver, and all the birds, she was starting to realise she didn’t want to be an Owleon specialist when she grew up. That was Hokma’s Code expertise, and no one could ever be greater than Hokma in the field. Astra wanted to find her own way of being famous. The problem was, she didn’t know where her genius lay. When she was little she’d wanted to work on limb regeneration, but Klor had been right: that research had been abandoned in favour of developing more sophisticated prosthetics. Nothing else especially interested her, which was worrying, because to be a genius at anything, she had read, you had to spend ten thousand hours practising, and the longer she went without specialising, the longer it would take her to make a major breakthrough and win an IMBOD medal.

  ‘Nah.’ She trailed her hand over a bank of wild grass. ‘I’m going to be a Code worker, though.’

  ‘What kind of Code worker?’

  She didn’t like being prodded, but at the same time, it was a terribly important question and no one else seemed to care about it. The Sec Gens all just did what adults told them, and everyone, even Hokma, seemed to assume that Astra would work with Owleons one day. Feigning indifference, she replied, ‘Dunno. I’ll decide when I’m at Code College.’

  Lil nodded. ‘My dad said that Gaia will always tell you what to do and when to do it, but sometimes She makes you wait because you aren’t ripe yet.’

  That made sense. Actually, it was quite profound. Astra didn’t like to give Lil that big a compliment, so instead she sang the opening lines of ‘Gaia Is Your Destiny’, and Lil joined in, until they reached the foot of the slope to Wise House and had to save their breath for the climb.