Astra (15 page)

Hokma and Nimma went to eat at the adults’ table and Astra sat down with her Shelter siblings. Klor was
still
fixing Tabby, so Peat, holding his own Tablette under the table, server-searched Sippur for her. The city, he said, had a population of nearly 25,000 people, which was ginormous
compared to Or’s 282, and even way bigger than New Bangor’s 7,916, though only half as big as Atourne, of course. Astra had known that Sippur was retrofitted like New Bangor. But she hadn’t known until Peat told her that it was made of basalt: not only the houses and the pavements, but also the thick wall with turrets and ramparts that surrounded the city as if it were a castle.

Basalt was the
cooled lava
from a volcanic eruption. It wasn’t orange though, Peat said; it was black and porous, which meant filled with holes. He couldn’t show her pictures in case Nimma confiscated his Tablette, so as she ate her porridge and apricots, Astra imagined what he meant. Basalt, she thought, would be like black melted wax after it had cooled and hardened and someone had pricked it all over with a needle. It would be a strange shape, pinched bits sticking out everywhere like the coral Nimma kept on the uppermost shelf in the Earthship living room. Yes – Sippur would look like a giant black coral reef, with steps and roads carved between its weird poking-out fingers, which would sparkle at night from their countless tiny porous windows. And winding all around the city the basalt wall would bulge like a gnarled dragon’s tail. She couldn’t wait to come home again and tell everyone all about it.

* * *

The journey took the whole morning. After breakfast, Astra, Hokma and Nimma picked some flowers for Sheba – an armful of daisies from the Earthship botanical cell, because those had been her favourite flowers, and three spider orchid stems from the lawn for Or. Then Nimma Tablette-talked Klor, who came down from Code House to meet them on the lawn. He was carrying a sprig of apple blossom, and –
yay!
– Tabby.

‘Astra’s first trip to Sippur.’ Klor stroked her head as she hugged Tabby and turned him on. ‘Hokma, really, I should come with you.’

‘No, Klor.’ Nimma took the apple blossom and added it to the bouquet. ‘I don’t want you going on that bus. We’ll take Astra and the others in the solar van soon.’

Phhwweet
. An urbagger whistled from the path and waved at Hokma. Astra kissed the IMBOD Shield on Tabby’s screen, stuffed him in his pocket, grabbed Hokma’s hand and tugged. The van was leaving now. She could catch up properly with Tabby on the road.

‘I’ll take good care of her, Klor,’ Hokma reassured him as Nimma retrieved the gold hair ribbon from her bag and tied it round the stems.
Watching her, Astra remembered again that she shouldn’t be excited about going to Sippur.

‘Can I carry Sheba’s flowers, Nimma?’ she asked.

‘Yes, darling. But take good care of them or you’ll have to give them to Hokma.’

The bouquet was big but not heavy. Astra cradled it in her arms. Nimma started dabbing her eyes with a hanky from her bag. Klor put his arm around her. ‘Sheba always wanted a little sister, didn’t she, Nimma?’ he said.

‘Umm.’ Nimma’s response was almost a whimper.

Astra felt frightened for a moment. It wasn’t like Nimma not to talk.

From East Gate, the van honked. ‘We’d better be off, then,’ Hokma said.

Astra let Klor and Nimma both kiss her, then trotted after Hokma to the van. When she got to East Gate she turned and gave a final goodbye wave. Klor and Nimma were hunched together, haloed by the sun behind them, as if they’d disappeared and only their dark shapes were left floating on the lawn.

‘Quick, Astra,’ Hokma ordered. ‘Arjun wants to get off.’ Astra jumped into the back of the van and sat down on a side plank opposite Sorrel. Between them the floor of the van was filled with plants the urbaggers were delivering to shops and houses in New Bangor.

The van rumbled off and Astra sat quietly checking Tabby’s functions. Everything was fine. His emotional weather report was sunny and breezy, and on his school homepage there was a new download: the official photo of the two IMBOD medical officers. She showed Sorrel, who said, ‘Don’t they look impressive? But
you’re
going to get your shot from Dr Blesserson. Wow!’ Then Astra wanted to ask Hokma lots of questions, about Dr Blesserson and Cora and her Code father, and whether Klor had ever been back on the bus to Sippur. But when the driver, Arjun, asked Hokma what Dr Blesserson was working on now, she just grunted, and said, ‘Gaia knows!’ in a grumpy voice. So Astra put Tabby back in his pocket and examined the plants, asking Sorrel all about them. Sorrel was very friendly. She plucked a stem of yellow freesias and loosened the ribbon to add it to Sheba’s bouquet. And when they stopped at the Sunbat station outside New Bangor for Arjun to exchange the van’s solar batteries and for Hokma to take Astra to the toilet to pee, Sorrel bought Astra a bottle of peach nectar to drink.

