Astra

by Naomi Foyle

  * * *

  It wasn’t a rock or a fallen tree trunk. It was a dirt-stained, corroded metal hull, a bit like a bus, except no bus could possibly have driven here. It wasn’t shaped like a bus either. It was tubular and half-torn, with a crumpled snout buried in a tangle of bushes and, at the other end, sloping down from a jagged rip in the roof, what looked like a twisted fishtail digging into the earth. Near the nose, a flat protrusion jutted out from the hull, ending abruptly in a ragged stump. Above it was a door with a shattered window, the pane too high to see through.

  She knew this shape. She had seen pictures of it from the oil junkie era. ‘It’s an arrowpain,’ she breathed.

  ‘Shhh.’ Lil frowned. She moved forward again, picking her way through thigh-high undergrowth. Astra hung back, then reluctantly followed in her wake, her sandals crunching through the gritty litter of metal and glass desecrating the forest floor. Arrowpains, Klor had once said, were more lethal than the sharpest arrow: they were like a non-stop hail of bullets shooting Gaia in the lungs. This one had tried to stab Her in the heart as well. Even though obviously long disabled, it still exuded menace. The gaping holes caused by its corrosion were impenetrable to vision, puncturing the once-white metal hull with the threat of its black interior.

  When they reached the base of the broken wing, Lil stopped. The arrowpain, Astra could see, had crashed on some rocks between the trees; that was why it was torn open and lifted above the ground. Though the protruding section was level with their heads it would be hard to scramble onto it without getting cut. Lil gripped the wing’s short, smooth edge and hung off it for a moment. Astra stepped back nervously: what if the arrowpain rolled over and trapped them? But the wing held Lil’s weight. She dropped back down, wiped her hands on her flanks and turned to face Astra.

  ‘My dad used to lift me,’ she whispered, beckoning Astra closer. ‘Give me a leg-up.’

  Astra looked up at the door. There was a pinching feeling in her stomach. ‘That’s where the driver sat,’ she objected.

  ‘You mean the pilot,’ Lil corrected.

  ‘Okay, the pilot. He might be in there still. With other people.’

  ‘They aren’t people,’ Lil hissed. ‘They’re ancestors.’

  The forest seemed to loom closer, blotting out whatever faint hints of sunshine the cedars were permitting through their branches. Ancestors belonged in Birth House, not in the forgotten wreckage of an oil monster – an arrowpain, one of Gaia’s worst enemies. The ancestors wouldn’t like it in there. They would be angry at being trapped all these years in a thing that should be dismantled and recycled, not left to poison the earth with its toxic paints and leaking engine. The Or-adults should be told the arrowpain was here. They would come and take it away and do a healing ceremony and return the ancestors to Gaia in Birth House. Until then, Astra didn’t want to go poking about in their decrepit, disrespectful tomb.

  ‘You’re not supposed to look at ancestors,’ she said hotly, instantly hating herself for sounding like Yoki, reinforcing Nimma’s petty limits on how many peaches one was allowed to pick from the greenhouse corridor before dinner.

  ‘You can if they’re relics,’ Lil rejoined, still in a low tone. ‘My dad said you’re supposed to look at relics. But only once a year.’

  Astra didn’t know what a relic was and she didn’t want to let Lil know that she didn’t. She hesitated.

  ‘You don’t have to look if you’re scared,’ Lil whispered dismissively. ‘But I have to make sure they’re still here. Me and my dad come every summer.’

  ‘I’m not scared,’ Astra retorted, even though the pit of her stomach was throbbing and she suddenly desperately needed a wee.

  ‘Then help me. We have to make sure they’re okay, and give them a ceremony. That’s what me and my dad always did.’

  Clenching her bladder, Astra regarded Lil suspiciously. ‘What kind of a ceremony?’

  ‘The window’s broken at the top. We give them a feather each.’

  ‘We don’t have any feathers.’

  ‘Yes we do. I brought one from Silver and one from Helium.’

  ‘You took a feather from Silver?’ Astra was outraged.

  ‘Don’t panic. He’s moulting. I got it from the floor of his cage.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. You can’t give Silver’s feather away. Only I can do that.’

  ‘I know. That’s why I brought it for you. I couldn’t tell you because it was a secret. I took good care of it. Look.’

