Stone Seeds

by Ely, Jo;

  “Take it. You, Child. Take it. You’re a slave, ain’t you?”

  Zettie pulls her left thumb out of her mouth for long enough to say it. “No.” She says. One word.

  “I am a Sinta.” She says. As politely as she’s been taught to speak to adults. The child doesn’t look away from Gaddys once. The most revolutionary words ever spoken to Gaddys, and they came from a child. Gaddys’ face blossoms red.

  Now Mamma Ezray and Zorry stand in front of Zettie. She looks through Mamma’s legs.

  “She’s just a Chil …” Zorry says

  “She’ll learn …” Mamma Ezray says, sinking.

  After Gaddys has gone, Zettie cannot be persuaded to touch or even look at the fish. And what’s more, she appears to be not speaking to either Zorry or Mamma Ezray. Maintains a dignified quiet. Neither Zorry nor Mamma Ezray object or try to break the small girl’s silence. “Let her keep something.” Mamma Ezray’s last word on the subject.

  After Gaddys’ home visit, Zettie holds her tongue as much as she can.

  LEECHES

  “GADDYS HAS LEFT A bag of protein pearls.” Zorry’s fathers voice, from the cottage doorway. He glances behind him briefly to watch Gaddys moving slowly away, down their rockoned garden path. Skirt the gate and vanish behind the tumbledown stone wall. The hedge. This time she has an Egg Boy assistant, he’s soft on her heels. Father turns back to his family. “So that’s good news eh? Protein pearls.” Holds the bag up.

  “What was she doing here?” Zorry asks Mamma Ezray. “Put it outside. Why’s she singling us out?”

  “She’s deciding whether to re-certify us or not. Did something happen in the shop? That day. When I sent you for our rations.”

  “What? You think this is my fault?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Mamma Ezray gazes at her eldest daughter. “She’s trying to figure out whether we’re tame. There’ll be a test for us somewhere now. We must be … Cautious.”

  Zorry’s father, disliking this kind of talk, simply acts like he doesn’t hear it.

  Something makes Zorry look up. She notices the small dark shadow on the back of her father’s neck. Closer examination, it’s curved like a half-moon. Thumbnail mark, and the purple print from an adult-sized thumb, just above it. She knows he won’t remember how he got the strangulation marks. The scratch. She doesn’t ask. Whatever happened to him during his last work rota, it was apparently bad enough that he was rebooted afterward. She examines his face closely. She had heard there was an escapee from last night’s work rota. A runner. Is it possible that Father helped the man, or else saw something? Now she sees the small electrical burns on the sides of Father’s temple. He has certainly seemed to be … Different. Lately.

  Mamma Ezray catches Zorry’s eye and now they are both staring at the back of Father’s head. They forget about the bag of protein pearls. The bag is on the floor by the front door and Zettie steps outside, toward it, quietly. She opens the bag. The packaging is striped pink and white and she examines it with pleasure. Two illustrated candy bars criss and cross on the front. Sweets, she thinks. She doesn’t check the bag before she plunges her small right hand in. Then she feels something moving under her fingertips. Yanks out her hand. It’s covered in sulphurous, sliding creatures, snails with half formed soft shells, tree slugs too, of the sucking kind. Mucous sliding out from their poison sacs underneath. She feels the first sting right away and she screams for her mother.

  It takes Zorry and Mamma Ezray fully fifteen seconds to prise the leaching things off the child. They look at the tiny holes and bite marks in her hand in silence. Swelling and reddening already. One small mark streams with blood and Mamma Ezray wraps it. Both Zorry and Mamma Ezray are also covered in small stings and bites. They bathe Zettie’s wounds in silence. Zettie holds out her hand patiently, quietly. Her eyes are half closed. Gritting her baby teeth against the pain. Small winces as Mamma Ezray dabs the ointment.

  “Protein balls was it?” Zorry says in disgust.

  “What are they?” Zorry’s fathers voice sounds shrill, urgent.

  “Bavarnican snails and the leaching, stinging tree slugs from the killing forest.”

  “What Gaddys give you that for?” Zorry’s father, fish still in his hands, looks genuinely shocked.

  “Gaddys put the snails and leeches in sweet packaging. It was clearly aimed at the child.”