The bus stop for Sippur was on the far side of New Bangor. Arjun drove there first to drop them off. Waiting by the side of the road, holding the flowers for Sheba, who had never woken up after being on the bus, was strange in itself, but other things were odd too. You couldn’t just walk up to the stop: there was a fence around it and an IMBOD officer at the gate who scanned their hydropacs and clothes with a paddle sensor. He even took Tabby out of his pocket and scanned him. When he’d finished, he didn’t give him back right away. He turned Tabby off.

‘What?’ Astra yelped to Hokma behind her. Tabby had only just been fixed. Was the officer going to take him away from her?

The officer pointed to a sign on the fence, a picture of a handheld with a red line through it. ‘No Tablette usage on the bus,’ he ordered, handing Tabby back.

‘Sorry, Astra, I should have told you to switch him off,’ Hokma said, reaching in her bag for her own Tablette.

Astra had wanted to tell the officer that her flowers were for Sheba, but she didn’t like him any more so she kept her mouth closed and waited for Hokma to be scanned. Inside the fenced enclosure, some of the other people were wearing clothes – skirts and robes. None of them, even the sky-clad ones, looked at Astra and asked how she was, or said to Hokma how good the bioregional security was, or what a beautiful day Gaia had brought, like people in New Bangor shops would have done. They just stood around, not looking at each other, occasionally peering through the fence down the road for the bus. There were four seats in the enclosure, but they were all taken. Behind them was a screen, displaying National and Bioregional Wheel Meet news. Astra waited beside Hokma, the bouquet in her arms getting heavier, almost as if the flowers were turning into a painted toxic metal, like in a fairy tale.

At last the bus drew up, shuddering to a stop and aligning its door with another gate in the fence. It was an ordinary bus, like the one that took her to school, but at the same time it was a big white metal shark that might eat you and keep you inside it forever. The IMBOD officer opened the gate and Astra hesitated a moment. Then Hokma put her hand on her shoulder and guided her firmly up the steps of the bus and to a window seat.

‘It’s a very scenic journey,’ she said sternly as the bus pulled back out onto the road, almost as if ordering Astra to look at it. But Astra was staring at the necks of the women in front of her. The women’s heads were
shaved and each of them had a big red lumpy scar right at the base of her skull.

‘Hokma,’ she whispered, pointing at the women.

‘Shhh.’ Hokma scowled. She was tugging at her waistcoat. Maybe, Astra realised, she was in a bad mood because of the clothes.

Astra rested Sheba’s flowers on her lap, then took off her flap-hat and stuffed it between the seats. The bus rumbled down the road, winding through the forest north-west of New Bangor. The firegrounds were behind them here, and between stringybarks and pines were side roads signposted with the familiar names of her school friends’ communities – Boson, Higgs, Sonnenplatz, Shady Grove, Windfall. Then there was a long stretch of just trees and Astra returned her attention to the scar-skulled women. Suddenly, as she was counting the neat white holes surrounding the red lump directly in front of her, the woman grabbed her companion’s arm and said loudly, tapping at the window, ‘The Congregation Site shines today. Praise Gaia.’

Hokma was sleeping, but nearly everyone else in the bus craned their necks. Half-standing, Astra followed the woman’s finger. The Boundary in the dry forest ran high on the slopes or behind inhabited hills and was colour-blended with the foliage and rocks so even in photographs you couldn’t really see it. But there it was: the Bioregional Congregation Site flashing like a golden waterfall in the distance. The Congregation Site was designed to shine – it was for pilgrimages and ceremonies – and though Astra had been there once, she had been just a baby then and she wouldn’t return until the Blood & Seed ceremony, which was ages away, at the end of Year Seven. She hadn’t known you could see it from the bus. Why hadn’t Hokma
told
her? If only she was allowed to use Tabby – she could have taken a photo to show everyone at home. She fingered the flowers in her lap. Had Sheba seen the Boundary too?

Even more awesome than the glimpse of the Boundary was the descent to the steppes, which was a whole new bioregion. Though Astra had seen far more of the steppes from up in the pine tree, it wasn’t until the road levelled off and the bus left the mountains and foothills behind that she understood how unutterably vast they truly were. When you were up high, she realised, you felt huge, but travelling through the steppes, unable to see beyond the line of their rising slopes, you realised that you weren’t even a freckle on the face of Gaia.

