Juno of Taris (26 page)

We turned and looked. She was right. It was Majool stumping along with the help of a stick.

‘Start eating,’ Silvern ordered, ‘and look happy.’

‘Take Hera for a swim,’ Vima said. ‘And put your head under the water. Get rid of the tears.’

I hadn’t known I was crying. I took off my tunic and folded it to hide the pocket with the phone. Vima shoved the letter at Silvern. ‘You keep it. Safer.’

I picked Hera up and ran with her into the water. I towed her out and ducked under the water when she whacked my head. I came up spluttering and she shouted, ‘More!’ I clowned around with her and watched the beach.

Majool hadn’t sat down. He was talking to them, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Then Vima shouted, ‘Come out, Juno. You need to hear this.’

I waded out. I was too shaken to cope with an angry Governance Companion. Hera flailed her arms. ‘Swim! More swim!’

I sat down. ‘What?’ I glanced around the others. They kept their faces blank.

Majool snapped out his message. ‘We’ve decided this isn’t a proper use of the recreation hour. You’re to go home now, and not meet again like this. Your work this afternoon has been changed to weaving and you will all stay in your own homes to do it. You need family time.’

I glanced at Vima. Congregation leads to communication. Stop the meetings and you stop the sharing of information. A slow anger burned in my body. She was watching him, her mouth compressed in a thin line.

Marba picked up a bread roll. ‘We hear you, Majool. But right now we need to eat.’

We all reached for food. I gave a roll to Hera but I knew if I tried to eat that I’d be sick right there on the sand in front of Majool.

He watched us through narrowed eyes for a moment, then he sat down on the grass behind us. ‘Very well. I will wait for you to finish.’

The others ate without speaking. I pretended to.

We finished and packed up the baskets. ‘Swim!’ Hera demanded.

Brex smiled at her. ‘Tomorrow, baby. Majool says we have to go home now.’

‘No! Swim now!’ She made a run for the sea.

Paz caught her. ‘Hush, little girl. I have something to say to Majool.’

‘Okay.’ She hugged his neck. ‘Paz nice. Man bad.’

Paz choked and the rest of us tried not to smile – except for Vima, who nodded once and said, ‘Perceptive child.’

‘Say it, and be on your way,’ Majool ordered. He ignored Hera.

‘I’m going to bring this up on Wednesday. There’s no logical reason why we shouldn’t picnic here. I intend to ask for your reasons.’ Paz stalked past Majool and began the walk home.

‘I agree with Paz,’ Silvern said. She looked Majool in the face, then tossed her head and followed Paz.

One by one, we followed. One by one, we repeated that we agreed with Paz. Vima paused for a second in front of Majool. We stopped and watched her. She didn’t say a word – just looked him up and down, shrugged her shoulders, then pivoted on her heel and stalked off.

We jogged down the path away from him. Paz stopped when we were out of sight. ‘Quick! Tell us the other secret – the one you didn’t have time to tell us at school.’

Vima hissed, ‘Not here. For the love of Taris, not here.’

I glanced across at the mountain. The hidden path was opposite us. Who might be lurking on it – listening to us? ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow at break. Let’s get out of here.’

They obeyed without argument but their eyes were sharp with questions.

The letter. The words of the letter thumped around in my heart. I was glad Silvern kept it for me. I didn’t want to read it again – didn’t want to have to tell my parents or let my grandparents read it. Irian. He’d been ordered to kill me.

Silvern and Paz came home with me. Paz handed Hera over, and Silvern slipped the letter into my hand. ‘You need to tell your family.’

Bossy cow. But she was right. As always.

I
told my parents. I told them Grif had taught me to read, and then, after I had warned them, I read them the letter.

Mother’s face went ashen and she ran to the bathroom. Dad paced the room. As I had done, he wept without knowing he did so.

I hugged Hera and tried to comfort her.

We had to tell the grandparents. I said I would go but Dad wrapped his arms around me. ‘No! My daughter, they will be watching for you. Don’t go anywhere alone.’ He looked over my head to Mother. ‘You were right, Sheen. They do want her dead.’ His arms were crushing me, but also squeezing out the last of the hurt from his withdrawing from me.

