by Naomi Foyle
But it wasn’t Lil’s fault she hadn’t gone to school and didn’t know the facts. ‘I’ve never heard of the balloons,’ Astra said, reasonably. ‘I think your dad made them up because he liked to tell you stories. The Infestation Non-Landers came up through Asfar in buses and tanks. An Asfarian billionaire did help: he bought some of the last petrol before the final CONC oil ban. Some of the Non-Landers in the Belt live in the buses still.’
Lil wiped her finger on her stomach. ‘There were buses too,’ she agreed, in a far too knowledgeable tone. ‘But mostly they came in balloons. The silk was printed with slogans, like One People, One Land, or Cradle to Cradle. The billionaire hired photographers and the Non-Landers got a ton of international support. That, and the massacre, is why CONC told Is-Land we had to negotiate with the Non-Landers and let them live in the Belt.’
Astra was utterly baffled now. ‘Massacre? You mean the suicide bombings?’
Lil scratched her chin. ‘No, not them killing us. Us killing them. When the Pioneers surrounded the camp at Harrana and killed a hundred Non-Landers. Families. Old people and babies.’
‘What?’ Astra laughed, her confidence restored. ‘Gaians would never do that.’
‘Why not? IMBOD kills people all the time.’
‘Yeah, okay: in self-defence. But we don’t kill babies.’ Astra unbuttoned her hydropac. If she could get a signal here, it would be a simple matter to settle this ridiculous argument. ‘Look, Lil,’ she said, kindly, ‘I know your dad had a great imagination, but he shouldn’t have told you made-up stuff about history. I’ll show you on Tabby. It happened like—’
‘Tabby’s IMBOD-loaded,’ Lil waved dismissively.
She turned Tabby on. ‘So?’
‘He’s not global-enabled. He doesn’t have access to world websites.’
Irritation bubbled in Astra’s stomach. ‘Doh. He’s an Is-Land Tablette.’
Lil leaned forward and asked, in a low, conspiratorial voice, as if they could possibly be overheard, ‘Don’t you think it’s funny that Is-Land hosts one of the main continental servers but no one here can access a single world website?’
There was no signal. Astra powered Tabby down and stuffed him back in his pocket.
‘I could visit world websites if I needed to,’ she informed Lil. ‘I could apply for a password.’
‘You mean you could travel for hours to Atourne and go through, I dunno, six interviews, and in the end you’d only get permission if you’re working on an IMBOD project.’
Astra paused. Once, in the Quiet Room, she had heard one of Klor’s team complain about her trip to Atourne. ‘After all that, they said my research wasn’t essential,’ she’d grumbled. But Klor had looked up from his Tablette and butted in, ‘Is-Land has the best minds in the world,’ he’d boomed. ‘We don’t need to import knowledge.’ The other Or-adults in the room had murmured agreement and the woman had fallen quiet. Later Klor had told Astra and Peat that the IMBOD interviews weren’t really assessing the importance of your research but the strength of your mind. If you were easily distracted, you would never be allowed a world websites password. Sec Gens, he’d said, would always score highly on concentration, but as they were also intensely attached to Is-Land, they would probably never want to browse the global web.
Astra wasn’t sure she could – or should – explain all that to Lil. ‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t get a password,’ she said defiantly. ‘Actually, it’s better not to get one. World websites are bad for us. They go on and on forever, and if you get lost in them you forget how to listen to Gaia. That’s partly what caused the Dark Time. People were so busy tweeting online, they didn’t hear that the birds had stopped singing.’
She sat back, inordinately pleased with herself for remembering that last line. Modem had said it once, in a Fountain story, and all the adults had applauded. Even though Astra had only a vague picture of what ‘tweeting’ meant – Peat had said it was programming bird calls into a Tablette for ringtones – she knew that whatever it was, it had contributed to Gaia’s great pain, and the phrase had lingered in her mind. At the same time, however, the conversation with Lil was making her feel a bit sick again: not as bad as seeing the arrowpain for the first time or looking over the rock ledge, but queasy. Maybe she was getting dehydrated. She took a slug of water from her tubing.
‘Twitter was good for knowledge-sharing, though,’ Lil countered, showing off. ‘My dad said that listening to Gaia and browsing the internet were related skills. He said—’
Astra had had enough. Water was dribbling down her chin. She rubbed it away and chucked her hydropac aside. ‘Well, he should have taken you to New Zonia then,’ she cut in, ‘instead of to the off-limits woodlands where even if you had a Tablette you couldn’t get reception.’
