Astra

by Naomi Foyle

  At the crest of the hill, Lil turned to Astra. ‘You can see my hymnbook tonight if you like,’ she announced.

  ‘Really?’ Astra blurted. ‘I mean, yeah, okay, after dinner,’ she corrected herself.

  ‘I knew you wanted to,’ Lil said, swinging up the path to the gate. ‘But I had to be sure it was for the right reasons. My dad said I should only ever show it to people who would appreciate it.’

  As they entered Wise House, Lil was no longer a Non-Lander. She was Astra’s friend.

  2.5

  ‘How many petals have you sewn now? Astra? Yoki?’ Nimma picked up Yoki’s drawstring bag and rummaged through it with her finger. ‘Sixty-eight,’ Yoki claimed.

  ‘Fifty-three,’ Astra grumbled. It was Veneday evening and she should be up at Wise House starting the weekend, but instead she was stuck in the Earthship falling behind Yoki in the most important task of the year. And just when she had been doing so well at Craft class. She had finished her socks, which to her immense pride had been deemed good enough to send to the Southern Belt, and last week, like everyone in her Year, she had started enthusiastically on her petals for the Blood & Seed ceremony. She and Yoki had each cut out five hundred petals from red and white cloth and now they were stitching the edges and veins in the opposite colour, adding sequins to every tenth one. She just hadn’t realised how long the work would take. Nimma had instituted a petal schedule on top of all their other homework, and although Astra thought she had been working quickly, yesterday Yoki had overtaken her and now he was speeding out of sight.

  ‘Very good, Yoki,’ Nimma purred. ‘Astra, if you don’t catch up you’ll have to cut back on your Wise House visits. I don’t want to be sewing for you the night before the ceremony.’

  It wasn’t fair: she was on schedule! Yoki was pulling ahead because he was sewing extra hours while she was feeding the Owleons. But no matter how boring it was, you weren’t allowed to complain about petal-sewing. You were supposed to do the work joyfully, listening to Code lessons on your earphones or singing Gaia hymns together. If you did sigh about it or, like Tedis Sonnenson, argue that your hands were made to hold bows and arrows, not needles, all the adults said sewing was a wonderful meditation and learning to do something difficult was the best possible preparation for life. ‘No task is too humble if performed in service of Is-Land,’ Klor had said sternly the one time Astra had wished out loud she was done.

  Then he had relented and tousled her hair. ‘The trick with Craft work, Or-child, is to get into the flow,’ he’d said. ‘Then your mind will suddenly open and ideas will rush through it like fishes down a river. Many’s the time I’ve had a breakthrough in Code thought when I was knitting.’ Astra had never seen Klor knit, but he did sit and stare at his Tablette screendesk all day, and some people called that knitting.

  Yoki didn’t complain, but once he said wistfully that it would be nice if Or were a larger community with more Year Sevens, then they could start an evening Blood & Seed sewing circle, like the one at school. Astra had felt a twinge of remorse then. She knew Yoki would have preferred her to sit with him most evenings instead of dashing off to Wise House right after petal hour. Now though, she might have to start sitting with him longer just to catch up. It was either that or sew at Wise House, but she didn’t want to do that. If she worked on the petals in front of Lil, Lil might start asking questions about the ceremony and decide she wanted to go. And even though things were different with Lil now, Astra wasn’t sure she’d like that. Lil was still pretty bossy, for one thing. When they’d looked at her small grubby hymnbook, with its coarse stitching and no illustrations, just words stuck to the ragged-edge paper, she hadn’t let Astra turn the pages. ‘I can’t let you touch it because it holds my secrets,’ she’d said. And then she’d opened the book up wide, to show Astra that there was a hidden sleeve in the back cover, inside which Astra could glimpse the pink leaf of paper. But even though otherwise the book wasn’t that impressive, if Lil brought it to the Blood & Seed ceremony everyone would want to look at it and Lil’s head would get as big as a jumbo caulis-quash. No, it was better to keep sewing in the Earthship, even if it meant Yoki might beat her.

  ‘I did fifteen petals in an hour yesterday,’ Yoki announced. ‘All by myself, with my earphones on. I can recite the Blood & Seed hymn nearly all the way through now.’