That revelation was followed by a slowly unfolding shock. Before, the steppes had always looked neatly if eccentrically patterned, like a cape or quilt made from random bits of fabric someone had spent years carefully fitting together. Astra had always assumed that the pieces were all fields, planted or lying fallow. Now, though, with her nose pressed to the bus window, she could see that huge parts of Is-Land’s interior were almost as desolate as the firegrounds. The roads were lined at intervals with narrow fields of grain or vegetables and there was the occasional walled orchard or llama pen, but these cultivated plots were dwarfed by the huge dirt hills billowing in all directions, their bowls of dry soil etched only with dry, sage-coloured bushes. The steppes, she now knew, were largely a world without water or trees or anything humans needed to survive.

Was this Gaia’s crone face, Astra wondered: parched and cracked, gifted with supernatural endurance? It was a frightening vision, and a warped one too. Down here, the heat haze that had shimmered in the view from the pine tree was as thickly rippled as the glass in the Old World silver mirror that Nimma kept in a drawer in her bedroom. The swollen heat waves were pressing in all around them; if Astra peered down the aisle to look out of the driver’s big window it looked like the bus was swimming underwater. The road ahead even looked
wet
, but as the bus got closer to the black patches she’d first assumed were puddles, they mysteriously evaporated. The wildness of the steppes, she thought, in a tangled kind of way, wasn’t one of pathless woods and rampant growth; it was more like she imagined the Barren Mountains to be: a climbing loneliness, an almost-emptiness that snatched away everything you ever thought you knew.

She wanted to ask Hokma all about the steppes, but Hokma was still sleeping, her head rolling against the bus seat. Astra kept thinking surely she would jerk awake any minute, but she didn’t, so she turned back to her window.

There were dirt tracks off the highway, signposted to communities she’d heard of only in passing, or not at all: Ripen, Sarsaparilla, Aberffraulein, Mahā Vidyā. Occasionally the bus passed a van or a cart, the carts pulled by garlanded cows or shire horses, but otherwise the road was empty. At one point the bus crossed an intersection, another main road between two steppes towns she did recognise: Sommerville in one direction and Nīrāgā in the other.

Then, after what seemed like ages, huge square buildings began to march along the sides of the roads, at least eight storeys high, twice as high as any in New Bangor, but all empty, with dirty, broken windows. Why hadn’t they been demolished? Peat would know. Perhaps IMBOD thought they might be useful again one day, or maybe the Bioregional Wheel Meet had run out of money for demolitions. These buildings were too nice to tear down, anyway: they were covered in mosaics, made of small tiles in patterns like needlework on a Craft House tablecloth. The colours had faded to shades of grey, and some of the tiles had fallen out, but you could still see that the design on each building was different from its neighbours’. That was very special. It made you want to keep staring and staring, never getting bored. Astra wanted to jump out and clean the tiles to make them gleam again in the sun.

But the bus rolled on, and now the farmed fields and grazing pastures started to crowd out the barren stretches of the steppes. Astra saw a woman herding sheep, a girl placing flowers at a cow shrine and a man riding a horse toward an Earthship, and then there was a deep stretch of greenhouses, their pointed roofs reflecting the sun. The bus stopped in front of them to let some more people on. Was it here that the man with the bomb had got on Klor and Sheba’s bus? Astra shook Hokma’s arm.

‘Uh, are we there?’ Hokma stretched, and smiled for the first time all day. ‘You’ve taken good care of those flowers, haven’t you?’

They were nearly there, and yes, Astra had, and her reward was seeing the Shugurra River before Hokma did, a beautiful blue snake glinting ahead between its bright green banks. The bus crossed the water on a long low-walled bridge, and after that the land was green and lush everywhere, dotted with little sandstone retrofitted houses, their gardens filled with flowers: yellow flags, aurums, freesias and anemones, and other blossoms Astra had never seen before. There were people, too, watering their plants, sitting on porches or walking up the road, and apart from a few children,
they were all wearing clothes
. The women were dressed in tunics like hers, or smocks and skirts. Some of the men were in robes or sarongs and others were wearing loose trousers. Around her, on the bus, the sky-clad passengers were pulling robes and tunics out of their hydropacs and putting them on. The bus stopped again to pick up people and let others off, and when it started moving again, there in front of her, high on a terraced hill, was the basalt wall of Sippur.