(1)
It was a Cycling Day – my Cycling Day, actually. Not that it made any difference; as always, I was woken up by Frazer moving round our room. He’s my little brother. Although he’s actually fourteen now, and nearly as tall as me, that’s how I still think of him. I suppose I always will.
“Sorry, Hazel,” he whispered, completely unapologetically, when he saw me peering blearily at him. He was like a solid shadow in the gloom, except for his hair, a shaggy white-blond mass, shining in the silvery moonlight leaking round the shutters. His round face is cute and energetic, with wide blue-grey eyes. I’ve noticed several village girls his age start to give him attentive looks at meals, nudging each other and whispering, but mainly giggling. He never sees them, of course – too busy. Frazer is always busy, either with his hands, helping Dad in the village carpentry shop, or with his brain. If he looks at anything for more than a few seconds, you just know his thoughts are taking it apart to figure out how it works. Maybe someday he’ll be the one that gets all the ship’s machines working again.
He put on his shirt and trousers and waved to me before slipping out. It was strange; nobody had been sleeping well for a while. I’d spent another restless night shuffling about on the thin mattress, waking intermittently. It’d left me as tired as when I went to bed.
I snuggled back under the blanket, all comfy and warm like a baby bird in its nest. On the other side of the room, hanging on the dresser, was my new dress. Dad’s partner, Tanari, had made it for me, and didn’t charge me a single food kilo – which was so kind of her. I just kept staring at it in the low light. That dress was the loveliest thing I’d ever owned, emerald-green to complement my red hair, with a long elegant skirt and wide shoulder straps. And right in the middle of the front was a Cycling symbol, a circle divided by an S-line down the middle, one half black, one half white, each with a dot of the opposite colour top and bottom.
The whole village was going to be watching me at the Cycling, especially now I’d got the dress. I was the ceremony’s flower girl, presenting the posies to those who were to be Cycled.
It’s a real honour to be chosen as the flower girl. After so many years of being overlooked, I was kind of surprised when the mayor asked me. Nobody over seventeen is selected, so I’d only got a few months left.
Cycling Day is the best time. For a start, nobody works. Well, the cows have to be milked, pigs and chickens fed, and the cooks have a lot to prepare, but that’s all during the morning, when the families are saying goodbye to members who are going to be Cycled, which is kind of a sad–happy time. Then, once the morning’s over, we have the ceremony at midday, followed by a big remembrance celebration and feast in the afternoon. The kids play games; there’s singing. Then, when the daylight goes off, the flower girl lights a big bonfire in the village square and there’s dancing until late.
So it was my day, and it was going to be wonderful. The only possible downer would be Zawn. He’s twenty, and a couple of months back he got appointed a probationary Regulator, so he thinks he’s important because of that. There’s a real swagger to him now as he walks about. Truth is, he only got the Regulator job because Elijah, his older brother, is deputy Regulator. And Zawn likes me – a lot. My fault; he was a mistake, a rebound from Scott. By the time I realized that, he’d gone and got all serious about us and decided I was The One for him. I broke it off, of course, but I handled that badly.
Out of the twenty-three precious books we had at the school, my favourite was Pride and Prejudice. I always see myself like Elizabeth Bennet, who keeps having all those mixed-up conversations with Mr Darcy. Except under no circumstances can Zawn ever be compared to Mr Darcy. So, basically, my
love life is an ongoing disaster.
I clambered up out of bed a few minutes before the daylight switched on. I really, really wanted to put the dress on, but I had chores to do first and I wasn’t going to mess it up. No way.
I pulled on my usual trousers, a shirt that wasn’t too scratchy, and slipped a jerkin on over that. My boots were soft leather and fitted perfectly, but the soles were worn. I’d have to visit the cobbler again before long, which will cost plenty of food kilos.
It took a couple of minutes sitting on the edge of the bed to comb out my hair, which falls nearly down to my waist. I inherited my red hair from Mum. It’s thick and tangles easily, which is a real pain, but red hair is rare in the Daedalus, and to be honest it is my best feature. Everyone says that. I let it grow long because I wanted my best friend, Alice, to have it for a wig, but in the end she said no, so now I just let Mum trim it when the ends get all split. I’m well practised at braiding it so that it only takes a minute.
I picked up my basket and the nightsoil bucket, then tiptoed carefully across the cabin’s living room so’s not to wake Mum. I needn’t have bothered. I could hear her coughing away in her room. It’s quite an epidemic in the village right now, which is maybe why we’re all finding it harder to sleep. Outside, the morning air was fresh from last night’s three-hour rain. I took a deep breath, smelling the lavender in the garden, and looked round.
