by Ely, Jo;
Phosphorescent moon rises. Antek shivers.
He thinks he sees something out there. It’s just for a moment. Lit up by a shaft of moonlight and then slipping out of sight again.
Antek realises that he must be looking at the government gaols. Shouts and whistles rising up from it, when he tunes into the sounds. And, from up here, the guards looking insect-like to Antek. In a little while he watches the prisoners shuffle out from their cells. Moving in droves from one side of the prison yards to the other in darkness, in patterns seeming orderly and strange. Moving together, perhaps for the comfort or warmth he thinks. And then he remembers the chains. Soft clink and rattle when he listens closely. Antek remembers what it was like to be trapped in a space so small. Boxes within boxes. He stops breathing for one long moment. Tears his eyes away.
The gaols were the first government buildings to be attacked in the Diggers’ riot which marked the end of the last era. The Diggers themselves had so many family members and friends inside the gaols. After the Digger tribe were mown down in one swathe by the Egg Men of batch 46, there were crackdowns to rid Bavarnica of the ‘dangerous’ hungry folks on the edge farms. Every Egg Boy, and batch 47 included, is taught the history of Bavarnica in school. There were gaps in the teaching, but batch 47 were taught not to ask. The most important lesson they learned.
Stage two of the general’s crackdown was, of course, the killing forest itself. A thin scrubby brush was replanted, fed and watered. It expanded quickly. It is subject to constant ‘improvements’. The lab technicians are worked hard in the basement of the general’s great house (Antek’s seen that much, working guard duty at the feasts). But the killing forest also evolves by itself in new ways which the lab technicians hadn’t necessarily foreseen.
Antek looks down at his hands. And then up. Desert sounds. Cicada, slow rattle of snake. Antek eyes what his father calls the upside-down trees, but the edge farmers call the baobab. Tree limbs like roots hanging fat and bulbous, and beyond their thick lines, only more desert scrub. The baobab make a bumpy silhouette against the desert.
The old Sinta rememberers say that the baobab used to walk but that they stopped when Bavarnica’s tribes were divided. The baobab haven’t moved since. But Antek knows that is only an old Sinta bedtime story, told to quiet infants on the Sinta cabbage patch farms. Storytelling’s quite illegal.
The general’s man-made sun comes up now, like a grotesque pumpkin or a hole in the sky. The sky around it seems to Antek as though it fills up with blood.
The OneFolks’ village has just gotten through a winter without dark, which came on the heels of a summer without daylight. But this is Autumn in Bavarnica. In the OneFolks’ village, at least. The climate isn’t so changeable on the edge farms, there’s a wet season with barely any rain, followed by a dry one which takes up more and more of the year than it once did. The desert is coming in slow but surely over the Edge Farms.
Antek understands that the rains are being redirected toward the OneFolks’ village. He’s not sure how it’s done. But there are rumours, spreading out from the officers’ quarters. Whispers in the vents.
Before the Diggers’ revolution, before even the Sintas’ trials on the mountain, the edge farmers had stood in a long line, hand in hand, along the border between the edge farms and the OneFolks’ village, causing the OneFolk farmers to down tools and gaze in wonder. And the edge farmers had watched the rain come down then, over the OneFolks’ village beside their lands, not a splash coming over their side of the fence. Silent. It seemed more like a reproach than a protest at that time. But later the killing forest grew up and outward. Things changed.
Only the Egg Boys who guard them know that some of the edge farmers will still stand there for hours, hand in hand along the fence as the dust on top of the dry soil of their lands behind them blows up in swathes, and small dunes rise against the backs of their heels, as sand collects against anything standing still for long on the edge farms. And that it’s right after the rains fall over the OneFolks that the edge farms’ rain dances begin.
When the music starts up, the soft hollers, the rhythms of feet, whoops and shrieks, then the general’s sirens start up too. Like the chorus.
Some of the senior officers, Antek knows, had thought that banning the rain dances was an unnecessary measure as most folks had forgotten all the steps in the ancient dances anyway. If they even believed in the dance now that the rain was apparently government property, just like everything else. Antek watches the rain clouds gathering. He realises that he’s waiting for the sound of the rain dance and the sirens. Nothing comes. Perhaps the edge farmers are too tired to protest today, the latest drought has after all lasted several weeks now. What food was stored has long run out and most edge farmers are using what strength they have left to tend to their dying.