  “What?” Father says, stupidly.

  Zorry feels something rising in her. A sudden need to have her father pay attention to what’s under his nose, to make him face what Mamma Ezray has to. She explains, as quietly as she can bear to, so as not to alert the neighbours, with the result that her words hiss, her eyes narrow, “Killing forest snails can move fast … Father. They leave a glutinous trail behind them as thick as a finger. Look at it. I said look at it. If Mamma Ezray hadn’t seen the trace of the last one on the back of Zettie’s shirt, heading in a neat loop toward her neck, then our Zettie would have been killed.” Zettie gazes softly from Zorry to Father.

  “What?”

  Mamma Ezray looks down. She shakes her head at Zorry. “Don’t. Zorry.”

  But Zorry, now that she’s started, cannot stop herself, “Mamma Ezray whipped Zettie round and caught it before it reached Zettie’s jugular vein. One moment too late,” she said, “and Zettie would have …” Father looks shocked. He stares at Zorry.

  Zorry holds the creature by its shell now, upside down. To show Father. It curls around and tries to reach the tips of her fingers.

  She drops the snail and Mamma Ezray crushes it underfoot.

  Zettie looks down at the small squashed body with interest. There are thick meaty edges to its underside and yellow suckers running down it. Now Mamma Ezray sees something, screams. She spins Zettie. She finds two more snails on the back of Zettie’s head, one is one of the worst kind of leaches. Now Zorry spots a stinging tree slug, on the child’s wrist and slipping out from the edge of her sleeve. Zorry pulls it off. All three are pale now. Panting for breath. Now they strip the child and plunge her into the rain barrel beside the kitchen window. They turn her clothes inside out, examine the hems and the seams.

  “That was the last.”

  Mamma Ezray pulls the child out of the rain barrel, checks her over once more. Rainwater streams from her onto the floor and they dress her quickly. Pat her head. “It’s over. Zettie it’s over.” The child has slipped inside herself. She looks pale. Detached.

  Zorry looks up now. Notices that her father seems to have tuned out even further. Shambles toward the sloping wall beside the kitchen. Takes a seat on a leaning, busted kitchen chair. And now he’s staring hard at a chip on the wall. Right in the very place where he’d thrown a plate of Mamma Ezray’s cooking, just last year. Zorry can’t see what Father sees there. But he seems to wilt. Fade in front of her eyes.

  Rallies just a little to say, “You must’ve done something bad, Zorry. In the shop.” And then he falls silent.

  “Don’t blame her. It’s not the child’s fault. Don’t talk any more. Just don’t …” Mamma Ezray snaps at him. It’s the first time Zorry has seen Mamma Ezray lose her patience with their father.

  Zorry takes a hold of Mamma Ezray’s hands and turns them softly, palms up. She looks down at the trail marks and snail bites on her mamma Ezray’s fingers. Gazes into her face. Waits for her mother to speak again. Her father, behind them, goes on shaking his head. “It doesn’t … I don’t …” He says. Bangs the side of his head twice, hard. Now Zorry listens to the sound of him opening his medicine cupboard, squeak of the hinge, the long pause. As though he is considering the thing. Then the soft popping sound as the medicine lid is opened. Mamma Ezray’s shoulders rise and fall. She gazes gently at Zettie. Zorry has never seen her mother look defeated. Until this moment now, she’s not truly known what fear is. She says to her mother quietly. “Look. I got to go.”

  “Yes.” Mamma Ezray looks up. As though she sees her daughter for the first time. Soft appraisal. She puts a hand on Zor
ry’s shoulder. “Yes. I know.”

  She turns back to the sink.

  Zettie is sitting on the cottage back step, looking into the middle distance. Mamma Ezray can’t see what Zettie sees. The child seems to her to be exhausted in a way that’s too old for her years.

  “How did my children get so old? So old, on my watch.” And then, heavily, “Go talk to Jengi, Zorry. There is no going back now.” Shoulders rise and fall, clutches the sink. “There is only going on.”

  Soft sound as the door closes behind Zorry. Mamma Ezray stares into the sink for a long time after she’s gone. And when she tries to, Mamma Ezray finds that she can’t move her hands. That last leech she pulled off her youngest had wrapped itself around her thumb, delivered all of its poison. She examines the large hole in her thumb. The paralysis lasts a moment. Mamma Ezray stuffs the dish cloth into her mouth when the pain rises. She bites down.

