Gold

PART I

Orchard

CHAPTER 1

Father steadies me while I step into the white protective suit. It’s so big for me it’s like I’m being swallowed in a gulp by one of those huge gigantiums that are in our Cosmology game. I roll up the sleeves and the trouser cuffs so that I won’t be engulfed altogether, then zip myself up. The hood scritch-scratches the side of my face as I tuck my hair in around each side of it before tightening the toggles. That’s enough to get the wobblies doing somersaults in my belly. Father calls them butterflies, but I’ve never seen an insect of any kind, let alone know what it feels like to have them inside me. Esper would call me a dizzard if I told him. The Sagittars have warned us not to waste energy on feelings, so I keep very quiet.

Before I know it, my brother is zipped up too and we’re ready to go.

‘These are my sons, Starn and Esper,’ Father says to the workers who are filing into the pollination station, pulling on their suits, just like us. I’m happy that Father introduces me first. My brother isn’t. He scowls at me. Twins are like that. One always wanting to be first in the line: to get the food, to get the smile, to be praised. I watch the workers scan their Sigma-cards before there is the scrinch of the big metal gates opening. One by one, they trundle through to the three interlocking domes of the triome.

Father still calls it a coaxiorum day, just like he did when we were smaller. That’s what he always calls something real nice, something that doesn’t happen very often. Sometimes it’s a piece of malt stick that he has been able to barter from the Stores or an outing to Biblion, even a game of gazillony. The pollination station is another big event. Because the pollination season is nearly at its end, he wants to show us how it’s done. He would really like us to graduate as pollinators when we leave Academy. ‘It’s the most important job you can do,’ he says. ‘It’s the only way we can survive.’

I don’t want to be a pollinator. But I can’t tell him that.

Father checks us over to make sure that we are in order. He swipes his Sigma-card and the big gates open, this time for us. Then we walk with him into the enclosed space of the station. Even though he has told us all about it, day in day out, it’s like nothing I have ever seen. The pictures on my E-pistle haven’t prepared me one little bit.

Huge lights shine from every section of the triome, making it as bright as sunlight. It’s almost too much for my eyes and I have to shield them as it beams down along row after row of trees.

‘It’s all a funny pink colour,’ I say, straining my neck to look around me. The pink is everywhere in the three domes that protect the whole area of trees from the choking ash that hangs in the grey world outside. It’s as if we were enveloped in a big bright-pink cloud.

‘That’s the colour of the apple blossom, oh-son-of-mine,’ he says.

‘Alpha,’ my brother and I say in unison.

Our heads turn in every direction to see apple trees growing in straight lines as far as the eye can see. Lift-baskets are parked beside each tree and already pollinators are standing in the lifts that move up along the branches. They take the pollen from one flower on one tree and move to the next, brushing the minuscule grains into the centre of the petals so that the flower will be fertilised.

Then there will be fruit.

‘Busy as little bees,’ Father says, waving his hand all around him in a great sweep.

The more people that become pollinators the more fruit there will be. The more trees that the workers pollinate the more rations they can get at the end of the week. We hope that if the fruit ripens then Father will be able to bring home an apple for us to taste again this year. Because he was Premium Worker of Orchard Territory for the last three years, he was given an apple for each of us at harvest time. I can still taste it, its scent, its shiny red skin. And, oh, its sweet crunch as I sank my teeth into it. I just held the flesh there in my mouth and let the sugars dance all over my tongue. It was the best thing that had happened to us in a long time.

Each year, everyone is frightened that some catastrophe will befall us again and there will be no fruit. When we were very little, the Interim Winds came unexpectedly just after pollination. The flowers were blown away and there was no fruit at all. We were too small to remember it, but when Father talks about it, he calls it the Black Year. The Sagittars built the poly-cover domes after that to make sure it never happens again.

Father says it was the smartest thing our rulers ever did. Normally they are so busy fighting among themselves or making up silly rules just to make our lives harder that nothing gets done. Father says that they don’t know their tail-bones from their funny-bones. He thinks we need new people to guide us out of this dark age but no-one has the courage to fight the Sagittars. He says they are a catastrophe.