Antek considers that if he were human, some or all of this might matter. Tries to remember he’s not. He looks down at his hands.
Antek watches the next moon rising, the second one a little bit above the first one, until they’re like the two crooked eyes of the desert hyenas, or the pirates that feed on them (illegal fairy tales told to OneFolk village children, meant to keep them indoors and away from the fences). One ‘moon’ is an all-seeing eye which rises over the mountain and scans it, lights up Antek in its beam. Antek tries to scramble backward into the rock mouth behind him but it’s too late.
Shouts from below. Antek’s father saw something moving, guessed it was his son. Long pause, during which Antek turns over his hands, examines his palms. Soft pink lines running down, covered in a thin layer of rock dust. Antek starts back down the mountain. Ducks under the rock tooth of his cave and slipping down its sheer face smoothly.
Antek is face to face with his father. There is a suffusion of blood in his father’s face, Antek’s never seen him so red. And the veins in his father’s neck and temple standing out as thick as plant roots. His overly large eyes seem to bulge in his great head. This is going to be quite bad, Antek thinks, with the inexplicable feeling of detachment he’s had since his last stain.
A soft cough from above in the silence, and then the government rain falls, soaking Antek and his father. Antek can hear the rush and hiss as rain hits the ground fast and hard round his feet.
The wind gets up, and now the tree behind Antek’s father is heaving and straining against its roots. Flailing its stunted, burned limbs.
“It’s time for your second staining, Egg Boy.” Father says. “Your human side is still making you weak, I can see that even if you can’t Egg Boy. Weak is a thing you can’t be in the times coming, Boy. You will need to be a man soon. A man like me, Antek.”
“Yes, father.” Antek says. There is no intonation in his voice.
In the shadow of the rock behind, a small light dips and rises.
Now Jengi blows smoke toward the path the boy and man took. He’s examining the back of Antek’s head, and then the huge strange skull of his father beside him. The rain slows and the two moons dip, one by one, behind a rain cloud. And then seem to blink out.
There is only the sound of Jengi’s feet now. Trooping back to the shop.
FIRST KILL
ANTEK ISN’T CUT OUT to be a farmer. Worst, for him, is pulling the male calves away from the teat. Antek hates that above all the things he’s so far listed in his mind that he hates about farm life. There is soft, curled fur between the calf’s dark eyes, blank with fear now.
Antek’s father puts the gun into Antek’s hand. Wraps his fingers around it. “Here. Take it, Egg Boy.”
Antek looks at the gun.
“An Egg Boy eventually has to learn to kill things, Antek. This calf is yours now. You know how to use it? The gun?”
“Yes.” Antek doesn’t look up.
There’s a clunk and rattle as Antek’s father slides the rusting bolt across in the door behind him. “You’ll come out when you’ve done it, Antek. Not before.”
Antek leans his forehead against the thin chip
board wall which separates the calf from the cow in the next stall. The calf is knowing. Frightened. Antek tries to calm it but this only seems to make the calf panic more, it scatters in the small space, banging itself against the walls, soft groans for its mother. Better get it done quickly, Antek thinks. Get it over with.
He’s let off the gun before he’s even finished that thought. It takes longer than you would have thought for the last life to leave the small body. When it’s over, when he thinks it’s over, Antek puts his hand on the small tufted brown head with the dark mottled neck still extended out softly toward him. The Egg Boy believes he can feel the last pulse heave and tick underneath his left hand.
There is a long and bovine groaning. You think it can’t be coming from you, Antek thinks. But it is.
He can’t say what he feels. Nothing he has any words for. He tells himself that he’s a killer now. That today is Day One. Antek stares down at his stain. It’s as though he sees it for the first time in his life.
Now Antek senses his father standing outside the stall door. And then the slide of his huge feet. Antek turns toward the sound. The old man’s boots cast a shadow in the gap underneath the door. There’s the slide of the bolt and the accompanying heavy feeling in Antek’s stomach, the one he gets when he’s in the presence of his father. Like a cold stone in the gut. The door opens slowly.