Surely she’d had the last word. But no, Lil just couldn’t leave it alone. ‘My dad didn’t want me to learn history from a Tablette. He said IMBOD left out bits and changed other parts to brainwash us into being para—’
It was automatic. ‘Shhhh,’ Astra hissed.
‘Why?’
Why? ‘You can’t talk like that about IMBOD. What if Tabby was on and his microphone picked you up?’
‘See?’ Lil crowed. ‘My dad was right: IMBOD wants you to be paranoid the whole time!’
‘Wha—?’ Astra sputtered to a halt. It was nearly impossible to keep up with Lil, but she had to try. Being ‘paranoid’ was something the adults joked about sometimes. Astra used to think it was a problem caused by your adenoids, if you hadn’t had them out. A while ago, though, Klor had explained it meant thinking that things were going wrong for you because other people were ganging up behind your back, instead of perhaps the fact that you hadn’t been doing your work properly. Paranoia could affect people outside the workplace too, he’d said, but it wouldn’t ever trouble her or any other Sec Gen.
‘No they don’t,’ she declared. ‘That’s why IMBOD invented the Security shot. So we don’t feel paranoid. You’re the one who’s paranoid. You think Is-Land history is made-up. You think the Pioneers killed babies. If you go around talking like that, people will think you’re an infiltrator.’
Lil wiped a speck of dirt off her hip. ‘So, let them. I’m not going to stay in Is-Land anyway. This place is so provincial.’
Astra stood up. Lil was being impossible. And ignorant. Is-Land didn’t have provinces: it had bioregions. She brushed away the pebbles that were sticking to her bottom. ‘I’m going back to Wise House.’
Lil was stretching her legs and wiggling her toes in the sun. ‘Do you remember the way?’
‘Yes. Sort of.’ Okay, no, she didn’t. She’d just followed Lil from place to place. But somewhere behind the brook and the ancestors was the gorge; if she just kept walking she’d hit it.
‘We’ve gone past the end of the gorge,’ Lil said casually. ‘It’s easy to miss it and end up walking too far north.’
Astra put her hands on her hips. ‘Come with me then.’
Lil rolled on her tummy and smiled up at Astra, as if nothing was wrong. ‘We just got here! Let’s have our lunch and then we’ll go.’
Astra scratched her ankle with the opposite foot and then sat back down. She picked up a small rock and began scraping the ledge with it. ‘You shouldn’t talk the way you do,’ she muttered.
Lil twirled a lock of her hair between her fingers. ‘You’re just saying that because you’re Sec Gen.’
Sometimes Astra could see the field mice in the meadow when she was flying Silver. Silver was Coded not to eat wild animals, but the mice didn’t know that. They would freeze when Silver passed overhead, their ears would flatten to their heads and a millisecond later they would dart away into the long grass. She felt like one of those mice now.
‘So what if I am,’ she said stiffly, gripping the rock in her palm.
‘It’s a shame for you, that’s all. It means you can’t think for yourself, so all the adults talk to you like you’re a child and you’ll just be an IMBOD d
rone your whole life. My dad didn’t want that for me. That’s why he took me away.’
Astra avoided Lil’s gaze. She rooted in her mind for the right Sec Gen Imprints. ‘I can think for myself. But my self is part of Is-Land, and therefore I think with everyone. IMBOD protects us, and we protect—’
‘Is-Land is a CONC outpost,’ Lil triumphantly interrupted. ‘IMBOD’s job is to protect the Continental Server and make Is-Land a safe place to stop between Himalaya and Neuropa. But when the global ceasefire ends, Asfar and the Non-Landers might declare war on us. That’s why IMBOD invented the Security Serum. You’re like the worms Hokma feeds to the Owleons: born and raised to blindly die for Is-Land.’
Astra slammed the rock down onto the ledge. ‘All Is-Landers would die for Is-Land,’ she said fiercely. ‘Being Sec Gen means we can fight better so we don’t die.’
Lil looked at her pityingly. ‘No, being Sec Gen means you’ll follow orders. Too many Is-Landers were starting to question IMBOD and that’s why they developed the Serum.’
