Filaria - Brent Hayward [12]
“Last night,” Deidre said, “father talked about an orange grove again. He said everyone used to drink delicious orange juice in the past so why should we drink this powdered garbage.”
“That’s got nothing to do with the sky. Is it the story I get?”
“Don’t you want it to be?”
“Of course not. Complaints about the crops we hear enough, direct from the Orchard Keeper.” Bent at the waist, the dead boy looked on the ground. The gashes on his neck lay open and Deidre saw within ridged gristle of exposed esophagus. “We’ve told your father so many times,” the boy said, indignant as he mulled over what Deidre had told him. “Amino sequences for all my citrus — except grapefruit and these lemons — are corrupt. What does he want, food poisoning?” He straightened. “When he contacts the console again, we’ll tell him. We will not sanction any edibles unless we are sure of their quality. That’s our mandate. It always has been and he can’t change it!”
“Good for you, Sam,” Deidre said, uninterested. “Okay, listen. Here’s a story. It’s not about your dumb roof falling in but one that my nanny used to tell me.”
“A real nanny?”
“Do you wanna hear this or not?” Taking a swipe at a small cloud of gnats that rose on a thermal jetting up from a tiny vent in the soil, she said, “What do you mean, anyhow?”
“I mean,” the dead boy said, “was your nanny a person or a machine?”
“Oh. A machine. She was like Lady.”
“From what you’ve told me, Lady isn’t exactly a machine.”
“She sure as heck isn’t a person either. Who ever heard of a nanny that was a person?”
“I’m convinced they had real women taking care of real kids once. I think my nanny was a real woman.”
“Well, she did a lousy job.”
Deidre instantly regretted her unkind words; it wasn’t often that the dead boy referred to details from his short life, and she hadn’t meant to stop him — Deidre suspected, at times, that he might even have lived when the world was very young and peopled by those who had built it, the vanished creators, but she had never felt right about prompting him. Did remnants of that past flutter, she often wondered, tattered and forgotten in the breath that Sam had revived his corpse with? Did vague, infantile memories of another time blow through the boy’s veins?
Regardless, he would not elaborate now.
So Deidre said, “This story,” and cleared her throat, “is called The Engineer — ”
But the boy interrupted: “A single pod is descending from Elegia!”
They both turned toward the lift shaft, like an umbilicus stringing whitish and gnarled a few fields over, extending from the ceiling far overhead to the misty land below. Individual lifts were not visible from the outside but nonetheless the girl and the dead boy stared at the shaft for two beats of Deidre’s heart, and when she again looked at the boy, she saw that he held, cupped in his pale hands — as if he had just conjured it — the body of the bianca. He dropped the dead insect into the open killing jar and a whiff of ether rose between the two, poison on the warm air. The moth twitched on the cotton, curled in on itself, ugly for a moment, in final death.
Deidre clapped down the lid.
Cued by that sound, compartments and recesses throughout the plantation around them hissed and opened; workers emerged from where they rested overnight. In the nearby field, like ancient cicadas, several staff members crawled up to begin their shift. They rocked from side to side to clear the dirt from their carapaces. Elsewhere, machines and men and those creatures betwixt prepared to do their toil. A clatter and a moan from high above as a great gusty breath blew down through the lemon trees; the entire plantation sighed, perhaps at the idea of starting another day —
A frantic