Our village is called Ixia, and its layout is typical of a Daedalus habitat village. Right at the centre – in every sense – is the hall, one of the arkship’s old buildings that date back before the Mutiny, a broad circle with a white roof that has radial curves, like a melted flower. Its glass walls have big, open archways leading inside. Above the largest, there’s a sign carved into whatever the roof is made of:
IXIA STATION
BLUE LINE
Nobody knows what blue line means. Maybe there was a blue path on the ground before the Mutiny, but if so it’s long gone now.
There aren’t many rooms inside the hall. There’s the main hall itself, which has the Electric Captain’s screen at one end – that’s where we all eat and have village meetings. It has the kitchen along one side, with the ovens and cold cupboards that work from electricity, just like people had before. Behind the kitchen is the hospital, which has a medicine machine that got smashed up by the Mutineers but still works a bit.
The Regulators have their rooms near the centre, too, along with the mayor’s office. But best of all is the school. I’m too old to go anymore. Besides, I know all of Ixia’s twenty-three books. Maybe not as good as Frazer does – he can recite them all by heart – but I enjoyed them plenty. I liked just sitting and learning. I know all my numbers and letters; I can write and do arithmetic, and draw. I also learned how to play the guitar, which is what I like the most.
Outside the village hall, laid out in neat concentric circles, are the cabins where everyone lives. Ours has bamboo walls and a reed roof, though some are constructed entirely from wood. We have a bigger garden than most, with long beds full of Mum’s herbs. There’s also some fig trees, and grape vines on a frame that Dad built before he left.
It was early so there weren’t many people about. I quickly dumped the nightsoil into the drain and left the bucket by the cabin door. Frazer and I are supposed to share that chore, but he never does it.
I made good time walking out of the village. All the barns and stables and pens form a border around Ixia’s cabins. The smell from the animals is ripe, but I don’t mind it. Farming is all part of the life Cycle. Without it, the arkship would be dead.
I’d been assigned a chicken coop next to one of the plough-horse stables. Teenagers always get an interim job once they finish school, so the mayor can see how reliable we are before we settle down into a profession. There are twenty-five chickens in my coop. It isn’t particularly hard work, but it’s important. Everyone eats eggs.
The birds were just starting to stir when I arrived. I tipped some grain and kitchen scraps into the feeder trough outside. Yesterday I’d spent a couple of hours giving the hutch a good clean so I wouldn’t have to do much today. As the silly creatures came strutting down the ramp into the silver light, I went inside and checked for eggs. I got seventeen, which I put carefully into the basket.
and a half above me turned from a gentle silver radiance to a dazzling white, like an incandescent rib cage holding up the solid sky. It’s never an abrupt transition, taking maybe ten seconds, but it always makes my eyes water.
I blinked the tears away and looked down the length of the habitat. Ixia is midward, almost equally spaced between the two endwalls. I knew the forward wall was twenty-eight kilometres away but couldn’t see it clearly. The landscape of farmland and forests sort of shimmered into a distance haze where the light strips overhead seemed to merge with the ground. They don’t, of course; tower mountains rise out of the land every five kilometres like titanic black pillars, helping to hold up the habitat roof.
To spinward and antispinward, the ground appeared to curve up, again until it reached the solid sky. Another optical illusion. Wherever you stand in the habitat, it always looks like you’re at the bottom of a curve.
Daedalus is basically a colossal cylinder flying through interstellar space on its way to our new world. It spins along its axis as it travels, giving us gravity on the habitat floor – apparently it’s the same strength gravity as Earth had. To start with, the ship was an asteroid, just a huge lump of stone floating round Earth’s sun. The Builders hollowed out the habitat section in the centre, making a cylindrical chamber fifty-five kilometres long and eleven in diameter, which gives it a circumference of thirty four point five kilometres. In the middle of that, the axis is another solid cylinder of rock – our sky. I always wish they hadn’t designed it that way, that instead they’d left us with an open cylinder so we could look up and see the land above us. But they chose this layout. Too late to change now – by nine hundred years.
I walked back to the village hall. Even twenty metres outside the glass wall, the marvellous smell of fresh-baked bread was thick in the air. Inside, the kitchen the cooks were working hard, shouting at each other and their helpers. No way was I going to interrupt that, so I left my eggs in the rack along with all the others. Hauer was on duty that morning, one of the village Regulators. Some of them try to make out they’re aloof, implying they’re better than the rest of us, but Hauer’s not like that. He smiled at me and put an entry in the food-kilo ledger that I’d completed my task. At the end of every week, Mayor Fininen and Chief Atov tally up everyone’s work hours and issue food-kilo coins for them. I had my eye on some blue cloth that I wanted Tanari to turn into a skirt for me, but I was still about eight food kilos short.
I thanked Hauer and looked round, trying to see Alice. We grew up together, played together, got into trouble together, sang together in the choir. She is my sister, more than any family could make her. Not that anyone can mistake us for family. First off, her skin is a lovely rich black. Second, she’s the pretty one. I’m just tall and skinny, while she’s almost as tall and has a figure which makes boys stare silently then talk like they have brain damage. And her smile… Even I feel happy when she smiles. I can’t smile like that. Don’t bother trying.
