Chapter 69: Patunga Tapu

Other sands were meant for our feet to trod, so we left the bluff and rode our winged steeds to a beach both wide and deep. We removed our boots, tying their strings together and hanging them about our necks, not wanting to walk shod on sands meant for sacrifice. All over the beach grew long crystal stems, pink and blue and white, clear as water inside a phial, and they ended in nelumbos of other bright colors, like the ones given me by Turk and Laffayette. The crystal loti rose higher and higher as we neared the ocean, till barely our shoulders rose above them, and the tawny sand had turned to soft green blades that bent under our naked feet. The ocean ahead of us was not the black, cold water of Tarthas, but a carpet of undulant azure, waving and heaving like a blanket stretched out over the ground on a windy day, such as we saw in the hands of two children, a light skinned girl and a dark skinned boy.

Rangi was his name, and he called her Evelyn. When they'd wrestled their blanket to the ground, they each opened a satchel and took from it so many cloth bundles apiece, and laid them out on the blanket so that the Winds could not take it from them. In his bundles were a sheep's pelt, a dried leaf from a fern, a withered corn cob, and a tube full of ashes which he opened and poured out. Somehow I knew the ashes to be human remains. The girl unraveled a bone like the arm of a bird's wing, only it was nearly the length of my whole arm, and then she proceeded to produce the stem of a vilox, a thorian root, and haunch of cured ysalamiri. 

Evelyn gathered her offerings on a patch of bare soil, and after gathering a pile of grass into the center, she found two sticks with which to star a fire. Rangi had a mortar and pestle, which he used to grind his gifts into a fine powder. When the fire had done its work, Evelyn scattered its ashes into the grass, and Rangi emptied his powder onto the blanket, then ran his fingers over all so the remains and the powder were one. He stood and, with great effort, lifted the blanket and snapped it in the air. Flowers like I have never seen sprang from where Evelyn scattered the ashes of her sacramental blaze. Rangi's gift I then watched, bewildered by the blue void ascended into. And in that rich blue sky were stars, and so I knew what they appeared to be.

"Victor," said my mother, for the umpteenth time. I scraped my fork along my plate, dragging a small chunk of waffle through the leftover syrup. Mom had all her milk glass cups and saucers dusted and perfectly arrayed on the mantle, but still she kept fussing over them every time she passed.

"Victor!"

"What?!"

She turned and glared, almost knocking great grandma's faberge egg off the mantle in the process. Why she kept such priceless antiques on such an exposed place as that mantle was beyond me.

"She came all this way to see you. Go spend time with her."

"I don't feel like going outside," was my feeble argument.

"Go," my mom said, pointing. "One day you'll want girls to like you, and if none do then you'll be lonely."

Her constant pointing was a far more effective argument than that. I went outside with an eye roll, and found Kendra sitting by the flower bed with some bug crawling on her hand. She was humming. She was always humming, or singing. She had a pretty voice, so I didn't mind it so much. I just would have preferred she sang something that I would recognise, instead of all that old, twentieth century music she listened to. Her favorite was that nordic girl who played the blind woman in that depressing movie.

Her father was out in the driveway, pulling a suitcase out of the boot. There was a book on top of the car; 'The Complete Works of Robert Frost'. 

"Hi Mr. Hughes," I said.

"Vic!" He almost bumped his head on the boot lid when he looked up at me. "How ya doin' kid? Long time no see. Man, you're gettin' tall. Just like your dad. He's not back yet, is he?"

"Nope," I said. "Still at the base."

Mr. Hughes nodded, then dragged the suitcase out and closed the boot. His car barely moved, despite how hard he slammed the boot shut. BMW made the best AG suspension. My mom's Mercedes would have dipped halfway to the ground if she slammed her boot shut like that. 

"I heard your uncle's still in Christchurch," said Mr. Hughes.

I nodded. "He volunteered to stay till the final test is over."

"He's a good man." Mr. Hughes stopped in front of me and put a hand on my shoulder. "He'll be ok Vic. The rioters won't make it anywhere near him. Every branch of government has a stake in those mirrors. No one's gonna let a bunch of protesters get to the control room."

I nodded. "Thanks. I'm sure he'll be ok."

"And if the worst happens, Vic, he's a soldier. He signed up for this. So did your dad and so did my wife. Don't think I don't know how you feel right now."

I nodded. "How's Kendra handling all this?"