Antek’s father appraises the situation on the ground. The clean-killed calf and the boy soaked in snot, drenched in tears, haggard face. Like he’d seen the worst thing that life holds. And then done it himself. Antek’s father tips back on to his heels. He scratches his head. Can this really be a stained boy? An egg boy? He thinks. This guilt, this suffering? Why would the lab technicians have kept that part of his humanity? They never did before, not in the previous 46 egg batches. They considered humanity to be a flaw to trip a soldier up on duty. So … Is the boy a flawed sample? What was the plan? He remembers the rumour that a Sinta infiltrated the labs before Antek’s batch was hatched out. The Egg Man tries to put the thought away, can’t. If the boy is flawed then he’ll be cancelled along with his batch. High treason not to inform the general on him.
Antek’s father decides not to file a report on the boy, it’s sudden. That decision. And he can’t exactly explain it, even to himself. But the thought rattles round the Egg Man’s head. Must’ve been tweaks in this batch, he thinks. Wasn’t that always the rumour? Gaddys said it was designed to sow fear in the ranks, and that batch 47 have been rigorously tested in the labs. But now the Egg Man considers his son Antek. The boy has certainly never quite seemed like a stained boy. He’s never felt like my son.
Antek feels the calf’s mother nudging at the chipboard, bump, bump, bump and then a bovine moan which must have come from the locked stall next door, but to Antek seems to have come up from below the spiky hay floor, and even under that too, from the wooden floorboards which Antek rests his large bony knees on, further down and down still until it seems to Antek there is nothing below that long groaning sound of the calf’s mother.
And one day this will be only a memory Antek has of his first kill, but it will be a memory which will seem to survive all memory reboots and erasures until the day when the past will be all stripped away, then this one scene will rise up. The calf and the cow shed.
And there will be who he thought he was before it. Who he knew he was after.
“Stop that noise, Boy.”
Antek’s father takes the gun out of Antek’s hand.
“Get on back to the house.” He pushes the calf with his boot. The soft flesh of the calf’s stomach yields to his boot pressure, he slides a knife out of his back pocket.
“I’ll follow you back when I’m done here, Antek.” Wields his knife in the air.
Antek reaches the farm gate to his house, he pauses. He’s not quite sure why. Sniffs the air. Just a few scrabble-necked chickens pecking in the yard, the occasional gloomy bellows of the cows in the field beyond the glinting farm fence. And the dog is barking. But then again, the dog is always barking.
Through the farmhouse window, Antek can see the fire burning in the fireplace. It seems huge, the fire. Even from outside. His mother must have put too many logs on it again. Antek presses on forward, pushing against his premonition. Puts his hand out toward the familiar door knob, his hand seems to him to be a mile away. I am untuned again, he thinks. Quietly wishes Central Control would address the problem.
The door knob against his palm is cold. Antek turns the knob, then he pushes. Soft clanking sound as the door opens. He presses it closed without looking behind him. Holds on to it one moment too long, noting the fingernail marks in the paintwork round the door knob, and down the hinge of the door from the day his mother tried and failed to escape with him as an infant. Antek can’t remember that day, except perhaps in bits and pieces. He remembers holding on to his mother’s head, while she scratched and clawed at exits. While she screamed. He remembers Father’s huge boots on the door jamb, the cold light behind him and that his mother was different from that day forwards. Antek’s father had voluntarily increased the number of his wife’s daily reboots. Once she was assessed a flight risk.
There is a strong wind in the yard outside the farmhouse just now, a powerful enough surge that it conducts a swathe of the yard’s fine gravel before it, the door shudders in its hinges. Antek’s mother sits with her back to the door. Not moving.
And then a sudden wind-blast that rattles the door and threatens to tear it out of its hinges. She flinches sharply once. Then goes on softly shuddering in her chair. Her tremor lasts around a minute, and normally Antek would go to her, hold her inside the loop of his arms joined by his hands and squeeze in the way that he’s learned will steady her. Although he’s not quite sure why. Some unfathomable tradition from her girlhood. She used to try to ‘hug’ him back when he was small, but the thing unnerved him and in a little while she understood, or at least she had seemed to accept it. Antek doesn’t like to touch people, not if he can help it.