We watch, mesmerised, as the lift-baskets go up and down, the workers move around the tree, pollen wands swishing all over the place. A man in a white suit and with a badge on his hat comes over to us. He has red, roundy cheeks just like the apples they are trying to make.

‘Would you like to have a go?’ he says to us.

We both look at Father.

‘If you think it’s OK?’ he says, turning to the man and then back to us.

Appleface nods, waves his hand across to where the lift-baskets come down to ground level. We wait until there is one available. Then all three of us step in and close the support belts around us. Father presses the starter control and it swings us up into the air.

CHAPTER 2

Up, up, up we go. It is only when we are at eye level with the branch covered in the palest of blossoms that he stops it.

‘You’ll learn all about this in Senior Academy,’ he says, ‘but there’s nothing like a head start.’

He shows us how to take the wand and brush it off the part of the flower called the anther that holds the pollen. Then he touches the pollen onto another part called the stigma and the tiny grains move down the tube called the style into the ovary where the fruit then starts to grow.

‘That’s all it takes to make an apple,’ he tells us. ‘Want to try?’

‘Please,’ Esper cries in excitement as he takes the wand, but I’m not that impressed. I try to hide my disappointment. I’m looking really hard but if there’s an apple forming on the twig then I’m not seeing it. Nothing. Nada. I was so sure the fruit would grow straight away once the pollen tipped off the stigma.

Esper will just call me a dizzard again so I keep my mouth shut as he paints one flower with the tiny grains and then the next. I’m much more interested in the way the lift-basket moves up and down, taking workers from the ground to the air in seconds and then back down again. Everywhere I look there are wands swishing this way and that like music playing way down low. We are as close as we can go to the roof of the triome. Outside is the dirty sky.

‘Starn, it’s your turn,’ Father says.

I’m nervous as I stretch out my left hand to take the wand from my brother, afraid I’ll be clumsy and mess the whole thing up.

‘You know by now not to use that hand.’

I quickly put my left hand behind my back and take the wand in my right, hoping no-one else has seen, or I will be in trouble. The Sagittars say the left hand is bad.

‘Tell me again, Father, how it works,’ I say, as I brush the wand in the way I saw Esper do. ‘Where does the pollen go then?’

But Esper is there before him.

‘Down the style into the ovary,’ he tells me and anyone else within earshot. ‘You’d have to be a dizzard not to know that. Being a pollinator is the coolest job.’

That’s my bro: full of knowledge and wants everyone to know it.

I say nothing. Of course the bees did a much better job of it. They knew which flowers were ready to be pollinated and which ones weren’t. That’s why they produced so much more fruit than wand-swishing pollinators. They’ll never, ever be as good as bees. I want to shout this out to my brother, but I keep the words hidden in my cheeks.

I hand the wand back to Esper. Father lets me work the lever to move the lift-basket and that’s the best thing ever. I move it across and up and down. The basket follows my instructions and takes us where I say. I am really good at this, up above the ground pretending I am in an aeroplane. Just when I’m really getting the hang of it, I shift the lever too quickly and Esper is jerked away from his task. The wand falls out of his hand. We watch it dive

down

down

down

through the lift to the ground below. Catastrophe. All that precious pollen lost!

Father grabs the lever from me. ‘I can’t bring you anywhere.’ Then he shifts the gear again and the lift-basket begins to move down the length of the tree until we hit ground level. But I know what he’s thinking: Why can’t you be like your brother? If I knew you were going to act like a baby then I would have left you at home.

I am so embarrassed I just want to scurry away and hide. The siren goes off and wobblies start in my stomach again. Does everyone know what I did?

‘That’s not fair.’ Esper glares at me.

I miss Mother.

When we get to the bottom, Appleface is standing there with the wand in his hand. He calls Father into the office. Esper and I shuffle against the wall. My skin is shaking. I don’t know what’s keeping them. The pollination station sucks.

‘Time to go,’ Father says when he finally comes back to us.