  Astra glowered as Lil unzipped her hydropac and took out a rolled-up red kitchen cloth. She laid it out on the ground. Inside were two feathers: one small and snow white, one long and tawny. The tips weren’t bent or separated. Astra couldn’t complain about how they’d been transported. As she was inspecting the flutings, making sure none were broken, Lil took a left-handed Owleon glove out of her pac and put it on.

  ‘Does Hokma know you took that?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be such a mule. She’s got about forty of them. And we need it. My dad always put a rabbit-skin blanket over the wing before we climbed it. You can get blood poisoning if you cut yourself on rust.’

  Well, she didn’t want to do that. Or start trapping rabbits. Ignoring the mule remark, Astra folded her arms. ‘Did you bring two?’

  ‘We need a lefty and she’s only got one. We can share it.’ Lil stuck Helium’s feather behind her ear. ‘C’mon, Astra, give me a legsie. You can go after me.’

  Why did Lil always treat her like a servant? Astra scowled. ‘No. You’re heavy. We can make a ladder. With logs and vines.’

  ‘That’d take hours. I’m not that heavy. I just need a booster.’

  Astra glared at her but there was no point squabbling. She couldn’t let Lil use Silver’s feather in a ceremony without her. And even if they did spend an hour building a ladder, there was no other way to look inside the arrowpain apart from taking turns.

  ‘All right. But I have to wee first.’ She stepped away, squatted and whizzed, and wiped herself with a leaf. Then she returned to Lil, bent and cupped her hands.

  Gripping the arrowpain wing edge with her gloved hand, Lil placed the ball of her right foot in the cradle of Astra’s hands. As Astra hoisted her as high as she could, Lil jumped, nearly kicking Astra in the face as she hauled herself onto the wing by her elbows and knees. At last Lil was standing on the metal ledge, peering down at her.

  ‘Let me stand on your shoulder,’ she demanded.

  Astra rubbed her hands against her thighs. ‘What?’

  ‘The gap in the window is too far over. My dad always let me stand on him. I thought I’d be tall enough now to reach now, but I’m not.’

  She’d gone too far to object now. At least Lil didn’t want to stand on her head. Lil gripped the window frame with her gloved hand and Astra let her balance her right foot on her shoulder. She waited like that for what seemed an age, Lil’s anklebone grazing her ear and her grimy sole bearing down on her hydropac strap. She wanted to watch the ceremony, but when she looked up all she could see were Lil’s leg and belly pressed against the door.

  At last, Lil dropped down to the ground. Her stomach was speckled with dirt and rust, but her eyes were gleaming. ‘No one has been here,’ she announced, in a tone of rich satisfaction. ‘Not since the Dark Time. No one except me and my dad and now you.’

  Then Astra put Silver’s feather in her own hair and Lil gave Astra the glove and a leg-up. Astra was a bit shorter than Lil and she couldn’t get onto the wing on her first jump, but Lil hoiked her higher the second time and she made it. Lil made her take her right sandal off and she rested her bare foot on Lil’s shoulder. The window was too splintered and fogged with age to see through, but at the top right-hand corner, just as Lil had said, the pane had fallen clean away. When she’d found her balance, she steadied her left hand above the window and peered inside the arrowpain.

  * * *

  A thick mulch of leaves had accumulated over the front window and it took her eyes a minute
to adjust. She had known she was going to see the ancestors, otherwise, even with the gradual revelation, she might have screamed and fallen. As it was, the scream shrank to a frog-gulp in her throat, and her muscles trembled for only a moment.

  There were two ancestors in the arrowpain. You couldn’t tell if they were male or female, sky-clad or clothed, because any clothes they might have been wearing had rotted away with their flesh. All that was left were their skeletons – not tall, bleached, airy skeletons like the pictures in anatomy lessons, but hunched assemblages of moss-coated bones, riven with cracks. The ancestor closest to the window was slumped forward, face smashed into the dashboard, arm bones dangling down by its feet. The other ancestor was sitting up straight, except for its skull, which was drooping over its ribcage. The seat material had rotted away too, and the ancestors were resting on rusted metal coils. There was a long, jagged hole in the floor beneath the seats, and Astra could see the roots of a tree crawling through the earth below.