  ‘That’s wonderful, Yoki.’ Nimma plumped herself down on the sofa beside Yoki and put her arm around him. Meem was the youngest, but Yoki was still her baby, everyone knew that. ‘Now, how are your night falls? Did you remember any of your wet dreams yet?’

  Yoki looked down at his Gaia pepper. ‘I woke up during the last one. I was swimming in a river with the bigger boys.’

  ‘Oh, isn’t that lovely and peaceful? You’re becoming a bigger boy yourself now, aren’t you, darling? And you, Astra? How are your dreams?’

  Nimma was being tactful, Astra knew, not asking about her blood. ‘Nice,’ she said. ‘I had one at Wise House yesterday, in the hammock. In the dream I was swinging in a hammock too, in a super-tall tree, and the rhythms were rolling right through me.’

  ‘How beautiful,’ Nimma sighed. ‘And when you’re not sleeping: are you both peaking okay?’

  ‘Yes, Nimma!’ Astra and Yoki chorused.

  ‘Wonderful. And how were Gaia-play lessons this week?’

  ‘Fine,’ they said together again.

  ‘Now, like Klor and I said before, if you have any questions at all about what Vishnu tells you, you must just come and ask us. Promise?’

  ‘Promise’. Astra and Yoki rolled their eyes at each other. Shelter parents and teachers were more worried about the Blood & Seed ceremony than the participants were: for months now the adults had been holding discussions at home and at school about Gaia Power – as if anyone needed lessons on how to peak! Astra had been peaking for a year now and no one had ever told her how: when she was alone in the forest or the lights were out in her bedroom, she just closed her eyes and rubbed her Gaia bud. As her fingers moved beautiful patterns – light pouring through water, flowers bursting open – would dance over her eyelids and her mouth would water as if someone had put a big piece of rose-syrup sponge cake in front of her. Time would soar away then, like Silver up into the sky, disappearing into a vast, wonderful whiteness, until at last her Gaia bud would freeze and an astonishing sensation would flood through her veins, like a cool breeze from nowhere on the hottest day of the year.

  The Gaia-play lessons did interest her though. When you were little, you Gaia-played with other little children: she, Meem and Yoki had all examined each other, and Peat had showed them all the funny puppet creatures he could make with his Gaia pepper. But as they’d got older, those games had become boring. Now, even when Gaia Power was surging through her, the thought of playing with a Shelter sibling or even other Or-kids was … well, weird. They would laugh at you or boss you around or start doing something annoying just when you were enjoying yourself. In their first Gaia-play lesson Mr Ripenson had said that this aversion – as he called it – was a common result of living in close-knit communities. Later, on the bus back home, he had agreed with Astra when she’d asked – in a low voice – if the fact that Stream and Congruence had both arrived in Or in their early teens was the reason Torrent was not averse to Gaia-playing with them. Aversion, he had said in class, was one of the reasons kids weren’t educated in their own communities. At school, they would meet other children they might want to play with.

  But as communities were often far apart, meeting up outside of school could be complicated to arrange. That was why, when they started at New Bangor High School in the autumn, they would take siesta not in a gym but in the woodlands that lay behind the school grounds. Gaia play was permitted here, subject to successful completion of their Blood & Seed ceremony, siesta supervision and a set of rules they would learn in upcoming lessons. This hadn’t been news: everyone knew that high school students could Gaia-play during Woodland Siesta if they wanted to, but
big siblings were always frustratingly sparse with the details. ‘I’m not allowed to talk about it,’ Peat had said when Astra pressed him. ‘Learning the rules is part of the build-up to the Blood & Seed ceremony and I’m not supposed to spoil it.’

  The build-up was tantalising. To begin with, Mr Ripenson had discussed the nature of Gaia play – which Tedis had claimed was competitive, like cricket, but he had said was co-operative, and a form of Gaia worship. In the next lesson they’d talked about gender difference. They knew already from Code class that gender was a spectrum – Leaf and other girl-boys and boy-girls proved that – and everyone, not just Leaf, had male and female qualities mixed up inside them in different proportions. Nevertheless, when it came to Gaia play some gender differences were particularly apparent. Peaking, for example, usually took longer for girls and girl-boys, so they’d spent a whole lesson discussing what boys and boy-girls could do to help while they were waiting.

