Stone Seeds (17 page)

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 its 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.

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.