Juno of Taris (22 page)

That made him sit up. ‘Go on.’

I told them of the two occasions when Hilto’s words had crashed into my head. ‘I don’t think I imagined it. There was so much hate. He scared the breath out of me.’

Marba rubbed his hands. ‘Excellent! I knew it was possible. Now, let’s …’

Brex held up a hand. ‘You’re doing it again, Marba. If I was Juno, I wouldn’t describe having Hilto in my head as excellent.’

He opened his mouth to argue, saw all of us looking at him. ‘But … oh, all right! But can’t you see? It’s exciting. It’s different.’

‘It’s murder,’ Yin said. ‘Not too much that’s exciting about that – especially if you happen to be the target.’

I stood up and started walking. ‘Time to go back.’

Silvern caught me up. ‘The other stuff – it concerns Vima, doesn’t it?’

I nodded. ‘Yeah. Most of it came out at the meeting. I think there’s more, but I don’t know yet.’

She grunted, gave me a piercing look, but said nothing. I was glad. Secrets. Who to tell? How much to tell?

On Tuesday, Justa had a surprise for us. ‘I’ve asked my parents to come and talk to you about the crisis. They’ll be here after break.’

They were waiting for us when we ran back up from the tamarind trees. Justa’s mother, Jenat, was tall and willowy while her father was the only person on Taris with a nickname. He was short and stocky with a smiling, wrinkled face – we called him The Gnome and I didn’t remember if we’d ever known his proper name.

Hera crawled around the floor while they talked to us. It was good to have her there. We could watch her when the story they were telling us became too much to absorb.

Jidda bounced in his seat. ‘Tell us about the technology.’ Trust him to want to know that. I almost protested. The story, that’s what was important.

But Jenat laughed. ‘It all worked a lot better than it does now. We had all the fancy phones, our computers talked to each other, to us and to the phones.’

‘That’s how the troubles started,’ The Gnome said. ‘It was so easy to communicate with one person, or a group of people.’ He shook his head. A gnome shouldn’t look sad – it didn’t suit him. ‘I can’t believe it now, but we,’ he gestured at Jenat, ‘our parents and two of our neighbours set up a communication system so we could guard our property the whole twenty-four hours of the day.’

‘Your houses, you mean?’ Dreeda asked.

The Gnome shook his head. ‘No, we knew those would be safe enough. We had a glass bowl of glowing colours. A chess set from Spain. A fan from Brazil. A hei tiki from New Zealand. A book of the history of the world. Other books. Paintings.’

Silvern fired a question. ‘You had books? You could read the old script? All of you?’

Jenat answered. ‘Yes. All of us. Pictograph script was being developed when Taris was settled. We could all use it, but we preferred the old script that we’d grown up with.’

Jidda waved his hand as if brushing away something unimportant. ‘What else?’

Well, I’d wipe
him
off my list of possible marriage partners. I gulped. Where had that come from? I knew my marriage partner would come from my learning stratum – that was knowledge we all had from birth – but I’d never given it serious consideration.

I shook my head and tuned in again to hear The Gnome saying, ‘… a game machine you could hold in your hand.’ He glanced at Jenat and his voice softened. ‘And the most beautiful dress you ever saw, which Jenat wore with such style. She looked like the queen of the dawn.’

I gazed at her and I swear I saw an image of her at twenty-five, clad in a dress that clung to her body and swirled around her legs and changed colour as she moved. It did sound beautiful, but not something to start a war over.

‘And?’ Marba demanded.

‘A Thinkmobile that scooted along at over fifty kilometres an hour on the straight,’ said The Gnome.

‘You had one of those?’ Biddo screeched.

‘Oh, man!’ Wenda cried.

He smiled but he was looking into the past and not at us. ‘Ours was the fastest. I was good with mechanics and I’d fine-tuned it.’

We were silent. I knew I’d have fought to save the books, the glass bowl and the dress – and for the chance to ride on something that would carry me so swiftly that my hair, when it grew, would stream out behind me.