  She thought the Gaia-play lessons were mostly fun – and very informative. They were held outside in the cherry orchard, and Mr Ripenson made jokes and the Sec Gens, even Yoki, all teased each other and laughed a lot. They learned Imprints to help them remember key points, and Mr Ripenson also taught positive body image meditations and special detumescence techniques to help them control their erectile tissues. Tedis could now detumesce four times a day, he’d told Astra and Silvie while they were waiting to bat during cricket yesterday. ‘Careful you don’t forget how to peak,’ Silvie had darted back, but he’d winked and said, ‘No need to worry about that.’ Then he’d asked Astra if she could detumesce her nipples yet. That was a stupid question – the girls’ exercises were focused on the clitoris – but for some reason, like now, just remembering Tedis looking at her breasts, it had made her Gaia garden tingle and swell.

  Sunblast! She’d pricked her finger with the needle. Thank Gaia Nimma was cuddling Yoki and hadn’t noticed. Fortunately she was working on a red petal and the bloodstain didn’t show. She sucked her finger. Why did Tedis Sonnenson make her make mistakes? Dangerous mistakes. She had to be very careful at school as well as at home. If she started letting her real feelings show she might get angry and that would raise alarms. The teachers had already called Hokma about her, back in Year Five, and since then she’d been under strict orders not to have any more temper tantrums. She’d been managing pretty well in Gaia-play lessons, except for that time Silvie had tickled Tedis with a leaf and a hot flood of emotion had rushed through Astra’s guts and for a moment she had hated Silvie Higgsdott: hated her brilliant blue eyes and her blonde fuzzy Gaia mound and her unflappable ability to always put Tedis in his place – and she hated especially the fact that Silvie had been the first Year Seven girl to get her Gaia-blood, coming to school two weeks ago in a pair of green blood panties with lace trim, armed with a supply of pads in a linen bag she had toted everywhere for five days.

  The highly unpleasant feeling that had rushed through her was envy, Hokma had told her. It was a negative emotion, one Sec Gens experienced only faintly, as a kind of mild regret. She’d had to mask it, drop her head and play with her dread so no one could see her face. At last the envy had drained away, leaving a scum-line of shame. It was wrong to hate Silvie – she was really nice and friendly to everyone. She never boasted about her Gaia-bleeding, but always said she didn’t like being first and couldn’t wait for the rest of the girls to catch up. And she tickled lots of people, not just Tedis; Astra too.

  Astra couldn’t ask Nimma about envy. She had to keep quiet and sew. With a practised jab she speared a sequin and threaded it though.

  ‘I hope Astra gets her Blood soon,’ Yoki said.

  ‘All in Gaia’s time, Yoki.’ Nimma stroked his cheek. ‘Girls can enjoy their Gaia Power whether they’re bleeding or not. Isn’t that right, Astra?’

  Astra grunted. That was absolutely right. She enjoyed her Gaia Power very much, on her own. She attached the sequin and pulled the thread tight.

  ‘Good girl,’ Nimma said. ‘Another half an hour sewing, you two, and then an early night.’

  * * *

  Sabbaday morning was Earthship chores, but straight after lunch, Astra was free to race up to Wise House. Hokma was busy working on Code, so she and Lil went for another walk.

  Lil led the way down the slope to the crossroads, but she stopped at the top of the steps to the Fountain. ‘Do you want to go somewhere secret?’

  Astra adjusted her hydropac. It was laden with lunch as well as enough water for the day and the straps were digging into her shoulders already. ‘The woods aren’t secret. They belong to everyone.’

  Lil dug a hole in the earth with her heel. ‘This place is my secret. Mine and my dad’s. No one else has been there since the Dark Time.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Astra asked sceptically.

  ‘If I told you, you’d know the secret.’

  In the end, just to stop Lil being so lofty and annoying, Astra said she wanted to see the secret place and promised not to tell anyone, anywhere, for the rest of her life, anything about it. Probably Lil was making things up and the place was nowhere special, so the promise wasn’t a big deal.

