Astra (32 page)

Afterwards, Lil smiled down at her. ‘You know all my secrets now,’ she said.

The next day was Arkaday, but Astra wasn’t allowed to go up to Wise House. In the morning she had to help clean and decorate Core House because tomorrow was the official results ceremony of the five-yearly IMBOD Or inspection and three officers were coming up from Sippur for a special evening assembly and banquet. The Or-kids had to recite Gaia hymns for the officers and rehearsing for that took all afternoon. After dinner, Nimma said she and Yoki had to sit in the Earthship living room and do at least two hours’ sewing. Tomorrow’s hymns had to be
word-perfect
, so she and Yoki had better wear their Tablette earphones while they sewed. ‘No ifs, ands or buts, butterbean,’ Klor had said when Astra started to protest.

Astra knew the Gaia hymn back to front, so after Nimma left, she switched channels and listened to music instead, a birdsong, brook-babble and flute tapestry that gently pulled her thoughts back to the forest. As she sewed petal after petal she roamed back over her afternoon with Lil, revisiting the ancestors and the arrowpain, and what had happened on the ledge. Soon, although her fingers were cramped and her vision blurred from squinting, in her mind she was floating above the steppes in a sunburst of Gaia Power and giggles.

It hadn’t all been wonderful, though. She still didn’t know if she and Lil had broken any Gaia-play rules, and that worry was nibbling away at her now like a rat in a kitchen storeroom. And earlier in the afternoon, she couldn’t forget, they’d fought: a horrible fight. Lil had said stupid, nasty things and Astra had felt a million
negative emotions
, emotions no Sec Gen ever had to worry about. When she remembered that part of the
afternoon, how exposed she’d felt, it was as if the rat inside her had spilled a whole winter’s granary into a sewer: her stomach panged and churned all over again. She should have kept calm; she shouldn’t have let Lil get to her like that.

But the horrible part had passed, hadn’t it, she thought, as nightingales warbled over a high lilting flute. When? After they’d eaten, and after she’d seen her Gaia vision: the dandelion seed heads blowing over Lil’s sleeping body. Finally, as she finished her twentieth petal of the evening, Astra realised what the vision meant.

Lil had wanted to see balloons – balloons her dad had told her brought Non-Landers to Is-Land, like viruses or germs. She thought that the Pioneers were baby-killers and IMBOD was brainwashing everyone in Is-Land. But the flying seeds said that she was wrong. The flying seeds were Gaia’s messengers: they were saying that Is-Land was a peaceful, beautiful country that sent seeds of hope out into the world – but Lil’s eyes were closed to them. Gaia had let Astra see them because Astra’s job was to teach Lil the truth: that Is-Land was Gaia’s guardian, and IMBOD existed to protect the protectors.

Understanding a Gaia vision was like watching an Owleon fly for the first time: your heart went soaring with the bird, riding the invisible currents of Gaia’s warm breath. Everything was perfect. Everything made sense. Her blood singing, Astra sat back on the sofa and tenderly watched Yoki sewing, his earphones shutting him off in his own tranquil, orderly Sec Gen world. As he mouthed his hymn, she experienced a second slow but dazzling wave of revelation: the Gaia vision wasn’t finished with her yet. Watching Yoki concentrate, his lips silently moving, his head rocking, for the first time in her life she realised
why she wasn’t Sec Gen
.

For Sec Gens, she suddenly understood with infinite clarity, visions weren’t puzzles: visions were simply images that illustrated Imprints. None of them would have turned a vision round in their mind like a pebble in the hand, feeling for the perfect fit to their fingers. Yoki and Meem learned their hymns and sang them gladly, with pure voices; Peat studied his laws and fitted them together like soilbags, one on top of each other, to make a solid barricade against uncertainty and fear. Her Shelter siblings weren’t
drones
; they weren’t worker bees or sacrificial worms, but if faced with a dangerous idea, like starlings they would immediately retreat into the strength of the murmuration. If Lil had said all the crazy things she’d said yesterday to any of them, they wouldn’t have tried to
argue with her. Yoki would have got upset and refused to listen: he would have closed his eyes, plugged his ears and started chanting Imprints to calm himself down; Meem would have been perplexed, perhaps would have tried to get Lil to eat her lunch; and Peat, well Peat might have been
benevolent
– yes, he might have said to Lil kindly (and a little pompously) that she was mistaken. But later on, all of them would have told Nimma and Klor that Lil was saying bad things about IMBOD, and they would have expected her to be disciplined or removed from their company.