She’s also bald. According to Marana, it’s some kind of very rare disease, which is otherwise completely harmless. Poor Alice didn’t think so a few years back when she started to lose her hair. That’s when I volunteered my hair for her. I couldn’t bear how much she cried – it used to set me off as well. But in the end she decided a wig of red hair with black skin would be even more weird. As it turns out, she made the right choice. Having no hair just makes her look even more striking.
At the party after the Cycling ceremony, it’ll be Alice who’ll have all the boys in Ixia lining up pleading for a dance while I’ll be left fending off Zawn.
The mayor had assigned her as a cook’s helper. I caught sight of her taking a batch of loaves out of an oven on a long wooden peel. There are seven ovens in our kitchen, all of them the same: hemispheres a couple of metres across the base with an open arched doorway in the side. The floor inside is some kind of tough stone that the electricity heats up. They’re always hot, about two hundred degrees Celsius, so everything gets cooked in them.
Alice slapped the loaf tins down on a table, then slid a couple more fresh ones into the oven. That was when she saw me and came over, snagging a couple of rolls on the way.
“You’re not in the dress yet, then?” she teased and handed me one of the rolls. It was still warm in my hands.
“I’m getting ready after breakfast,” I told her.
“I want to help braid your hair.”
“How long till you finish?”
orning. Five! Can you imagine that? On Cycling Day! So the rest of us have to cover, and it’s not like we’ll get extra food kilos for it. Itzy got taken to hospital in the middle of the night – she won’t stop coughing. They say Marana’s worried something is in her lungs, an infection maybe.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Yeah.” She coughed, then looked annoyed with herself. “Hope we haven’t all got it.”
“We’ll be fine,” I assured her. I knew Itzy. She’s three years younger than me. Yes, it’s wrong to judge people, but Itzy always looked frail; she was shorter than everyone else in her year and had really thin limbs. At school she’d hang back at playtime, never joining in the games. We’d whisper behind her back that she’d likely be going for an early Cycling. That’s horrible, I know, but Dad always said school is really for toughening you up ready for adult life.
“I’ll be as quick as I can,” Alice said. Her expression soured as she caught sight of something behind me. “Uh-oh. He’s been asking when you’d be in.”
I turned to see Atov, Ixia’s chief Regulator, walking towards me, a powerfully built man in his early fifties with brown hair just starting to show strands of grey. He got the job three years ago, when Shamus, the last chief, Cycled. Actually, he’s not a bad Regulator – a pragmatist, Dad says. Whatever. I always feel guilty when I see him. Having him come towards me so purposefully was troubling. I’ve never done anything wrong – well, technically. I’m too young to drink alcohol… but surely he doesn’t care about that? If he did, he’d have to fine every teenager in Ixia.
“Hazel. I’m glad you’re here.”
“Chief Atov.” I bobbed about pathetically as he looked me up and down.
“Is that your flower-girl dress?”
I frowned crossly. “No, sir!” Then I realized he might be making a joke. His thin face was regarding me quizzically. I’m not used to Regulators trying to be funny. I suppose he wanted to put me at my ease. Why would he want to do that? What–
“Can I have a word with you, please?” he said. “Nothing to worry about.”
“Yes, sir,” I mumbled.
He led me towards his office in the centre of the hall building. Behind me, Alice pulled a wicked face. I gave her a shrug in return, grinning.
“Are you looking forward to the ceremony?” he asked me.
“Uh, yes, sir. I thought I might never be asked. I’m nearly too old.”
“Nonsense. A girl like you, with your head screwed on right, you were always going to be asked. You’re a credit to your family and your village.”
“Thank you.”
His office was a simple circular room with a big desk in the middle. Sheets of whiteleaf were piled up on its broad wooden top. The Regulators keep notes on everybody – when you were born, parents, school marks, infractions, good citizenry citations, illnesses. Your Cycling Day.
On the wall behind the desk was a long cabinet. I noticed it because it’s made out of metal, which is unusual – most of the furniture in the village is made of wood. So the cabinet was obviously pre-Mutiny. Its lid was glass, which allowed me to see Ixia’s five Regulator pistols inside, sitting neatly in their cradles.
Our Regulators don’t carry them often, thankfully. They’re nasty dull-black things with a fat barrel. I remember old Shamus coming into school to explain them to us. The pistols suck up electricity when they’re not being used, he said, and that powers the mechanism that fires the dart.
Darts are dangerous. If you’re too close when a Regulator shoots his pistol, they can punch a big hole in you. Really close, and the damage can be fatal. They’re intended to inject a fleeing infractor with a simple anaesthetic, knocking them out. The darts themselves are reloaded with anaesthetic from the hospital medicine machine.