  What was frightening, she realised, were the gaps and the teeth. You thought people were full of feelings, but through the gaps in the ancestors you could see how empty we are. An ancestor, she thought, was like an awkward hug with no one inside it. That was sad, and you could almost feel sorry for the ancestors, except for their teeth. Their teeth had feelings still – strange, threatening feelings you could never understand. The ancestors’ teeth were clamped together in dark, eternal, gangrenous smiles as if being this lonely and empty was a magnificent private treasure, all anyone could ever long for.

  Then, as Astra kept looking, a strange thing happened. She began to see that the inside of the plane was immensely peaceful. With their bent heads, the ancestors could be praying. Not like Himalayans or Whirlers, but … She tried to remember who prayed with their heads lowered – yes, maybe the ancestors were Abrahamites. They had sky gods, so perhaps the arrowpain was the right tomb for them. Perhaps Gaia had called it to Her bosom and was embracing it now, forgiving the ancestors. After the Fountain story, Klor had said that oil addiction was an illness and we mustn’t hate our Dark Time ancestors; we should feel sorry for them instead.

  The hole in the window was too high to stick her arm through. Lil must have just dropped Helium’s feather in, because it had drifted down to the seat and was resting against the first ancestor’s hipbone. There were other feathers too, a glossy black one at the base of the spine and a red-tipped one in the crease of the seat. Others might have fallen down inside the door, or perhaps Lil’s dad had been tall enough to climb up and put them in the other window, with the other ancestor. Next time, she and Lil would have to build a ladder.

  She took Silver’s feather out of her hair, closed her eyes and pressed it to her lips.

  To the ancestors. You saw the whole world. Please help us fly by ourselves now.

  The flutings along the edge of an Owleon’s feather helped the bird fly silently. The ancestors fed on silence, she could sense that. They would be thankful for Silver’s gift. Tip first, she pushed the feather through the hole in the glass. It twirled down over the near skeleton and slipped between two ribs, coming to rest on the curve of a long green bone.

  * * *

  She was sweltering and her body was streaked with paint and rust from the hull. She put her shoe back on and took a long swig of water from her tubing.

  ‘We have to wash now,’ Lil said, pointing beyond the nose of the plane and into a stringybark stand. She led Astra downhill from the wreckage, winding through the trees, until they reached a brook. On its bank, they took off their hydropacs, stepped in and hand-splashed themselves clean. Lil rubbed herself vigorously between the legs, then picked a flake of metal-paint out of her Gaia hair.

  Astra sat down on a rock. ‘I’m getting hungry. Shall we eat here?’

  ‘No.’ Lil stepped out of the brook, shaking droplets of water over Astra’s arm. ‘I know a way better place.’

  They struck out again, walking further away from the arrowpain, and eventually emerged from the forest onto a long, narrow ledge. A strip of full sun blanched the rock before it dropped clean away to the lower forest and the fire grounds. Beyond, the steppes stretched out in an endless pale haze: just as the ancestors must have seen them from up in the arrowpain.

  Lil walked out from the shade of the trees, planted her feet wide apart and spread her arms, stamping the sky with the brown X of her body.

  ‘Gaiaaaaaaa,’ she called out to the horizon and up to the stratosphere.

  Lil’s toes weren’t touching the rock edge, but they were no more than a step away from it. Astra hung back. The ledge inclined slightly downwards, making her feel dizzy, as if her body were in freefall, somersaulting off the cliff.

  Why was she so afraid today? The ancestors were with her now. She ventured out and stood exactly beside Lil, about an arm’s length away. Far below, skirting the firegrounds, the road to New Bangor creased through the foothills. But the view was like a magnetic field, threatening to drag Astra into its green depths. She raised her gaze and focused on an imaginary spot in the air, a few feet directly ahead. When she’d regained her composure, she placed her hands in a prayer formation in front of her chest and lifted one foot to the inside of the opposite knee. Once she’d found her balance, she lifted her arms above her head. Tree pose.

  ‘Don’t dive off.’ Lil turned on her heel and cartwheeled back to the shade of the treeline. The sudden movement sideswiped Astra and she came out of the asana with a wobble. Her heart was thumping in her stomach, but she’d not toppled.

  Lil was sitting half in the shade now, removing her hydropac. Astra plumped herself down cross-legged on the flat, warm stone beside her. Holding her own pac in her lap, she stared out over the steppes.

  ‘I wonder where they came from,’ she said.