She, Astra, had been open to Lil and all the different feelings she’d provoked. It had been a painful experience but as a result, she had learned something a Sec Gen would never have understood. She’d been able to see, at last, when Lil ate the cake, that she wasn’t dangerous. She was strange and uneducated, sad and confused, not because she was bad, but because she’d never had a Tablette or a Shelter mother, and because her dad – well, Astra still didn’t really understand Lil’s dad. Frowning, she returned to her petal. Possibly, it occurred to her as she bit off a knot, he really was crazy: maybe he’d had a
mental illness
.

It was such a stunning thought she dropped her sewing in her lap.
Of course
: why else would Lil be saying such crazy things? Craziness didn’t just mean things being jumbled and random, like one of Nimma’s quilts – it was also scientific: it meant having a mental illness. No one in Or had a mental illness because the adults were screened before they were allowed to live here and their Code children were safe from genetic disorders. But in cities like Sippur and Atourne, even in New Bangor, people still suffered from conditions that thanks to the Serum would soon be a thing of the past: depression, bipolar disorder, claustrophobia, and –
oh!
– there was one that made you paranoid! Yes –
schizophrenia
!

It was like solving a Code Thought or Logic problem after you’d struggled with it for ages. Astra wanted to throw her petals and needle aside and jump up and shout
Yes!
Maybe Lil had inherited schizophrenia from her dad. That would explain everything: why he’d taken Lil away in the first place, her lightning-fast changes of mood, her paranoid fantasies, her suspicion of Tabby and IMBOD, the absolute impossibility of explaining anything to her.

The music was quickening to a new rhythmic line of woodstick on stone. Her heart pattering, Astra stared unseeing over Yoki’s shoulder into the row of fruit trees in the greenhouse corridor. Nimma said Gaia had sent Lil here. Gaia had done that so Astra could watch over her. No
Sec Gen would have the understanding or patience or curiosity to keep one step ahead of Lil’s unpredictable mind. She would have to watch Lil carefully now. She might ask Hokma about paranoia – one day when Lil was doing chores in the garden, perhaps. And she would stay open to more Gaia visions, because it was clear that Gaia wanted her to help Lil recover. Otherwise Lil might have to have a brain implant, like the people on the bus to Sippur. Astra had seen them since, over the years, shopping together in New Bangor, carefully stroking the vegetables at the market before putting them into their basket, and once she’d almost run into one of the women on her own. She was talking rapidly to herself and barging past people on the pavement, rudely, just like Lil—

‘Dreaming, Astra?’ Nimma came bustling into the room with a feather duster and clicked her fingers under Astra’s nose. As Astra started, one of her earphones fell out and the music leaked into the room.

‘What on Gaia’s green earth are you listening to? No wonder you’re distracted! You should be learning your hymn for tomorrow.’

‘I know it already,’ Astra mumbled automatically, turning the music off.

Nimma began flicking the duster over Sheba’s photo on the mantel-piece. ‘Then you should be learning your Blood & Seed chant, or at least sewing your petals. Look at Yoki, he’s charging ahead.
And
he’s memorising his hymns.’

‘Sorry, Nimma.’ Astra picked up her sewing again. For once, she didn’t mind being told off. Telling you off was just what Nimma did. It was her pattern, just like memorising laws was Peat’s pattern and protecting Gaia’s creatures was Yoki’s. Up until now, Astra’s pattern – her special melody in Gaia’s symphony, as Hokma called it – had been training the Owleons, but that had kept her apart, up at Wise House, as though she didn’t really belong with her Shelter siblings and the other Sec Gens at school. In fact, she realised from her new vantage point high above the world, up until now her special melody had been yoked to a discordant counterpoint: a turmoil of unspeakable emotions. Now, though, Gaia was hinting that Hokma was right: because of this hidden turmoil, her human harmonies ran deeper than the Sec Gens’. She was able to
understand
people, even strange and difficult people, and one day she might become a genius at curing mental illness. The thought was so exciting it almost banished the very possibility of negative emotions.

As Nimma dusted around her and Yoki, Astra finished expertly edging her two-hundred-and-eighty-second petal.

‘I put sequins on this one.’ She showed Nimma her handiwork.

‘Oh, so you did. That’s lovely, darling,’ Nimma cooed. ‘Now just another hour, and then bed. You’ve got a big day tomorrow – an important Gaia-play lesson, Vishnu said, and then the hymn ceremony and banquet. You’ll want to be wide awake for all of that, won’t you?’