‘The others of our group had things they valued,’ Jenat said. ‘We banded together to protect what we had.’ She shook her head. ‘It was crazy, but at the same time it was fun. We felt so alive. It was like a giant game of chess. We spent our time working out tactics, moving around the island, hiding, planning raids on other groups.’

‘Defending ourselves from their raids,’ The Gnome said. ‘At first, the whole thing was like a huge game. We knew it couldn’t last so we played all the harder. Gradually though, it got more serious. People started getting hurt. We worked on our weaponry.’

‘We developed a stun gun,’ Jenat said almost casually, as if she were talking about inventing a new recipe. ‘And other groups had things like anaesthetising darts.’

Hera crawled to The Gnome, bunted his leg and he picked her up, laughing at her.

‘How long?’ Shallym whispered. ‘How long did it go on for?’

They shrugged. ‘A month. Six weeks. Maybe longer. We lost track of the days.’

‘What stopped it?’ Pel asked.

‘Who, not what,’ The Gnome said. Hera wriggled and he put her down. ‘It was Fisa. She had guts, that woman. She pulled us back from death.’

Jenat sat back in her chair and closed her eyes. She breathed deeply a couple of times. ‘She sent messages saying she was going alone to the meeting place with her possessions. She said she was going to leave them there unguarded. She took them all; her lovely clothes, her delicate china, a painting, her camera and a disk of photographs.’

So. There had been photographs on Taris once.

‘What did she do?’ It was hard to imagine Fisa thirty-two years younger.

The Gnome took up the story. ‘Such was our greed that all of us,’ he shook his head and no humour stayed in his face, ‘all of us turned up with our weapons and our own treasure because we dared not leave it unguarded. We lurked from vantage points, waiting and watching for the chance to dart in and seize what she had.’

‘She started with the china,’ Jenat said. ‘She smashed it plate by plate, cup by cup onto the ground. Then she took an axe and pulverised it. All of us kept calling to her to stop, that if she didn’t want it then we would take it.’

‘All of us will remember until the day we die how she silenced us,’ murmured The Gnome. We leaned forward so as not to miss a syllable. ‘She lit a brazier that we hadn’t even noticed. She started feeding the clothes into it. Somebody shouted. She held up a hand. “I can burn my possessions. But who will burn my body in ten days when all of us are dead?”’

‘She cut off her hair,’ Jenat said, ‘her beautiful hair. It was long and brown – full of light and movement and so straight you could have sewn with it. She took the scissors, cut it off and dropped it into the brazier. She called out, “I am afraid of pain, and have not the courage to kill myself. Let this be a symbol of what is to come. We are killing ourselves. There will be none left to give our bodies dignity. So I burn my hair. In that alone can I honour the body that has served me so faithfully.”’

She stopped speaking, giving us time to see the scene in our minds.

At last, The Gnome continued. ‘There was a crashing silence all over the meeting ground and then – one by one – we walked forward. We carried with us our treasures and we laid them on the ground. One by one, we cut off our hair and burned it in the brazier.’

Jenat sighed. ‘And that’s it, really. We finally faced up to what we were doing. We talked for hours and we worked out a way of living. The way we needed to be if we were to survive in this strange, cut-off world.’

The Gnome gave us a twisted smile. ‘Your bald heads, my children, are a legacy of our foolishness.’

We said nothing. I wanted to hold the books in my hands. I wanted to wear the beautiful dress, to ride on the Thinkmobile. And I wasn’t the only one.

Silvern stood up. She walked to Jenat and hugged her, then The Gnome. ‘Thank you. I understand now. Thank you.’ Her voice broke.

We followed her example. For the rest of the afternoon we worked in silence, our thoughts not on the problems in front of us, but on the story of our history. Fisa a heroine. I couldn’t accept it. Not until I knew the truth about Elin and Oran. Hera thumped her heels on the floor and shouted.

W
e talked of it at home. We sat with the grandparents and filled the gaps in our history. Some of them anyway. But I sensed things unspoken that the four of them hid in their hearts, in their memories. In their fears.