  THE STAINING

  ANTEK HAS BEEN PRESCRIBED two more stains before he’ll be certified an Egg Man.

  His next staining is tomorrow.

  Bavarnica is stretched out beneath Antek but his eyes are closed. His head is face down on his arms, so he can only see the rough green linen of his sleeve, the stain on the hairless skin creeping out from under the edge of the fabric, just above his wrist. The stain has moved down since this morning.

  Antek opens his eyes. He can hear the sound of hopeful OneFolk people singing karaoke in the village below him.

  The village itself seems to seep out from the strange dip at the bottom of the mountain, like a chin and a throat at the stone base, he thinks. And the show village like the chin’s shadow, or just a spill on the mountain’s vest. Antek shakes himself. Bad songs and bad singing, he thinks.

  Farther away still, somewhere to the left of the rock wall he leans on, Antek with his specialised ears can just hear the sea. Coming darkly in and out. Cicadas. The sounds seem to him to rise now. Antek puts his hands over his ears. He shifts on to his haunches. There’s a gentle rock fall behind him. Then another clatter of gravel unloosed by that, small stones sliding down the mountain’s sheer face, bouncing off his back and skimming to either side of him. Antek doesn’t move. He goes on looking down.

  Lately Antek has taken to climbing The Reach. The mountain range behind the OneFolks’ village. He doesn’t know why but more and more, he finds he wants to be up here alone.

  Antek’s hearing is acute, so much so that he’s sometimes uncomfortable to the point of low level pain. No one knows why batch 47 needed that feature, but things will become clear, they say, when batch 47 grow to man size and their mission for the general is started. The lab technicians are not known to add unnecessary features to the Egg Boys.

  Antek puts his hands over his ears but the sound of cicadas in the scrubby plants at the bottom of the mountain, are like a long slow chainsaw to him, slicing through Bavarnica’s head. There are small stones under Antek from some long ago rock fall. Caught by the upward jut of his mountain shelf. He pushes his feet into the stones. He breathes out.

  Antek is hidden by a long jag in the rock which must date, he thinks, from when the Sinta tried to fund the building of tunnels through it. Roadways to the wider world, that was the spirit of the times then. Of course everyone in Bavarnica who’s heard the story also knows that those early Sinta builders were caught on the rocks. Batch 46, meaning Antek’s father and his unit, were sent to finish them off. The Diggers’ revolution began the next day, Antek knows that much from the whispers he’s heard in the batch 47 barracks, after dark, and whatever other fragments he’s caught from the edge farmers’ songs during the rain dances.

  All that’s left to remember those long-gone Sinta are some odd dips and curves in the mountain now, they’re like wide open mouths when the light hits them in a certain way, just before curfew when the general’s artificial sun is dimming. The mouths darken further as the light shifts downward, at which time those Sinta who still remember will tell their childur, “Look up, Child. See how even the mountain can cry.”

  It was typical of the general to let the Sinta get half way with their improving plans, to let them spend all their funds and sit through a thousand hopeful meetings in which the minutes are taken and the attendants’ names are listed one by one.

  All the idealists amongst the Sinta were, of course, drawn to the mountain project. More lists for Gaddys. More names. Names of the dead, now, Antek guesses. He’s been told more than once that there are unmarked graves just beyond the line of baobab trees, at the point where the edge farms meet the desert. The strangely ploughed-looking ground, the earth mounds and farrows appeared at the end of the Digger riots which marked the last era. The edge farms’ rain dance songs tell how the soil there is fertile with the dead. Things grow there.

  Antek is right now sitting in the most successful Sinta half-tunnel. He’s about half way up The Reach, give or take a few handspans. Antek pads about the rock shelf to check for signs of his father, down there. Careful to make no sound.

  Antek’s father doesn’t generally tolerate Antek being this late home, and he’ll be out looking by now, Antek knows that much. Even crawling over the small rocks and gravel, Antek can accomplish this feat of silence, on account of a certain cat-like muscular control which one of the general’s lab technicians apparently decided would be a useful feature in the lab batch of stained folks Antek belongs to.