  ‘You’ll never regret it! Come on, let’s go.’ Lil started brightly down the rock steps to the Fountain, immediately making Astra anxious: they weren’t supposed to visit Birth House on their own. But halfway down Lil veered off the steps and picked a path north through the trees, a mix of pine and stringybark, with the occasional black cypress and cedar grove, which helped their orienteering. It was the ideal territory for playing Silent Tracker. Lil was already barefoot so Astra took off her sandals too and they proceeded stealthily, Lil in the lead because she knew the way, until Astra got tired of being docked points for every crackle and crunch and suggested they play Ambush instead. Noise didn’t matter as much as speed in this game, so she put her sandals back on and they joined forces to swoop down slopes and capture dozens of Non-Landers. When they were bored with that, they just walked, following a shallow gorge that ran like a rip through the forest, talking about the ridiculousness of clothes, the potential self-defence uses of Owleon shit, Hokma’s snoring patterns and the possible reasons why she kept her IMBOD medal in her toolbox on the verandah, in a tray with screws and nails, instead of hanging on the wall in Wise House. Lil said it was because she was planning to melt down the medal one day, and just hadn’t got round to it yet, but Astra said no, that was a stupid answer: Hokma had told her she’d put it there to remind herself that the point of fighting was to build a better world. Then they had to concentrate on the terrain for a while, negotiating a tricky slope. At the bottom Lil checked her bearings and took Astra through a paperbark glade.

  ‘Is this the secret?’ Astra whispered.

  ‘Huh?’ Lil was marching ahead. ‘No.’

  But it was. Paperbark groves were rare, hidden places the Pioneers had planted far from paths so that people could worship Gaia alone in them. Astra could see why. Sunlight sashayed through the leaves and the white peeling trunks were so smooth and delicate she wanted to stop and rub her cheek against each one.

  But she had to keep up with Lil. ‘We learned the Code for paperbarks at school this week,’ she said. ‘The original edition wouldn’t grow well in a dry forest, but the Pioneers especially wanted to have them in Is-Land so they were the first trees to be Gaianised.’

  Lil yawned. ‘My dad said school was for mules.’

  ‘Mules?’ Astra had studied them in Code class: if you cross-Coded species, you risked creating a genetic dead end. But she didn’t see the connection with school.

  ‘Yeah. He said you go in as prancing foals and you come out half-donkey, with your Gaia Power sterilised.’

  That was ridiculous. ‘We learn tons about Gaia Power at school,’ Astra informed Lil. ‘In fact, we’re taking Gaia-play lessons right now.’

  Lil picked up a stick and flung it between the trees. ‘My dad said Gaia play is easy. All mammals do it. We don’t need lessons. We just have to rememb
er that we’re worshipping Gaia first and each other second. He said it’s easy to get confused about that.’

  Astra hesitated. Before the lessons she had thought Gaia play would be easy too. But if she told Lil how complicated it was to synchronise peaking, and how you had to do special exercises to prepare for it, Lil would just laugh at her. Lil would scoff even harder if Astra said that there were Gaia-play rules to obey. She’d demand examples, and Astra wouldn’t be able to provide any. Mr Ripenson was going to explain the rules next time, in the Woodland Siesta lesson. Then she would be able to correct Lil. Right now, she started humming, ‘Gaia, Gaia, My Garden is Your Shrine’. Lil joined in, and soon, singing the hymn at the tops of their voices, they left the paperbark glade. Then they let the last note trail away and walked quietly until they reached a grove of cedars.

  ‘Shh,’ Lil ordered.

  They were in the middle of the forest and there was no one around for miles. The cedars were impressive, maybe even ancient, but there was a whole slope of them on the other side of Or, and tons around Cedaria. And, most importantly, she hadn’t been making a sound. Astra felt irritated, until suddenly it struck her why Lil was being so mysterious. ‘Are there animals?’ she asked, awestruck. Was this a place with otters?

  But Lil had plunged left, nimbly zigzagging down a gentle incline through the dark towering trees. She stopped behind a large boulder and let Astra catch up.

  ‘It’s on the other side,’ she whispered, her cheek pressed to the lichen-speckled rock. ‘Don’t be scared. They can’t hurt you.’

  ‘Who can’t—?’

  Lil put her finger to her lips, then turned and tiptoed around the rock. Astra followed. Lil stopped and pointed at a long, creeper-covered hump between a stand of oaks. For a moment Astra didn’t understand. Oaks: yes they were ancient, but hardly a big secret. Then she saw.