‘Go, Zanin,’ Mother said. ‘And look cheerful.’

‘Tell people you want to talk about why we’ve been banned from the bay,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Good. I’ll do that and it won’t matter that I look …’

‘Grim.’ Mother finished the sentence for him.

We fed Hera, then sat and waited.

Leebar and Bazin arrived first. They didn’t ask questions – just played with Hera and waited the few minutes more until Grif, Danyat and Dad arrived.

‘I’ve warned them,’ Dad said. ‘Read it, Juno.’

I complied. My voice shook and the words stuck in my throat.

Grif sat on the sofa and sobbed. Leebar walked round and round the room, her hands over her face. The grandfathers swayed where they sat, shocked into silence.

Dad fetched a flask of wine. ‘Medicinal. You must tell us everything. All the secrets.’

Hera patted Grif’s knee. ‘Up.’ Grif picked her up and settled her on her lap.

‘I’ll put her to bed,’ Mother said.

‘No!’ Hera shouted. ‘Stay here.’

We had no will to argue.

Bazin sat at the table, took a swallow of wine, then said, ‘I’ll tell the story.’

Danyat put a hand on his shoulder. ‘We’ll help. It’s our story too.’

Bazin didn’t look at us. He sat slumped forwards, his hands clasped loosely between his knees. ‘Taris was settled in 2025. We four were selected as pioneers – us and our parents.’

That stunned us.
They
were pioneers? But how could that be? ‘But now it’s 2227.’ I stared at them. ‘You’re not – you can’t be – over two hundred years old?’

Danyat patted my hand and took up the telling. ‘We were twenty-eight years old, and now we are nearly seventy.’ He gave me a ghost of a smile. ‘So, how old is Taris, Juno?’

‘Thirty-nine. Maybe forty. But is it? Is that the truth?’

Grif sighed. ‘Yes. It’s the truth. It’s hard even for us to believe that our long history – all two hundred years of it – is a myth. A legend grown and made solid with the telling and re-telling.’ She stroked Hera’s head. ‘There are days when I find myself believing in it, wondering if I’m going mad. If my memories have played me false.’

‘Have they?’ Mother asked, sharply for her.

Leebar said, ‘No. They haven’t. We lived Outside until we were twenty-eight. Things were bad. The Taris Project gave people hope. We were important. We felt special, privileged. It was an exciting time for us all.’

Danyat leaned back in his chair, his eyes shut, remembering. ‘We married. We’d been screened for compatibility Outside. We were happy.’

‘And seven years after the establishment, no more ships came with supplies. They couldn’t come. Things were bad. Famine. Water shortages. Disease. Wars.’ Bazin shook his head and sighed. ‘There was no money for extras and we on Taris were extras. Six months after the last ship came, the communication stopped as well. We sent message after message. Nothing. No reply of any sort. We lost our balance, our sense of perspective, of who we were. That was the crisis.’

‘The one Fisa dragged us back from,’ Grif added.

‘And the rest you know,’ Leebar said. ‘We’ve lived a lie for all these years. The lies have grown and we haven’t been able to check one without exposing the others.’

‘And to do that was to invite death,’ said Danyat.

We said nothing. There was nothing to say. Too much to say. We weren’t who we’d thought we were. They weren’t who they’d told us they were. My head spun. Hera bawled.

‘Should we tell the people?’ Grif asked. ‘Is there reason enough? My brain hurts when I think of it. Yes or no? Either way has its costs.’

Danyat looked at the three of us. ‘You wrestle with it. Fresh minds, fresh ideas. Do we tell and destroy what holds our world together?’

‘Or do we keep quiet? Taris works. It’s still viable. And there’s no escape anyway. Difficult questions,’ said Leebar.

Danyat took Grif’s hand. ‘Come, Ann. Let’s go home.’

We gaped at him. ‘Ann? Why did you call her that?’

Grif wiped her eyes. ‘Ann. Yes, I should like to be Ann again.’