  There are tweaks in each generation of the Egg Men. Each batch, the OneFolk villagers say, seems better and more lifelike than the last one. Antek’s batch 47 are mostly organic this time around, Gaddys the shopkeeper says. But even Antek knows there are computerised parts to him. Some things are run from central control, he can feel his limbs slowing down a few moments after curfew, so he’s guessed this much. “They are run off a different system to us, that’s the main thing.” Gaddys likes to say often. And this in front of Antek, whenever someone happens to comment that Batch 47 seem so human. Gaddys soon puts them straight. She’s commissioned several news programmes on the matter. So it’s settled then. Antek is not human. That’s that. He pushes out his long toes, feels the cold stones.

  From his mountain shelf, Antek can see the OneFolks’ village, nestled at the base of The Reach, and to the side of that, and just beyond the small Sinta farmsteads, Antek can just make out the edges and corners of his father’s steel trap of a farm.

  Beside the OneFolks’ village, Antek can see, from up here, the long dark seam of the forest which the OneFolk villagers, Egg Men, Sinta and edge farmers alike all call the killing forest, on account these are government protected lands and experimental. “There are things in there,” Gaddys the shopkeeper tells her customers with a little shudder. “There are things in there …” What things she never quite gets around to telling, but generally the OneFolks will stay away from the fence. A few reckless youth on the edge farms have also learned in the last years to fear it. Those cocoons hanging there all night, for all to see in the morning.

  It seems to Antek like just a small bound from the OneFolks’ village and the killing forest to the edge farms, arranged in lines and circles like clots in the veins at the edge of the forest.

  The edge farmers work the poor soil, Antek knows that much. And, from up here, Antek can see the stark difference in colour between the fertile earth of the OneFolk villagers’ farms and the poor untreated soil of the edge farmers, the long boundary fence of the killing forest twisting between the two tribes’ farmlands, like a line of spite.

  The killing forest looks much like regular jungle from Antek’s spot, and not a man-made tangle of stinging brush, trees and scrubby bushes, developed by the general for the sole purpose of testing out his latest living weapons. Nothing gets past the fence of the killing forest, Antek has been told. Not the edge farmers and not their desert.

  The desert stretches out as far as the eye can. Antek knows that no-one goes into the desert. Impossible for even the hardiest of edge farmers to survive its burning shadeless daylight heat or it
s freezing nights for more than minutes. You’d live for an hour at most, OneFolk children are advised in school. Same goes for the killing forest. And for all but Antek’s batch 47, with their specialised climbing skills, climbing the mountain reach without equipment is a no-go also.

  Triangulation, the security managers call it. The mountain, the desert, the killing forest. Protected on all sides.” We are invincible in defence in The Triangle.”

  That’s been Bavarnica’s motto ever since the Diggers’ revolution was ended and the general’s long reckoning era began.

  The general’s motto has never made much sense to Antek. It’s not even a triangle, he thinks. So that’s the first untruth.

  From his mountain viewpoint, Antek can’t decide if ‘The triangle’ is a safe zone or a slow-squeezed trap. It seems to him to keep the OneFolks’ in just as much as it keeps the edge farm danger out. Certainly Bavarnica seems to Antek to have shrunk since he was a child.

  Antek knows that, by government diktat, he will have to stay within The Triangle until he dies. He knows that his bones will rot in the field behind The Holy, where the Egg Men are buried together in piles, under one banner, denoting their batch number and a tombstone with approximate time of death chiselled into it. No names.

  When he’s gone Antek knows that his family, and any batch 47 friends he’s made, will be rebooted. Antek won’t be remembered at all. Every ‘son’ his mother ever raised for the general, she named Antek. He positively doubts she remembers the difference between all her lost sons.

  Antek goes on staring at the desert horizon for a long time. The light dips softly at first and then a sudden black out. He realises with a small shudder that he’s broken curfew. Total blackout is rare enough in Bavarnica to take villagers by surprise, but it happens about every few weeks in truth, as Antek has observed, on his few occasions breaking curfew. It lasts for a moment, whilst one generator switches to a new one and the first one’s recharged. It comes down fast, the dark. Antek thinks. When it comes.