I never thought about it before, but looking at the pistols made me wonder… That’s quite a coincidence, that among the very limited number of medicines the machine in the hospital can produce – biotics for infections, painkiller pills, contraception pills, creams for sick skin – the bit that makes the anaesthetic drug still works. You’d think the Mutineers would’ve smashed that part first. And it’s not just Ixia’s medicine machine – all the Daedalus villages have the same kind of machine and each one can make the dart drug for their Regulators.
ought was a kindly fashion. “It’s like this, Hazel,” he said. “Your job today is nice and simple. You award everybody who’s being Cycled with a pretty bunch of flowers.”
“A posy,” I corrected. I didn’t like that he was disparaging the flower girl’s role. “It’s a posy of flowers, not a bunch.”
“Quite. It’s the symbolism, you see. Flowers are bright and colourful when they’re open, full of life, but they also contain seeds, which are the future.”
“The life Cycle.” I knew all this, we did it at school the whole time. I didn’t understand why he needed to bring me in here to tell me again.
“Normally, we Cycle when we’re sixty-five.” He gestured at the stack of whiteleafs on his desk.
With a start, I realized a sheet with my name on it would be there, sitting among all the others – Savin (Dad), Mum, Alice, even Frazer. All those sheets with our Cycle Day written on them. Everything decided, because that’s how it has to be. They explained it all at school: despite how big the Daedalus is, it’s not a wide-open world like Earth from before. Even though the Builders did their very best to make it planet-like, it’s a closed system which only works because of the Cycle.
“It is a great time,” he continued. “An honourable time. We Cycle to make room for the new generations. We return to the soil, which grows crops, which we eat. Thus we live.”
“Yes.”
“Everyone knows this. Everyone accepts this. So everyone whose Day it is takes their posy from you before they’re Cycled; and when they do, they smile and say thank you. There’s never normally any fuss.”
Now I knew why he’d brought me in here. “The Cheaters,” I said.
“Exactly.”
It had been the talk of the village for the last four days, ever since the Regulator squad had brought back three Cheaters they’d found stealing our sheep. I’d caught a glimpse of them sitting in the cart as they were taken to the village hall and locked in the cells, two men and one woman, so terribly old. They had run away before their Cycle Day, run off and hidden somewhere inside the arkship’s habitat – actually, in the tower mountains. Everyone knows that’s where Cheaters go.
Now they’d been caught. Our diligent Regulators had brought them to justice. They were going to be Cycled this afternoon.
“They can’t physically run,” Atov told me. “They’re too old now, anyway. And my people will be escorting them to the Cycle platform. But they may resist when it comes down to it. We don’t often have to Cycle a Cheater; I’m old enough to have seen it a couple of times. There could be shouting, a lot of anger. It might be unpleasant.”
“I understand,” I told him, and I really did. And that was accompanied by a nasty thought: had I been chosen because I was old? That a five-year-old flower girl wouldn’t be able to cope with Cheaters at the ceremony?
“Good. You need to be prepared, that’s all. If it looks like they’re going to be trouble, if they start kicking off, we’ll use a dart to put them under.” He gestured at the pistol cabinet behind him. “Nobody wants the ceremony ruined, especially not by a Cheater. Today is a celebration. It’s your celebration, Hazel.”
“Right.”
“So if they can’t receive the posy gracefully like they’re supposed to, like a decent citizen would, just lay it beside them and move on. Got it?”
“Yes.”
“Good girl. I knew we’d chosen well. You just keep your head and tonight we can all have a great party.” He winked. “I might just be not looking your way when you and your friends have a drop or two of something you shouldn’t.”
“But…” My forehead must have crinkled up, I was puzzling away at this so hard. “If you disable them with a dart, how will they take the Blessing?” The Blessing is the little glass of liquid that everyone being Cycled drinks as they go to lie down on the platform. In school, they told us it has the best taste imaginable. It sends you peacefully to sleep and slows your heart until it eventually stops. Then Daedalus Cycles you.
“The Blessing can be injected if necessary,” Atov said flatly. “That’s something the Regulators will take care of. It’s our job. Don’t you worry about it.”
“Yes, sir,” I nodded hurriedly.
Daedalus is the Cycle. You know when your Day will come. It’s written down there on the whiteleaf in the Regulator’s office on the very day you’re born. And when it comes around, you take the Blessing and give yourself to the future. That’s the only way the Daedalus will eventually reach our new world.
I never questioned it my whole life. Cycling is so simple, so obvious. Everyone is brought up understanding the necessity of it.
Cheaters don’t. They believe in something different altogether. They’re not like us; they’re arrogant, greedy and horrible. But they’re still people. And if Chief Atov is right, they might not take the Blessing drink willingly. It will be forced on them.
I suppose that means – if you take away all the smooth, soothing words – we’re going to execute them. ...
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