Astra had lost track of what she herself thought, but she knew she had to defend herself, defend Is-Land, defend IMBOD, from Lil’s outrageous accusations. ‘No one questions IMBOD because no one has to question IMBOD,’ she flared. ‘IMBOD takes orders from the National Wheel Meet, and the National Wheel Meet represents all of us!’ As she was saying it, she believed it.
Lil sat up. She was excited now, her eyes bright, her voice high. ‘People used to question the Nat Meet. My dad told me that lots of Is-Landers used to believe that some Non-Landers should have the right to stay here, especially the day labourers.’
Lil’s voice was buzzing around Astra’s head like a bluebottle fly. She reached up and took a vicious swat at it. ‘The infiltrators, you mean.’
She’d only made things worse. Lil became even more eager, speaking more quickly and leaning close to Astra’s face. ‘They weren’t infiltrators.’ She pounced on the word, flung it aside. ‘They were seasonal aglabs, and when IMBOD decided to close the Boundary checkpoints, some communities wanted to help them stay. They even petitioned for Non-Landers to get citizenship if they converted to Gaianism. IMBOD cracked down on the dissidents and jailed them. That’s why they invented the Security Serum. So that no one would ever question IMBOD again.’
Like ‘faxma-sheen’ and ‘burlesque’, ‘dissident’ was a word from another world. Is-Land had never had dissidents. Again, Lil was scrambling the facts as though they were alt-eggs. ‘No!’ Astra flashed. ‘Some aglabs hid in Is-Land, but no Gaian would ever have helped them. The Non-Landers were attacking us in the Belt. Remember: Hokma lost her eye on patrol. That was why we had to close the Boundary. Then the infiltrators swarmed up to the mountains and dug tunnels and smuggled nano-explosives into Is-Land. That’s why Klor only has one leg. His daughter died too – my Shelter sister. At a bus stop in Sippur. I saw it.’
She was almost panting with the effort to correct Lil’s warped views. In response, Lil reached over and stroked the teaby vaccination scar on her arm. ‘You’re right,’ she said lightly, mockingly, ‘I shouldn’t talk like this. You’re a poor little Sec Gen drone. You’ll probably have to report me.’
Lil’s fingertip was an electric needle, sending a sizzle of fury to Astra’s heart. She opened her mouth to blast Lil off the cliff—
But as she did so, Lil looked her right in the eyes and smirked.
A cold, feverish knowledge crawled over Astra’s skin. Lil knew she wasn’t Sec Gen. She clamped her mouth shut.
‘I’m Sec Gen,’ she said, finally, each word an iron spike to kill this argument dead. ‘That means I care about my friends. Even if you’re not Sec Gen too. Even if you don’t love Gaia enough to die for Her.’
But she’d given it away, she knew. Just like on the sunlit strip of the ledge, she’d wobbled. She’d been about to yell, ‘I’m not Sec Gen, so shut up and listen to me!’ and even though she hadn’t, the intention had hurtled out of her at the speed of light and struck Lil right between the eyes. Lil’s flashing, smug expression said as much and more.
* * *
‘I’d die for Gaia,’ Lil said grandly. ‘Just not for CONC.’
‘Is-Land is Gaia.’ Astra batted Lil’s jibe away with another Imprint. The crisis had passed. So what if Lil knew she wasn’t Sec Gen? No one would believe her if she said so, especially not considering all the other crazy things she was spouting today.
‘No it isn’t. There are Gaians in Asfar, you know.’
‘There aren’t,’ she replied flatly. It had somehow become her duty today to disagree with Lil and she wanted her shift to end.
‘There are. They wear clothes; that’s the only difference. Even some of the Southern Belters are clothed Gaians too, now. They converted, but IMBOD still won’t let them in. I think there’s room here for all the Non-Landers. They can live in the cities and eat alt-meat.’
Astra was bored now. Lil was trying to goad her with heretical remarks, but these were ancient Year Four arguments that everybody knew the answer to. ‘They don’t want to live in cities. They want to live in villages and slaughter sheep and cows. Which reminds me: I’m hungry,’ she complained, opening her pac.
‘Me too.’ It was surprising to hear Lil agree, for the first time all day. She pulled out the hummus and tomato sandwiches Hokma had made for them that morning, and the two green apples. The sandwiches were a little squashed, perhaps because of Lil’s cartwheel. Astra had a salad box to share: lettuce, cucumber slices and toasted hazelnuts, with a small bottle of lemon dressing. She also had forks and napkins, and some carrot cake Nimma had given her. She brought everything out, drizzled the salad dressing over the leaves and gave Lil a fork. They ate in silence, apart from the munching of the apples. When she’d finished hers, Lil got up and hurled the core off the cliff. It sailed in a high curve through the air, tracing an arc like an invisible rainbow.