I am so relieved, I go towards him but he pushes me away. Guess we’ve lost our chance of an apple this apple-time.

He puts his hands on our shoulders and steers us towards the Defender of the Seed. We stand in the white, white room while a small man with every part of him covered except for his eyes takes a tiny vacufill and runs it all across our suits. The machine beeps each time it locates a grain of pollen and it’s sucked into the clear sac that is attached to the end of the machine.

I cannot see anything happening, the grains are so tiny. By the time they are finished with us, a little speck of yellow is at the end of the sac. I want to know why.

‘Gathering any pollen grains that have escaped, then sending them back to Labspace. They’ll experiment to see if they can tell which flowers are ready to accept the pollen and which are not. Then they’ll get onto the plant nursery to see if they can get new species to grow. So there will be better crops, just like the bees could do.’

Told you! I say under my breath.

‘Mind yourselves on the way home,’ Father says as he walks us to the gate and we head towards the pedal-pod station. The platform is packed with workers who have just finished the early shift. Father has to stay longer today to take stock of how many trees are left to receive the pollen. I think of the pollen grains I lost on the fallen wand. All those apples!

The almond trees were the first plants to go. Then corn, then soya. The bees were exhausted, being driven around the world to pollinate all those trees and plants. When the ash came it choked any blossoms that hadn’t been blown off by the Interim Winds. There wasn’t enough nectar for the bees and they got so weak they just died away. We have einkorn for our breakfast and our bread because the wind pollinates that grain.

But so many other things are gone from us. Father gets all excited talking about raspberries and blueberries, pears and plums. Mother used to tell us too about picking blackberries and making something called jam. We can only imagine what they tasted like.

We await our turn before we pile into the carriages. I get all wobbly inside until I am safely pedalling away. Last time we were on the pedal-pod there was a commotion at the other end of the platform. We saw four helmets with spears on top push their way through the crowd. The Sagittars. They grabbed a man by his raggy coat and pulled him away. An indigent who had been caught trying to sleep behind one of the shelters. Indigents are homeless, having lost their homes when the ash fell. Lots of them have died but the Sagittars are trying to clear the territory of any of them still left. If they find them in open spaces they gather them up and lock them away in the detention unit. We nearly lost Father once when he stepped in to protect an old man from having his hand twisted behind his back by them as they carted him away. They warned Father that he was treading on thin ice. Father laughed it off but he has to be careful.

Soon we’re in our seats, pedalling along, leaving the pollination station well behind us; hoping that apples will form. That the outer part will flesh out and the inner part will create new seeds that can all go into the seed bank. Everyone looks to the air in hope that there will be a summer. That the wind will blow the clouds from the sun just long enough to give the trees the natural light they need to fill out for a good harvest.

We pedal out through the plains of dust and scrub, away past the big umbrella leaves of the gunnera that bear down on us from every side. It’s one of the few plants that have survived the ash and continue to grow all year. Their seeds float down the waterways and they plant themselves in different spots. They are as big as trees now and if it wasn’t for them we would have no oxygen to breathe. The Sagittars have decreed that no-one goes near the big floppy leaves, as they keep us alive. They’re left to grow away all around us on their own.

I shiver as we pass the isolation unit in the distance. Beside that is the plant nursery where they’re trying to get new plants to grow in the poor light. Beyond that: Virus Islands. Five of them altogether, forbidden islands, the ones the Sagittars say are full of viruses like the one that killed Mother and Seelah. They are out of bounds, so that no more disease is brought back to Orchard Territory. It would be a brave person who would take a chance trying to cross the strait, which is teeming with zanderhag fish. They would be devoured in an instant.

Sometimes a swirl of ash might clear like a curtain opening in the world. We catch a glimpse of the islands’ humped backs rising out of the sea. But as soon as it clears it closes in again and it’s as if they’re not there at all. It was where Father and Mother grew up before they came to the Territories, BA – Before the Ash.

‘I’m definitely going to be a pollinator when I leave Academy,’ says Esper. ‘Guess you blew your chances.’

‘Shut –’ But I stop myself. I’m in enough trouble already. I hate