No she
didn’t
want to be awake for the Gaia-play lesson. For one thing, she didn’t want to learn that she had broken a rule already, or to say anything by mistake that might betray what she and Lil had done on the ledge. For all she knew, being an early starter at Gaia play was a sign that a person wasn’t Sec Gen. But almost worse than these fears was the painful pressure she awoke to the next day, building on her cheek – a
pimple
.

* * *

A pimple was an Old World stigmata, an Abrahamic mark of disgrace. None of the Sec Gens got pimples, and when Astra’s first one had erupted, Nimma had almost taken her to the doctor. Klor had saved her, saying that surely IMBOD hadn’t entirely solved the problem of puberty yet, and wasn’t it better just to let Astra get some sun? But the sun didn’t help. Like scarlet volcanoes, the pimples throbbed beneath her skin until, despite everything Nimma and Klor said, she was forced to squeeze them, making the yellow, custardy pus spatter the mirror and a bitter wash of saliva rise in the back of her throat. She could almost taste it, this vile, alien fluid her own body was manufacturing to humiliate and betray her.

For after being squeezed the pimples didn’t disappear, but sprawled on her face like Dark Time bomb craters, and everyone who saw her looked first at the absolute mess she’d made of herself. On the first day you could even see the marks of her fingernails, two red crescent moons digging into her skin. The adults silently pitied or condemned her while the Sec Gens examined her closely – never unkindly – in awe of her difference and debating the cause of her plague. Silvie favoured diet, though Astra ate exactly the same food as her siblings, while Tedis thought she wasn’t peaking enough and prescribed twice-daily sessions of self-Gaia play. Nimma, of course, blamed Astra’s dread, saying it was greasy and telling her not to let it touch her face or the pimples would spread. Astra would mutter, ‘I washed my loc yesterday!’ but the most painful thing about the pimples was the lurking feeling in her stomach that Nimma was right: she
should
wash her hair more and she
shouldn’t
pick at her skin. The curse of the pimples really was her own fault.

Today she had controlled herself and the pimple was still just a painful red bump. She still didn’t want anyone to see it, but she’d had
no choice. She wasn’t ill and she had to go to school. As the Gaia-play class settled in the cherry orchard, she kept her head down, her dread dangling over her face. It was an inadequate shield – she’d rather be wearing a beekeeping hat or a fencing mask – but it would have to do. Tedis, thank Gaia, was sitting on her good side and Sultana, on her left, would be entirely focused on the lesson. Just to be on the safe side, she avoided everyone’s gaze, concentrating on the scent of dry earth, the skittery sounds the squirrels made as they investigated the trees and the way the light slanting through the branches struck the brand on Mr Ripenson’s chest. The scarification was in the shape of a pair of crossed staffs, the four heads each embellished with a different design: a lotus opposite a discus, and a conch shell opposite a mace head. The symbol had been burned with a laser by a Craft worker in Atourne, he’d told her one evening at dinner, and represented the Old World god Vishnu he was named for, whose motto was ‘to maintain and preserve’. The lotus meant spiritual purity, the mace head was a mighty weapon and the conch was not only a trumpet but the home of the god’s Gaia partner Lakshmi. The shell was now the CONC emblem, of course, but Astra especially liked the discus: it was a Sudarshana Chakra, a spinning blade with 108 teeth that would destroy your enemy forever.

Mr Ripenson smiled round at everyone. ‘Good morning everybody, and welcome to the lesson we’ve all been waiting for: Woodland Siesta and Gaia-play rules.’

Interest rustled around the circle. Tedis exclaimed ‘all
right
’ under his breath and Sultana had her Tablette out already. Yoki, opposite Astra, grinned as Acorn cleverly twirled a stick between his fingers.

‘As you know, in high school you’ll take siesta in the woods. There’s a main shelter there with mats and hammocks, where you can sleep if you like, or play Tablette games, but there are also huts and clearings spread throughout the bushes for private Gaia play. It’s school and a game, so it’s only natural that there will be
rules
. The good news is that Sec Gens won’t generally feel any urge to violate most of these rules. But’ – he lifted a finger, quelling the playful groan that had arisen at his joke – ‘this is extremely important, everyone: Woodland Siesta rules are also Is-Land laws and you can be punished severely for breaking them. In order to graduate, you will need to pass a written exam on them, so I advise you to take detailed notes today. Turn to the lesson page, please.’