"Why don't you go ask her?". Mr. Hughes smiled and gave me a hard pat on the back before taking his suitcase to the guest house. He left the book on top of his car, so I went and took it to give to Kendra, or to bring it to the guest house myself. When I got to the flower bed she had her whole arm covered in bugs.

"Check this guy out," I said. There was a giant weta crawling on the porch. Kendra's eyes practically popped out of her head. 

"I wish I lived here!". She shook the other bugs off and put her hand in front of the weta. It crawled onto her arm and waved its feelers all over her face. She giggled. 

She had a cute laugh. She was a good looking girl, too. I don't know why I didn't like her as more than a friend. I just didn't. She felt like a sister, and she treated me like I was her brother, so it was just weird how everyone was trying to push us together.

"You might be staying for a while," I said, though I hadn't heard so from anyone. It seemed like a nice thing to say, and it seemed like it would probably be the case, so I said it.

"There were so many people by the fence when we drove in."

"I know," I said. I didn't want to think about it.

"That's for you," she said, nodding toward the book. I looked at it and noticed that it was brand new.

"Did you get it for me?"

She nodded. "Well, my dad paid for it, but I picked it out."

I smiled. "Thanks. I've never heard of this guy."

"I think you'll like him. He's not esoteric like William Blake, or flowery like Lord Byron, but he says a lot of really powerful things in his poems."

"Are his poems dark?"

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Kendra cocked her head and thought for a moment. "There's some sad ones, like one called 'Nothing Gold Can Stay', and this really pretty one called 'November Guest', but nothing really dark. Well, he talks about how cruel nature can be. I dunno. He's not dark like your girlfriend was."

I chuckled. It was true that all my crushes were dead. Virginia Wolfe, Sylvia Plath, Senator Castille, Diana Rigg, Hypatia. Oh well. I thumbed through the book and found 'Nothing Gold Can Stay'. I liked it. Then I found one about the end of the world. "Now we're talkin'", I said. 

Kendra laughed. "Is it the Ice and Fire one?"

I nodded. "I think I know enough of hate, to say that for destruction ice is also great, and would suffice." I was beaming.

"I knew you'd like it."

We sat out there for at least an hour. I read while Kendra rolled in the dirt with the worms and the bugs, and her dad hustled to get our guest house looking as much like their own home as he could. My mom came out to check on us a couple times. I read her one of the poems, and she said she'd heard of Rober Frost when she volunteered at the Bibliotheca project.

"How could you remember any books when you saw so many?" Kendra asked.

My mom shook her head in mock dizziness. "They became a blur after a while. It's not like the names of stars. Every author had their own style, and some books have titles that are almost sentences. Especially the high-pre-post-postmodernists. I'll take a week at stellar cartography over an hour at the Bibliotheca."

"Did you get to go on the ark?"

Mom shook her head. "Nope. No volunteers were allowed onboard Icarus or Haven."

           "Even with your creds, Mrs. Aitua?"

           Mom laughed at that, and made some half modest statement about not abusing her position.

"Icarus is a lousy name for a colony ship, don't you think?" said Kendra. 

"Yeah," said mom, though she had nothing to follow up with. 

I was quiet, but I disagreed. If I had wings, I'd fly as close to the Sun as I could too. Anything to get out from under the smog canopy. We had less of it, being as close as we were to the north windmaker, but even in our little haven the air was stifling.

The next few days were boring but peaceful. Kendra had bought a new swimsuit, a two-piece, and I was a little bit curious to see her in it. I wasn't into her, but she had a nice body, and she started growing boobs sooner than most the other girls her age. I was going to go out and splash around with her, but my mom came into the dining room and tried to get me to hurry with my breakfast so I could swim, and it weirded me out that my mom was trying to get me to go and creep on Kendra like that. I think that was only part of it, though. I think what really got me was that the mirrors didn't work. 

Dad called to tell us he'd be flying to Christchurch to help with security while they rushed a follow up test. I asked him why it didn't work and he said it had something to do with the Clarion relay on Mount Erebus, but no one was sure what exactly went wrong. He didn't say it, but I knew the anti colonizers had taken out Casey Station and were last seen moving towards Clarion. It was extremely depressing, for so many reasons. I wanted to see dad, I wanted to see uncle Lawrence, and I worried about them being in Christchurch much longer. Yes there were plenty of soldiers there, and yes my uncle was guarding the founders and so he was deep inside the research compound, but the magnacities had too many ways people could sneak around for them to be completely sure they were safe. I think, though, that what really had me down, was that I'd been hoping to see the Sun. Even just to have a small patch of the smog blasted away would have made me a lot happier.