  ‘From Sippur. They were Non-Landers.’

  Astra stared at Lil, incredulous. ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what my dad said. He checked out the back of the arrowpain and it’s full of food bags. They were escaping from the bombing, but something went wrong with the engine. They tried to land, but they lost power just above the trees. That’s why the arrowpain isn’t smashed to little bits.’

  Lil thought she was so smart, but she didn’t get the most basic things sometimes. ‘Non-Landers aren’t ancestors,’ Astra said, shortly. ‘Not our ancestors, anyway.’

  ‘Yes, they are,’ Lil contradicted. ‘My dad said that they were ancestors of the steppes, so they belonged to Is-Land.’

  Astra struggled to respond. Sippur had been bombed during the Great Collapse – she’d seen the crater before it was landscaped into a municipal park. So it was just possible that the skeletons were Non-Landers; that would explain why their smiles had been so frightening. But Lil had no idea how crazy her dad was. The steppes had lain barren and abandoned, toxic and parched, during all the long years of the Dark Time, and when the Pioneers had arrived to clean up everything had started over. CONC had transferred legal ownership of the land to the Gaians, so to say that Non-Landers – no matter how dead they were – in any way belonged to Is-Land was not just wrong, it was absurd and dangerous. This kind of thing was precisely why she couldn’t have Lil coming to the Blood & Seed ceremony.

  ‘If they were Non-Landers,’ she said at last, ‘we have to tell Hokma so that IMBOD can come and take them away. We can’t have a shrine for Non-Landers in the forest. Infiltrators might come here to worship them.’

  ‘We’re not telling Hokma anything,’ Lil hissed. ‘You promised.’

  Lil was upset. Obscurely, Astra felt she had won. Thinking about it, the last thing Hokma would want to do was summon IMBOD to question her and Lil. If she told her Shelter mother about the arrowpain, she would probably take Lil’s side. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said generously. ‘I’m not going to tell. They’re our secret. And your dad’s. But they’re not Non-Landers. They must have been Neuropeans, fleeing the Great Collapse.’

  Lil fixed her with a bitter stare, but she didn’t argue.
It seemed to be a deal. Lil looked south, her expression morphing into a dreamy gaze. ‘I wish I’d seen the balloons,’ she said.

  ‘What balloons?’ Astra said tetchily. She had wanted to tell Lil about her idea that the ancestors were Abrahamites, but as usual Lil had changed the subject.

  Lil picked up a flattish pebble and skimmed it out over the ledge. It whisked out into the air before disappearing into the drop. ‘The balloons that started Operation Silkroad. Don’t they teach you history at school?’

  Astra bristled. ‘It’s your dad who didn’t teach you history. The Non-Landers in Sippur all went to the Southern Belt. And Operation Silkroad wasn’t a birthday party. Besides,’ she continued haughtily, ‘only Asfarians call it Operation Silkroad. We call it the Infestation.’

  Lil’s face shuttered up for a moment and Astra instantly regretted her attack; she shouldn’t sneer at Lil’s dad. But Lil recovered instantly. ‘Ha ha.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘They weren’t kids’ balloons. They were hot-air balloons, with baskets woven from rose bushes. An Asfarian billionaire bought a fleet of them to help the Non-Landers in the desert cities return to Is-Land. He hired pilots to drop people off in the Southern Belt and then go back to the cities for more. It was called Operation Silkroad because the balloons were made of silk, and ages ago people used to travel across Is-Land on silk-trading routes. I thought you knew all that.’

  ‘Everyone knows what the Silk Road was,’ Astra retorted, offended. ‘And your dad was telling you fairy tales. You can’t make a flying machine out of rose bushes – the baskets would be all thorny, for one thing. They’d’ – she searched for an ironclad rebuttal – ‘rip the material when the balloons were being deflated!’

  Lil fingered a smear of dirt on her upper arm. ‘I expect the flight engineers removed the thorns first. For aerodynamic purposes.’

  Astra wanted to push Lil off the cliff. At the same time, a horrible, sad, topsy-turvy feeling was assaulting her stomach: she and Lil had just honoured the ancestors – real ancestors, from the start of the Dark Time – so why were they fighting now? She just wasn’t used to this kind of arguing, she realised as she watched Lil lick her finger and rub the dirt away. Sec Gens never tried to insult you, and adults never used sarcasm.