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Little Island Books - Geraldine Mills

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112 pages

English

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Esper and Starn are twin boys who live in a grim world that has been almost laid waste by massive volcanic explosions. Very little grows in Orchard, which used to be a fruit-growing area, but with the death of insects and birds, pollination of the fruit trees is a tedious and precarious undertaking. When the boys discover an intriguing old manuscript in a locked room in their apartment, which tells of gold on one of the forbidden islands the people can see from the coastline, they determine to go on gold-hunt. They manage to construct a glider that takes them far from their home territory, and so begins a whole new adventure for the boys, as they travel from island to island in search of gold. Their adventures are many and they come close to death. They do in the end, find the gold - but it is nothing like what they expected

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Science-fiction

General

Science fiction

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General officer

Science & Nature

Juvenilee Fiction

Social Themes

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Publié par	Little Island Books
Date de parution	07 juillet 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781910411698
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

GOLD
GOLD
GERALDINE MILLS

First published in 2016 by Little Island Books 7 Kenilworth Park Dublin 6W Ireland
© Geraldine Mills 2016
The author has asserted her moral rights.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in a retrieval system in any form or by any means (including electronic/digital, mechanical, photocopying, scanning, recording or otherwise, by means now known or hereinafter invented) without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-910411-55-1
A British Library Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.
Insides designed and typeset by redrattledesign.com Cover design by Lauren O’Neill
Printed in Poland by Drukarnia Skleniarz
Little Island receives financial assistance from The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Watch them closely and they will teach you the way. If you listen to them carefully you can recognise their moods from the sounds they make. Agitated or content. There will be days when they need to be cooled down. Days when they have to huddle around one another to keep warm. In the dark they are the life of it all.
from The Book of Gold
To Lia Rose and all her cousins
PART I
Orchard
CHAPTER 1
F ather 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
U p, 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 c