I ignored mom as she tried to get me to go swimming. I caught a glimpse of Kendra bobbing in the water by the pier. It wasn't just a two-piece, but a bikini. But then there was the news, and the sirens, and all the reports saying they were false alarms just made me feel even more nervous.

"It's nothing, Victor. Just some asteroids. D-Net will take care of them."

Then there was that guy shouting off camera that D-Net was down, and they cut him off right away saying that there was a brief lapse in our comm tower's link, as if that could explain the terror in the guy's voice. I never trusted the news, especially being a Brigadier's son, and the fact they were trying so hard to calm us down had me convinced that something was going very wrong. For a solid year there were rumors of a long range strike, then construction on the arks was being rushed worldwide. Then it was all quiet, and the arks sat there, and then someone in the Andes saw a fireball in the smog, and his video went viral, and we all saw the fireball get smaller, and smaller, and smaller, until it was completely gone. I was only eight when I saw it, but I remember it like I saw it this morning. And I remember the data purge even more, and that left me nervous and afraid of any government employee till this very moment. 

There was no calming me. No matter how many glimpses I caught of Kendra's chest bouncing when she crawled back onto the shore, or how warm and clean the air was outside, I felt a growing fear of being outside. I even asked mom if the bunker was prepped, which got me nothing but a scowl. I couldn't help it, though. The whole six years after the fireball we'd heard nothing from the exo systems. Nothing. No tyfloch delegations, no video transmissions of lucien teenagers with 'We welcome you, Terra' signs, no somber megathere ambassadors explaining how there just wasn't room for us, and that they were busy trying to prevent war from breaking out between their own governments. Just nothing. Dead, quiet, empty air, only the sound of our windmakers blowing away the bottom layers of smog to remind us that our own world was still spinning. 

Then I looked at Kendra, and part of me liked how her skin looked while wet in the Sun, and that I probably could learn to see her in a different way when we got older, but again, mom came and made it weird by trying to pressure me to go make a move. At least she just told me to go out there with her, and didn't get all detailed about how like Dad always did. She made up a story about how Kendra bought that bikini specifically so I would see her in it and be attracted to her. Total bubkis, that. Kendra bought a bikini because she wasn't a chubby little kid anymore and wanted to show off, plain and simple. 

I remembered when I started working out, and when I first started to get even a smidge of definition I was going everywhere shirtless. I wasn't even remotely muscular, of course, but I was at every catchball game showing my piddly little guns off to everyone. That's exactly what Kendra was doing in that bikini. She finally hadwhat she considered something to show and she was showing it; it had nothing to do with me. And besides, she was having all the fun in the world out there by herself. I knew full well that it wouldn't bother her at all if I sat there and sulked. And I was about to say that, when there was suddenly nothing to say. The wall of dust came so quickly and so silently, rolling over the mountains and swallowing everything in its path, and soon I was watching Kendra's pretty wet skin peel off her body in a spray of pink mist.

"I'm sorry," Kendra said. 

"It's not your fault," I told her.

"They're a bunch of jerks," she said.

"Why did they fight me?" I asked, holding the icepak she brought me to my eye. "I didn't do anything."

"They're jerks, that's why. They're mean to all the maori kids. I keep telling my dad and all he does is talk to their parents, and nothing ever happens to them so they keep doing it."

"It's ok."

"No it's not!"

"I mean, it's ok between us. I know you're not like them."
She stopped crying and smiled, then hugged me, then said "Watch this!", and did the most hilarious haka I'd ever seen. It made me laugh, and we were best friends from that day on. 

In a spray of pink mist.

 

Astus lifted her skull off the ground, and he glowed white hot, so that the dust and pebbles blasting at him were melted before they struck, and he cradled Kendra's skull in his arms as he turned and walked away, and when I followed him I saw Patches pounding a metal rod that bristled with lightning into Belial's gelatinous head until he'd completely oozed through the grate. The eleventh and final agent of the megathere batch shrieked as the furnace melted him into nothing. In the confusion of the Angel's attack, I saw a chance to give Dolores the vengeance she deserved, so I thrust my spear into Colonizer Kharn's exposed white eye and commanded the jinn within my weapon to rage.

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