Watching the apple core disappear, Astra suddenly felt incredibly lonely – lonelier even than the ancestors, who were somehow together, privately alike, even if locked in their own separate prayers. Why couldn’t she tell Lil she wasn’t Sec Gen? Lil said whatever she liked, all the time. She had just spouted off all that absurd, exhausting stuff about the Pioneers and IMBOD and CONC without a single worry that Astra might tell Hokma or Nimma or Klor.
But that was the problem. Lil didn’t respect any rules and so you couldn’t trust her to keep a secret. And she wouldn’t understand, anyway, that you could be like Hokma and question some of IMBOD’s decisions without being a dissident.
She chucked her own apple core into the undergrowth. She was done competing with Lil for today.
They had both saved the cake for last. Lil picked up her piece, sniffed it and examined it closely. ‘Is it made out of carrots?’ she exclaimed.
At last, something Lil didn’t know. ‘Yeah,’ Astra said. ‘And walnuts and soy-butter icing. Nimma made it.’
‘It must have taken a long time to cut the carrots up so small.’ Lil actually sounded impressed now.
‘She didn’t cut them up. She grated them.’
Lil didn’t want to, Astra could tell, but grudgingly she asked, ‘What does “grated” mean?’
Astra thought about it. ‘A grater is a kitchen utensil. It looks like … a metal cylinder with lots of little moon-shaped knives cut into it. The knives have holes behind them for the grated bits to fall through. You can do apples and beetroots too, for salads.’
Lil was staring at the cake in her hand. ‘I’ve never had carrot cake before.’ Without warning, her whisper edged into a whimper.
Nimma and Hokma had badgered her to play with Lil, to be kind to her. ‘She’s never had a friend,’ they’d said. Lil had won her over with her games and stories, and gradually Astra had forgotten how desperately sad she could be. Now, for the first time, Astra felt the enormity of everything Lil had missed out on: friends, cakes, a kitchen, a Shelter mother. The emptiness was huge, bigger even than the emptiness of the ancestors. It
sucked her appetite away.
‘I guess you couldn’t do any baking in the cave,’ she offered, awkwardly. Lil ignored her. For a moment Astra thought she was going to give the cake back, but she didn’t. She took a bite and ate, slowly, expressionlessly, her jaw methodically churning. Astra started eating her piece too. The aroma of cloves and nutmeg was calming, and Nimma’s rich, creamy icing stuck to the roof of her mouth, absorbing her attention. As she chewed the cake, its honeyed syrup flowed steadily into her veins.
Beside her, Lil was licking her fingers, one by one. When she’d finished, she turned to Astra with a radiant smile. She had a dab of icing on her chin. ‘That was good.’
‘Nimma’s carrot cakes are the best.’ Astra grinned too, and popped the last crumb from her palm into her mouth.
‘I need a nap now, and then we can go.’ Lil stretched out on her back and closed her eyes. Her nipples puckered into hard brown walnuts. As Astra watched her ribs rise and fall, a fleet of dandelion seeds drifted over Lil’s ribcage. It was a Gaia vision, she could tell, but what it meant, she didn’t know.
* * *
When she woke up, Lil’s face was next to hers.
‘I’m sorry I said mean things,’ she said quietly. ‘I like you being Sec Gen. It makes you benevolent.’
The sun was lower in the sky and its lengthening rays were travelling up Astra’s legs to her thighs. Lil’s breath smelled of the carrot cake, sweet and spicy, and her breasts were brushing against Astra’s arm. They felt soft and mysterious, as if even Lil didn’t know what they were doing. Astra didn’t move.
‘That’s okay,’ she said. ‘I like you not being Sec Gen.’ It makes you magnificent she almost, but didn’t, say. ‘Thank you for showing me the ancestors,’ she whispered instead.
Then the palm of Lil’s hand was grazing her chest and Lil’s chin was on her shoulder and Lil’s voice was in her ear. ‘Your skin is my skin,’ she said, and then she was kissing Astra’s face, and Astra was turning towards her and kissing Lil too.