‘You didn’t behave like that,’ Mother said. ‘You wouldn’t.’ Her voice trembled and Dad put his arm around her. They sat together on the sofa and stared at their parents.

‘Yes. We did.’ Leebar spoke gently. ‘All of us. We were every bit as bad as everyone else.’

We found it hard to believe. They were so controlled, so careful to do things correctly.

Except the reading. I watched Grif. She smiled at me. ‘I had a book of fairy tales, a book of poems, and disks of books.’

I too would have fought for books. I smiled back at her and held in my head the questions I knew they wouldn’t answer: Why didn’t you rebel? Why did you bow your heads to the rules? Was it only because of Elin, or was there more?

‘When did they stop teaching children to read the old script?’ Dad asked.

Bazin shrugged. ‘That wasn’t something we discussed. It just happened. The pictograph script was easy – those who didn’t speak English as their first language were already using it.’

‘Then one day we realised that there was no longer any of the old script left on our screens.’ Grif wrapped her arms around her body. Her face was bleak. ‘In a Wednesday meeting I asked the Governance Companions why this was. Irian answered me. He said it was his fault. He’d managed to fix the computers after a major crash of the system but he’d had to wipe a lot of stuff off the server, and somehow other things had gone too.’

‘Did you believe him?’ Dad shot the question at all four of them.

Leebar gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Oh no, but we didn’t question him.’

Why? My parents and I stared at them. Why wouldn’t they ask? Why wouldn’t they demand that he put back the old script?

‘He was crying,’ Zanin said. ‘He was distraught when he told us what had happened. Nobody had the heart to question him further.’

‘And so it became another rule.’ Grif looked at me, her eyes holding a warning. ‘We did not teach our children to read and we did not question why. It simply became part of who we were.’

Vima and I talked the next day when we were at the bay with Hera.

‘You know what I don’t want to believe?’ Vima asked as she liberated Hera from the backpack. ‘I don’t want to believe we owe our flaming existence to Fisa. Makes me sick to my gut.’

‘Do you think she’s still brave?’ I whispered.

Vima shrugged. ‘Dunno. Maybe she’s twisted. Power gone to her head. That sort of thing.’

‘But is she the murderer? Is she the controller? Or is it someone like Hilto?’ I wanted to be fair. To consider all the possibilities.

‘She has to know who is. Guilt by association if nothing else.’

Yes. I dived into the water and swam leaving Vima looking after my sister.

My grandparents were at my house when we returned from the bay. ‘Come in,’ they called to Vima. ‘Come and have a drink before we go to work.’

We spoke of gentle things. It was like slipping from a dangerous world into one of peace and joy. I felt removed from it – distanced.

‘Have you heard?’ Danyat asked. ‘Creen and Kalta are having a special anniversary dinner tonight.’

‘No, I hadn’t heard that.’ I could say the right things – go through the motions. ‘What anniversary?’

‘Their ten month anniversary.’ Grif laughed and looked fondly at Danyat. ‘Young love is so sweet.’

None of them glanced at Vima or hinted at their expectation that she and Oban would marry. She said nothing. Hera banged her fist on her high chair and shouted. Vima stroked a finger down Hera’s face and smiled the saddest smile in the universe.

I thought about it that night: Vima, Jov and Oban.

I sent her a text:
don’t worry we all might die.

She sent back:
u r grt comfort

My heart ached for her. You weren’t meant to love somebody you couldn’t have. Things like that were not supposed to happen on Taris.

What if the same thing happened to me? I shook my bristly head. Why worry? Taris could have failed and killed us all by the time I was old enough to marry.

For the next few days we heard questions as we walked to and from our activities.

But then, exactly four weeks after the meeting that blasted our conception of who we were, came other news.

For ten days we walked around in hot, sticky air. Hera grumbled and woke at night crying. Nobody slept well. I saw nothing of Vima – she was working all the hours she could stay awake trying to help get the sensors working again.