Antek feels exhausted in a way he can’t explain, not even to himself. When Mother reaches out one bony hand to pat him, passing, he steps around her outstretched fingers. Moves toward the kitchen drawer and slides it open. He stands there, looking down. It’s a strange impulse, what am I doing here? He thinks. Antek’s mother sits immobile in her chair. She waits for her son.
Something about the contents of the drawer catches Antek’s eye, it’s an odd arrangement. Spoons collected at the top, forks at the bottom, battered knives to the left side, then in the heart of the drawer: one spoon, one fork, one knife. Perfectly polished. It isn’t like Antek’s mother to clean things. She rarely moves from her chair. The cutlery on either side is dim grey with collected dirt. Tinny-looking, next to the gleaming silver in the middle. Looking closer still at the silver cutlery set in the middle, Antek sees the nick in the knife handle. Now he’s thinking. Fingers the scar on his chin.
And now he notices that one prong of the fork is bent slightly left, like a listening antennae. And then there’s the spoon. There’s a small inky stain in the centre of the spoon’s face. Antek can’t say what the substance is, but it doesn’t come off when he scratches at it with his thumbnail, not on his shirt neither, when he rubs at it. “What’s this?” He asks. Turning softly toward his mother. She doesn’t answer. Turns toward him. She begins gently rocking her chair.
It seems like paint, only paint has been forbidden for a long time in Bavarnica.
“What’d you do to the spoon?” It’s a scientific question, as far as Antek is concerned. His mother never moves from her chair without a reason. And her reason is always fair-to-middling interesting to Antek. Mother and son are not entirely unalike, or so it seems and in spite of the fact that she is only an organic.
She watches her son. “Antek.” She says. And then her long, dim, unblinking gaze. She seems to look right through Antek. As if to some essential thing hidden just behind the boy. Antek has the sense that she is looking towar
d someone else. He turns. No-one.
Now the pupils of his mother’s eyes darken and change, and then the changes spread out from that centre: the coloured yellow iris of her left eye seems to shift into brown, the lapis lazuli blue of her right iris is blackening. And then the coloured irises are being swallowed by her pupils, followed by the yellowing whites of her eyes. In a minute, perhaps two, the entire area of both eyes is treacle coloured. Antek takes two sharp steps forward, toward her. He tilts her head up with his hands. Makes a quick, expert appraisal. “Reboot.” He says aloud.
Mother’s clearly been rebooted, and recently, Antek calculates. From the look of her, she was erased some time over the last hour. And if that’s true then when did she do this with the spoon? It must have been some time before that, so she knew the reboot was coming. What was she trying to remember?
Double helpings of the erasures is a regular dose for the mothers and wives of the newly stained Egg Boys. As they transition into Egg Men, there are occasionally breakouts from the mothers and sometimes younger family members. Furniture thrown out on the streets, yelling, or the smashing of windows. For mothers to be removed and replaced is not unheard of in Bavarnica. But it seems that Antek’s mother has been through a triple or even a quadruple course of reboots. It’s likely that she won’t know who he is.
“Antek,” she says again, sharply. And then softer, “Antek.” She repeats, looking at him. It’s a knowing look, with a hint of triumph in it, “Antek, give me my spoon, Boy.” Antek looks down at his hand. Passes the spoon over. And now she wraps her trembling hands around it, pulls it into her chest.
“Why do you never want to forget me?” Antek asks now. “I mean … after the reboots. You always find a way to know who I am, Mother. Even when you can’t rightly say what my name is.”
“I know who all of you are. Antek.” She says. Not making sense, or not making any sense that Antek can see.
“Antek,” she says. “My sons.” And then looking up at Antek sharply. “Your name is Antek?” And then gazing gratefully at the spoon-reminder. “I knew I was due for a big dose, a large reboot.” She sighs. She sounds more like herself. “So I ‘wrote’ your name all over my kitchen.”