Astra (30 page)

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.

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—’