‘You had other names?’ Dad demanded. ‘Outside names?’

‘I was Daniel,’ said Danyat.

‘Zinzan.’ Bazin glanced at Dad. ‘We gave you the same name. When the crisis came, Zanin was as near as we could get to Zinzan.’

‘I was Leah,’ said Leebar. ‘My name was Leah Barton.’

‘Ann without an E,’ Grif said. ‘I chose Grif which is grief without an E.’ She gave Mother a brief smile. ‘And you, my daughter, were called Sheena.’

‘Why?’ It seemed such a little thing. What did it matter what name you had?

Grif shrugged. ‘It was like our hair. Lenna came up with the idea in that first, day-long meeting. A new start, she said, with a new look and let’s have new names too.’

Leebar gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Her name was Hortense and she didn’t like it. We all agreed to change. It was the time for big changes and so what was one more?’

‘But,’ I said, thinking it through, ‘it’s now another way of hiding the truth.’

The four of them kissed us goodnight and walked out into the rainy dark, leaving us alone with the problem they’d lived with for most of their adult lives. To tell or to stay silent. To risk the destruction of our world. ‘Or to give us the chance to begin again and do it better.’ I voiced the thought, but my parents didn’t answer.

We were too battered to make decisions right then. ‘Thought before action still seems like a good idea,’ Dad said with a smile that wobbled at the edges.

They were still sitting at the table when I went to bed.

I sent Vima a text:
more revelations from the g
parents

She didn’t reply. I stayed awake, thinking about her and not about the things I’d learnt that day. She was making herself ill by working so hard, and it didn’t seem to be helping the soreness in her mind. Could anyone see it besides me? I sighed. Jov would know it, and so would Oban. I couldn’t see any solution; Jov was married to Sina, they were expecting a baby, and that was that. And if Vima refused to marry Oban, then he must remain single for all the days of his life. Unless one of the young men in his stratum died and left a widow behind. And that, I asked myself, had happened how many times in the history of Taris? I shook my head and corrected myself – the known history of Taris which, as far as I could tell, bore no resemblance to the real history.

Vima didn’t reply. I tried to sleep.

S
leep didn’t come. Words from the letter chased themselves round and round in my head. My parents stayed up longer than normal, too, and perhaps it was the murmur of their voices that finally lulled me to sleep. When the phone vibrated under my pillow it jerked me out of a tangled dream I was glad to wake from.

This was a fine time for Vima to reply. Serve her right if I ignored her; she did it to me often enough. But what I read on the phone propelled me out of bed. I ran for my parents’ room, shook Dad, then Mother. They both stirred but didn’t wake more than to say
wassamatter not morning yet.

I smelt the wine on their breaths, ran to the lounge and looked in despair at the empty wineskins. My parents were in no fit state to help.

hurt on m

Vima. What had she done? Was she so badly injured that she couldn’t finish the text? M had to mean mountain. Why had she gone there, and at night? I fired off a text but felt little hope of getting a reply. What to do? I pulled on some clothes, running possibilities through my head. Silvern would help me, and Paz. I wouldn’t have to explain everything, and they’d help me climb the mountain, find Vima and bring her home.

If she was alive. The thought made me hurry. I gabbled into the messager and hoped my parents would think to check it if they woke and found me missing.

I slipped from the house, ran through the rainy dark to Silvern’s house and round the side to her bedroom window. It was open. I peered in – she wasn’t there.

That wretched girl! She’d be with Paz at their secret meeting place. She should have told me where it was. I ran as I worried at the problem. They met halfway between her house and his. My feet beat out the word on the wet path:
halfway,
halfway, halfway
. Fisa’s house was halfway, but I couldn’t believe they’d be with her.

Light shone from Fisa’s windows. I gasped with relief and ran towards the door – they were there, they had to be, and I’d find out why later. I set my foot on the bottom step to leap onto the verandah and hammer on the door … and I saw Lenna walk into the room, her back to the window. I heard voices. I ducked and wheeled to the side of the house, away from the lights. The Governance Companions were in there, not Silvern and Paz, and they would not help me.